







Over the crackle of an old record, you can hear a woman singing in Urdu. Though listening to her is as easy as clicking a few buttons on the British Library website, her voice comes to you across vast distances in space and time. Sometime in the early 20th century, engineers recorded the voice of a woman called Malkajan for the German company Odeon, which pressed shellac discs for Indian record collectors in the 1910s and 30s. Now her work is part of a series of recordings called The Odeon Collection, digitized by Mumbai record collector Suresh Chandvankar with help from a grant from the British Library. There are over 1400 recordings in the collection, and all are free to the listening public. If you love music and history, it's easy to get lost in the riches of this easily accessible digital archive.

Chandvankar explains the collection:

Odeon label shellac discs were issued in India in two phases: during 1912-16; and during 1932-38. During the first phase, Odeon's first Indian recordings were made in late 1906 on a grand tour that took the engineers from Calcutta to Benares, then on to Lucknow, Cawnpore, Delhi, Amritsar, Lahore, Bombay and finally back to Calcutta. In all, they recorded some 700 titles, which were duly shipped back to Berlin for processing and manufacture in what was then the established worldwide pattern. Disc records manufactured and pressed in Germany were shipped back to India by 1908... Because of the diversity of language and cultural taste, Odeon's engineers recorded a great deal of regional music for local consumption. In the second phase, the Odeon disc manufacturing company operated during 1932-38. Its operations were mainly from Mumbai and Madras and the company produced over 2,000 titles in north and south Indian music. At this time, radio and film songs had just entered the entertainment era. Disc manufacturing and distribution activity continued until the outbreak of World War II. Because of the embargo imposed on German goods, the company had to wind up their business in India, leaving behind hundreds of titles. The musical genre recorded on these discs include drama songs, speeches, folk music, classical music, drama sets, skits and plays, vocal and instrumental music.

What he's describing is a treasure trove of Indian musical culture, from a period when folk songs and traditional music were giving way to the pop music that pervades so many Bollywood movies. Odeon records allowed Indians to enjoy everything from classical music to contemporary comedy from all over the country. And now, over a century after many of these recordings were made, we have a chance to hear what the Indian music industry was like in its infancy.

Like the digitized books, movies, and art preserved by groups such as the Internet Archive, the Odeon Collection is the opposite of a museum display. It's what many collectors would call "ephemera," or media that was not intended to last. As digital archivist Rick Prelinger has argued, ephemera often offers a better view of what history was really like. Unlike well-polished works of art, ephemera are made by and for ordinary people. They reflect what people listened to on their record players after a hard day at work rather than what they dressed up to see at the theater. That's why digitizing the Odeon Collection is just as important as preserving the Diamond Sutra under glass. History shouldn't record only the pinnacles of human achievement. It should also include random comedy sketches from 1930s Bollywood and the voice of a woman singing in Urdu one day long ago.