In London, the Gramophone Company had just begun to send "recording vans" to India—heavy, horse-drawn caravans packed with wax cylinders and a giant horn. Their focus was purely commercial: sell records to the wealthy in Bombay and Calcutta. Edward wrote them a desperate letter. He didn’t want to sell records; he wanted to save sounds.
By the end of the month, they had nine usable wax cylinders. Edward shipped them to London in padded boxes stuffed with dried tea leaves. The Gramophone Company pressed a single test disc—black shellac, 78 rpm. They labeled it, "Assamese Folk – Unknown Artists."
Today, that recording is stored in a climate-controlled vault in New Delhi. It is the earliest authentic recording of Assamese folk music in existence. And on the centennial of Edward Gait’s death, the people of Jorhat erected a small stone near the Bhogdoi river. It doesn’t mention tea or empire. It simply says: assamese recording
They tried again at dawn, when the air was cool. They built a small fire inside the recording horn to dry the air. It was madness—fire and wax—but it worked. Saru sang the Dehbichar Geet , a song about the soul’s journey after death. Her voice cracked on the high note, but Edward kept rolling. He later said that crack was the most perfect thing he had ever heard—it was the sound of a life being poured out.
She began to hum. Not a song, just a low, guttural lament. It was the Khonikor , a funeral chant no one had written down in three centuries. Edward’s hands trembled. He signaled to the engineer. The engineer cranked the handle. The wax cylinder spun. In London, the Gramophone Company had just begun
In the humid, pre-monsoon heat of 1930s Assam, a young British tea planter named Edward Gait was about to do something that had never been done before—not for power, not for profit, but for the simple fear that a world of sound was about to vanish forever.
He noticed something terrible. The oldest songs, the ones that spoke of the Ahom kings who had ruled for 600 years, were being sung by only three women in his entire district. Their voices were like cracked porcelain—beautiful, but about to shatter. He didn’t want to sell records; he wanted to save sounds
Joymoti leaned into the brass horn and sang the Borgeet —a Vaishnavite hymn composed by the saint Shankardeva in the 15th century. The needle wobbled. The wax shaved off in a fine, gray curl. For ninety seconds, the air was nothing but raw, living history. Then the needle stuck. The wax was too soft for the humidity. The recording was a screeching mess.