London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. Sukhdev Sandhu

Empire; Bhagvat Sinh Jee was Thakore Saheb of Gondal; Bhawani Singh was Raj Rana Bahadur of Jhalawar; Malabari edited the Indian Spectator; Jhinda Ram was Pleader at the Chief Court of the Punjab; even the students Nowrojee and Merwanjee were, respectively, son and nephew of the master builder of the Honourable East India Company’s dockyard in Bombay. Such social standing distinguishes these writers from those discussed earlier. They weren’t dragged to London against their wishes; they didn’t flee there to escape slavery; unlike Wells Brown, they weren’t even required to tour the nation delivering Abolitionist broadsides. Nor did they require scholarships or subsidies: they paid for themselves and came here out of curiosity and in pursuit of pleasure.

      Though they may not have encountered quite as much resistance back home as the students, still the impression abided: London was a moral abattoir. Gandhi’s family told him that the food was terrible there, that he was bound to turn to meat, cigars, drink and shameless dress.⁶⁵ Ramakrishna delayed coming for forty years after his mother lamented that he would become ‘a “walking corpse”, a living dead body, a being socially and religiously lost to her, to our family and clan’.⁶⁶ Crossing the Kálápani (the black waters) was thought to breed discontent. It also implied a rejection of caste, an embarrassment at one’s birthright. Some authors shared this fear that things would never be the same after leaving for England: T.N. Mukharji worried that, ‘The elders of the family on whose bosom I prattled in my infancy will shun me as an unclean thing’.⁶⁷

      This anxiety about London spoliating its visitors stems from the puritanical rigidity that characterizes the upper ranks of the Indian caste system where all interaction with outsiders is viewed with suspicion. Indians who came to London in the nineteenth century were less inclined to revere the metropolis than subsequent writers such as Mulk Raj Anand, V.S. Naipaul and Dom Moraes. Those three, along with the Caribbean novelist George Lamming, were to a greater or lesser extent disappointed, but, unlike Mukharji or Ramakrishna, they did at least arrive in London eager to believe that the city embodied cultural virtue and purity.

      Some Indian authors of the Victorian period claimed their travels were pedagogically or philanthropically motivated. Bhawani Singh wrote his book ‘primarily for the benefit of my people in Jhalawar, whose ideas of European civilization were of the vaguest’.⁶⁸ Chunder Dutt wanted his to ‘serve as a guide-book to Indian youths intending to visit Europe’.⁶⁹ Mukharji’s preface-writer, N.N. Ghose, bluntly stated that the

      book inculcates the principle of change in the direction of progress, he and others like him are among the main solvent influences acting upon a hardened social regime. No nation, left to itself, has improved to any great extent, and whatever tends to bring Indian life and ideas into contact with English, is desirable even more in the interests of India than of England.⁷⁰

      Others, meanwhile, wished to be thought of as cultural ambassadors: Nowrojee and Merwanjee hoped ‘our humble efforts promote and increase the existing kindly feeling towards the natives of the East in the breast of the British public’, whilst Ramakrishna intended to ‘promote a sympathetic understanding’ between Great Britain and India.⁷¹

      The latter author also claimed that, ‘To visit England was the dream of my life’, and this trope reappears in Malabari’s rhapsody on the ‘Land of Freedom, the land of my youthful dreams, which holds so much that is precious to me personally, and so much more that is of greater value to the land of my birth’.⁷² Earlier he’d admitted that, ‘A trip to London has been my dream for years, a hope long deferred. More, indeed, than wish or hope, it has been a faith with me, to be rewarded in the fulness of time.’⁷³

      Malabari’s dreams, like those of Ramakrishna and nearly all of the Indian students, princes and visitors who came to London throughout the nineteenth century, were realized to glittering effect. These men experienced few hardships or privations. They weren’t forced to seek out cheap, dingy lodgings; nor were they shackled by overweening owners. Upon arrival K.C. Sen could afford to move into very expensive rooms in Norfolk Street, Strand. Jhinda Ram did the same, whilst Bhagvat Sinh Jee stayed at the Great Western Hotel. Even those few Indians who switched to insalubrious quarters weren’t ostracized by polite society: Mirza Khan lived in Rathbone Place, half of whose inhabitants were courtesans, yet ‘my friends had the condescension and goodness to overlook this indiscretion; and not only was I visited there by the first characters in London, but even ladies of rank, who had never in their lives before passed through this street, used to call in their carriages at my door’.⁷⁴

      Such ‘condescension’ is unsurprising. Indians were rare birds of passage: socially lofty, exotically dressed with fancy headwear, foreign-tongued and adhering to impressively ancient religious codes, they didn’t have much in common with those filthy and downwardly mobile lascars who were the only other Asiatics most Londoners might previously have come across. According to his biographer, K.C. Sen was ‘lionized’ by London female society during his stay in the capital during 1870. Lionizing, she argues, was ‘a recognized pastime of middle-aged women to take up controversial figures and show them off as their own pet discoveries’.⁷⁵ Similarly, Mirza Khan claimed that

      the Nobility vied with each other in their attention to me. Hospitality is one of the most esteemed virtues of the English; and I experienced it to such a degree, that I was seldom disengaged. In these parties I enjoyed every luxury my heart could desire.⁷⁶

      ‘Hospitality’ and ‘luxury’ aren’t words that crop up too often in this book. Nineteenth-century Indian travellers spent most of their stays in London being generously pampered. They had no financial problems, and could afford to circulate through the city by coach, hansom cabs or, in Bhawani Singh’s case, by motor car. Not only did they make regular trips outside the capital – Brighton, Oxford, Manchester, Liverpool and Scotland were common destinations – but they also ranged freely across London itself. Each day brought new encounters, fresh vistas, a seemingly endless conveyor belt of diversions and entertainments. A typical sojourn in London would include, at the very least, visits to Madame Tussaud’s, St Paul’s Cathedral, Hampton Court, the Crystal Palace, the Houses of Parliament, the Zoological Gardens, the British Museum, the National Gallery and Westminster Abbey. Sporting events such as the annual Eton versus Harrow cricket match at Lord’s and the Henley Regatta were savoured as were theatrical performances: Chunder Dutt acclaimed The Mikado the ‘finest thing on the stage in London’, whilst Bhawani Singh regularly attended the Apollo and Royal Court Theatres.⁷⁷ Many books celebrated the greenery of Regent’s Park, St James’s Park and Hyde Park. Nor were the worlds of science and commerce neglected: Nowrojee and his cousin attended Royal Institution lectures on Daguerreotype and the Gallery of Practical Science in Lowther Arcade near Charing Cross, as well as the Polytechnic Institution, Woolwich Dockyard, Custom House and St Katharine’s Docks. In short, London was, as Syed A.M. Shah claimed, ‘a place (if not the place) of wonders and curiosities, and it is impossible to see everything of note in London’.⁷⁸ For many of these Indian travellers, the metropolis was a massive fruit bowl which they eyed lasciviously, plucking from it the tastiest, the most succulent fancies. It wasn’t the harsh, abysmal hole portrayed by Mayhew, Booth or even Dickens. London wasn’t a city they really lived in – it wasn’t a place where they worked, scraped, or tussled for bricks and money. Instead they skittered through its most celebrated chambers and drawing rooms, stopping only to sign the visitors’ books of royalty, and chatter superficially with other social adepts, before moving on to the next engagement