Indian Music and the West examines perceptions and representations of Indian music in the West over a period of two hundred years, ranging from orientalist studies of Indian history and culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the adoption of elements from Indian music in Western popular culture in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Gerry Farrell charts the place of Indian music within the context of colonialism, the use of Indian imagery in Western popular songs and on the stage, and the early days of the gramophone in India. Farrell also demonstrates how Indian music has been discovered and re-discovered in the West, and how these discoveries have reflected changing cultural, social, and political relations between India and the West. This is the story of the interface between two sophisticated and complex musical systems.