मिस सोशी मुखी

Miss Soshi Mukhi is one of Indian music history’s most overlooked yet historically significant figures. She was a young actress and singer associated with the Classic Theatre Company of Calcutta, one of the premier theatrical troupes performing Anglo-Indian and contemporary Bengali theatrical works in the early 1900s.

On 8 November 1902, Frederick William Gaisberg of the Gramophone & Typewriter Company arrived in Calcutta to make the first commercial recordings of Indian music. Seeking theatrical performers as well as traditional musicians, Gaisberg recorded Miss Soshi Mukhi early in his sessions. In doing so, he captured what became India’s very first-ever gramophone recording — predating Gauhar Jaan’s more famous November 1902 recordings by several weeks or months (exact dating of early recordings is sometimes ambiguous in historical records).

However, Gaisberg’s notes about Soshi Mukhi were dismissive. He described her voice as ‘miserable’ and her technical abilities as crude compared to the training and polish he would encounter in Gauhar Jaan. This colonial-era prejudice, combined with the fact that Gaisberg only recorded a handful of tracks from Soshi Mukhi compared to 150+ from Gauhar Jaan, meant that Soshi Mukhi’s recordings were rarely pressed in quantity and quickly forgotten.

Very little biographical information about Soshi Mukhi survives. Theatre company records from the era are sparse or lost. No photographs of her are known to exist. She represents the many talented performers of the early recording era whose contributions were overshadowed by more commercially successful contemporaries.

Yet her historical significance is undeniable: Miss Soshi Mukhi’s voice was the first Indian voice captured on a gramophone disc. She deserves recognition as a pioneer, even if circumstances and prejudice relegated her to obscurity.