There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a room when a needle finds the groove of an old Bengali record. Something that was recorded in a single afternoon in a studio somewhere near Dum Dum, in the northern reaches of Calcutta.
That studio, built in 1928 by the Gramophone Company of India, was one of the oldest
recording facilities in Southeast Asia. By the time the 1960s arrived, it had already accumulated decades of memory in its walls. Rabindranath Tagore had recorded his songs and poems there in his own voice. So had Kazi Nazrul Islam, the rebel poet whose compositions had given Bengali music some of its fieriest and most tender moments. The studio carried that history into every session that followed.
The Gramophone Company of India, headquartered in Kolkata, was the oldest music label in the country, established in 1901 as the Indian branch of the British Gramophone Company, and for several decades it released its records under the His Master’s Voice trademark. HMV was not merely a label in Bengal — it was the institution through which Bengali music reached Bengali homes. A new record from HMV was an event. It was purchased with anticipation, carried home carefully, and listened to on a turntable that sat in the main room of the house where the whole family could hear it.
The 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s are considered the golden age of Bengali Adhunik Gaan, the genre of modern Bengali songs, and Bengal at that time had a unique mix of singers which inspired composers and lyricists to create what became an enormous treasury of creative music. The voices that filled those records were extraordinary. The main artists who popularized modern Bengali songs, both in film and outside it, included Hemanta Mukherjee, Manna Dey, Sandhya Mukherjee, Shyamal Mitra, Arati Mukherjee, Kishore Kumar, Sachin Dev Burman, Asha Bhosle, Lata Mangeshkar, Satinath Mukherjee, and Jaganmoy Mitra. Each had a distinct quality that Bengali listeners came to recognize within the first few bars.
The films and the records were inseparable. Bengali cinema in this period was genuinely
ambitious, directors like Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen were receiving international attention and its music was treated with equal seriousness. Songs went from the studio to the screen and back again. A film song that landed well would be pressed as a single or compiled onto an LP, and audiences who had heard it in the cinema would seek it out to own it. Many of the Bengali non-film recordings released on LP in the early 1970s were actually reissues of songs that had originally been pressed as 78 rpm discs in the 1950s and 1960s , meaning the vinyl era was, in part, a way of preserving and distributing material that might otherwise have faded.
The Dum Dum studio handled everything: recording, manufacturing, pressing — and a record was treated accordingly. Musicians played live, full orchestras in a single room, and whatever happened that day was what ended up on the disc. The warmth collectors still hear in those old pressings comes from exactly that: no fixes, no overdubs, just a room full of people playing well.
By the mid-1970s, cassettes were coming in and the LP’s hold on Bengali households was
loosening. But those two decades had left something behind. The voices, the songs, the
grooves pressed into black vinyl — all of it is still out there, in crates and on shelves in Kolkata, Dhaka, and living rooms across the diaspora, waiting for a needle.
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