Shellac as Musical Plastic

Around 1920, an early silent film about the making of gramophone discs was released. Plainly entitled Making a Record, it was an industrial documentary avant la lettre, offering a series of novel views on an everyday sounding object.¹ An establishing shot (twenty-one seconds into the film) reveals the inside of a recording studio: we see a female singer accompanied by a violinist, a clarinetist, a flautist, and trumpet players all crammed around a horn suspended in midair, funneling musical vibrations toward a rotating wax disc (see figure 1). These performers are accompanied by a sound technician, centrally located, who holds the horn from below while looking at the singer’s mouth. The singer, who goes unnamed in the film, stares back at him, adjusting her tone in response to his facial cues. Everyone looks a bit on edge. Perhaps the nerves were due to the presence of the film camera and crew, together with the jitters commonly reported in early experiences of the recording studio.²

Having shown the performers and technicians, Making a Record goes on to track the outcome of their collaborations in the wax impression, which is “graphited and placed in a special bath” (to quote from the intertitles). A man brushes a blackened comb over the wax, then dunks the wax in the bath, where it builds up a metal coat that eventually forms into a hard shell, later to be peeled away, releasing the negative impression: the master record. This master is then reinforced with a steel back in preparation for stage three, the pressing of the records themselves. Several shots show men in flat caps feeding large clumps of a molten mixture—“shellac, lampblack and clay” (to quote again from the intertitles)—through huge, motor-driven mangles, flattening the material into sheets. The purpose is to render the material pliable, ready to be pressed out: the molten mixture is encased, together with the master and a paper disc label, within a steel pocket, sealed, and compressed under hydraulic pressure. A closing shot shows a record slowly rotated before the camera by a faceless (and headless) worker (see figure 2).

With this display of the final product, Making a Record comes to an end. It has guided us along a chain of industrial processes and material encounters, from musical input to manufacture, culminating in the widely known (if less widely owned and used) sonic commodity. The gramophone record turns out to be both familiar and full of mysteries—mysteries that this new kind of industrial film can both outline and pleasurably solve.³ But of course, Making a Record inevitably leaves much out. By tracing the disc back to the moment of performance, it omits the labor that made studio recording possible (at one end, the musical composition and rehearsals; at the other, the heating of the wax and readying of the turntables). In its overriding interest in factory work, metals, and mold making, the film also elides the infrastructures on which such work relied: the international, gendered division of labor involved in stamping records, along with the larger colonial networks of resource extraction needed to supply the disc’s materials.

This article tells a new story about the making of records, one that ventures beyond the industrial frame of Making a Record and other documentaries, a frame shared by pioneering work in the field of sound studies.⁴ Rather than looking again at Western science, engineering, and musical performance, I home in on an often overlooked aspect of the disc’s materiality: specifically, on those black clumps of molten mixture fed through the industrial rollers glimpsed in the film. Among other things, that mixture could contain crushed limestone, slate, barytes, and other mashed rocky minerals, lampblack collected from industrial smokestacks, and a resinous sap called gum copal.⁵ All these materials invoked global supply chains, and each gave discs certain physical traits. The ground rocks were sourced from countless locations, providing frictional resistance against the pressure of gramophone needles.⁶ Lampblack (also known as carbon black, a fine soot) could be gathered wherever fossil fuels were consumed. It blackened discs and gave them a consistent appearance, helping create the impression of a uniform commodity (despite widespread variability in their material composition).⁷ Gum copal is derived from the accretion, over the course of centuries, of sap from the Daniellia tree of West and Central Africa and became a global commodity with the rise of the Indian Ocean slave trade in the nineteenth century; it worked as an adhesive in the heterogeneous ensemble of disc materials.⁸

I have left until last the component of the mixture that will be my focus in this article: this is shellac, the chief binding agent both within gramophone discs and across the gramophone industry’s colonial architecture. While never the main disc material in terms of physical mass, shellac was to become essential for their making; it could not be readily substituted, and when supplies dwindled, the industry faltered. This industrial dependence had fundamentally to do with shellac’s plasticity, a physical property that was itself the result of elaborate manufacture, enabling the material to take the shape of sounds, holding and preserving them over time. As a varnish, shellac had been produced for centuries, if not millennia; it originated in forests around the Indian Ocean and derived from the resinous secretion of the lac insect that inhabits them.⁹ First as a luxury commodity, then as a run-of-the-mill component in the nineteenth-century paint industry, shellac changed over time to become increasingly (thermo)plastic in response to musical and electrical industries that demanded precision molds. It was an important component in the making of gramophone discs, and the history of its manufacture reveals yet again the crucial role of non-Western environments and knowledge systems in so much Western industry.¹⁰

Despite the historical centrality of shellac, it has become a topic of interest only recently through the rise of ecocritical approaches to sound media.¹¹ Jacob Smith presents shellac as an environmentally friendly material, drawing a comparison with the more polluting formats—such as vinyl, CDs, and digital streaming—that were to follow.¹² While agreeing that shellac is indeed biodegradable and so in some ways preferable to synthetic plastics, Kyle Devine has instead underscored the material’s human and environmental costs: the systems of colonial extraction by which countless workers, insects, and trees were expended in the name of musical consumption.¹³ What is more, shellac established a long-standing pattern of musical consumerism, one that relied on disposable materials (and people) and resulted in the endless buildup of media waste. Elodie Roy explores this afterlife of shellac as “vibrant matter” embedded in larger socionatural cycles of renewal and decay.¹⁴ She puts forth infrastructural thinking about shellac—the processes through which the material is assembled and constantly reassembled in light of the present—in order to “excavate and recirculate repressed or buried issues, most notably the colonial question.”¹⁵

Guided by these explorations, the present article interrogates shellac’s history as a musical commodity, further investigating the labor conditions on which mediated listening experiences depended. I intend, however, to make new spaces in shellac’s history for the agency of workers, both as the bearers of technical knowledge and as political actors. By the 1920s, the gramophone industry accounted for 30–40 percent of global shellac yields, creating a dynamic bond between users of musical media and mostly Indian shellac workers—Adivasi cultivators of lac, other rural workers in a widely distributed shellac cottage industry, and shellac factory laborers mainly in Calcutta.¹⁶ While lac cultivators remained to a significant extent insulated from global market forces, rural and urban factory-based shellac workers were largely indentured to their employers and thus more dangerously enmeshed in the circuit of imperial capital. These exploitative labor practices were typical of colonial economies and constitute an important vector of the material’s history—but not the only one. Shellac work also involved far-reaching technical knowledge and could be a means of resistance to capitalist and colonial forms of authority.

Writing ahead of a wave of newer materialisms, Arjun Appadurai famously proposed a focus on commodities, and the politics of knowledge they enfold, as a way to interrogate potentially global cultures. Rather than privileging local meanings of exchange, Appadurai advocated allowing the forms, uses, and trajectories of things to illuminate relations within and between societies.¹⁷ This approach has come in for some criticism, in particular from ethnomusicologists, because commodified things—as nonhuman actants that create human societies through their exchange—may (paradoxically) be overlooked in terms of their material effects and forms of nonhuman agency.¹⁸ Appadurai nevertheless highlighted a dimension of materiality that has faded from more recent scholarly turns to the post- and nonhuman. By stressing the “complex forms and social distributions of knowledge” involved in commodities, Appadurai famously expanded their remit beyond Western industrial society.¹⁹ He called fresh attention to the processes that things—often luxury articles such as museum artifacts, tourist art, and fashion—underwent as they moved in and out of the commodity state, as a way to highlight the politics inscribed across swathes of economic, physical, cultural, and epistemological distance.

As a global commodity, shellac was embodied and embedded in both industries and environments; it thus points to the epistemological entanglement of the gramophone as a sound reproduction technology. To put this another way, shellac was the material in which one set of techniques—those for making plastic—interfaced with, and sharply switched into, another—those for musical listening.²⁰ While this second set of techniques is more or less familiar to musicologists and sound students, the former remains less so.²¹ Yet cultural techniques of production, however distant, mundane, or even uninteresting they may sometimes be, are nevertheless central to musical materiality. The production of shellac for the purpose of gramophone records, for example, overloads even the most inclusive and/or expansive definition of “musicking” as a social activity (to name one of the more celebrated accounts of musical ontology presently in circulation),²² suggesting a more disjunctive, material conception of music as worldly thing.

My interest in techniques of producing commodities takes its cue from global historians of science, who have recently stressed the need to find and acknowledge the multiple objects and sites of knowledge production. This is a pressing issue for historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the wide orbits of European empire, where one-sided accounts stemming from the archives of colonial science preponderate.²³ Kapil Raj, for example, has urged historians to note the constant implication of bodily practices in knowledge systems of all kinds, which coproduce scientific knowledge through “the encounter and interaction between heterogeneous specialist communities of diverse origins.”²⁴ In a musical register, shellac can be understood in this way: the material itself is a more than colonial archive. Its familiar presence in disc collections around the world constitutes a dispersed, latter-day monument to the knowledge practices and patterns of circulation that underpinned the gramophone industry during the first half of the twentieth century.

The global dispersal of shellac as a commodity across wide-ranging musical archives (past and present, domestic and official) also speaks, more pointedly, to ruptures between knowledge systems—to the abrupt switch between the sets of cultural techniques of production and listening adumbrated above. After all, gramophone discs did not, for the most part, circle back to shellac workers and makers; musical consumption was in this sense only a late stage in the material’s commodity journey.²⁵ In the pages that follow, I track the coordinates of this path, and this switch to musical use, which have broad implications for thinking about shellac, the gramophone, and sound reproduction technology writ large.

Shellac’s journey must begin in the middle of things. Its very name embeds another material, lac, the resinous encrustation produced by the lac insect, a substance cultivated mainly in South and Southeast Asia. The word “lac” derives from the Sanskrit “lakṣa,” the number of one hundred thousand, an etymology that seems to refer to the material’s genesis in the insect multitudes that swarm twice yearly on certain trees.²⁶ But “lac” also denotes a product of human labor, one that has to be harvested, removed from the trees on which the encrustation develops.²⁷ Shellac is a material derived from lac; it can more easily be measured, bought, and sold. These two words—“lac” and “shellac”—mark interconnecting histories that unfold over different timescales. By far the more ancient, “lac” occurs in the Sanskrit epic the Mahābhārata, in a tale about a house specially designed to go up in flames and kill its inhabitants.²⁸ Over two thousand years later, lac appears in more familiar guise in a lengthy account of Akbar’s court, as a building material for varnishing wood and in the name of a category of workers who “varnish reeds etc. with lac” in the Mughal Empire.²⁹

“Shellac” (an English condensation of the French “lacque en écailles,” lacquer in shells) is a much more recent coinage: it and its cognates are first found across early modern Europe. Shellac is mentioned, for example, in Daniel Defoe’s A New Voyage around the World by a Course Never Sailed Before (1725). A story inspired by contemporary narratives of global circumnavigation—and designed to enthuse British readers about establishing a new East India Company—this work listed shellac among the “solid Goods” worth “spending Money for” in India: “The necessary or useful Things are Pepper, salt Peter, dying Woods and dying Earths, Drugs, Lacks, such as Shel-lack, Stick-lack, etc., Diamonds, and some Pearl, and raw Silk.”³⁰ As a species of commodity, “shel-lack” was born of global trade; and, as the context in which Defoe’s novel was written demonstrates, the word emerged through Western colonial multinationalism.³¹ In Defoe’s list, shellac appeared among other, commonly desired Indian commodities and in ready contrast to “stick-lack” (that is, lac still attached to the twigs on which the lac insect feeds). “Shel-lack” specified the flakes or shells, the result of removing and refining the insect’s hard encrustation—of grinding, washing, melting, purifying, stretching, and shattering lac. Neither lac nor shellac were natural products, then. Both are better described as “socio-natural commodities,” to borrow environmental scholar Nancy Peluso’s term: neither had any “significant use or exchange value unless … industrially treated.”³² Shellac, however, passed through a greater number of industrial processes and so concentrated a greater quantity of human labor.

Lac continues to be traded to this day, but the rise of shellac in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries highlighted an important historical shift. Whereas Mughal lac could be a varnish used as a building material in the land of its origin, shellac was an Indian commodity sought after by European colonial powers. In other words, it rebranded lac as a material for export, processed and awaiting future use, sometimes far from the places in which it was made. Early accounts mention shellac as a material used in conjunction with wax to seal letters and as an ingredient in japanning (European lacquer work) and French polish.³³ It was applied to wooden floors, furniture, and musical instruments such as guitars, violins, and harpsichords.³⁴ In this way, shellac shaped both the acoustics of various musical instruments and, much more broadly, the way in which elite spaces sounded and felt. A luxury commodity applied—and, as it wore down, intermittently reapplied—to other luxury commodities, “vernice indiana” (Indian varnish) mediated the touch of tables and chairs, the way footsteps rebounded on surfaces.³⁵

By the nineteenth century, both lac and shellac were consumed at scale. In India, Pakistan, and elsewhere, age-old traditions of lac-turnery—a technique by which shellac is applied through friction against a rapidly rotating object—flourished, supporting a growing industry in jewelry and wooden toys.³⁶ Around 1850, however, shellac (some processed from lac in India, some in European factories) also took on global importance in the paint industry. For this purpose, the material was newly traded in “Standard T. N. bags” and “Standard T. N. cases,” where “T. N.” signified “Truly Native,” a trademark and colonial brand referring to the material’s Indian origins.³⁷ Shellac continued to fulfill many older purposes (for example, it remained key in the hat industry in stiffening wool and fur to make felt), but toward the end of the century it was also applied in Western electronics industries where precision molds were needed. In particular, shellac became the major binding agent within a class of “Hot Molded Organic Materials” for the making of switches, handles, telephone handsets, and gramophone records.³⁸ Within a fast-changing industry of proto-plastic mold making, it was widely deployed to impart qualities of flexibility and resistance.³⁹

The word “plastic” entered discourse on shellac in the early twentieth century concurrently with the rise of synthetic resins. Key in this regard was US experimentation with celluloid as an industrial substitute—in the making of clothes, combs, and dental plates—where “natural” materials such as rubber and shellac were in short supply.⁴⁰ Celluloid, in spite of its origins in camphor laurels and pine trees, was widely understood as more artificial than the materials it was meant to replace, largely on account of the conspicuous role of chemical research in its manufacture.⁴¹ As Wiebe E. Bijker has shown, celluloid supplied nascent research into plastics with a “technological frame”—a set of concepts shared by a community of scientists and industrial engineers, together with the series of interactions and exchanges between them.⁴² This technological frame defined materials research around 1900 and created the paradigm within which synthetic plastics developed.

But celluloid also reshaped the uses of and expectations regarding older materials such as shellac. Once understood mainly as a varnish, it could now be reinterpreted as natural plastic. Through comparison with celluloid, shellac was reimagined as a product of nature’s laboratory, while the lac insect itself came to be understood as a kind of chemical factory productive of diverse commodities. In a passage attached to a hand-drawn sketch of a 1920s biplane, shellac was presented as “essential in aeroplanes, electrical appliances, insulating materials, and in the manufacture of phonograph records. It is also used in the manufacture of buttons, grinding wheels, oil-cloth, dominoes, poker chips, linoleum, imitation ivory, mica products, shoe polishes, sealing wax, stiffening for hats.”⁴³ This typical passage comes from Elizabeth Brownell Crandall’s Shellac: A Story of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1924). Traveling through past, present, and future, Crandall presented a romanticized view of the material and its uses, calling attention to shellac’s South Asian origins while underscoring its pervasiveness in everyday Western lives. She doubly recast shellac: as an ancient, exotic varnish and as a hypermodern plastic. The above passage enacted this transition and expansion from varnish into plastic: the items listed shapeshift—grinding wheels into oil cloth into dominoes and so on—as if to invoke shellac’s plasticity and fire enthusiasm for untapped potentials.⁴⁴

In the parade of shellacked objects in Crandall’s list, phonograph records came next to airplanes, electronics, and electrically insulating materials, musical use providing a link between older and more futuristic applications. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, records had become, for the most part, a historical concern within this discourse. In a manual written in the 1950s, shellac promoter and engineer Edward Hicks outlined the ebb and flow of the record business, with the production of shellac tethered to its changing fortunes: rising at the birth of the gramophone industry in the early twentieth century, falling at the advent of radio, rising again in the 1930s with the “rebirth of the phonograph record business” following the Wall Street Crash, but then falling off once again with the interruption of shellac supplies during the Second World War. Wartime shortages had long-term effects and shellac continued to be prohibitively expensive, permitting “great inroads by synthetic resins such as vinylite, ethyl cellulose and polyvinyl compounds,” which ultimately enabled the production of LP records.⁴⁵

Looking back at a historical industry, and alert to the synthetic plastics that displaced shellac for musical use, Hicks offered an archaeological account of how gramophone discs were made that highlighted shellac’s plasticity. Largely technical in scope, his manual homed in on the kind of shellac required: it needed high fluidity, long life under heat, a low wax content, and a low content of insoluble matter—qualities found only in high-grade shellac.⁴⁶ Like Bakelite, high-grade shellac was prized for its capacity to become malleable and then quickly solid without significantly changing shape as its temperature rose and fell—while only gradually wearing down the metal stamper that gave it shape.⁴⁷ Hicks thus located shellac (retrospectively) as a moment within a longer history, describing its value for the gramophone industry in terms of its protean thermoplasticity.

As musical use of high-grade shellac increased in the first half of the twentieth century, the material demanded a greater quantity and intensity of Indian labor, with important consequences for the industries and environments in which both lac and shellac were made. The testimony of botanists and entomologists—who tried, and often failed, to increase yields—can illustrate some of these changes. Shellac researchers have left behind an extensive paper trail, a typically one-sided colonial and scientific archive in which the interests of British imperialists largely, though never entirely, eclipsed Indian knowledge and labor.⁴⁸

A comparison of a number of encyclopedia entries published around the turn of the century—the first set around 1890, the second in 1908—can illustrate this displacement of knowledge within the colonial archive. All were edited by Sir George Watt, the official Reporter on economic botany in British India, and present contrasting snapshots of lac and shellac—before and after the emergence of the gramophone as a musical medium around 1900. Watt’s interest in the material was long-standing: he curated an enormous display for the Economic Chamber of the 1883 Calcutta International Exhibition, including a large section on gums and resins.⁴⁹ He went on to compile a monumental six-volume Dictionary of the Economic Products of India (1889–93), in which he included a long entry on lac and a shorter one on the insect, “Coccus lacca.”⁵⁰ Watt synthesized current science on the insect and its parasites and pests, the distribution of lac across India and Burma, lac’s chemical properties, and its manufacture and manifold uses. It is worth keeping his rubrics in mind. They recurred throughout his enormous Dictionary—and were familiar categories in economic and colonial botany—helping to shape an enduring narrative about lac and shellac, one that flowed from nature to culture.⁵¹

Beginning with the insect and its forest habitat, Watt’s 1890 Dictionary entry on lac moved on to discuss biology, industry, and finally human purposes, culminating in a lengthy, quasi-ethnographic discussion of Indian traditions of lac-turnery.⁵² Along an arc from nonhuman nature to human users, human producers of lac did appear, but only briefly, as though squeezed in among botanic categories. For example, in a section on lac’s distribution, in a subsection dedicated to the Central Provinces, he observed that

At the same time as this shift to an export market, an important change in the epistemology of lac can be charted by comparing Watt’s accounts across these decades, as it was increasingly understood less as a botanical resource and more as an insect product available for scientific intervention. Whereas Watt’s Dictionary contained a long entry on lac and a supplementary one on the insect, by 1908 the insect—now given as “Tachardia lacca,” the latest taxonomy—became the dominant category.⁵⁶ Updating and significantly lengthening former entries, this later article reorganized knowledge of lac around the insect. Cultivators were now mentioned in a subsection (“Central Provinces”) of a subsection (“Distribution”) within an article (on the insect). At the same time, they became lac “sellers” and “collectors.” Yet such categorization was significantly misleading, since lac could only be “collected” once it had been cultivated—for example, by tying bundles of twigs on living branches at certain times of the year, in such a way that the bundles could be untied at the time of collection.⁵⁷ Watt did not say so, but a wealth of techniques were involved in cultivating both trees and insects to make the encrustation develop on these detachable bundles, together with a depth of environmental knowledge informing where and when such cultivation took place.

A parallel story can be reconstructed for the workers who refined lac into shellac. Watt’s Dictionary included a great deal of information on the complex activities involved in making shellac—but did so in a short supplementary article about the insect. His summary was written up largely in the passive voice: “twigs are removed” from the trees; “the resinous crust is broken from the twigs”; “it is beaten with a wooden pestle or trodden under foot.”⁵⁸ Matter-of-fact though his account was, Watt offered a degree of detail that might suggest direct observation: the granules were washed and purified, dried, and placed in bags (“10 feet long and 3–4 inches in diameter”), which were stretched across charcoal fires to melt, twisted, and drained into specially constructed troughs; the molten yield was then forced through a cloth mesh, spread into sheets and dried again, and finally broken into shellac flakes. In all this, he described a formidable division of labor, but only indirectly gestured to the accumulation of knowledge it entailed.

Watt offered a similarly unpeopled account of shellac manufacture in 1908, one that was even more tightly focused on the insect. As formerly, he included hefty sections on the insect’s life history, and on the distribution, chemistry, manufacture, and human uses of lac; but now the narrative led from the forest to the factory, introducing, among other things, the chemicals recently developed in modern methods of production.⁵⁹ This new emphasis gave Watt’s article a prognostic bent, as though anticipating increased use of machinery in shellac manufacture—even though traditional methods were still the dominant modes of production and would remain so for decades to come. The article also included two new categories of entomological knowledge: a comprehensive account of the lac insect’s appearance in human history and an executive summary of international trade. Marking the rising value of shellac as a colonial export, these new sections bookended, and significantly reframed, older botanical ones, as Watt freshly mined Sanskrit and ancient Greek records of the lac insect in order to promote the consumption of shellac in millinery, lithographic ink, and, above all, gramophone records.⁶⁰

As Watt’s later writing reveals, the lac insect emerged as the protagonist within scientific accounts of lac and shellac at the turn of the century, as the many people involved in their production, only tentatively acknowledged within the frame of earlier economic botany, were reduced to the status of merely laboring bodies. Around 1900, men and women were routinely shown at work in drawings and photographs representing the division of labor: figure 3, for example, which shows the skilled work of the lac stretcher (sometimes referred to as a Bhilwaya), comes from the extensive 1921 Report on Lac and Shellac compiled by two British scientists, Harlow and Lindsay, who were also colonial Forest Officers.⁶¹ In their commentary on the image, these scientists constantly sought to distinguish between skilled and unskilled labor: “The chief operator in the firing room is the roaster or Karigar, a skilled and highly paid workman. He is assisted by the shellac stretcher or Bhilwaya, also skilled, and the bag twister or Phirwaya, an unskilled worker.”⁶² The purpose of such interest in skill was to illustrate the cost of the labor expended in the making of shellac. More bluntly, such science was a form of market research conducted in the service of Western capital.

Yet in giving an account of the skilled work of the lac stretcher, British scientists nevertheless recorded important connections between knowledge and labor—connections that pointed well beyond knowledge of the insect that the Report on Lac and Shellac more broadly advanced. For example, Harlow and Lindsay itemized the tools associated with the Bhilwaya—a “glazed porcelain cylinder 10 inches in diameter and 2 ft 6 inches long, full of warm water,” a piece of cloth, and a strip of palm leaf—and documented how each was used: “The Bhilwaya spreads out [the glutinous mass] on the cylinder with his palm frond, polishes it with the cloth, and then removes the sheet carefully from the cylinder. Seizing it with hands and feet and mouth, he stretches it from its original size of about 2 ft by 1.5 ft to about 4 ft or 5 ft by 3 ft or 4 ft, warming it in front of the fire every now and then to soften and anneal it.”⁶³ Plain though this description is, it nevertheless retains a trace of the act of observation: of the heat. To be stretched, lac had to be melted over fires and molded over heated porcelain. In rural shellac manufacture, which took place in countless small factories known as “bhattas” (ovens), shellac was unavoidably hot work: lac could be stretched only within a limited window of time before cooling and hardening into sheets, which were then to be shattered into shellac flakes.

A thermal view of figure 3 might thus stress the entanglement of observer and observed in the production of knowledge. As a scientific diagram, it conveys the embodied knowledge required to convert lac into shellac—both the dexterity needed to smooth out the material and a capacity to withstand heat. At the same time, the image signals the dangers of heat and unhealthy working conditions that were not yet widely discussed, but that would become so in the decades that followed. Just after the Second World War, government economist Bhalchandra Pundlik Adarkar published his wide-ranging Report on Labour Conditions in the Shellac Industry. Proceeding by region, Adarkar built up a picture of a “medium-scale, unorganized cottage industry,” consisting of a widely distributed network of around five thousand bhattas worked by a fluctuating population of roughly twenty-five to thirty thousand men, women, and children—noting that the “overwhelmingly large majority of the workers were found to be indebted.”⁶⁴ Additionally, there were roughly 360 shellac factories, mostly concentrated in urban centers, in which working conditions were perhaps only marginally better: while legislation to protect workers’ rights existed, Adarkar concluded that “no labour law is properly respected in this industry.”⁶⁵ Drawing a grim comparison between conditions in (more prevalent) rural bhattas and urban factories, Adarkar wrote,

As for the cultivators of lac, it was not until the 1980s that an official account established the conditions of largely rural and Adivasi working practices. Entitled Dependence and Dominance: Political Economy of a Tribal Commodity, this report was the outcome of months of sociological fieldwork at a major center of lac cultivation in Jharkhand (what was then South Bihar) by another economist, Kamal Nayan Kabra. Kabra found that just under half of the people involved in gathering lac were Mundas, Kurukhs, and other Scheduled Tribes—the rest being nontribal (both Hindu and Muslim) rural groups—while noting the involvement of women and children.⁶⁷ Acknowledging that lac had always been a secondary source of income for Adivasi and other rural cultivators, granting them a significant degree of autonomy from market forces, he nonetheless voiced a forceful critique of the political economy of lac: colonial and postcolonial governments had routinely sought to empower lac cultivators through technocratic intervention, consistently failing to interrogate the imperative of foreign demand that encouraged rural dependence on distant metropoles. Lac had come to be thought of as something made to be sent to the bhattas and then transformed into shellac for export abroad.

Both Kabra (in relation to lac) and Adarkar (in relation to shellac), though writing decades apart, made the same recommendation: since India held a “virtual monopoly” over the material owing to the insect’s geophysical distribution, there was a pressing need to end dependence on foreign markets by reinvigorating local demand.⁶⁸ Alongside many other commodities, lac and shellac thus entered into a larger project of anticolonial and nationalist economic critique in which hitherto ignored cultivators and producers became newly important.⁶⁹ Lac insects, in other words, would lose some of their imaginative power in the postwar period, as discourses of rural development and labor practices became newly widespread. However, developmental proposals inspired by anticolonial critique often overlooked an important theme of the history of lac and shellac, since the colonial ideal of “manufacturing dependence” was only ever partly achieved. Whether due to parasites, pests, or political resistance, the shellac industry was beset by delays caused by bad harvests and deliberately neglected harvests, as well as by riots and strikes.

Urged on by wildly fluctuating prices back in London—in 1914 the price of shellac per hundredweight was £3; by 1920 it had reached an all-time high of £50—the Government of India’s Forestry Department commissioned a wide-ranging investigation. Written up in 1921 as a Report on Lac and Shellac (the very report by Forest Officers Harlow and Lindsay mentioned above), the study linked an unpredictable supply of the material to a lack of knowledge about the insect.⁷⁰ Such compulsive focus on the insect as the primary agent of production will by now be familiar, as will the Forest Officers’ approach to lac cultivators. Typically, nowhere in their report did cultivators appear as bearers of knowledge about lac, being viewed rather as an underdeveloped labor force:

That was at least the plan. A few years later, on the report’s recommendation, an Indian Lac Research Institute opened its doors. Its first director, Manchester-born biochemist Dorothy Norris, assembled a team of research scientists, consisting of four biochemists, four entomologists, and three physical chemists—each subject area headed by a British chief but otherwise staffed by Indian scientists—along with three laboratory assistants, four fieldmen, an entomological photographer, a mechanic, five administrators, a librarian, and twenty-five “menial” staff.⁷³Figure 4 shows a map included in Norris’s book on the institute, which reveals that it occupied several laboratories, a staff club, a cook house and servants’ quarters, an insectary, experimental plantations, and a miniature lac factory.⁷⁴ This map provided a blueprint for colonial science, showing how political hierarchy—and entanglement—was built into the site’s architecture. One of the oldest continuously running laboratories in India, the Lac Research Institute was established in Namkum, Ranchi (where it operates to this day as the Indian Institute of Natural Gums and Resins), taking advantage of its central position within the Chotanagpur forest plateau, at a midpoint between central and northeastern clusters of lac cultivation.⁷⁵ As the map of the grounds indicates, the institute was cordoned off from its surroundings by a high wall and security detail.

For the most part, the Indian Lac Research Institute did not engage lac cultivators, but focused on research into the physical, biological, and chemical nature of lac, and especially the lac insect’s habitats, predators, and parasites. In 1934, ten years after the institute’s founding, Norris reported on its activities: it had published more than eighty research articles and generated much new knowledge—notably the classification of multiple species of lac insects with complex, interlocking reproductive cycles. Old problems persisted, however. Recalling the reason for the institute’s creation, Norris wrote that “crops are neglected when prices are low,” cultivators still preferring to wait it out.⁷⁶ As before, parasites continued to feast on lac insects, who were themselves subject to the laws of an unpredictable climate.⁷⁷ To put all this more bluntly, colonial aspirations had mostly failed: a wealth of new scientific knowledge had neither incentivized cultivators nor much increased the yields of the forest.

In this sprawling colonial-scientific bureaucracy, the gramophone emerged as a central preoccupation and frequent cause of concern. By the 1930s, musical use had become the dominant motivating factor underpinning scientific research; but it was also, in Norris’s report, the occasion for anxious reflections on the future of lac and shellac:

This threat posed by the rise of synthetic plastics was more widely felt. Biochemist Motnahalli Sreenivasaya, of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, predicted the imminent demise of the shellac industry as a whole.⁸⁰ In the journal Current Science, he sketched the bleak “Industrial Outlook” for 1932: beginning, like Norris, by noting the violent fluctuations of the shellac market, he traced these back to the unpredictability of insect ecosystems.⁸¹ He departed from Norris, however, in identifying human contributions to this situation. Rather than the “indolence” of cultivators, he attributed market fluctuations to the vagaries of foreign demand, and pointed to the gramophone consumer as a chief danger.⁸²

Sreenivasaya’s prediction of a “ruinous crisis” in the shellac industry caused by a shift to synthetic resins and plastics in the gramophone trade did not come to pass until after the Second World War. But he clearly expressed, even in the 1930s, a historical and political tendency in the material—its fateful co-option by foreign demand. As he put it, shellac had grown to be a major industry as the result of a broad and “greedy hunt for new raw materials from all parts of the globe” by Western colonial powers, leading to the neglect of local demand in recent times: “Bangle-making could have grown into the moulding trade, later developed in the West; the lacquer industry could have been built up … for metals and wood; but there existed neither the atmosphere nor the urge to elaborate industries based on the utilization of indigenous raw materials.”⁸³ Sreenivasaya thus anticipated critiques of lac and shellac (outlined in subsequent decades by Adarkar and Kabra) and proposed a radical solution: “The remedy to this threatening situation is not in propaganda in foreign countries extolling the virtues of our raw material, but in building indigenous industries which will consume it in our own country.”⁸⁴ Sreenivasaya’s target here was perhaps none other than Norris’s Lac Research Institute, which had recently established offices in London and New York to promote shellac and conduct market research in the major centers of consumption.⁸⁵ In opposition to such activities, he appealed to researchers to cease pandering to foreigners and direct their efforts toward Indian markets as a matter of urgency “which bears heavily on the economic prosperity of the country.”⁸⁶

In calling for a change of scientific priorities from foreign to local demand—with a move away from a hungry gramophone industry—Sreenivasaya’s writings are highly unusual within shellac’s colonial archive. Not by chance, he showed a keen interest in the knowledge of cultivators, suggesting that scientists might learn from them. In a short article of 1935, he presented a quasi-ethnographic portrait of an unnamed village near Mysore (probably near Channapatna), aiming to distill local knowledge about lac where “an adequate scientific explanation … cannot at present be given.”⁸⁷ Such knowledge—for example, the ratio of top to root involved in pruning trees and the insect’s preferences for certain climates—was borne out by practice.⁸⁸ Yet Sreenivasaya also wrote about the customs followed by the men who spread lac insects on trees, noting that they were prohibited from taking oil baths and from shaving in order to avoid “branches appearing clean shaven and besmeared with oil” on harvest day. On that day, milk was boiled beneath the tree in a new earthenware pot and the vigor with which the milk boiled was taken as a sign of the future health of the host tree, a bubbling foam presaging the “white filaments characteristic of healthy and bumper crops.”⁸⁹

Sreenivasaya provided this rare glimpse of one set of local customs surrounding lac cultivation under the pretext of translating such traditional knowledge into modern science. His remark, for example, that the branches might appear “clean shaven and besmeared with oil” communicated a specific sense of unease that a tree might be lac-free on harvest day. Such words constituted an act of anthropological transcription, one that notated “superstitions” in the documentary mode required by a scientific journal.⁹⁰ Yet Sreenivasaya more fundamentally demonstrated the entanglement of scientific knowledge about lac (and hence shellac) in local beliefs, bodily practices, and on-the-ground observations.⁹¹ He opened a window onto an epistemology in which “all lac-bearing plants” were haunted by evil spirits, and sacrifices of rams, goats, and chickens were practiced before solar and lunar eclipses—casting light on the conditions of lac cultivation at the height of the gramophone industry.⁹² His description of animals laid to waste in the fields around Channapatna presents a complement to the scientific bureaucracy established in Namkum: he drew a contrast between, yet inadvertently sketched a continuity across, appeasing the evil spirits of plants and publishable research. He did not venture to interpret the significance of animal sacrifice in this unnamed village, yet his act of observation pinpointed a moment of contact between knowledge systems—one brought about, in large part, by musical consumption.

Despite the energies and anxieties it stimulated among scientists and workers throughout the industry, lac rarely (if ever) appeared in the endless consumer discourse generated by the gramophone and discs. Here, “lac” was completely absorbed by “shellac.” A short story published in 1930 can demonstrate this. Written by little-known author Laurence Oliver, and entitled simply “Shellac,” it was published in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, a fashionable London-based women’s journal, and lavishly illustrated.⁹³ It was a love story of sorts. Olive, raised in a small Devonshire town, has recently married George, an English shellac trader. Attracted by the colonial lifestyle, she moves with him to Calcutta, but soon becomes disenchanted with both man and city. The couple quarrel; the tropical heat is oppressive; a cook runs off with silverware. George becomes unable to fulfill orders from international clients because he is shortchanged by a Calcutta dealer who has control over supplies from the rural bhattas. He acts boldly, to save both business and marriage, by moving his business into the country—the first white man to do so, we are told—to a small town outside Ranchi.⁹⁴ Here George can trade face-to-face with shellac manufacturers.

Both the love story and its illustrations construct a particular view of shellac. In figure 5, the material enters George and Olive’s bungalow against a forest backdrop, ready-processed and packaged in a burlap sack.⁹⁵ “Lac” never enters the picture: George is busy in conversation with traders; Olive watches the transaction and gazes into the forest beyond. Shellac is revealed to her—and to the reader—as a wondrous material, transforming her perception of George’s work:

If “Shellac” traded on colonial adventure and cliché to reignite a faltering relationship (its teaser-tagline was “It’s not all romance in India—all the time”), then the material became the means by which romance was restored. Beneath the veranda, shellac changed before Olive’s eyes from dull commodity into the substance from which the music of celebrities was made. Famous names in the classical world, alongside well-known jazz singer Sophie Tucker, sprang to her mind; the (male) author thus conjured a chain of connections for a women’s readership. Insects magically converted trees into plates to feed “greedy ears,” by way of grinding, washing, and filtering, human dimensions within an imagined division of labor that were acknowledged, but only in passing, in a celebration of insects, wilderness, and George. Sitting next to her husband the shellac dealer, Olive projected a view of the material from the perspective of consumption in which human labor all but disappeared. Yet it was only in proximity to the realm of production that such labor appeared at all: as the above passage declares, under normal circumstances consumers did not “waste thought” on shellac.

When consumers did think about the material, music was the mode through which their thoughts were habitually channeled. In “Shellac,” the author depicted a dawning consciousness of shellac as a musical good, representing the act of consumption in overtly gendered terms.⁹⁷ This dynamic of musical recognition was a broader feature of discourse on the material, as gramophone audiences throughout the 1920s and ’30s routinely claimed to be surprised that discs were made from shellac. In 1922, an editor for the magazine the Talking Machine World reported that North American consumers had until recently been “completely unaware that shellac is the principal ingredient in the manufacture of disc records”; only as record prices spiked around 1920 did they begin to wonder “what shellac had to do with” the gramophone industry, many believing that discs, “with their beautifully polished surfaces, were made of vulcanite.”⁹⁸ An industrial material derived from rubber, vulcanite was a product often used in place of, or together with, shellac in making “Hot Molded Organic Materials.”⁹⁹ And so, while North Americans may have been (or at least claimed to be) largely unaware that discs were made of shellac, their first guess was pretty close, betokening an awareness of the industrial and colonial genesis of thermoplastic products.

A similar scenario played out in the United Kingdom, whenever listeners were moved to reflect on the materiality of discs. Price hikes were often the cause of plastics becoming a topic of discussion. In The Gramophone—the long-running journal launched in 1923 to proselytize for classical music, and the earliest such publication marketed at consumers (rather than traders) of music on record—shellac became a new measure of music’s value, as the material that simultaneously increased the price of discs while enhancing the listener’s musical knowledge. An editorial of 1924 is typical of this approach. After discussing the need to increase consumption in order to drive disc prices down, the anonymous writer addressed the reader-as-amateur-listener in the following terms: “As to lifting the level of appreciation, lots, I think, can be done; and with the lifting also a lot of broadening. As to the resultant standard of reproduction, again, much; for as a realist I insist upon the objective Edisonian test, as far as the limitations will allow. Heifitz in the flesh, so! Heifitz via the shellac, so! (or ‘not so’ as it mostly is).”¹⁰⁰ The editorial went on to say that such aural comparisons were indispensable for a true appreciation of classical music (for which amateur gramophone clubs were the proposed solution). At the same time, the author disclosed a set of contemporary meanings for shellac as the currency through which an amateur might stockpile a musical education. Shellac appeared in the act of making amateur aural comparisons between the recorded and the “live,” providing the imaginary counterpart to, and extension of, the performer’s body.

This materialization of shellacked performers and performances was common in The Gramophone magazine in the 1920s. The inaugural issue, for example, contained an article by Compton Mackenzie, the journal’s founding editor, entitled “Good Singing,” in which shellac was said to permit only the finest singers to shine through:

And yet … it bears repeating that shellac more often than not went unmentioned in discussions of musical listening. Only in the broader realms of the consumer imagination—such as in an occasional work of fiction expressly dedicated to the substance—did the musical connection more fully emerge.¹⁰² Musical journalists and gramophone enthusiasts largely directed their attention to the effable contents of listening experiences rather than their plastic containers. When the material came up, its naming was inspired by mundane circumstances: consternation at the rising costs of discs, or the banal needs of gramophone journalists in completing a sentence (“Heifitz in the shellac, so!,” “more than mere wax, vulcanite and shellac”). Not so much a pressing concern of gramophone promoters, it might be fairer to say that the material more gently occupied the mental landscape of consumers and those who mused about sounds-on-record on their behalf.

Shellac could, if only occasionally, be thus recalled in musical experiences. And this marked one end point in the commodity’s journeys. As it entered into combination with other disc materials—as one commodity converted into another—its travels were effaced. In giving plastic shape to gramophone discs, shellac faded into the background of global musical markets—into the very background that it supplied. The material’s neutrality was in this sense an inescapable condition of sound reproduction technology and the new kind of musical globalization it facilitated. Shellac needed to stay invisible and inaudible for the gramophone to channel sounds, and for a musical medium to function as such: its aesthetic transparency was closely bound up with the political conditions of its international availability, together with the cultural and epistemological distances traversed in the process of colonial exchange.

In a celebrated account that prefigured the interdisciplinary field of sound studies, Jonathan Sterne argued that the “cultural origins of sound reproduction” lay in a twofold process: in techniques of the body that zoned in on the ear as the site for, and object of, sound; and in creating larger networks of machines, discs, and listeners that could elaborate technical possibilities into fully fledged media forms, such as the telephone, phonograph, and radio.¹⁰³ Sterne’s history began and ended in North America, the undeclared site of sound reproduction’s “cultural origins,” and tracked its development there as a social construction: as the heavily mythologized product of white-collar invention, naturalized through “social faith” in sprawling media infrastructures. According to this now more or less predominant view, sound reproduction was above all—and perhaps remains today—a powerful ideology (of the kind articulated by Making a Record, the short film discussed at the head of this article) and media technologies are to be understood as the distinctive products of industrial-scientific mythopoesis and Western consumer fantasy.

Such deconstructions of sound media must, however, remain significantly incomplete. In unmasking the grandiose pretensions of United States–based inventors such as Bell, Edison, and Berliner, scholars routinely overlook alternative techniques and knowledge systems implicated in their making.¹⁰⁴ According to Sterne, for example, it was the “plasticity” of modern sound, its sheer malleability and capacity to take diverse material forms, that allowed it to find new social uses and establish a range of novel media in North America around 1900. Yet his argument does not suggest the material resources of this protean power.¹⁰⁵ The history of lac and shellac identifies environmental knowledge and skilled labor—such as the technical knowhow and gestural fluidity entailed in converting lac into shellac—as the fountainheads of sound’s newfound plasticity.¹⁰⁶ It can thus help provincialize the US novelty of sound reproduction, in the largest sense repositioning the gramophone as a global moment in this material’s longue durée as a South Asian technique for preserving objects over time. As a commodity for making other commodities, and in furnishing the plastic qualities that allowed sounds to endure, shellac pinpoints the reliance of sound-on-record on indentured labor and music’s role in imperial capital. And it underscores the importance of lac as a form of knowledge and as a technique, always secretly at the heart of the gramophone disc vaunted as a “Western” technology.

Since Sterne published his pioneering book, many scholars have begun to interrogate the materials required for and engendered by sound reproduction technologies.¹⁰⁷ In the wake of “green” media studies and ecomusicology, media artifacts such as radio sets, MP3 files, and AirPods—all dirty products involving resource extraction, global assembly lines, and rapid obsolescence—have risen to the fore.¹⁰⁸ This may be because media, in the vastness of their networks, seem to beckon to scholars of musical sound, inviting them to identify the many actors, both human and non, closely imbricated in aural experiences. Recent efforts to materialize listening in this way have not been confined to technological media, of course; but with their large infrastructures, such media have provided important targets of ecocritical attention. In this sense, shellac speaks to the twenty-first-century digital mediascape in showing the human and environmental costs that have always been implicated in extending our senses.¹⁰⁹

But can we hear shellac itself? Around 1940, exiled in New York, Theodor Adorno observed, “When you place the needle upon a revolving phonograph record, first a noise appears; as soon as the music begins, the noise recedes into the background, but constantly accompanies the musical event. … The slight, continual noise is a sort of acoustic stripe.”¹¹⁰ Could Adorno’s acoustic stripe be shellac’s sonic signature? Jacob Smith, for one, has argued along these lines that the noises of gramophone discs “be heard not simply as noise to be eliminated but as an eco-positive attribute of shellac, giving voice to the kusum trees and reddish insects that provide a material base for the voices of Gilbert Girard or Enrico Caruso.”¹¹¹ In other words, when listening to these celebrated human voices, we behold the labor of insects, along with the work of the nonhuman nature that those insects more broadly represent. Less redemptive, and more attuned to the politics of such an ecology, Devine has invited us to hear instead a “constant reminder of the ways that this format enfolds and indexes frictions such as exploited resources and workers, traumas of war and waste.”¹¹² The acoustic stripe is, on this reading, the result of a huge and clamorous ensemble of materials, actors, and agents, elaborately organized around the frictional encounter between needle and shellacked groove.

These are some of the stakes for ecocritical listening to media formats, which hearkens well beyond familiar sites of musical performance and listening. In this respect, the “acoustic stripe”—the very sound of mediation itself—proves to be an almost irresistible object of ecological interpretation: giving voice to insects, on the one hand, or as the index of colonial violence, on the other. And yet, while listeners may and perhaps should listen to shellac discs in these ways now, it is worth pondering why such noises were rarely heard in the gramophone’s heyday—or were able to recede as the musical event began. What Adorno described from the listener’s perspective, as a sudden conversion of noise into music—even as the noise persists beneath the emerging sonic signal—can also be understood from the perspective of production: as a moment of transformation in which techniques of production swiftly turn into techniques for listening. Shellac held a multiplicity in tension, as the plastic material connecting heterogeneous knowledge systems and bodily practices. To put this another way, the ability to ignore the acoustic stripe and to have access to mediated sound was (unbeknown to Adorno, as to many others) contingent on the knowledge required to manipulate the insect and to stretch lac across the body.¹¹³ Shellac, as a plastic, thus embedded lac stretching (among other skills) as a bodily technique, one that could be later and elsewhere deployed to harmonize multiple disc ingredients, while providing the material condition for their audible transformation into more than the sum of their parts.

A focus on this moment of transformation—a material switch into musical listening—suggests an ecocritical priority not only for shellac, but also for other media materials. Michael Silvers has outlined political and ecological links between Brazil’s phonograph industry and carnauba wax, which involved intimate knowledge of the drought-resistant carnauba palm and large quantities of skilled (and badly paid) labor.¹¹⁴ Carnauba wax—along with the many saponified waxes that became prevalent in modern industrial processes—suggests parallels with shellac as the plastic in which knowledge of the environment and patterns of resource extraction were remade into listening practices.

Shellac also bears comparison with more recent uses of plastic in musical media, whose acoustic stripes may be less conspicuous or even completely silent. After all, shellac-for-discs was prized for its inaudibility: its value as a musical commodity lay in its neutrality and transparency to the senses. This affordance of shellac—as a plastic able to carry objects, such as sounds, yet go largely undetected and unremarked—illuminates both its historical role and its musical and technological purpose. It also suggests the larger ecological and political effects of constructing absences for the senses, both in disc media and in larger musical infrastructures that are stitched together by plastic means. Other plastics (Bakelite, vinyl, PET, ABS) could tell different stories about sound reproduction technology, and about the political and environmental structures that enable those materials to withdraw and be mercilessly consumed—a larger issue that connects music to the overwhelming environmental hazards of plastic use throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century.¹¹⁵ An ecocritical approach to media should be able to account not only for these human and environmental costs, but also for the way in which the many different things implicated by mediated sounds recede from them.

The history of shellac shows one way in which this could happen: through colonial modes of fabrication that facilitated the plastic’s production and musical effacement. The production of lac/shellac was shot through with knowledge, but also with gaps, notably those between makers of lac and of shellac. On the one hand, lac was the outcome of rural labor and Adivasi knowledge of the forests in which colonial officers and scientists struggled to manufacture dependence.¹¹⁶ On the other, shellac was the product of migrant and indentured labor, involving highly specialized techniques and appalling working conditions, inviting rioting and strikes. These inglorious conditions, and workers’ resistance to them, rose to their peak as a musical medium grew.

Against the rickety canvas presented by plastic materials and their histories, our views of sound reproduction may begin to shift away from its cultural origins toward the hybrid realms of global commodity exchange. No longer only a host of technologies for detaching sounds from their sources, or a range of social techniques for coordinating copies and originals, sound reproduction is also (and perhaps always) a series of political and environmental relations between knowledge systems, which allow sounds to be molded, carried, and more or less inaudibly sustained. Shellac puts such a decentered history of sound reproduction in prospect by illustrating the politics of knowledge that gather, in complex patterns, around plastic commodities as they become musically essential: as things urgently needed in the making of sonic things, both required and demanded, if only to be overlooked and underheard.