Photograph · before 1930 · beside the gramophone horn
Gauhar Jaan
1873 — 1930
The first voice India ever put on a record, and the woman who taught a raga to fit into three minutes.
In November 1902, a recording engineer from London named Fred Gaisberg turned two hotel rooms in Calcutta into a makeshift studio. The star he most wanted was a twenty-nine-year-old singer and dancer who was the most sought-after performer in the city. She sang a khayal in Raag Jogiya into the horn, and at the end of the take she said, in English, "My name is Gauhar Jaan." She had to: the wax masters were going to Hanover to be pressed, and the technicians there needed to know whose voice it was.
Over the next eighteen years she cut more than 600 songs in more than ten languages. She took a classical form built to unfold over an hour and compressed it into the three-odd minutes of a 78 rpm side. She became India's first recording celebrity. Then she died in Mysore, far from the city that had made her, and for most of a century the voice was better remembered than the woman.
From Azamgarh to the gramophone
The lifeline
1873
Born Angelina Yeoward in Azamgarh, of Armenian and Indian descent
1883
Mother and daughter, renamed Malka and Gauhar Jaan in Banaras, settle in Calcutta
1888
Debuts at about fifteen at the court of Darbhanga Raj
1902
Sings for the Gramophone Company in India's first recording sessions
1911
Sings at the Delhi Durbar for the coronation of George V
1930
Dies in Mysore at 56, eighteen months after joining its palace
By the numbers
The measure of her
600+
Songs she recorded between 1902 and 1920
10+
Languages she sang in, from Bengali and Tamil to Persian, French and English
₹3,000
Her reported fee for a single recording session in 1902
~3 min
The length of a 78 side, into which she fitted a whole classical performance
What she sang into being
The work
1888
Court musician at Darbhanga, after training under Kale Khan of Patiala and Ustad Ali Baksh, with Kathak from Brindadin Maharaj.
1902
The Calcutta sessions. Over six weeks, Gaisberg's team cut more than 500 recordings of local artists. A khayal by Gauhar Jaan in Raag Jogiya was among the first.
1903
Her discs go on sale, pressed in Germany and shipped back to India. They helped turn the gramophone from a foreign novelty into an Indian habit.
Hamdam
Ghazals of her own, written under that pen name. She also sang thumri, dadra, kajri, chaiti, bhajan and tarana, and recorded Rabindra Sangeet.
1910
Victoria Public Hall, Madras. After this first southern concert, her Hindustani songs were reprinted in a Tamil songbook.
1911
The Durbar duet. With Janki Bai of Allahabad she sang "Ye Hai Tajposhi Ka Jalsa" for the coronation of George V. Each singer received 100 guineas, according to one record historian.
Famous, then forgotten, then found
Recognition
In her lifetime
Among the best-paid performers in India; her records were billed simply as "Gauhar Jan, First Dancing Girl, Calcutta"
But she was a tawaif, a courtesan-performer, in an era when reformers' anti-nautch campaigns made that a stigma
Lawsuits and betrayals wore away her fortune, as her biographer tells it
Died in Mysore in 1930, unwell and depressed, far from Calcutta
Today
Remembered as India's first recording star, "the gramophone girl"
Vikram Sampath's 2010 biography My Name is Gauhar Jaan! brought her life back into view
Google honoured her 145th birthday with a Doodle on 26 June 2018
Her 1902–1920 discs are collected, digitised and reissued by archivists of early Indian sound
The city that made her
Calcutta
Her mother, a singer and Kathak dancer who now went by Malka Jaan, brought her to Calcutta in 1883. In the 1880s the deposed Nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah, still kept a court of musicians at Metiabruz, on the city's edge. Malka Jaan sang there, and Gauhar trained in the house her mother bought on Chitpore Road. In 1902 Calcutta was where the London-based Gramophone Company came looking for Indian voices.
₹40,000
What Malka Jaan paid for 24 Chitpore Road, within three years of arriving
500+
Recordings made in the city's first six-week session, in 1902
1896
The year Gauhar began performing in Calcutta in her own right
"My name is Gauhar Jaan."She said it at the end of her recordings so that the pressers in Germany would know whose voice they had. More than a century later you can still hear it on her 1905 thumri.
— Gauhar Jaan, on record, 1902 onward
