Ratan Devi

Ratan Devi Coomaraswamy (born Alice Ethel Richardson; 1889 – July 15, 1958) worked under the stage name of Ratan Devī. She recorded Indian music and was a performer of Hindu songs and poems, and went on concert tours in Britain and America. Martin Clayton identifies Alice as one of the significant women overlooked with regard to music in the British Empire. They would in time have two children, Narada Coomaraswamy and Rohini Coomaraswamy. Apart from the press, she also received good reviews from the composer Percy Grainger, the playwright George Bernard Shaw and the poet W. B. Yeats.

In 1916 Alice became pregnant as a result of, according to the occultist and magician Aleister Crowley, becoming involved in sex magic rituals. Alice and her husband were both in America in 1917 where under the stage name Ratan Devi she completed a concert tour. Whilst they were there, Coomaraswamy was invited to serve as a research fellow on Indian art in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1917. According to Crowley, Alice pleaded with him to take her back but he said that he would only do this if she gave up her husband. Alice refused to do this. What is known is that Crowley wrote a story for The International that included a character named "Haramzada Swami" where Haramzada meant "bastard" in Hindustani.

Coomaraswamy divorced Alice and then he married the American artist Stella Bloch. Stella traveled to India and returned to the United States trained as an ethnic dancer.

Alice died of a heart ailment on July 15, 1958, at Phillips House at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

Works Thirty Songs From the Punjab and Kashmir, Recorded by Ratan Devi with Introduction and Translations by Ananda-Kentish Coomarswamy and a Foreword by Rabindranath Tagore (London, Old Bourne Press 1913).