Music and Empire in Britain and India ─ Identity, Internationalism, and Cross-Cultural Communication

Partly because of academic disciplinary boundaries, music remains a neglected subject in the historiography of the British Empire and indeed intellectual history at large. In this book, however, author Bob van der Linden demonstrates that the imperial encounter by itself, at least in part, was a sound exercise, and that music is an essential aspect of identity formation as well as transnational networks and communication between colonizer and colonized across cultures. Specifically, it explores the ways in which rational, moral, and aesthetic motives underlying the institutionalization and modernization of "classical" music converged and diverged in Britain and India out of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Additionally, it tracks subversive, internationalist counter-movements that challenged nationalist musical establishments - as well as the openness of some Britons and Indians to the possibility of learning from each other. As an interdisciplinary study, this study opens up new area for research by taking music as a lens through which to examine societal and intellectual change.

Bob van der Linden is an independent historian and musicologist. He also wrote Moral Languages from Colonial Punjab: the Singh Sabha, Arya Samaj and Ahmadiyahs (2008).