Archive of Indian Music (AIM)
Preserving India's civilisational memory extends beyond documenting its history. It also involves safeguarding the voices, music, and soundscapes that have shaped our cultural journey.
India's First Digital Sound Archive for Vintage Gramophone Recordings
FIHCR is home to what is widely regarded as India's first digital sound archive dedicated to vintage gramophone recordings - the Archive of Indian Music (AIM).
Established in 2011, AIM was founded with the vision of preserving the voices of our ancestors and making them digitally accessible through an online platform for researchers, musicians, students of music, educators, and the public at large.
Over the years, AIM has collected nearly 15,000 vintage gramophone records, many rescued from chor bazars, flea markets, scrap dealers, and neglected private collections across India. These fragile shellac discs, many of immense historical and cultural value, have been painstakingly restored and digitised, giving them a new lease of life for future generations.
To date, more than 2,000 recordings have been carefully restored, reaching an audience of over 4.5 lakh listeners through the Archive's digital platforms. Looking ahead, AIM has set an ambitious vision of digitising and preserving one lakh vintage gramophone records, creating one of the world's most comprehensive digital repositories of India's recorded musical and cultural heritage.
Extraordinary Treasures
The Archive houses numerous recordings of exceptional historical and cultural significance, including:
- The first known recording of M. S. Subbulakshmi, made when she was just nine years old
- India’s first commercial gramophone recording by Gauhar Jaan (1902)
- An early rendition of Jana Gana Mana by the Visva-Bharati Chorus
- Mahatma Gandhi’s “Spiritual Message”, recorded in England in 1931
- Rare recordings of the voices of Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose
- Rare theatre performances and early cinema recordings spanning multiple Indian languages
Together, these extraordinary recordings offer a unique window into India’s artistic, intellectual, political, and cultural history.
Patronage and Founding Support
The establishment of AIM in 2011 was made possible through the patronage of T. V. Mohandas Pai, Chairman of Manipal Global Education and former Chief Financial Officer and Board Member of Infosys.
The Archive also received the generous patronage of Sudha Murty and the Infosys Foundation.
The Founder Trustees of the Archive are Shri Sampath Srinivasan and Smt. H. N. Nagamani, whose vision and commitment laid the foundation for this pioneering initiative.
AIM has further benefited from the support and expertise of several distinguished record collectors, including Suresh Chandvankar of the Society of Indian Record Collectors (SIRC) and Shri Kushal Gopalka, among others, who have contributed significantly to preserving India's recorded heritage.
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A Living Archive
The Archive of Indian Music is more than a collection of restored gramophone records - it is a living repository of India's cultural memory. Every restored recording revives a forgotten voice, a performance, a speech, or a musical tradition that might otherwise have been lost to time.
By preserving and sharing these invaluable recordings, AIM ensures that India's history is not only written and remembered - it is also heard.
The Archive has also curated audio exhibitions ‘Voices of India’ in several cities of India like Bangalore, Delhi and Kolkata. AIM wishes to disseminate this information freely with everyone and thereby address the issue of accessibility to these rare treasures. It also collaborated with Google Cultural Institute to curate online thematic exhibitions on some of its collections.
Dr Vikram Sampath on the Archive of Indian Music
Documentary film
The archive also undertook the ethnographic documentation of musical traditions of indigenous communities, which are at the risk of extinction in the decades to come. Mr. Ricky Kej, internationally renowned Indian Music Composer, Environmentalist and three-times Grammy Award Winner along with Mr. Rajib Sarma, a practising Tantra specialist at Kamakhya Temple in Guwahati, the Founder Trustee of the Foundation for History and Heritage Studies, undertook a pilot project with the archive that resulted in a documentary film on the mystical Bauls of Bengal. Bauls are a nonconformist sect having gurus, but no dogmas, rituals, religious institutions or scriptures. Their path to God or spirituality is defined through music.
Declared as an Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO, The Bauls of Bengal have kept their philosophies alive for over a 1000 years, but modern demands threaten their simple, enlightened lifestyles.
The film was directed by Mr. Sairam Sagiraju, one of India’s first VR filmmakers, who is known to experiment with storytelling using multiple mediums.
After a successful run at several international film festivals, the film has now been uploaded on YouTube for viewing.
A trailer of the film
Film: Who is BAUL
Posters from film
The archive has ambitious plans to also document the lifestyle and music of the 300+ indigenous communities (who are otherwise disparagingly called as tribes) of the North East of India providing thereby not only a rich archival source of their art but also bringing the limelight and focus on them and their art to enable possible sources of livelihood and performance, both within and outside India.