Rattan Devi’s programme was an early attempt to familiarise Britons with India and Indian culture.
By Dr Kusum Pant Joshi
On 11 January 1917, a unique musical event took place in the heart of London in the Princess Theatre located at 73 Oxford Street. Described in the 1908 edition of Dicken’s Dictionary of London as “a handsome [building]” specialising “in melodrama of strong incidents and effects”, the Princess had served as a theatre from 1840 to the year 1931 when it was demolished and replaced with a large Woolworth’s store.
The music programme that day attracted many famous Londoners. Among those sitting in the audience were eminent playwright George Bernard Shaw and famous Geologist turned art historian and ardent Indianist and writer, Dr Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy. We also know that the singer being presented that day had learned Indian classical music from Ustad Abdul Rahim of Kapurthala while in Kashmir. She had earlier also played the piano and sung Indian classical ragas in a London drawing room before a select gathering that included Nobel Laureate and Knight of the British Empire, Sir Rabindranath Tagore.
There were two important features of the programme that added to its uniqueness. One, it was a presentation of Indian classical ragas and Punjabi and Kashmiri folk songs before a London audience in a posh mainstream venue. Two, the singer was (not a visiting musician from India such as Pir O’ Murshid Inayat Khan and the Royal Musicians of Hindustan who had accompanied him to London a few years earlier), but a little-known Yorkshire-born English woman, Alice Richardson, who had adopted stage name of Ratan Devi.
Such a programme would be considered unusual even today when Indian music, dance and other aspects of Indian culture are no longer unknown to the UK’s indigenous white population. That it was conceived, organised and presented in the early 1900s makes it seem out of sync with the socio-cultural climate of those days due to a host of reasons.
Firstly, at the time, India was a distant colony of the British Empire and the general British public had a conspicuous lack of interest in or respect for Indian culture. Secondly, most people in the west had serious misconceptions and prejudices about India and its artistic genius. The prevailing anti-India bias was indeed so strong that in a historic address as President of the Royal Society of Art in January 1910, Sir George Birdwood, had openly “denied the value, even the existence of indigenous [Indian] art [and declared that] all Indian art was either obscene or utilitarian, and that the icon figure of the Buddha was no more than a boiled suet pudding.”
If even the strikingly glorious visual arts of ancient India were looked upon with so much disdain by a British arts scholar of the eminence of Sir George Birdwood, it would appear rather facetious to expect the profundity and intricacies of Indian classical music, (which has few takers even today), to be appreciated by the uninitiated British public of the early 1900s.
Luckily for us, we have strong supportive evidence of the general level of British awareness of Indian music in the form of written observations left behind by prominent Indian visitors to the west in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Among these, perhaps the earliest and most telling are those of Prince Dwarkanath Tagore, paternal grandfather of poet Rabindranath Tagore who is mentioned in Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man. The authors of this publication write that in 1846, when Prince Dwarkanath Tagore was in Paris during one of his many trips to the west, Max Muller, eminent philologist and Orientalist with an expertise in India who lived most of his life in Britain, begged him for “some authentic piece of Indian music”. Relenting to his pleadings, Prince Dwarkanath Tagore is reported to have played a piece on the piano and also sung something for him. When Muller responded by describing the music as having neither rhythm, melody or harmony, Prince Dwarkanath is said to have retorted strongly and presumably with a degree of annoyance. His retort which is a powerful and clear summary of the general ‘Orientalist’ or Western negative perception of the ‘Other’ and how it contrasted with a typical Indian perception of the Occident, was as follows: “You are all alike; if anything seems strange to you and does not please you at once, you turn away. When I first heard Italian music, it was no music to me at all; but I went on and on, until I began to like it, or what you call understand it. It is the same with everything else. You may say our religion is no religion, our poetry is no poetry, our philosophy no philosophy. We try to understand and appreciate whatever Europe has produced. If you studied our music as we do yours, you would find that there is melody, rhythm, and harmony in it, quite as much as in yours. And if you would study our poetry, our religion, and our philosophy, you would find it that we are not what you call heathens or miscreants, but know as much of the Unknowable as you do, and have seen perhaps even deeper into that it than you have.”
Another eminent Indian, whose writings and response are relevant in this connection is Hazrat Inayat Khan who first visited Britain and Europe in 1912. The first Sufi from India and perhaps also the first trained Indian classical musician to present Indian classical music in the west, Hazrat Inayat Khan came from an established family of classical musicians. His grandfather Maula Baksh was the first principal of the music centre or Gayanshala that he set up in 1886 in the princely state of Baroda. This pioneering centre later developed into the Music Department of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. Maula Baksh was adept in both north and south Indian classical music and had also developed a system of notation for Indian music.
Despite his impeccable musical credentials, Hazrat Inayat Khan’s music was little understood by his listeners in the west. Describing their limited understanding, one of his biographers writes thus regarding Inayat Khan and his group of singers: “The first time the brothers performed they unhurriedly began to tune up. When they paused for a moment and wanted to begin an even longer warm-up. The audience applauded. They did not even have the remotest idea of Indian music and took the tuning for an actual raga.” Regarding Hazrat Inayat Khan’s disillusionment with the western response to Indian classical music, Farrell writes: “There are indications [...] that Inayat Khan was starting to lose patience with Western musicians’ attitude to Indian music, and even their academic interest in it.”
Likewise, Rabindranath Tagore also seems to have had low expectations as regards the attitude of Westerners towards Indian music. This is apparent in the very first lines of a Foreword that he wrote to Thirty Songs From the Panjab and Kashmir, Recorded by Ratan Devi: “When I was given an opportunity of hearing Ratan Devi sing some Indian songs, I felt uneasy in my mind. I never could believe it possible for an Englishwoman to give us any music that could be hailed as Indian. I was almost certain that it was going to be something that defies all definitions, and that I was expected to sit listening to some of those contemptible tunes that a foreigner, without the power to discriminate and patience to learn usually picks up in India.“
So, was the coming of someone like Ratan Devi simply a freakish or accidental event that cannot be explained? An examination of London’s socio-cultural milieu of the early 1900s, however, reveals that an explanation lies in a gradual awakening of interest in Indian culture within parts of the upper echelons of British society. This had inspired a few Britons to start taking some steps in a positive direction. One of the most effective of these was their setting up the India Society, an organisation dedicated to the promotion and projection of Indian art and culture in the UK and the west through talks, publications, and other positive activities. Set up in London in 1910, the founders of the India Society constituted a group of enlightened and open-minded British artists, writers and men and women of letters led by English artist William Rothenstein.
Ratan Devi’s programme was not an India Society event, but it was directly linked with it. Organiser,Dr Coomaraswamy, was a prominent founder and an active member of the India Society. The singer, Ratan Devi, was Coomaraswamy’s wife and the two are reported to have first met in 1907 or around 1910 at a recital of folk songs organised by Cecil Sharp who, besides being Ratan Devi’s English music guru, was a friend of AH Fox-Strangways who was the Secretary of the India Society.
Strangways’ interest in Indian music was considerable. He had travelled to India to meet and hear Indian musicians there, had befriended Tagore in London, had discussed Indian music with both Tagore and Inayat Khan and had also authored a pioneering book, The Music of Hindostan (1914) that the India Society had helped by purchasing copies for its members.
Ratan Devi’s programme was, therefore, an early attempt by a small group of Britons who were familiarising themselves with India and Indian culture, to introduce Indian classical and folk music to a limited group of Britons who had little or no knowledge of it. This is amply evident from the format of the programme in which Ratan Devi’s songs were always preceded by a verbal introduction. Regarding her 1917 programme, a contemporary newspaper wrote as follows: “Dr Coomaraswamy, who looks like Maxim Gorky’s picture and is a scholar of voluminous writing on Eastern art, prefaced his wife’s singing with brief and illuminating talk.”
Having arrived prematurely, Ratan Devi’s impact proved ephemeral. Like her contemporary Maude Macarthy or Omananda Puri, an Irish musician and Theosophist with an interest in Indian music, she created a little wave within intellectual circles in London and was then soon forgotten. Having vanished from public memory with as much dramatic suddenness as she had appeared on the public stage, scarcely anyone remembers or even knows her name today!
Kusum Pant Joshi is the researcher for the South Asian Cinema Foundation.
