Last of Delhi’s gramophone mechanics
HIS WORLD Rais Ahmed mends wind-up gramophones, helping many discover the joy of full-fidelity music experience in the digital age
NEWDELHI: Rais Ahmad’s first-floor workshop in the walled city is a charming musical mess. The dimly-lit small room, which exudes an old-world charm, is choc-a-bloc with wind-up gramophones of brands such as HMV, Columbia, Thorens, some of which more than 100 years old.
It is a Friday afternoon and Rais is trying to fix the broken spring of a suitcase gramophone, a 1930s HMV machine. It was delivered to him for repair a few days ago by a young man from Lucknow. “People come from all over the country to get their mechanical gramophones repaired. Some are rediscovering the joys of listening to a gramophone, and others, mostly youngsters, wish to keep alive memories of their forefathers,” says Rais, 60, one of the last of the gramophone mechanics in the city.
His family has been repairing gramophones for over seven decades. Rais learnt the job from his maternal uncle who used to work for HMV.
A wind-up gramophone, Rais says, may be a machine with a simple mechanism made up of a crank handle, brackets, a needle, turntable, sound box, a horn, and powered by a spring motor, but one needs a delicate hand and an ear for sound to be a gramophone mechanic. “What makes my job difficult is the unavailability of parts as gramophones went out of use almost five decades ago,” says Rais. “But I try my best to fix the original part, and if that is not possible, use one from other old machines of the same models.”
Rai s ’ s workshop has s he l v e s crammed with old gramophones and spare parts sourced from all over the country from his carefully built network of junk dealers.
Broken spring because of over-winding, he says, is a common problem in gramophones. “So, the motor will clunk, rattle, stick, or stall, when you wind them, and it is not easy to repair. I often have to disassemble, clean, regress, and reassemble the springs enclosed in a small steel drum, which is quite a complex business. In many cases they need to be replaced and finding a replacement is not easy,” says Rais.
Rais says that he gets a lot of gramophones that buzz or squawk even when playing a good record. “In such cases, I often have to refurbish the sound box. At times, I have to fabricate parts too, but that is not acceptable to some of my customers , especially collectors who do not want to compromise with the originality of their machine,” says Rais, who gets about 5-6 customers every month. A lot of them, he says, belong to old aristocratic families. “There are few gramophone mechanics left in the country; I am one of the last of my breed.”
Interestingly, Rais says, he gets a lot of customers from remote Himalayan villages, where some people still use mechanical gramophones. “It is because electricity is a problem in many remote villages,” he says.
The value of mechanical gramophones made during the first three decades of the 20th century is rising, says Rais. So, which gramophone model is the most sought after?
“The HMV 102,” he says immediately. “It was a suitcase gramophone, had great looks and sound quality. It had made suitcase gramophones quite popular among the upper middle-class. In the 1930s, upwardly mobile people would take them to picnics, and carry them during their travels. Those days only the well-heeled could afford them.”
For the uninitiated, the HMV 102 was introduced in the early 1930 as a successor to the HMV 101. “It was one of HMV’S bestselling models ever. It was a rage those days, and a lot of youngsters aspired for it. I got one from my father as a gift,” says Satish Sundra, 83, a Sunder Nagar resident whose family had a HMV dealership in Himachal Pradesh in the 1930s. “In Delhi, Maharaja Lal & Sons and Howard Radio Company in the walled city were among the most popular shops to buy gramophones.”
By the early 1980s when audio cassette players became popular, gramophones fell out of favour, Rais says. “People started junking them during this period. But by the mid-1990s, many people began to collect the older models from the early 20th century,” says Rais, standing at his workstation that has a jumble of tools such as drills, pliers screwdriver, grinding machine. “Most early machines were hand-produced, and they require basic tools for repair.”
Talking of the gramophone enthusiasts, he says that a lot of audiophiles too visit his workshop for repair. “Vinyl, they believe, provides them a full-fidelity listening experience, with incomparable richness of sound,” says Rias. “But I think people nowadays buy gramophones as mere decorative items.”