ग़ज़ल और दादरा तवे — बाई सुंदराबाई

“Ghazal and Dadra Sides — Bai Sundarabai” represents the c. 1919 Gramophone Company recordings of Sundarabai of Pune — Urdu ghazal and Hindustani dadra from western India's leading bilingual woman recording artist, cut in Bombay with harmonium and tabla on His Master's Voice 78s.

Sundarabai's sides pair the Urdu ghazal's measured ache with the dadra's six-beat lilt, sung in a bright, forward voice with crisp consonants — a Marathi tongue entirely at home in Hindustani vowels. Harmonium and tabla frame her in the standard salon format the horn recorded best.

Her repertoire moved between the ghazal's formal couplets and the dadra's domestic teasing — and, on Marathi sides, the lavani's earthy wit. The bilingual record was a commercial idea before it was an aesthetic one: one purchase, two audiences.

By 1919 Sundarabai had built what few women outside the North Indian tawaif world then had: a recording career. Pune and Bombay were her bases, the Gramophone Company's Bombay sessions her studio, and western India's bilingual middle class her market — a different geography of stardom from Calcutta's, and a preview of the talkie audience to come.

Sundarabai's discs document the westward widening of the record industry beyond Calcutta and the rise of the bilingual woman artist — the line that runs from her to the singing stars of the Marathi-Hindi talkies.