It may be a historians’ curse to be plagued by the ancient nature of their work, but there is also a blessing that such work may endow. It comes in the guise of a startling discovery that nostalgia alone can cause. When, from underneath the frozen folds of history where memory has greyed out, one stumbles upon a singular historical moment which harks back into the future, mirroring the future simply by preceding it, rising up as a spectre in the now, one that takes you to the then: such are joys afforded by historical memory.

This historic tale is set in this country, our country, when it didn’t exist but as the Kohinoor that set the Victorian Crown apart from any that History had ever seen; it was the collaborative spirit that united the East and West in such historic endeavours as this one, and which produced the highest moral (Gandhi), political (the Invention of India) and artistic achievements, that can truly designate the British Raj as a integral impetus for the creation of a modern Indian nationhood. . This, as a true measure of the White Man’s burden.

The life and times of our protagonist unfolds from the year of her birth, onto the days of painful obscurity that were brought on by personal and professional decadence, and which end in an early death in the year 1930, far from home. It is what transpires in between these two dates that forms the crux of our tale.

This inadvertent revelation of the gender of the hero in question ought not to give the reader any pause (except of one for the rising suspense) as there are, as of yet, many, uncountable gems lying buried under the sea of colonial (patriarchal) history, for whose obscurity the fashionable word, ‘marginal’ suffices as cause enough for scholarly/ historical abandonment. But the vibrant voice in question was one that would not be silenced in a hundred years.

A possible meaning of history may also be investigated as recollection into a narrative, memory of life lived, incomplete, imperfect, yet attested to by the fact of historical accuracy.

Born Eileen Angelina Yeoward in Azamgarh, UP, on 26th June 1873 to an Armenian father and a British mother, Gauhar Jaan was the first Indian artist to have her voice etched on the 78 rpm shellac disc of the gramophone on 11th November, 1902; this was the same year that Fredrick William Gaisberg travelled to Calcutta to carry off India’s musical gift to the world via the newly invented phonograph; he was assistant to Emile Berliner, the man who invented the gramophone and the first recording expert of The Typewriter and Gramophone Limited, the company Berliner founded in a bid to globally promote his ‘self-sufficient’ music recording by dispatching technicians like Gaisberg to different parts of the world to capture ‘native voices’ and bring them back to the US for sale.

The gramophone, the harbinger of modernity (speed, efficiency) in musical circles, originally appeared as absurdly ill-equipped to accommodate the luxuriously sprawling compositions (bandish) of Hindustani ragas. Across all the ‘genres’ of classical/folk such as thumri, dadra, hori, chaiti, bhajan (all of which our hero excelled at) and which are the lighter forms of Hindustani, least complex movement requires at least an hour to develop and creep towards the finale . As the name of the particular piece she chose to perform as representative of her ‘high-pitched and cultured’ voice: khayal (imagination) suggests, (it being the heavier composition) encapsulating the traditionally hours-long raga into a meager 3-minute version, seems like either travesty or mock desperation; it seemed both to the Establishment, or those who fancied themselves as the official vanguard of Classical music. They perceived in this accomplishment (for Gauhar Jaan more than managed it) a dual threat: firstly, that a tawaif (courtesan) had usurped their privilege of being seen as the national exemplar in a naturally male-dominated field like theirs; secondly, the technological intervention of the recorder was yet another trick by the West to degrade great tradition of Hindustani classical.

Was it that as a nautch dancer she was scorned by society as being an inferior creature who rose solely on the basis of her organic talents? While the first half is certainly untrue, the second half finds its testimony in history. Being a tawaif at the royal court, even in the colonial era was akin to being a court-poet in Renaissance England. It was, thus, not for naught that Gauhar Jaan demanded a whopping amount of Rs 3000 (at the time) to perform the condensed Raag Jogia (a morning raga) for three minutes on the recorder. A shrewd business woman, reared by her singer-dancer-poet mother, Malka Jaan, the 29 year old knew just how profitable an enterprise Fredrick Gaisberg held in his hands and the latter, too, consented to her exorbitant fee, as he was well aware of the cult status she had attained as an artist of unparalleled repute, a baiji (senior courtesan) in the court of the exiled Nawab Wajid Ali Shah of Awadh. Interestingly, at the end of her recording, most memorably, at the very first one in Calcutta, she would announce (with resounding pride): “My name is Gauhar Jaan”; this was so that disc-scratchers back in Hanover, Germany where the discs would be processed for sale, would find it easy to identify the artist/country. This became a marker: her legend-making name in her flamboyant style.

It was at his make-shift Court in a suburb of Calcutta that she rose to heights of stardom from 1896 onwards after having made her debut at the age of 14 years at the Royal house of Dharbhanga Raj in Bihar. It was the culturally vibrant atmosphere of the fin de siècle in Northern India that made her divorced mother and young daughter prosper in those Courts that would soon be going to the seed.

Apart from her these famous incidents from her spectacular life of enviable connections and even higher artistic legacy, there are some not-so-delectable events recorded from her life, such as when she gave a lavish party worth Rs 20,000 at the occasion of her cat’s having delivered her litter (something along with 3 minute songs, high-fees and self-referencing that pop stars today do), having been fined for driving a four-horse buggy post curfew hours, and having had a tragic affair with a thespian from Gujarat that ended in his abrupt death, followed by a disastrous marriage with her manager who, it turned out, had only married her for her immense wealth, and with whom a costly court-battle ensued, along with another where she had to prove her parentage as she was an Islamic convert of mixed race.

An extremely versatile singer, she would go on to compose nearly 600 ragas comprising 10 major Indian languages including French, Pashto and English. When Gaisberg challenged her to attempt yet another time-bound rendition in a bid to extract the best out of her, she answered with the original breathless masterpiece, Raga Sur Ki Malhar, symbolizing the rain-like (malhar) flow of synchronized (sur) music. Never having found fulfillment in her love-life, she instead poured her heart out in melodies like Aan Baan Jiya Mei Laagi in Raga Ghara, which was a dadra composed along with her one true love (the Guajarati actor, Amrit Nayak) whose death she could never get over. Another famous bandish imagines the Prophet Muhammad playing Holi in Madina named, Mere Hazrat Ne Madine Mei Manaayi Holi, is Gauhar’s original creation and which exemplifies the ‘Hindustani’ syncretism of the culture in which her talent blossomed. The not-so-unknown tune in Raag Bhairavi, Ras Ke Bhare Tore Naina, which formed part of the background score of Monsoon Wedding, is one of the most austere yet deeply expressive melodies bemoaning the plangent and plaintive loneliness of her life ,when she had passed the allures of a resplendent youth and was beleaguered by rather ugly and expensive legal battles.

Not only was she an innovator of original musical sensibility who infused her own vein into the whirlpool of Hindustani music, but in the truest sense of the word, she was also a generous popularizer of it, as only pop stars today are. At a time when popular culture couldn’t have existed except as the low culture of street-singers and brothel dancers, Gauhar Jaan unleashed the stranglehold that the musically trained elites had over the music of a people and took the craft of the courtesan out into the halls of bourgeoisie ‘respectability’ while at the same time paving the path for musicians (and women) to give the gramophone a go with the grace that only the individual artist could bring.

She became the Gramophone Girl of India or the Grand Dame of Modern Hindustani Classical, or as a recent play chronicling her life with live singing has it on its poster: ‘India’s first mass media superstar circa 1902!’ She was India’s first commercial vocalist, before there was any commercial idea of a country like India, or that music could be an industry not restricted to the chosen few, but accessible to all across space, time and sex. She took up the new glove the gramophone offered her and married it with the old hand of history itself. The mixing of the old and new is art, and something else, too.