Cultural inscription hunters usually find themselves thwarted when tracking through the mists of music. Unlike other forms of expression, where written or visual clues provide glimpses of meaning, music remains elusive, especially when it inhabits multiple—and for some, mutually exclusive—musical cultures. It is its very elusiveness, however, that makes capturing any musical meaning so prized. As Alex Ross makes clear, “Musical meaning is vague, mutable. … Still, even if history can never tell us exactly what music means, music can tell us something about history” (The Rest is Noise [2007], xiii). It is for a good reason, then, that Nalini Ghuman chooses these words from Ross as the fourth and final epigraph to her deliciously readable Resonances of the Raj: India in the English Musical Imagination, 1897–1947. Like Ross, Ghuman accepts the hermeneutical hazards of biographizing music and musicologizing biography, yet she also relies upon the conviction that “music can tell us something about history.”

And tell us something about history she does—in a finely conceived and richly documented biographical and musical tour of modern Anglo-Indian culture, taking the reader through discrete chapters from Indophile performer and scholar Maud MacCarthy to her second husband and soul mate, the composer John Foulds, via Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, and the lesser-known figures of Amy Woodforde-Finden and Kaikhosru Sorabji. MacCarthy's transcultural life sets the tone. A prodigy and virtuoso violinist, MacCarthy left Britain after ill health forced her to quit her performing career. With Annie Besant (soon to become president of the Theosophical Society), she traveled to India in 1905 and began immersing herself in its musical culture, becoming a regular fixture on the Anglo-Indian circuit as a writer, lecturer, social campaigner, and mystic. Rabindranath Tagore would opine, “With her great natural gifts and high attainments both in Western and Eastern music, Miss MacCarthy is so eminently fitted to introduce Indian music to a Western audience” (14). MacCarthy was bound to appeal to a humanitarian like Tagore; as Ghuman emphasizes, MacCarthy “sought to humanize not to patronize … to emphasize the overlapping musical experience of Indians and British” (41). MacCarthy remarks: “All my audiences for lecture-recitals of Indian music were genuinely enthusiastic; which proves that saying ‘East is East, and West is West’ only applies superficially” (41).

Debunking the deeply embedded orientalist adage that “East is East, and West is West” lies honorably at the heart of this admittedly post-Saidian project. Occasionally, however, its ethicized agenda forces Ghuman into bare speculation. Turning to Elgar, for example, she examines “the composer's burden” by problematizing the imperial content of works like his masque The Crown of India (1912), “a colourful depiction of the Delhi Darbār [1911] … carefully inscribed with its creators’ considered beliefs and suppressions” (59). For Ghuman one movement, Agri's aria “Hail Immemorial Ind!” raises it “above the level of routine recycling of exotica” (70–71) because it purportedly “carries with it an Islamic ethos” (73) sensitively transferred from Elgar's experience of hearing a meuzzin's call to prayer and other mosque music in Izram (then Smyrna) in 1905. But how exactly is Elgar's “exotica” different from the routine variety? What, in fact, is musical “exotica”; is it different from another widely used term, musical “orientalism’; what are its signifiers; who are its musical theorists today, and how do they define it; and why should we believe that Elgar's brand is any less imperialistically inscribed just because it appears to incorporate vernacular music idioms more sympathetically or accurately? Ghuman's interpretation of Holst provides clearer answers, because unlike Elgar, Holst was not simply a curious musical traveler, but psychological resident in India. Compositions like the solo and choral settings of hymns from the Rigveda (written between 1907 and 1912) epitomize his obsession. Suffused in Indian knowledge, they reveal a trenchant preoccupation with Indian musical forms and structures. The most startlingly new observation about Holst, however, is the fact that The Planets (1914–16)—in some ways the paradigm of musical Englishness—is actually brimming with Indian compositional ideas.

The composer Amy Woodeforde-Finden could not have been more different. A celebrity in her day for her enduringly popular settings of Laurence Hope's Indian Love Lyrics (written 1901, published from 1902), Woodeforde-Finden created compositions that embodied the orientalist imagination. Yet in their “friendly, romanticized Orient” (185) they also managed to capture the erotic imagination of generations. A frisson of lesbianism gave them a boost after the disclosure (or discovery) that Laurence Hope was actually Violet Nicholson, the wife of a serving Indian Army General some twenty years older. “Could Woodforde-Finden,” a contemporary admirer might moon, “during her travels, possibly have taken in the ‘delights of summer in the vale of Cashmere,’” as the “Kashmiri Song” suggests? For Ghuman the “Kashmiri Song” is “not only a document of its historical moment but also, in its own whimsical way, refracted through myriad interpretations, a musical space within which the marginalized voices—of Muslims, exiles, women, lesbians—of Indo-British colonial history can be heard” (206).

Sorabji and Foulds are more complex composers. As portrayed by Ghuman, Parsi British Sorabji was a self-confessed hybrid defined by an argumentative, antagonistic, frequently self-conflicted and equally self-destructive personality who wrote uncompromising—though now not academically uninteresting—music with affinities to the avant-garde. He represents “a kind of uneasy meeting point between different traditions and cultures” (247). Foulds is thankfully less contentious as a personality, though history finds his Indian-based compositions to have been strangely unrewarding. Apart from his own compositional life and obvious cooperation with MacCarthy, Ghuman traces his main influences to broader cultural concerns, like the creation of an All India Radio ensemble, which sowed the seeds for Ravi Shankar's musical influence.

While the meaning of music may be elusive, Resonances of the Raj proves that it can definitely tell us something about history. And that history is immeasurably improved by this thoughtful consideration of Anglo-Indian musical intersections. In Resonances of the Raj, Ghuman simply and successfully fulfills MacCarthy's objective: “The Eastern point of view is unmistakably getting hold of them. This could be shown by an analysis of contemporary western compositions—a matter too technical to enter into them here, but which deserves the attention of all who would hear the music of West and East, harmony and melody, combined in sweet accord” (“Is Indian Music Appreciated in the West?,” [1912]).