A collection of Indian sound recordings from the early 20th Century, which has never been made public before, has been put online and is available to download free.

The recordings were made by British colonial officers as part of a massive effort to study hundreds of different languages and dialects spoken in Britain's Indian Empire, which in those days stretched from the frontier with Afghanistan all the way into Burma.

The gramophone records were only recently tracked down, gathering dust in the British Library, by Professor Shahid Amin of Delhi University.....