Gramophone Records A Collectors Item

By M Anandaswamy
Posted on 2008-08-24
According the archivists of the Indian musical industry, the very first recording by Indian artists was in 1899, when Dr Harnamdas and Mr Ahmad recorded, in London, recitals from the Ramayan and Ayats from the Koran. The collectors have found none of these records. From 1899 to late 1978s, when the gramophone companies in India stopped making the old type of 78-rpm shellac records, nearly five hundred thousand records were made encompassing all the musical schools/cinema in India. The oldest and longest drama set was K M Mitter and party’s Jaydev in Bengali, recorded around 1910, in 30 parts and duration is almost two hours.
Further the total number of films produced in the last 100 years is about 35,000.  The ratio of Hindi to Regional films is 1:2-3. Old 78-rpm records had two songs per record.  About 2,50,000 titles produced.  This is a rough estimate and a good starting point for researchers in 21st century. The total output of gramophone records is about half million records [titles].  The number of copies of any given record varied from 500 to a few lakhs, depending upon the popularity/sale. But today, about one hundred thousand - barely one fifth of the magnificent heritage - survive! . In fact as late as 2004, one Durga Puja pandal in Calcutta was ‘decorated’ by the organisers with the remnants of more than 11,500 shellac records melted by them!
Before the invention of phonograph records, we had cylinder phonographs in India using wax cylinders to record the music and they were in vogue till the 1905. The first demonstration of the cylinder phonograph was in around December 1878 (within a year of its invention in USA), at Calcutta.  Professor H Bose, the renowned businessman of Calcutta, entered into this new business of cylinder records under the banner of ‘H Bose Records’ and later ‘Pathe-H Bose Records’.  Most of these have been lost to history except for the Bande Mataram sung by Rabindranath Tagore, made in 1902. Till the year 2004, the archivists could not find any wax cylinder phonograph left in India and that year the phonograph enthusiast, Mr Shrimali of Baroda stumbled upon a treasure trove of a 100-year-old cylinder playing Edison Phonograph – an Edison original disc cutting machine form the early 20th century ands 60 wax records in the Baroda Musical college! It is supposed that the late Maharaja of Baroda, Sir Sayaji Rao Gaekwar in the early 1900’s, had bought this equipment.
Although there were gramophone record collectors in many parts of India, there was no organised plan to preserve whatever was available of these music treasures for posterity. Then in 1990 came the providential meeting of two devoted collectors of these records, Mr Suresh Chandvankar, a Tata Institute of Fundamental Research scientist and Michael Kinnear, an Australian musicologist who worked as an engineer with HMV Bombay in the sixties. They decided to form the Society of Indian Record Collectors (SIRC) to salvage the 78-rpm records from total obscurity. The society has 200 members - 70 from India, the rest from US and Europe.
Thanks to this organisation, India is beginning try to save what it can, of its musical treasures. Even earlier there were several institutions with large collections of gramophone records with adequate listening facilities. But no effort was made to correlate their efforts to form a National Archive of gramophone music for India. In recent years, digitalisation of old records ensures that you can separate and record the pristine original voice from the old, scratched shellac records.
According to the SIRC, the largest collector of Indian gramophone records is 78-year-old S A S Rangarao from Madras with a collection of over 40,000 shellac records of different Indian languages and music styles. At Calcutta, a building material supplier, Sarajlal Mukherjee collected over 25,000 shellac records in about 40 years and made a trust for the maintenance of these treasures. In nearby Pakistan, we had Mr Alladad Khan, who at the time of his death in Peshawar in 2002, in addition to the massive collection of 14,000 records also had hundreds of movies, songbooks, movie posters and other memorabilia. There are at least 100 collectors in India who possess records from a few hundreds to a few thousands.  These individual collections reflect the taste and the liking of the collector.  The majority (almost 95 per cent) of these collectors have records of film music.
But unless we plan a grand list of these heritages there is very little one can do to ensure their preservation for posterity. MF