'Bajanaamā' is about the first decade of commercial recordings in India. It is about the professional singers and theatre artists who were stars in their own right and thus the first to be recorded by recording companies. It is about the pioneer sound recordists and their encounters with Indian divas. It is about idealistic swadeshi entrepreneurs who set up their own recording companies in the face of stiff competition from well established recording giants, predecessors of contemporary MNCs. It has all the elements of a successful Raj romance-European pioneers, haughty Indian divas, wily musicians, hot headed maharajas.....
'........Bajanaamā' is all this and much more. It is an honest effort to document the social and political landscape of the Indian sub-continent after the first Great War for freedom from British rule and just before the Delhi Durbar in 1911. At another level, the volume tries to contextualize the history of Hindustani music at a very crucial juncture- the bowing out of the individual patron and the plebianization of the kotha through the easily available records. The record imposed its own limitation on the artist- s/he had to present a piece within three minutes; the liesurely warm-up had to be done away with. At this point the major courts of North India had disintegrated and erstwhile court musicians were forced to become itinerant musicians who occasionally managed to find favour with smaller principalities and zamindaris. This phenomenon gave rise to a new trend of mixing of elments of gharanas.
..........A.N. Sharma's effort to present some nearly lost records of Hindustani music is a great service to the cause of the history of music and, ethnomusicology. 'Bajanaamā' is a visual and aural treat for students and teachers of music, the music lover and the plain book lover.
