The New Indian Express ·
How do We Bring India’s Voices Home?
On a frosty, winter afternoon in 2010, I found myself inside an archive in Berlin, surrounded by boxes and cabinets containing shellac discs more than a century old. As a visiting Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, my research on the early history of Indian gramophone recordings led me to the Humboldt University’s Lautarchiv. I encountered something quite unexpected: Indian voices, preserved thousands of kilometers from the country of their origin.
These were recordings of Indian prisoners of war from the First World War. At the Halfmoon Camp at Wünsdorf, south of Berlin, German scholars had recorded voices of prisoners from across the world, partly for linguistic research. The South Asian collection alone comprises 282 titles on 193 shellac discs. They include Hindi and Hindustani, Punjabi, Bengali and Sylheti, Garhwali, Baluchi, Pashto, Khasi, Tamil, Telugu, Nepali, and several other languages. There were songs, stories, poems, anecdotes, and spoken passages. In several cases, transcripts, transliterations and translations survive alongside the recordings, including detailed accounts of who the prisoner was, the village in India he hailed from and his ancestry. Those crackling recordings gave me goosebumps. They were fragments of the voices of Indians who had lived a century ago—voices that had somehow survived when so much else about their lives had evanesced.
Interestingly, one recording acquired a second life through the remarkable documentary The Halfmoon Files by German filmmaker Philip Scheffner. He traced one of the Indian voices recorded at Wünsdorf, Mall Singh, and began reconstructing the world behind the recording. The Indian man was suddenly no longer merely a catalogue entry, but a real human with a back story.
