Tagore, Sourindro Mohun (EN)

Tagore Sir Sourindro Mohun, Saurīndramonana Thākura, *1840 Calcutta, †5 July 1914 Calcutta, Indian musicologist and music teacher. He was raised in an aristocratic family of artists and patrons of the arts. He studied Sanskrit at the Hindu College in Calcutta, founded by his grandfather, Gopi Mohun Tagore. In 1856–58, he studied sitar with Lakshmi Narayana Mishra and Ksetra Mohun Goswami, and learned European music under the guidance of European teachers. In 1871, he founded a Bengali music school in Calcutta, and in 1882 a Bengali music academy. These schools were founded on European models, and their task was to promote Indian music and culture; they became models for other music schools that were established in India. Tagore provided teaching materials for music schools and paid teachers. His work gained international recognition, as evidenced by the awarding of honorary doctorates to him from the University of Philadelphia (1875) and from Oxford (1896).

Tagore was a typical representative of the 19^th-century Bengali intelligentsia with an English education, loyal to the British crown while glorifying native ideas and values. His treatises on musical theory and practice in Sanskrit and Bengali with explanations in English were addressed mainly to the Bengali middle class in Calcutta and to orientalists in India and abroad. He also spread knowledge of Indian music by conducting extensive correspondence with scientific societies, museums and people from the ruling classes in Europe, the United States and Asia. He offered them Indian musical instruments, books and manuscripts. He contributed to ethnomusicology with numerous publications in English, consulted with Western researchers, who also made use of his achievements. Probably under the influence of reading Yantra Kosha by V.Ch. Mahillon, he created his classification of musical instruments divided into 4 groups. A.J. Ellis, O. Abraham, and E.M. von Hornbostel based their research on Indian scales on Tagore’s publications. His accounts of the Ragamala tradition are an interesting source of information on the role of nineteenth-century Bengal in the history of East-West contacts. Tagore’s Sangīta-sāra-sangraha led to the intensive study of ancient and medieval Sanskrit treatises on Indian music and dance, while his collection of writings on Indian music, Hindu Music from Various Authors, including rare works by Sir W. Jones and A. Willard, remains a useful anthology of Indian musical literature of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in English. The Universal History of Music may be considered the first serious attempt by a non-European writer to write a history of world music.

Literature: F. Chrysander Verzeichnis der Werke und Publikationen von Dr. Sourindro Mohun Tagore, “Allgemeine Musikzeitung,” new series XIV, 1879; J.W. Furrell The Tagore Family, Calcutta 1892; C. Capwell Musical Life in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta as a Component in the History of a Secondary Urban Center, “Asian Music” XVIII, 1986 No. 1; C. Capwell Sourindo Mohun Tagore and the National Anthem Project, “Ethnomusicology” XXXI, 1987; J. Bor The Rise of Ethnomusicology. Sources on Indian Music c. 1780–1890, “Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council” XX, 1988; N.A. Jairazbhoy The Beginnings of Organology and Ethnomusicology in the West. V. Mahillon, A. Ellis, and S.M. Tagore, “Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology” VIII, 1990; C. Capwell Marginality and Musicology in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta, the Case of S.M. Tagore, in: Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, ed. B. Nettl and P. Bohlman, Chicago 1991; G. Farrell Indian Music and the West, Oxford 1997; R. Lindsey et al. Raja Tagore: Renaissance Man of Indian Music, 2014, http://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/of-note/2014/raja-tagore; Sourindro Mohun Tagore Digital Books; http://archive.org/search.php? query=creator%3A%22Sourindro+Mohun+Tagore…