1925 के नाट्य-संगीत तवे

Bal Gandharva — playing heroines with a voice that defined an era — kept natya-sangeet atop the western-India lists through the mid-1920s; these sides carry Khadilkar-era stage music in its full acoustic bloom, just before the microphone and then the talkies dimmed the theatre's lamps.

Raag-rooted pada with the famous murki-laden line — theatre projection meeting disc economy.

Khadilkar-era pada: stage verse built for repetition and rapture.

Narayan Shripad Rajhans — known by his stage name Bal Gandharva (1888–1967) — began his gramophone recording career in the acoustic era and continued through the electric transition. By 1925, when electrical recording arrived in India, his theatre-based reputation across Maharashtra was unparalleled. He had acted in and sung for twenty-seven classic Marathi plays, nearly always in female roles, and his distinctive soprano projection — honed for large open-air theatres — translated beautifully onto disc. The 1925 HMV sessions represent his recording activity in the transitional year when the new electric microphone was just beginning to supplant the acoustic horn; his discs from this period thus carry a warmth and immediacy that the horn recordings could not fully capture. He recorded over 400 songs across several labels — primarily HMV — with the bulk of his 78 rpm output falling between 1925 and 1935. The natya sangeet padas on these discs were raag-rooted and sung in a taal dadra style, the same repertoire he had performed on stage under the Marathi theatre tradition shaped by Bal Gandharva's collaborators and playwrights like Khadilkar. No individual disc session log survives in the public domain, but the catalogue of recordings from this period is well documented through HMV reissues.

When the talkies came, Prabhat and others would mine exactly this idiom — often with his own collaborators.