ग्रामोफ़ोन कंपनी — प्रथम भारतीय रिकॉर्डिंग

Part of the first commercial recording session of Indian music. Frederick William Gaisberg, the Gramophone Company's pioneering recording engineer, arrived in Calcutta on October 27, 1902, carrying portable recording equipment across the seas to capture the voices of India for the first time on disc. Working out of makeshift studios set up in hotel rooms, Gaisberg and his team recorded approximately 500 matrices over six weeks — thumris, khayals, dadras, ghazals, bhajans and theatre songs. The sessions found their defining star in Gauhar Jaan, the celebrated tawaif of Calcutta, who arrived bejewelled with her retinue, commanded a fee of a thousand rupees, and closed each three-minute performance with her famous spoken flourish: 'My name is Gauhar Jaan!' — a practical announcement for the German technicians labelling the wax, which became the first signature of Indian recorded sound. The masters were shipped to Hanover, Germany for pressing, and the finished discs returned to India in April 1903, putting Indian voices on sale in Indian bazaars for the first time. With these sessions, the Indian recording industry was born.

Three-minute wax masters cut in a Calcutta hotel room: khayal, thumri and dadra compressed into the disc's tiny frame, harmonium and sarangi crowding close to the recording horn. At the end of each take the singer announces herself — 'My name is Gauhar Jaan!' — so the Hanover pressing plant could label the masters correctly.

Fred Gaisberg arrived in Calcutta in October 1902 with portable recording gear and no knowledge of Indian music. Theatre agents led him through Calcutta's salons; the sessions ran in a makeshift hotel-room studio, the wax masters shipped to Hanover, Germany for pressing — there was no record factory in Asia yet.

These six weeks in Calcutta are the founding event of recorded music in India — the moment 90+ years of Hindi song history begins. The sessions created India's first recording star in Gauhar Jaan and proved that classical and semi-classical repertoire could live inside the three-minute disc, forcing a compression of the khayal and thumri that reshaped how Hindustani music itself was performed and taught. They preserved the voices of the tawaif tradition at its height, decades before that world was pushed to the margins. Commercially, they opened the Indian market that would make the Gramophone Company's Indian branch one of its most profitable, leading directly to the Sealdah pressing factory of 1908 and the label that India would know for a century as HMV. Every playback singer, every film soundtrack, every record stamped in India descends from these matrices.

The birth certificate of recorded Indian music. These sessions proved Indian classical music could survive — and sell — on disc, launched Gauhar Jaan as the gramophone's first Indian star, and set off the recording race that brought a pressing factory to Sealdah by 1908.