S.M. Tagore was a 19th century Bengali musicologist who founded the Bengal Music School (1871) and Bengal Academy of Music (1881) and published extensively on music theory. In the early 1880s he set Indian translations of God Save the Queen to popular Indian melodies as national anthems for the Indian Empire.

Tagore’s composed his hymn Srimad Victoria Mahatyam for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1887. Each verse appears on the versos of each page in Sanskrit with the music in Tagore’s newly devised Indian notation and on the facing recto the Sanskrit text is transcribed with the music in the Western notation. It ends with Indian goddesses of poetry and music blessing Victoria: ‘the destroyer of the darkness of ignorance and the dispeller of the fear of the god of death - bless you in these words - "Beest Thou the abode of bliss, O Victoria!