Nearly every vintage Indian record you will ever hold leads back to one company and, for much of the story, one address on the edge of Calcutta. The Gramophone Company of India, trading to the world as HMV, was for decades effectively the Indian record industry. Its history is stamped, literally, into the deadwax of our shelves.
Calcutta, 1901
The Gramophone Company of London opened its Indian branch in Calcutta in 1901, when recorded sound itself was barely five years into commercial life. The next year, recording engineers made some of India's first commercial discs, among them the celebrated recordings of Gauhar Jaan, the Calcutta singer who became the subcontinent's first recording star. India was not a late adopter of the record; it was one of the earliest markets on earth.
The factory
In 1908 the company opened a record factory in Calcutta, among the first anywhere in Asia, and manufacturing later settled at the site whose name collectors still speak like a brand: Dum Dum. For generations, being "pressed at Dum Dum" is simply what an Indian record was. Shellac 78s first, in staggering variety across languages and regions, then microgroove vinyl from the late 1950s onward.
The dog and the trumpet
The His Master's Voice trademark, the terrier Nipper listening to a gramophone horn, became one of the most recognised images in the country, painted on shop walls from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. Under the EMI umbrella from 1931, the Indian company deployed a family of imprints alongside HMV: Angel, Odeon, Columbia, and Regal, each with its own catalogue series and personality. Our guide to the EMI label family maps them for collectors.
The catalogue of a civilisation
What makes this company remarkable is breadth. On one shelf of our shop sits a Tagore dance drama sung by Suchitra Mitra, a sitar recital by Ustad Vilayat Khan, the Barsat Ki Rat soundtrack, and Carnatic and Hindustani masters in their prime, all wearing the same dog-and-trumpet or its sibling marks. Film music paid the bills, but the company recorded classical, folk, devotional, and regional music with an archivist's appetite. It is fair to call the HMV vaults the largest sound archive of Indian culture in existence.
Reading a Dum Dum record today
The artefacts reward attention. Heavy board sleeves with release catalogues printed on the back. Label designs that changed by era, letting collectors date a copy at a glance. Catalogue prefixes, ECLP, ECSD, 3AEX, MOCE, that sort the catalogue into series. And pressing quality that, at its best, stands beside anything from the era's Western plants.
Soumitra Chatterjee / Suchitra Mitra / Hemanta Mukherjee
Shapmochan (শাপমোচন) - Tagore's Musical Drama
₹2,200
Ali Akbar Khan
Raga Chandra Mundan / Raga Bhairavi
₹2,000
Why it matters to a collector
Understanding this one company is understanding Indian vinyl: its imprints explain the labels, its series explain the numbers, and its factory explains the phrase "Indian pressing". Most of the first pressings we verify at the shop are, in the end, Dum Dum records read correctly. The company's story is not background trivia; it is the collector's toolkit, and everything on our First Pressings shelf was authenticated with it.
