[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":174},["ShallowReactive",2],{"story-en-cargills-hundred-record-trade":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"category":139,"description":140,"era":141,"extension":142,"featured":143,"heroImage":144,"imageCredit":145,"imageLicense":146,"imageSource":147,"meta":148,"navigation":149,"path":150,"rawYear":151,"seo":152,"sources":153,"stem":172,"translated":149,"url":156,"__hash__":173},"storiesEn\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fcargills-hundred-record-trade.md","The Cargills Hundred",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":130},"minimark",[9,23,26,29,34,37,40,43,47,50,57,60,84,87,91,94,97,104,107,111,114,117,120,124],[10,11,12,13,17,18,22],"p",{},"One day in October 1938 a fifteen-year-old stage actress named Daisy Rasammah Daniels was introduced to a bandleader called H. W. Rupasinghe. Rupasinghe heard her sing, and put her in front of a recording horn. The song was ",[14,15,16],"strong",{},"සිරි බුද්ධගයා විහාරේ"," (",[19,20,21],"em",{},"Siri Buddhagaya Vihare",", \"at the Buddhagaya temple\"). The disc went out the following year as His Master's Voice N-9300, and the girl went out under the name Rukmani Devi.",[10,24,25],{},"The interesting part of that sentence is not the singer. It is the last line of the catalogue entry. The record was issued in Ceylon by Cargills Ltd — that is, by a department store on York Street, Colombo Fort, whose other business that season included Australian butter, horse feed, Enid Blyton annuals and a Santa Claus at Christmas.",[10,27,28],{},"For roughly forty years, the Sinhala record trade did not have a record industry behind it. It had an import house.",[30,31,33],"h2",{"id":32},"forty-departments-and-a-gramophone-counter","Forty departments and a gramophone counter",[10,35,36],{},"Cargills began in Kandy in 1844 and moved into its purpose-built Fort premises — the long burnt-sienna building at the junction of York Street and Prince Street — in 1906. The historian Asiff Hussein counts it the biggest of Colombo's \"Big Four\" department stores, alongside Millers, Whiteaway Laidlaw and Colombo Apothecaries, all four built on the Harrods model and all four at their most glamorous in the 1950s and 1960s.",[10,38,39],{},"By independence Cargills had some forty departments. It was the Ceylon agent for Arnott's biscuits, Fray Bentos corned beef, Del Monte fruit, Singer sewing machines, Hornby trains — and for the His Master's Voice radiogram. Down the street, Millers stocked Marconiphone radios and Columbia gramophones. So the two great rival record labels of the Sinhala 78 era reached Ceylonese buyers through two rival British-style department stores a few hundred yards apart, filed somewhere between the toy department and the wines and spirits.",[10,41,42],{},"That arrangement shaped what got recorded. A shop that has to shift stock before the next shipment arrives is a very different kind of patron from a record company with a repertoire policy. It wants songs that sell this quarter.",[30,44,46],{"id":45},"one-hundred-records-1939","One hundred records, 1939",[10,48,49],{},"Then, once, the shop behaved like a label.",[10,51,52,53,56],{},"In 1939 Ananda Samarakoon signed a two-year contract with His Master's Voice and made his first two gramophone recordings. Garrett Field, whose ",[19,54,55],{},"Modernizing Composition"," is footnoted to Sinhala primary sources, records that those recordings \"were part of one hundred new Sri Lankan gramophone records produced through collaboration between HMV and Cargills, a powerful import and wholesale business.\"",[10,58,59],{},"A hundred records is a programme, not an accident. It is the largest single act of talent-picking in the history of Ceylonese recorded music, and it was run jointly by the world's biggest record company and a Colombo grocer.",[10,61,62,63,17,66,69,70,17,73,76,77,17,80,83],{},"Samarakoon's two sides show what HMV thought it was buying. ",[14,64,65],{},"ජන සම මන",[19,67,68],{},"Jana Sama Mana",", \"all the minds of the people\") was written to the melody and the long-and-short syllabic pattern of Tagore's \"Jana Gana Mana\" of 1911; ",[14,71,72],{},"බලන්න සොහොයුරියේ",[19,74,75],{},"Balanna Sohoyuriye",", \"look, my sister\") was fitted to Tagore's \"Jodi Tor Dak Shune Keu Na Ase Tobe Ekla Cholo Re\" of 1905. Samarakoon had studied at Santiniketan and said openly that in song his true guru was Tagore. HMV gave him something no other Sinhalese artist on its books received: a genre category of his own on the label, ",[19,78,79],{},"කලාත්මක ගී",[19,81,82],{},"kalatmaka gi",", \"artistic song\").",[10,85,86],{},"Rukmani Devi's N-9300 was issued in the same season by the same agent, and between 1938 and 1945 she recorded forty-four songs for His Master's Voice. Whether her disc was one of the hundred is not recorded anywhere we could find; the two facts simply sit next to each other in the same year.",[30,88,90],{"id":89},"the-label-that-recorded-in-colombo","The label that recorded in Colombo",[10,92,93],{},"There was one exception to the rule that Ceylon had no studio of its own, and it lasted three years.",[10,95,96],{},"In about December 1933 two brothers from a Bombay diamond-trading family, Jesinglal and Kirtilal Mehta, founded The Musical Products Ltd in Madras to produce Indian repertoire for the English BROADCAST label. The discographer Michael Kinnear records that the company kept its head office on Mount Road, Madras, a branch in Bombay, and recording rooms in Bombay, Calcutta and Colombo. The discs themselves were pressed in England, by the Crystalate Gramophone Record Manufacturing Company of Tonbridge, Kent.",[10,98,99,100,103],{},"Field lists Broadcast among the labels pushing the new Sinhala genre of ",[19,101,102],{},"alut sindu"," through the 1930s. So for a few years there was a working studio in Colombo cutting wax that would be shipped to Kent, pressed, and shipped back to be sold in Ceylon.",[10,105,106],{},"It ended abruptly. In March 1937 Decca took over Crystalate's plant and goodwill; the last known Indian BROADCAST catalogue is dated February 1937; and by 1940 the company's Colombo branch had stopped being a studio and become simply a shop selling off the stockpile. The Musical Products Ltd closed altogether in 1944.",[30,108,110],{"id":109},"what-survived-and-what-did-not","What survived, and what did not",[10,112,113],{},"The commercial machinery of the era is easier to reconstruct than the music it made. Cargills' agency for HMV, Millers' Columbia counter, the distributors Lewis Brown's, Gauri Corporation and New Saraswathi Stores — these appear in advertisements and trade records. Record labels also carried the catalogue and matrix numbers that let a researcher date a disc.",[10,115,116],{},"What is missing is the paperwork on the other side of the glass. The hobbyist collector behind the Jayasri Gramophone blog, one of the few people to have gone looking, reports that most of the register books listing Sri Lankan artists have been destroyed by damp or by simple lack of storage. Labels frequently did not print lyricists' names at all. The result is that a substantial part of the first four decades of Sinhala recorded music is anonymous, and will stay that way unless the London session ledgers of the Gramophone Company are read against the surviving discs.",[10,118,119],{},"There is a reason to care about a department store's record counter. When the state finally did start commissioning Sinhala song at scale — through Radio Ceylon in the 1950s — everyone involved knew exactly what they were reacting against: a business in which a song was stock, a lyricist was paid a few rupees and left unnamed, and the deciding vote belonged to whoever had to clear the shelves.",[30,121,123],{"id":122},"what-we-know-and-how-we-know-it","What we know, and how we know it",[10,125,126,127,129],{},"The hundred-record collaboration between HMV and Cargills, and Samarakoon's 1939 contract, come from Garrett Field's ",[19,128,55],{},", an open-access monograph footnoted to Sinhala sources including Sunil Ariyaratne's research. The BROADCAST label's Colombo recording rooms and its 1934–37 span come from Michael Kinnear's discographical work; the department-store detail from the historian Asiff Hussein; Rukmani Devi's N-9300 and its issue by Cargills from a Sarasaviya profile cited on Wikipedia. What we do not have is the list. Nobody has published the hundred titles, and the register books that would have held the artists' names are, by the account of the collectors who went looking, largely gone.",{"title":131,"searchDepth":132,"depth":132,"links":133},"",2,[134,135,136,137,138],{"id":32,"depth":132,"text":33},{"id":45,"depth":132,"text":46},{"id":89,"depth":132,"text":90},{"id":109,"depth":132,"text":110},{"id":122,"depth":132,"text":123},"institution","Ceylon's record business ran through a Fort department store that also sold Australian butter. In 1939 that store and His Master's Voice made a hundred Sinhala records together.","1930s-1940s","md",false,"\u002Fimages\u002Fstories\u002Fcargills-hundred-record-trade.webp","Adam Jones — the Cargills building, York Street, Colombo Fort","CC BY-SA 2.0","https:\u002F\u002Fcommons.wikimedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FFile:Facade_of_Cargills_(Ceylon)_with_Military_Vehicle_-_Fort_District_-_Colombo_-_Sri_Lanka_(14014756511).jpg",{},true,"\u002Fen\u002Fstories\u002Fcargills-hundred-record-trade",1939,{"title":5,"description":140},[154,157,160,163,166,169],{"title":155,"url":156},"Garrett Field, Modernizing Composition (UC Press Luminos, 2017) — full text","https:\u002F\u002Farchive.org\u002Fdetails\u002Fdli.doa.211",{"title":158,"url":159},"Modernizing Composition — publisher's page","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.ucpress.edu\u002Fbooks\u002Fmodernizing-composition\u002Fpaper",{"title":161,"url":162},"Rukmani Devi — Wikipedia (HMV N-9300, issued by Cargills)","https:\u002F\u002Fen.wikipedia.org\u002Fwiki\u002FRukmani_Devi",{"title":164,"url":165},"Asiff Hussein interviewed on 'The Big Four of Old Colombo' — eLanka","https:\u002F\u002Fwww.elanka.com.au\u002Fthe-big-four-of-old-colombo-2\u002F",{"title":167,"url":168},"Michael Kinnear, 'BROADCAST in India' — Bajakhana","https:\u002F\u002Fbajakhana.com.au\u002Fbroadcast-in-india-english-manufactured-indian-record-labels\u002F",{"title":170,"url":171},"History of gramophone songs in Sri Lanka — Jayasri Gramophone (hobbyist)","http:\u002F\u002Fjayasri-gramophone.blogspot.com\u002F2014\u002F07\u002Fhistory-of-gramophone-songs-in-sri-lanka.html","en\u002Fstories\u002Fcargills-hundred-record-trade","mK3rofD-B8MusxRGQKrdAfDQJDmkAHgg6z6z6lHUAYY",1787999337611]