कलकत्ता से परे: रिकॉर्डिंग बॉम्बे, मद्रास और क्षेत्रीय भाषाओं तक फैलता है

In 1906 gramophone recording moved outside Calcutta for the first time, reaching Bombay and Madras, and this geographic expansion gave regional musical traditions a chance to be preserved. Artists who could not afford the journey to Calcutta now found the industry coming to their own cities.

From 1902 to 1905, Calcutta was the sole recording center for Indian music. Every artist who wanted to make gramophone recordings had to travel to Calcutta, often leaving their homes and families for extended periods. Fred Gaisberg's recording sessions happened in Calcutta's studios, and the city's strategic position — as the capital of British India, a major port, and a cultural hub — made it the natural choice for the gramophone industry.

This monopoly had profound consequences. Artists from other regions had limited access to recording unless they were already famous enough to warrant the expense of travel and recording sessions. Regional musical traditions — the folk forms of Bengal, the classical traditions of South India, the distinctive gharanas of Lucknow or Jaipur — were largely undocumented. The gramophone, which had the potential to preserve musical diversity, was instead concentrating musical documentation in a single city, creating a recording industry that represented Calcutta's musical culture disproportionately.

By 1906, however, the gramophone industry began expanding beyond Calcutta. The Gramophone Company established recording operations in Bombay, and multiple labels began planning recording sessions in Madras, Bangalore, and other major cities. This expansion had several drivers: the commercial success of the Indian market, competition between labels for market share, and practical recognition that valuable musical talent existed outside Calcutta.

Parmeshwari Bai's tappa recording in Bombay for Odeon Records exemplifies this shift. Rather than traveling to Calcutta to record for HMV, she could now record in her home region for a different company. This had immediate consequences: artists who had previously been excluded from the recording industry — either because they lacked the resources to travel to Calcutta or because they were not part of Calcutta's established musical circles — could now find recording opportunities locally.

With recording centers in multiple cities, regional musical traditions began to find their way onto gramophone discs. Bombay, with its unique position as a cosmopolitan port city and major cultural center, developed its own recording aesthetic. Bombay recordings tended to feature a slightly different repertoire and approach than Calcutta recordings. The commercial film music tradition was just beginning to emerge, and early gramophone recordings from Bombay sometimes reflected the more theatrical, entertainment-oriented sensibility of a port city culture.

Geeta Bai's chaiti recording represents another geographic dimension of this expansion. The chaiti — a seasonal form associated with spring in Uttar Pradesh and northern regions — was being documented through the gramophone medium precisely because recording opportunities were expanding regionally. A hundred years earlier, such regional folk-classical hybrids would never have been considered worthy of professional documentation. By 1906, the gramophone's geographic expansion meant that such forms could be preserved and made available to listeners across India.

The geographic expansion of recording in 1906 had lasting consequences for Indian music. It meant that artistic talent was no longer concentrated in a single city's recording monopoly. A talented vocalist in Bombay, a master musician in Madras, a folk singer in the villages of Uttar Pradesh — all of these could potentially have access to gramophone recording if they were in the right place at the right time when a recording session happened.

This expansion also broadened the definition of what constituted worthy recorded music. Calcutta's recording establishment was dominated by classical purists and those influenced by court traditions. The regional expansion brought different aesthetics into the recording catalog. Seasonal forms like chaiti, which had previously been considered too folk or too regional, became part of the permanent recorded archive. Regional song traditions, regional raag interpretations, regional approaches to classical forms — all of these now had pathways into the gramophone industry.

By 1906, the gramophone's promise of democratizing musical documentation had begun to be realized. The medium was no longer merely a Calcutta-centric recording tool. It was becoming, genuinely, a vehicle for capturing India's musical diversity across regions, across gharanas, across traditions. This geographic expansion in 1906 set the template for the early twentieth-century gramophone industry: multicentered, regionally distributed, increasingly inclusive of diverse musical traditions.