Optical Recording and Direct Sound

The earliest sound recordings in India were registered in 1902, when London’s Gramophone and Typewriter Ltd. sent its recording engineers for an ethnographic expedition in South Asia to gather music and sound recordings. The intention of the company was to set up a sound industry in the colony in order to export the profit back to Britain through the exploitation of local resources, labour, and materials. Indian films were still silent when these developments took place. The gramophone had a separate trajectory of technological transmission in India, as did radio. Whereas the era of ‘talkies’ began in the United States with the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, sound came to the still nascent Indian film industry only after investors and studio owners travelled to the United States to experience this new phenomenon. Once these producers, such as Jamshedji Framji Madan of the Madan Theatre, experienced sound film, they committed to bringing this technology to India. By 1931, the first Indian sound film, Alam Ara (Ornament of the World), directed by Ardeshir Irani, was released along with a large number of other films in Bombay, Kolkata, and elsewhere – all talkies.

The gramophone, and later film and radio, all modern inventions imported from the West, irrevocably altered sound practices in India in the early twentieth century. With the coming of sound recording technology, major unsettling transitions took place, and filmmaking moved from the hand of amateurs to the bigger studios that could afford the technologies of sound recording and reproduction.