This book examines the ramifications of the ‘intertwined and overlapping histories’ of Britain and India on English music in the last fifty years of the Raj and traces the effects of the Indo-British colonial encounter on the English musical imagination. Contrary to orthodox narratives of the one-way influence of Britain on India, of musical ‘Englishness’ perpetuated through a home-grown and homogeneous ‘renaissance’, and of the post-colonial Western ‘discovery’ of Indian classical music, constructed in the vested interests of imperialism, nationalism, and orientalism, respectively, the book ... More

This book examines the ramifications of the ‘intertwined and overlapping histories’ of Britain and India on English music in the last fifty years of the Raj and traces the effects of the Indo-British colonial encounter on the English musical imagination. Contrary to orthodox narratives of the one-way influence of Britain on India, of musical ‘Englishness’ perpetuated through a home-grown and homogeneous ‘renaissance’, and of the post-colonial Western ‘discovery’ of Indian classical music, constructed in the vested interests of imperialism, nationalism, and orientalism, respectively, the book draws on new archival sources and approaches to investigate how the Indo-British encounter ‘acculturated’ England musically. The book, extensively illustrated with music examples and images, many previously unpublished, presents case studies of six figures representative of the era and significant in their own right, who collectively cross traditional boundaries of colour, ethnicity, class, gender, and musical type: two well-known composers, Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst; two marginalized composers, Kaikhosru Sorabji and John Foulds; an immensely popular composer, Amy Woodforde-Finden; and an ethnomusicologist and performer, Maud MacCarthy, whose work in interpreting Indian music, brought into focus here for the first time from a private family archive, lies at the very heart of British-Indian musical interstices. The reintegration of the music of this period into the cultural history of empire demonstrates that some of the most interesting English musical creations—along with their audiences then and now—were shaped in enduring ways by interactions with the culture and sounds of India and its people.