Colonialism, Philology and Musical Ethnography in Nineteenth-Century India: The caseof S. W. Fallon.

S. W. Fallon (1817–80), best known as a compiler of Hindustani dictionaries, submitted a detailed proposal to the Government of Bengal in 1873 for an extensive collection of Indian folksongs, of which he provided a classification. Although the outcome of the proposal is uncertain, his expressed aims alone are remarkable, in their relationship to the colonial enterprise and, more especially, for the ways in which they anticipate major concerns of ethnomusicology right up to the present.