BENGALURU: For nearly a decade after he first encountered India’s Gramophone Woman, Gauhar Jaan, writer Vikram Sampath yearned to see her in motion.
The dream finally came true when Lillete Dubey’s production Gauhar, adapted for the stage by playwright Mahesh Dattani, premiered in November. The play comes to town on Thursday, and he definitely plans to catch it again.
“I was so deeply involved in the research (for his second book, My Name is Gauhar Jaan! – The Life and Times of a Musician) that I felt like I was in love with her,” says the author, currently the director of Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication. “And I rued that there are no video recordings of the first person to cut a record in India (November, 1902), and the model whose photographs appeared on matchboxes and posters in Austria afterwards.”
Sampath first stumbled upon a reference to Gauhar Jaan while he was researching for his first book on the Wadiyars in the libraries of Mysuru.
He found letters in which the woman who was unashamedly extravagant and hedonistic in her heyday – riding a four-horse carriage against the rules and throwing parties for `20,000 in Calcutta – was begging the king not to cut income tax from her. That the artiste who was referred to as the first dancing girl of India spent her twilight years in penury, frustrated and lonely, struck a chord in him.
So, even as he continued to work on The Splendours of Royal Mysore, Sampath began to follow whatever little he found out about the musician-composer -- and the times she lived in -- and piece together what he describes as the jigsaw puzzle of her life.
“I visited the place she stayed in -- Dilkhush Cottage in Chamundi Vihar. I even tried to find where she is buried. I knew that she died in KR Hospital, but the reason for her death is unknown, and she was only 57.”
His quest for her grave remains unsuccessful, perhaps because she had no next of kin to place a tombstone where she was laid to rest, he reasons.
He compares uncovering her past and putting it in context to investigative journalism. “I had nothing when I started out,” he says with a laugh. “Just a woman who had been dead for over seven decades.”
His research took him from Azamgarh in present-day Uttar Pradesh, where she was born as Eileen Angelina Yeoward, to Allahabad, where she was baptised in the Holy Trinity Church, to Kolkata, Mumbai, Mysuru and even Berlin and London.
Her father was an Armenian Christian while her mother Victoria Hemmings was of half-British and half-Hindu descent. After her parents’ separation, six-year-old Eileen and her mother travelled to Varanasi, where they converted to Islam, taking the names (Badi) Malka Jaan and Gauhar Jaan respectively.
In the Berlin and London, he found two important sources: the diary of Frederick William Gaisberg, an agent of Gramophone Company that immortalised her voice on the 78 rpm wax records, and a collection of poetry by Gauhar’s mother, Badi Malka Jaan, Makhzan-e-ulfat-e-Mallika (the only copy was in possession of the British Museum).
Another source was documents of two court cases she fought – one to prove her parentage and another against her secretary Abbas, whom she married only to find that he was embezzling her.
“Pre-independence records of the Calcutta High Court had been destroyed. Luckily for me, someone had kept copies, and his widow gave them to me,” says Sampath.
He also had to rely heavily on anecdotal material, speaking to families of those who had interacted with or played alongside her. “I went to places like Rampur and Darbhanga, where she gave her debut concert at 14,” he recounts.
Women Pioneers
Procuring her records was none too easy either, he says. He had to frequent chor bazars and tea shops, where the records were once played.
“She has cut around 600 records in 20 languages – Hindustani, Urdu, Bengali, Persian, French, English, Tamil, Kannada...Those were the early days of records, and the artistes didn’t know what would sell, so they tried out various languages and genres and waited for the market response.”
This, though, was only possible because of the range of the tawaifs in the north and the devadasis in the south. “They were well versed in various styles of music, dance and poetry while the women of families that enjoyed status and power remained uneducated.”
The women who reigned the kothas and mehfils and the durbars alike were the ones the Lucknow gentry sent their sons to so that the youths could pick up courtly etiquette. They were also the first women taxpayers, shrewd and business-like, says Sampath.
So it was hardly surprising that it was to these women communities that agents of the gramophone company turned to when they found that male musicians were unwilling to the point of floating rumours that artistes would lose their voice if they sang for a record. In the early days of the recording industry, the musician had to shout into a horn – which changed around 1925, with the advent of the microphone.
“By then, the men had also seen what recording could do,” he says. So over the next few decades, the men ousted the women from the industry they had pioneered in.
Post-Sepoy Mutiny Era
Umrao Jaan lived before the sepoy mutiny, when the tawaifs flourished, but the hardships of the community increased after the uprising, says Sampath. “Because they they were involved in the sepoy mutiny. So the kothas were under surveillance.”
It was also the time when the tawaifs began moving to a more urban setting, like Gauhar did to Kolkata, he adds.
Visit to Bengaluru
In the letters of Gauhar Jaan – among them were correspondence with bakers and confectioners and hospital bills – Sampath found mention of a planned visit to the city.
“The details are a little sketchy, but I think she came here for a cataract operation at Minto Eye Hospital when she was living in Mysuru. By then, she had almost stopped performing, so I don’t know if she has given any concerts in Bengaluru,” he says.
How It Played Out
If it was her loneliness that drew Sampath to Gauhar Jaan, his chronicling of the mother-daughter tawaifs brought out such strong characters that the book almost played out in celluloid for Dattani when he first read it. “My first thought was that it should definitely be made into a film, and if not that, a play,” says Dattani.
His Dance Like a Man has seen over 450 shows under Dubey’s direction, another story where the woman is marginalised and her talent not recognised.
“Perhaps I’m attracted to subjects like this,” says Dattani, looking forward to seeing Gauhar performed in his hometown. But this was very different in that it was the first time he was adapting from an existing literary source and a biography of sorts.
“All the events in her life are already laid out. But I took some liberties. Gauhar had a relationship with theatre artiste Amrit Keshav Nayak. She moved to Mumbai to be with him, but just as the relationship was turning serious, it was cut short by his sudden death in 1907, the same year Gauhar had also lost her mother,” he says.
This was a turning point in her life, but the play only makes a passing reference to Nayak. “I didn’t want to show her as victim of circumstances because she didn’t see herself that way. She was, however, the victim of tragic choices, so I have retained the part about her relationship with her secretary Abbas,” he says.
Dattani is waiting for it ‘settle in’ on stage so he can publish it with the changes. After that, perhaps, he will work on a screenplay for it. “I want to direct it,” he says.
Meanwhile, many in the Bollywood circles have been showing interest in a film adaptation of the book, says Sampath.
*Catch Gauhar at 7.30 pm at Chowdaiah Memorial Hall on Thursday.