परदा ख़ामोश था, संगीत नहीं: 1913 का हिन्दुस्तान

The story of 1913 — when Indian cinema was born voiceless, and its voice was supplied by musicians from the mehfil and the Parsi stage. Phalke's Raja Harishchandra, the live music of the picture halls, the song-empire of Agha Hashr Kashmiri's plays, and Tagore's Nobel — three streams of Indian art converging in a single year, and the first distant footstep of the record industry's future.

What Dhundiraj Govind Phalke — Dadasaheb — built by bringing a camera from London, mortgaging his home and conscripting his family into the works, played before a public audience for the first time on 3 May 1913 at Bombay's Coronation Cinematograph: Raja Harishchandra, a mute story-film of about forty minutes. The legend of the king who lost everything for truth moved across the screen while written title cards carried the plot. Sound itself was still eighteen years from reaching Indian cinema. But Phalke's audiences did not sit in silence — in India, no spectacle was conceivable without music.

The music of silent cinema sat not on the screen but beneath it: harmonium, tabla, sarangi — here and there a clarinet or violin. This was no new art; these were the same accompanists who until yesterday had played in the tawaifs' mehfils, the nautanki troupes and the Parsi theatre companies. Now they struck up raags against mythological scenes — a shadow of Bhairavi for pathos, fast rhythm for battle, Pilu's sweetness for reunion. Every show was a living, unwritten accompaniment; every city, every hall had its own manner. The roots of Indian film music lie in this anonymous tradition: for eighteen years before the talkies arrived in 1931, Indian audiences had known cinema only with music. Which is why, when the screen finally spoke, the first thing it did was sing.

In 1913 the biggest factory of popular music was not cinema but the Parsi theatre. The drama companies of Bombay and Calcutta — and their uncrowned king, the playwright Agha Hashr Kashmiri, whom the age called 'the Shakespeare of Urdu' — toured song-laden plays across the country. In this very year Agha Hashr's famous 'Yahudi Ki Ladki' reached the stage; its story and songs would travel decades later into talkie cinema (and the Yahudi of 1958). Theatre songs sold in the record catalogues too; stage, mehfil and disc were three corners of a single musical world. Phalke's cinema was still a dwarf beside this empire — but it was growing, and in time it would swallow the theatre's singers, accompanists and playwrights whole.

In November 1913 came the news that Rabindranath Tagore had won the Nobel Prize in Literature for Gitanjali — the first Asian ever to do so. The song tradition he had been building in Bengal for decades — Rabindra Sangeet — became a national glory overnight; demand for recordings of his songs rose, and in the decades ahead Rabindra Sangeet became a permanent pillar of the gramophone catalogue. And here 1913 points past itself to the age that follows: cinema had been born, theatre stood at its zenith, records were reaching ordinary homes — and in October of the very next year, in Faizabad, Akhtari Bai would be born, heir to all three worlds, to be known one day as Begum Akhtar. 1913 is the year in which the twentieth-century map of Indian music first appears complete.