Sourindro Mohun Tagore and the National Anthem Project

The record of this ephemeral project is composed of diverse fragments of information that neither suggest an overarching theory about the contact of music cultures nor comprehensively illustrate a musicological phenomenon; their interest lies in the intricate picture they provide of a moment in the ongoing process of the music culture of British India. In attempting to re-enter this distant moment we may, or may not, learn things that will help to explain the events and artifacts of other such moments, but the significance of this investigation lies in its enabling us to comprehend the particular moment that is its focus, and the value of that moment, as a record of human activity, is intrinsic and does not depend on its contribution to a larger systematized study or its appropriateness for an external framework of interpretation. The dynamic and processual nature of history and culture are revealed in the synchronic complexity and diversity of a moment as in the diachronic changes and evolutions of time, and while we cannot, in investigating cultures of the past, essay a thickly descriptive record as we might in the field, we may, by focussing on a single event-its ramifications as well as its particulars-refine our sensitivity to and awareness of those past cultures as we do with contemporary ones through immersion in the field. This holds true whether the event chosen be considered either seminal or inconsequential when viewed with the prejudice of the present; it is the richness of the record rather than the consequence of its contents that illuminates and signifies. The National Anthem Project was certainly an inconsequential event in the history of British imperialism and even less than that in the history of Indian music, but it left behind a record of surprising variety that paints a picture of the musical and social concerns of the protagonists in both. The