Resonances of the Raj

Book excerpt: During the century of British rule of the Indian subcontinent known as the British Raj, the rulers felt the significant influence of their exotic subjects. Resonances of the Raj examines the ramifications of the intertwined and overlapping histories of Britain and India on English music in the last fifty years of the colonial encounter, and traces the effects of the Raj on the English musical imagination. Conventional narratives depict a one-way influence of Britain on India, with the 'discovery' of Indian classical music occurring only in the post-colonial era. Drawing on new archival sources and approaches in cultural studies, author Nalini Ghuman shows that on the contrary, England was both deeply aware of and heavily influenced by India musically during the Indian-British colonial encounter. Case studies of representative figures, including composers Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst, and Maud MacCarthy, an ethnomusicologist and performer of the era, integrate music directly into the cultural history of the British Raj. Ghuman thus reveals unexpected minglings of peoples, musics and ideas that raise questions about 'Englishness', the nature of Empire, and the fixedness of identity. Richly illustrated with analytical music examples and archival photographs and documents, many of which appear here in print for the first time, Resonances of the Raj brings fresh hearings to both familiar and little-known musics of the time, and reveals a rich and complex history of cross-cultural musical imaginings which leads to a reappraisal of the accepted historiographies of both British musical culture and of Indo-Western fusion.