Mezzo soprano Vidya Shah is always a pleasure to listen to. When her book Jalsa: Indian Women and their Journeys from the Salon to the Studio came to me, it was indeed intriguing to know that Vidya is as comfortable as a researcher and writer. The book is a cornucopia of multimedia stills, pictures and small journal jottings without being a verbose vocabulary of documentational drama.
Done as a project that took Vidya and her husband, Parthiv Shah, to historical locations—from Hira Mandi in Lahore to the narrow alleys of Kolkata where gramophone records were sold in shacks—the book is a veritable treat in unravelling the era of women singers. The author’s amazement at the repertoire of women singers is flanked by Parthiv’s photography of their ancestral homes. The sepia-toned archival photographs of singers, their records and their families have a salient beauty about them. Vidya says she has found some of the music through online catalogues, some as part of private collection of music lovers and others through small stores selling gramophone records.
The book is a culmination of six years of work, during which the duo recalls visiting jalsaghars or areas in old houses earmarked for musical performances. Some of these houses are well maintained, but others are in a dilapidated condition. Jalsa traverses the scents of history.
The pages entice for their ability to show spaces the singers were instrumental in carving. While the women were entertainers, Vidya doesn’t know if pleasure was an agency they themselves were privy to. She saw how they paved the way for performers today, and valued the continuum in the fact that singers can sit on a stage and sing a thumri or dadra, which may have been viewed partly risqué at that time, enjoy it and have their audience enjoy it too without judgment.
Vidya does not romanticise the past, but states that there is seamlessness to it, which started with the amalgam of women, technology and the performance space. It paved the way for what is loosely defined as entertainment today. Tracing combinations and concerts, it becomes undeniable that a huge majority of those adapting to changes were women.
Read her interview here: 'Traditional musicians need government patronage'
The visible truths of discography show that women were on the forefront of this phenomenon. It becomes an added gender awakening because women were more willing to record when it started. They took on technology and looked at it with an accepting mind, thanks to their own struggles. Many of the women learned from their sarangias, as the Ustads were not willing to teach them. For these women, there were struggles within struggles—financial, sexual, and their own stories of the struggle for survival. Jalsa puts on record their presence in the making of the music market in India.
As for the project of research, records and historical data, this book is an archive of antiquity.