सौ गिन्नियों का गाना: दिल्ली दरबार में गौहर और जानकी

The musical story of the 1911 Delhi Durbar: how two courtesan-singers were summoned to the empire's grandest spectacle, how 'Yeh Jalsa Taajposhi Ka' was made and sung, the hundred-guinea fee, the announcement at the same Durbar that the capital would move — and beneath this glittering moment, the ground already shifting under the art the tawaifs stood on.

In December 1911 a city sprang up overnight on the plains outside Delhi — canopies stretching for miles, upward of forty thousand tents, new railway sidings, electric light. The occasion was the Coronation Durbar: Britain's new King-Emperor George V and Queen Mary had come to India for the first time as sovereigns. On 12 December, crowned before vast crowds and hundreds of princes, the Emperor made two announcements that bent history — the partition of Bengal annulled, and the capital moved from Calcutta to Delhi. The festivities of this great spectacle needed music — and in that India, music meant two names above all: Gauhar Jaan and Janki Bai.

Gauhar Jaan was then thirty-eight — the woman who had made India's first commercial recording in 1902, mistress of six hundred discs, 'the Gramophone Girl'. Janki Bai was thirty-one — Allahabad's 'Chhappan Chhuriwali', whose records played from Peshawar to Rangoon. The two were considered rivals; the Durbar put them on one stage. Vikram Sampath's biography of Gauhar Jaan records that for the Durbar festivities the two together presented a mubarakbadi — 'Yeh jalsa taajposhi ka mubarak ho mubarak ho' — and that each received a hundred guineas. The mubarakbadi was the tawaif tradition's old art of the salaami: felicitation composed for nawabi coronations, weddings, feasts. The only difference was that this durbar belonged not to Lucknow but to an emperor from overseas — and the salute came on behalf of the entire tradition of Hindustani music.

Consider history's irony: of a performance that great crowds must have seen and heard that day, exactly one line survives — the mukhda, 'Yeh jalsa taajposhi ka mubarak ho mubarak ho'. No commercial disc of the duet is verified; no accessible source preserves the full text. The very voices the gramophone made immortal lost their grandest live performance to the air — because it was composed not for a three-minute disc but for an empire's evening. Perhaps that is the story's real lesson: even at the dawn of the recording age, music's greatest stage was still the living mehfil, and it is the nature of the living mehfil to pass.

The 1911 Durbar was the summit of the courtesan-singers' public standing: a summons to the empire's biggest stage, princely fees, names in the newspapers. But in that same decade the ground had begun to shift. The anti-nautch movement was teaching respectable society to call the tawaif's art a stain; princely treasuries were shrinking; and ahead lay cinema and the microphone, which would mint a different kind of singer. Gauhar Jaan died lonely in Mysore in 1930; Janki Bai went in 1934, having willed her wealth to charity. Their records survived — and so did that one line they sang before an emperor. The song of felicitation, seen in hindsight, was also a whole tradition's last salute.