The City as Archive in Gauhar's Thumris

The ecology of urban sound in late nineteenth-century Calcutta wove together multilingual, multi-sited sonic practices and sensibilities that preserved the memory of space and of being-in-place as a peculiarly multisensory experience of social life in city spaces. I would imagine that visualising a sound map of Calcutta in the long nineteenth century might at first seem like an impossible undertaking. Surely, sound and sounding space would have been ‘done’ differently in the inner chambers of the andarmahal, the baithak-khana, the nat-mandir, and the Hatibagan-Chitpur theatres? More difficult still, how do we listen to the moving body that slips in and out of these real-and-imagined spaces of the city? Has she left us with an archive of her lived space?

Here, as in elsewhere, Gauhar Jaan became my muse by default.

While scholars of nineteenth-century Bengal have extensively documented and analysed the vast body of Gauhar Jaan’s recorded work available to us today, very little attention has been paid to how it maps space and the body as it moves through space in urban encounters, in her striking sonic dialogues with the Rajasthan of Khwaja Moinuddin, or the Benaras that she, along with her mother, Malka Jan ‘Benareswali’, had left behind to settle in Calcutta in 1883. It is with Gauhar that we take part in this space of transgression as a necessary mode of historicizing the ‘elsewhere’ toward which truth is always slipping, into a curious conjunction of the sensorily dense and intimate spatiality of, for instance, Medina’s sacred topography, which in Gauhar’s music is often interspersed with the bodily-sensorial language, rhetoric, and idiom of the Chishtiyya qawwalis. The performance practice of Calcutta’s baiji and tawa'if communities, including also Kīrtana, Śyamāsangīta and the songs of Tagore, and Nazrul Islam, seemed to have practised and played with this space of transgression in ways that also resituated urban spatialities- Gauhar’s house, for instance, now renamed ‘Salim Manzil’ lies adjacent to the Nakhoda Masjid in Lower Chitpore Road, the principal space for Sunni Islamic worship in the city. Quotidian stories collected from the residents, vendors, or perfumers of Chitpore Road have been, and continue to be, my primary resource for arriving at a sense of space, for representing the sensory body as it moves through urban space and song.  Yet the numerous commercial recordings- from the likes of Angurbala, Indubala or Manadasundari Dasi from Calcutta’s Rambagan area- remain inconsistently scattered across YouTube channels, in the private collections of Kolkata’s vinyl collectors, or the record stores and listening rooms operating in Kolkata’s Mirza Ghalib Street, without (and despite) the kind of metadata produced and maintained by archival institutions. Even before one might begin the work of mapping the city’s different spaces in their sound practice, one needs to look for sound ‘itself.’ This potential archive of deep, transtemporal sonic connections is manifested in what I understand as a distinctly urban-classical compositional style in the compositions of the courtesans, which, while drawing on the formal grammars of raga, tala and genre, tacitly incorporates the courtesan’s own ludic constellations of historical, mundane, and aesthetic objects, of exile and flight. The city-in-song is the tawaif’s space of play, as Lefebvre would call it, at least in certain ideal moments.
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This piece is a slightly modified introductory section from a project proposal I sent in several months ago. I hope to write more on Gauhar, sound, and the city soon (or at least edit the rest of the proposal for the blog!). 
I listen, take notes, and write.

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