S.M. Tagore was a 19th century Bengali musicologist and founder of the Bengal Music School (1871). He composed this collection of songs in English and Sanskrit in praise of Queen Victoria and her predecessors in anticipation of the Prince of Wales’s visit to India in 1875. This presentation copy made for her was bound in purple velvet jewelled covers.

Tagore later founded the 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.