ख़याल-भजन — पहले तवे, हीराबाई बड़ोदेकर

“Khayal and Bhajan — First Discs” represents Hirabai Barodekar's recording debut for the Gramophone Company, c. 1923–25 — the Kirana gharana's second generation arriving on shellac in a young woman's voice that made the classical concert respectable for daughters of the middle class.

Hirabai's first sides carry the Kirana signature in a young voice: the long, prayer-still swar of Abdul Wahid Khan's taleem, intonation polished like riverbed stone, and a sweetness that the acoustic horn — cruel to so many voices — somehow kept intact. Even compressed to three minutes, the gayaki's repose is unmistakable.

Her debut repertoire ran from khayal bandishes of the Kirana stock to Marathi bhajans and natya-geet-adjacent devotional pieces — the mixed programme with which she would soon fill ticketed halls. The specific debut texts are undocumented.

Born in 1905 to Abdul Karim Khan and Tarabai Mane of the Baroda court family, Hirabai trained under her uncle Abdul Wahid Khan after the family's split, and emerged in the early 1920s as something Indian music had not yet seen: a daughter of respectable society singing classical music professionally, on stage and on record, under the name Barodekar. Her mid-decade discs travelled where mehfils could not — into family parlours — and made her the first woman the concert public treated as a gharana torch-bearer rather than a salon entertainer.

Hirabai's first discs mark a social threshold: after her, the female classical concert career — Kesarbai, Mogubai, and the generations beyond — had a template. Her own records sold steadily for three decades, and she would later sing at the Red Fort ceremonies of independent India.