कोठे से कॉन्सर्ट तक: 1922 की नई आवाज़ें

The story of 1922's generational turn: the era of Gauhar Jaan and Janki Bai wanes; Hirabai Barodekar's public debut opens women's singing to 'good families'; Indubala carries the tawaif tradition's taleem into the record age's second generation; and Maharashtra's natya sangeet — Bal Gandharva, Master Krishnarao, and their guru Bhaskarbuwa Bakhale, who died this year — becomes classical music's biggest mass medium.

Indian music at the start of the twentieth century stood on a strange divide. There were women who sang — Gauhar Jaan, Janki Bai, Zohra Bai — and their art was at its summit; but they came from the tawaif tradition, and public singing was all but forbidden to daughters of 'good families'. Even women's roles on stage were played by men — Bal Gandharva was that system's great hero. The music reformers — the generation of Paluskar and Bhatkhande — had opened schools to make music 'respectable', but the stage's threshold remained high. Around 1922 that threshold began to break — and the one breaking it was a girl of seventeen.

Hirabai Barodekar was the daughter of the Kirana colossus Ustad Abdul Karim Khan and Tarabai of Baroda's distinguished Mane family. After the parents separated, the children took their mother's side and the 'Barodekar' name; her taleem came from her father's cousin, the ascetic Kirana master Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, and from her brother Sureshbabu Mane. Around 1922 — sources waver between 1921 and 1922 — the teenaged Hirabai sang at a ticketed public concert. The sentence sounds ordinary today; then it was an explosion. A daughter of a respectable house, on stage, for money, before strangers — and with dignity intact. Her sweet, disciplined singing and composed presence left the critics unanswered. In the decades that followed she turned the path into a highway — musical theatre, HMV discs, concerts across India, the Padma Bhushan (1970). Every woman concert artist from Gangubai Hangal's generation to today is in debt to that 1922 jalsa.

In Calcutta, meanwhile, a second current of change was flowing. Hirabai had come to the stage from a 'respectable home'; Indubala entered the new world from inside the old professional tradition. Raised in Rambagan and trained by Gauhar Jaan, she cut her first disc for HMV around 1921 — almost in step with her teacher's exit. By 1922 she was a settled voice of the catalogue: Bengali tappa and kirtan to Hindustani thumri and dadra. When radio came (Calcutta, 1927) she was among its first women's voices; when films came she sang there too; and until her death in 1984 she was called the living memory of the Gauhar tradition. Hirabai and Indubala — one from the stage's side, one from the disc's — together did the same thing: they gave the singing woman a future.

In western India the turn came by a third road — natya sangeet. The Gandharva Natak Mandali stood at its imperial noon: Bal Gandharva's Rukmini and Sindhu were household legends, and the HMV discs of his raag-based pads reached homes that would never see a theatre. Beside him, the discs of young Master Krishnarao had begun to appear — the prodigy from Alandi who packed khayal's lightning into the natya-pad. And in this same 1922 the guru of them both — Bhaskarbuwa Bakhale — died. The legacy of that great teacher of the Agra-Gwalior-Jaipur synthesis now rested with his disciples, on stage and on shellac alike. That is the true picture of 1922: on one side the age of Gauhar Jaan and Janki Bai taking its leave; on the other, the generation of Hirabai, Indubala and Krishnarao entering by their separate doors. The acoustic horn had only a few years left; the microphone, the radio and the talkie stood in line. But the sociology of music had already changed — and it was changed not by any machine, but by these voices.