This song has a lyric that is supposedly based on fact—the love of the son of a Kashmiri rajah for a married English woman. The story of the song’s creation is no less engaging. When The Garden of Kama, a collection of Indian love lyrics, was published in 1901 they were described as by ‘a new and refreshingly virile poet’. In fact ‘Laurence Hope’ was the wife of a Bengal Army officer, Captain Malcolm Nicolson. Born in Clifton, Gloucestershire, she was herself the daughter of an Indian Army officer and lived in India from the age of sixteen. There she met and married Captain Nicolson, who was over twenty years her senior. Her celebrity increased when Four Indian Love Lyrics (of which the ‘Kashmiri Song’ is the third) were set to music, but tragedy followed in 1904 when Major Nicolson (as he now was) died in Madras during a prostate operation. Heartbroken, his widow committed suicide by taking poison two months later.

Amy Woodforde-Finden, composer of the Four Indian Love Lyrics, was born Amelia Ward in Valparaiso, Chile, where her American father was British Consul. Later the family settled in South Kensington, after which Amy travelled in Kashmir and married a lieutenant-colonel who had served with Colonel Nicolson. Perhaps surprisingly, she experienced difficulty getting her songs published, until the singer Hamilton Earle took them up. Among artists who have recorded the ‘Kashmiri Song’, the most unlikely is perhaps Rudolph Valentino in his only recording.

from notes by Andrew Lamb © 2003