कुत्ता, भोंपू और लड़ाई का बाज़ार

How the First World War redrew the Indian record market — the expulsion of German labels like Beka and Odeon, the Gramophone Company's resulting monopoly, the wartime shellac squeeze, the new importance of the Sealdah factory, and the arrival of the His Master's Voice label and Nipper on Indian discs around 1916.

Before 1914 the Indian record market was a fairground. The Gramophone Company wore the crown, but the German challenge was in every lane — Beka discs, Odeon discs, Carl Lindström's machines; agents poached artists with higher fees, and enthusiasts heard the same thumris on cheaper German pressings. Then in August 1914 the guns opened in Europe, and in British India the trading-with-the-enemy laws wrecked the whole fair overnight. German firms' stock was seized, agencies shuttered, trademarks suspended. The competition that had been raising artists' fees since 1905 ended at a stroke. The Gramophone Company stood alone on the field — facing a market in which nobody else could now bid. The monopoly the war created would shape the fate of Hindustani music for the next two decades.

The picture was old — Francis Barraud had painted his late brother's fox terrier Nipper peering into a horn in 1899: His Master's Voice. In Britain the image had long since become the company's identity, but Indian discs carried the 'Recording Angel' — a seraph inscribing a disc with a quill — for years more. The change came around 1916: Indian releases began appearing under the His Master's Voice label, and the dog replaced the angel. This was more than a printing change. It was wartime consolidation — a monopoly wants one unmistakable identity — and it was the birth of the name that would become a synonym for the music industry in India: HMV. Later generations forgot the company's legal name; what remained was the dog, the horn, and the master's voice turning on the disc.

Note the irony: the substance from which the world's discs were made — shellac — was India's own gift. Refined from the lac of the Bengal-Bihar forests, shellac travelled via Calcutta to every record factory on earth. But the war drafted this homegrown material to the front — military demand, from munitions sealing to aircraft varnish, sent prices soaring, and the shortage of shipping finished the job. The pressing factory at Sealdah, Calcutta, opened in 1908, was now the company's lifeline — Europe's plants were entangled in the war, and Indian discs were pressed at home. Even so the catalogue thinned: fewer new recordings, more re-pressings of proven stars; the guaranteed seasonal sellers — Sawan kajris, Phagun horis, bhajans — became the backbone of the shops. Perhaps for the first time in music's history, warehouse arithmetic was deciding which melodies survived.

The monopoly's effect on music cut both ways. For artists, the age of bargaining was over — the singer who in 1905 had played Beka and the Gramophone Company against each other for double fees now stood at a single door. For new voices the door grew heavier still; the catalogue contracted around proven names — Gauhar Jaan, Janki Bai, Peara Saheb. Yet inside that contraction ran a counter-current: the budget Zonophone label recruited new middle-class buyers, Marathi natya-geet and devotional discs opened new provinces and new homes, and as war and pandemic emptied the mehfils, the gramophone took their place in the parlour. When the guns stopped in 1918, India had one great label, its own factory, and the listening habit of millions — the trinity on which the next decade's boom would stand. And the dog on the discs has never got up since.