ABSTRACT
The relationship between music and Orientalism is widely acknowledged to be an important one, particularly so in the long nineteenth century, and yet the literature on this topic remains under-researched and modest in scope. Portrayal of the East attempts to do much the same on a broader scale, by bringing together diverse essays on music and Orientalism in the British empire of the long nineteenth century, and offering, for the first time, an opportunity to assess the impact of Orientalism and music in that time. The Indian temple dancer — devadasi or bayadère — is a staple both of travel literature and of the European stage in the nineteenth century. Despite the massive popularity of the The Crown of India, both at the time and in the following years, the majority of commentators elect either to negate the value of The Crown of India in relation to Edward Elgar’s overall output, or to simply ignore it altogether.
