पतझड़ में मलिकाएँ

The story of the founding generation's twilight — Gauhar Jaan's litigation and waning empire, the unshaken industry and charity of Janki Bai 'Chhappan Chhuri', the space left by Zohrabai Agrewali's death in 1913, the incandescent decline of thumri's emperor Mauzuddin Khan, the shadow of the 1918 pandemic, and the rise of successor voices like Sundarabai.

The woman who had stood before the horn in 1902, sung India's first disc and chirped at its end — 'My name is Gauhar Jaan!' — was doing the rounds of courtrooms in 1918. The wealth was still there: the Calcutta mansion, the jewels, the earnings of six hundred discs. But the trusts had been looted. The secretary she had kept closest — Abbas — was at the centre of the disputes and property suits that had begun to swallow her final years; contemporaries tallied the difference between the lakhs her records earned and the money flowing into legal briefs. Yet the voice did not stop — her late ghazal sides trade the dazzle of her first decade for a learned economy: shorter taans, plainer statement, pain carried in the pauses. The ghazal that spoke of faithless promises and ruinous trust was now the singer's own biography. In 1928 she would leave for the Mysore court; in January 1930, there, far from her own, the empress's story would close.

In the same 1918, the world of Janki Bai of Allahabad was another country. The singer who had survived fifty-six wounds in childhood — 'Chhappan Chhuri' — wore her name like armour and ran her career like a factory. From 1907 she was the catalogue's spine: kajri for Sawan, chaiti for Chait, hori for Phagun, thumri-dadra for the mehfil, and Urdu ghazals — many of them, it is said, from her own pen; her verse was later collected as the Diwan-e-Janki. In the years of war and pandemic, when the company contracted around proven names, the most proven name was hers. And what she did with fame, Allahabad remembers to this day — charity. Her generosity to the poor, to pilgrims, to the needy fills as much space in her chronicles as her voice. If Gauhar was this generation's tragedy, Janki Bai was its dignity.

The first leaf of the generation's autumn had fallen back in 1913 — Zohrabai Agrewali, the Agra-trained voice whose khayals and Khusrau settings were the jewels of the early catalogue, died barely past forty. Her discs were now heirlooms; her place stood empty. And in Calcutta's mehfils, thumri's emperor Mauzuddin Khan was burning in his own fire. Risen on raw genius without completed taalim — the singer whose Bhairavi made ustads weep, whose pukar tore through gatherings — he kept shying from the recording horn; his few discs were being treasured like relics while he still lived. Drink and recklessness took him in 1926, barely fifty. But his style did not drown: the grammar of bol-banao he forged would become the mother tongue of the next Banaras generation — Rasoolan Bai, Siddheshwari Devi. Even in autumn, the seeds were flying.

In the second half of 1918 influenza seized India as even the war had not seized Europe — millions died; theatres, fairs and mehfils stood empty for months. In that silence the gramophone's importance inverted and grew: where gathering was danger, the disc was a mehfil at home. Devotional records sold like medicine of consolation. And in this altered market the new generation began to claim its place — voices like Bai Sundarabai of Poona, who brought the baithak's polish to Hindustani dadra and bhajan and would become one of western India's most prolific record artists over the next two decades; and on the stage Bal Gandharva, whose Swayamvar pads had already crossed Maharashtra's borders on disc. On 11 November 1918 the guns in Europe fell silent. India's music industry that day possessed one unchallenged label, its own factory, the discs of the old empresses and a queue of new voices — autumn and spring playing to the same theka.