बीस के मध्य के भजन-तवे

Between the salon's thumri and the theatre's pada, the steady seller was always the bhajan — Meera, Kabir and Surdas texts cut by dozens of catalogue voices. The mid-1920s lists show devotion as the gramophone's bread: the repertoire every home could admit.

Plain keherwa-dadra settings, words forward — singability as policy.

The nirgun-sagun canon in its most-loved verses.

The bhajan list in any 1920s gramophone catalogue was not assembled through inspiration — it was a commercial formula refined over two decades of disc selling. HMV's Calcutta cataloguing system grouped devotional recordings under 'bhajans and kirtans', and buyers in every region of India requested them consistently year after year. The mid-1920s lists drew from a pool of artists trained either in the classical khayal tradition (who sang bhajans as semi-light material) or in the nationalist devotional tradition pioneered by Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, whose students spread Meera and Kabir texts through schools and public programmes across North India. Many of the 1925 bhajan sides were not new compositions but standard texts — 'Mera To Girdhar Gopal', 'Chadariya Jhini Re Jhini', 'Nirgun Brahma Gyani' — that buyers recognized from festivals and domestic puja. A bhajan side required few rehearsals, used minimal accompaniment (harmonium, tabla), and could be cut in a single morning session, making it commercially efficient as well as steady-selling. The result was a bhajan market that, by the mid-1920s, had become the gramophone's most stable revenue category in India, one that would flow directly into the devotional song sequences of the 1933–35 talkies.

This list flows straight into the talkies: Puran Bhagat's bhajans are its 1933 harvest.