Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers & Settlers in Britain 1600-1857

Long before the Kumars had moved into No. 42 or Bombay Dreams wowed West End, an Armenian lady from the Mughal court of Jehangir in Agra married William Hawkins, an English representative of the East India Company in 1609. Two years later, they set sail towards Britain. Unfortunately, Mariam was widowed before she reached her husband’s land. But in between Hawkins’ death and Mariam’s arrival in Britain, she became romantically involved with Gabriel Towerson, another Englishman who was travelling on the ship. In London, the two married and lived happily ever after — or, at least, till Mr Towerson returned to India with Mariam in 1617, after which their marriage went to pieces.

What is revealing is that in her three years in London, an Indian married (twice) to an Englishman — something that in later centuries may have been considered ‘inter-racial’ — did not evoke any adverse comments. In fact, like Mariam, there were many other Indians who noiselessly fitted into the cubbyholes of class and gender of British — marrying Britons, keeping English servants, going to church. Like the Cambridge-educated Guy Perron in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet  three centuries later, who feels a great affinity with the Indian Hari Kumar, who went to  the same public school as he did, pre-Company and Company Raj Britain was class driven in its interactions with Indians.

Counterflows to Colonialism traces Indian responses to Britain and the interactions of Indians with Britons in the latter’s ‘natural habitat’ from 1600 to the year of the Sepoy Mutiny, a pivotal point in the history of two cultures looking at each other. The book is also about two other aspects of this cross-cultural exchange, which has gradually become one-sided. Apart from providing rich streams of narratives on the first Indian travellers to Britain and the ‘first NRIs’, it also explores a much neglected part of British history — the existence of a multicultural Britain that wasn’t just a pluralising gesture of what a country should be, but what a country was. Fisher also charts how self-perception changed for Indians as the mirrors available for viewing oneself overwhelmingly started carrying the ‘Made in England’ tag.

By the mid-nineteenth century several thousand Indian seamen, servants, scholars, soldiers, women and children, students, diplomats, royalty, merchants, tourists, and settlers were participating and contributing in varying ways to British life and society, depending on their gender, social origin, and personal circumstances. In multifarious and contested ways, their self-representations and activities influenced British attitudes and policies towards them as individuals and towards India generally. Some settled, but most returned to India after months or years of living in Britain. Most also sent or brought back to India direct information about Britain, which disseminated in complex ways within Indian society.

Beginning in the 17th century, Indian domestics, servants and ayahs (nannies), began to be brought to Britain in the service of the East India Company agents and British families returning from India. Some were returned to India when no longer required, but an unknown number remained in British homes. Indian sailors, the lascars, first recruited in small numbers to fill the manpower gap arising through death or desertion in India of white sailors, crewed the Company's East Indiamen, and later, as an all-lascar labour force, the steam-powered liners like P&O and Clan Line. Although they were transients, lascars sometimes jumped ship in British ports to escape maltreatment and their inferior employment conditions (Asiatic Articles). Servants and sailors were the earliest Indian working-class settlers in Britain. Starting in the 18th century, travellers, emissaries, and petitioners seeking redress for lands lost to the East India Co.,   or with such other omplaints against the Company-Raj visited Britain.

Today’s Brick Lane, in East >  End of London

From about the middle of the 19th century an increasing number of people from India – largely traders and professionals - came to Britain. Some came as a result of the political, social and economic changes brought about under colonial rule. Others came out of a sense of adventure or curiosity to see the land of their rulers, or as in the case of the princes, on official visits or for pleasure. Students, some on scholarships, came to obtain vital professional qualifications to enable them to gain entry into the structures of colonial hierarchy back home. Some, having qualified, stayed on to practice their professions in Britain. Political activists brought the struggle for colonial freedom to London, the centre of imperial power. Businessmen and entrepreneurs came to seek economic opportunities.

Glory to God in Highest in Portuguese and Urdu on a board at the Home for Asiatics, on West India Dock Road.

Such was the charm of coming to live in England, in the early days of the Raj that in early 20^th century, an Urdu poet and a High Court Judge, Akbar Allahabadi was versifying his cynical reflections of  his country-men’s love for England:

Who jaayen makka-o-kaabaa;ham Inglistan dekhen ge—    Wo dekhen ghar khuda ka, ham khudaa ki shaan dekhen ge. [Purport: Let others go and visit Mecca & K’aba; I am     heading for England. While they are visiting Gods house, I’ll go and revel in God’s glory!]

The inter-war period saw a growth, though numerically still insignificant, of both working-class and professional Asian migration to Britain. By then Asian organisations and institutions, places of worship, 'ethnic' shops and restaurants had also been established.

By the end of the Second World War, as a result of ‘de-mobbed’ soldiers from the North African and mid-European theatres of war choosing to come and live in ‘Englistan’ –the land of the ‘Sahibs’ and their ‘mem-sahibs’— several thousand Asians had been living in Britain for generations, and an 'Asian Community' was already in existence. There were Asian professionals, industrial workers and labourers, students and activists, petty traders, merchants and businessmen, artists and writers. Asians then (as now) were not a homogenous community. There were different religious, ethnic and linguistic communities from south Asia and the diaspora in Africa and the Caribbean. Others were born here, some having families across the racial divide. The official India Office records document some aspects of their lives and struggles as imperial British citizens living at the heart of the imperial metropolis.

The context for these interactions and representations was colonialism and its processes, which powerfully altered what being an 'Indian' meant, both culturally and legally. This book surveys and analyses the range of Indians that ventured to Britain over 250 years, their reasons for travel, their diverse lived experiences, and their contrasting representations of colonizer, colonized, and colonial rule.

    Written in lucid and jargon-free prose, this volume will enthral general readers as well as historians. Its strong interest in narrative and the telling anecdotes, in individual personalities and peculiar lives, makes this book unusually appealing as much for its incredible wealth of new data and fresh arguments, as for its accessibility."