Some locals believe the house was among the finest partition-era buildings of the city when it was demolished few years ago with the purpose to build a modern accommodation in Minchanabad — a tehsil of district Bahawalnagr of southern Punjab — some 44km west of Sulemanki headworks on River Sutlaj.
During the digging and construction work, chief mason Muhammad Khan found unique treasure in a tin box buried under the old wall of the haveli. Finding it useless, the contractor permitted Khan to keep the tin box with him.
Resident of Behakan Bodla, a village two km east of Minchanabad, Muhammad Khan brings the tin box to his home and after few months, he gives it to Riaz Sidhu, a librarian and agriculture farmer of the same village.
The ‘treasure’ inside the tin box was gramophone records. Mason’s kids already broke many of them.
Now in their early 50s, Riaz Sidhu and his younger brother Rafaqat Sidhu are great lovers of old Indo-Pak music. Play any song of Lata Mangeshkar, Muhammad Rafi, Kishore, Lal Chand Yamla, Surinder Kaur, Amar Sigh Chamkila, Kuldip Manak or any other top singer on YouTube, they will probably tell you everything about the track.
Riaz and Rafaqat, however, are unable to recognise the name of singers and melodies inscribed on the gramophone records.
“Do you know these singers, have you heard these songs ever?” they asked while showing me the records when I went to meet them last month.
“Can you find the owners of these gramophones?
“We really wish to return these records to the family which built the haveli in Minchanabad and left it during partition. We want to know about the person who had great taste of music and who tried to save the records from violence and bloodshed of partition,” they said.
Their late grandfather Fateh Muhammad was from Dhanaula, a city of Punjab’s former princely state Nabha (13-gun salute state) which now falls in Barnala district of Indian Punjab. Sidhu Brothers say their forefathers had very good relations with Raja of Nabha, Hira Singh Sidhu (1843-1911), one of the rulers of Phulkian states (Nabha, Patiala, Jind, Malaudh) of pre-partition Punjab, and with Ripudaman Singh, the last raja of Nabha who was deposed by the British in 1928. A revolutionary soul, Ripudaman was a friend of Lala Lajpat Rai and other leaders of swaraj movement.
“Our grandfather owned a large haveli in Dhanaula. It was similar to the one demolished in Minchanabad,” said Rafaqat Sidhu while quoting the memories of partition he heard from his late father Rafique Sidhu.
“Our grandfather,” he continued, “donated a large piece of land to gurdwara in Dhanaula and to local Sufi shrine when my father born.”
Phonograph and Gramophone Record:
Phonograph or gramophone which is also called record player since 1940s is a device for the mechanical recording and reproduction of sound. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a “record” or gramophone/phonograph records.
The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) – an American inventor and businessman who has been described as America’s greatest inventor. A gramophone record (or just record) is a type of analog storage medium- a flat disc usually made of plastic. It stores recorded music (or other sounds). It was popular during most of the 20th century. Gramophone records are played on a phonograph (“record player”).
Thomas Edison originally used tin foil to record the sound. Soon wax cylinders were used in place of the tin foil. The cylinders could be taken off the machine and put back on without destroying the recording. Although discs were made as early as 1888, it was not until 1902 that discs became more popular than cylinder records.
Gramophone in India/Pakistan:
According to an article “Indian Gramophone Records -The First 100 Years” on a UK based website and scripts from the book “The Gramophone Company’s First Indian Recordings, 1899-1908” by Michael Kinnear, the first voice of an Indian person was recorded by the Gramophone Company in 1899 in London. In 1902, first gramophone disc was cut at Calcutta.
“In 1901, J W Hawd came to Calcutta and soon a branch office was opened. F W Gaiseberg arrived in 1902 for his first recording expedition and recorded about five hundred songs. These were then sent to Joseph Berliner’s pressing factory at Hanover in Germany. In order to have recorded documentation, for making paper labels, the artists were asked to announce their names in English at the end of singing. This helped the technicians in Germany in making the final records ready for sale.
Initial recordings were taken from ‘Nautch Girls’ (dancing girls) and ‘Baiji’s’ or ‘Kothewalis’. Later on, celebrities like ‘Gauhar Jan of Calcutta’, ‘Jankibai of Allahabad’, ‘Peara Sahib’ recorded prolifically for the company. This continued for two more recording expeditions and about 3000 wax records were made, pressed in Germany and brought back to India for marketing. Considering the enormous market in India, several rival gramophone companies from Germany, France and England entered the market. Until 1916, about 75 different record labels/brands were seen in Indian market, the important ones being – Nicole, Universal, Neophone, Elephone, H Bose, Beka, Kamla, Binapani, Royal, Ram-a-Phone (Ramagraph), James Opera, Singer, Sun, Odeon, and Pathe. With time, all these companies either disappeared or got merged with Gramophone Company. The name His Master’s Voice (HMV) and the label first appeared in 1916 and soon established their monopoly in the market.
During last one hundred years, over half million records were issued, spanning all musical styles in all Indian languages.”
Gramophone Records Found in Minchanabad:
The records found under the old wall of a haveli in Minchanabad some years ago were of His Master’s Voice, New Excelsior Record and Megaphone companies.
One of them bears titles “Parh Bismillah”, a qawwali by Mohammad Aslam. (I could not find details about the singer).
The other record inscribed with the name of Agha Faiz (also called Bhai Agha Faiz), a singer from Amritsar who was considered a very sophisticated folk and semi-classical vocalist of 1940s.
Name of Inayat Bai Dheruwali, one of the earliest great melodies who recorded different compositions for Radio Lahore along with Ustad Barkat Ali Khan and Roshan Ara Begum before partition, pasted on another record.
A song of Kamala Jharia, real name was Kamala Singha, is mentioned on one of the records found in Minchanabad haveli. Kamala lived in the palace of the Maharaja of Jharia (now in Dhanbad district, coal capital of India in Jharkhand state). Born in 1906 in Jharia, Kamala died on December 20, 1979 in Calcutta after making great contribution to Indo-Pak music.
A song by Miss Dulari, a Hindustani vocalist from Peshawar who specialized in several genres of classical music, inscribed on another records.
“Can you find the owners of these gramophone records?” Sidhu asked me. I said, “I will try.”
