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

in some ways prefigure those of Kureishi’s flexisexual metro-bohemians.

      Indian travellers were honoured and cherished newcomers to London. Both the black population of the eighteenth century and those lascars who cramped into the East End in the nineteenth century led anonymous and rather fugitive lives. Prisoners of their own misfortunes, they rarely had the money or need to shuffle out of their own smoggy enclaves. Apart from the colour of their skins they had almost nothing in common with someone like Bhawani Singh who could inform his readers that, ‘When an Indian Chief visits London he has to call upon the Secretary of State for India. I therefore called on Mr Brodrick in my Indian costume. A red cloth was spread from the carriage to the house; this is a mark of honour paid to Indian princes.’⁷⁹ Meanwhile, the Rajah of Kolhapoor recounted in his diary how he had been greeted by the Political Secretary of the India Office at Charing Cross; Sen met Lord Shaftesbury and Benjamin Jowett, lunched with the Dean of Westminster who introduced him to Max Müller, and breakfasted with Gladstone; not only did Mirza Khan frequently attend the King and Queen’s drawing room, but he was also invited to dinner by Alderman Combe who had just been elected Mayor of London. Allocated a seat at the same table as Lord Nelson, he was amused to find that his foreign garb and apparent air of superiority led many parties to come over throughout the evening, bend their knees and stoop their heads – to Lord Nelson for his victory on the Nile, ‘and to me, for my supposed high rank’.⁸⁰

      This is a far cry from the altercations lascars had with washer-women, crimps and prostitutes. Few Indians had the time or inclination to attend to the grimmer, ungilded parts of town. Bhawani sombrely visited the East End one afternoon, only to spend the evening gadding about at a State Ball held at Buckingham Palace. And although some Indian travellers did notice and speak to the city’s destitutes, the registers with which they describe these encounters are frequently patronizing (‘Oh the street arabs of London! Dirty, unkempt little urchins, out at elbow, often out at knee too, if I may use the phrase; lean and hungry as a rule, yet full of life, and always amusing’⁸¹), pompous (‘London appears to a stranger the richest, most prosperous, and happiest city on the face of the earth. But stop for one moment. While you enjoy the magnificence and splendour of the Great Metropolis, do not fail to see the misery and wretchedness in its streets’⁸²), or sanctimonious:

      we also think that much of the dissipation, and many of the robberies committed by young men, may be traced to an intimacy with improper females, which commenced within the saloon of a theatre. The saloons of those theatres that are allowed to be infested with such characters, are, instead of being an accommodation to the public, harbours of vice, at which a virtuous man frowns with disgust.⁸³

      Far more to the liking of the Indian travellers was the opportunity London gave them to inspect for the first time aspects of their own culture. Here they could see some of the ivory, manuscripts and gold pieces that had been seized from their country. It wasn’t so very surprising that they had to travel to London to see their own arts and achievements displayed. After all, London was the capital of India. Imperial centre, the largest city on earth – it was from there that the treaties, curricula and legislative frameworks which shaped their lives were established. Political and economic issues pertaining to India were frequently discussed: J.S. Mill asked Sen about education, income tax, and the administration of justice in India; the Rajah of Kolhapoor attended an East India Association meeting at the Society of Arts to hear a Paper on Cotton.

      London was also the place in which to see the sinews and arteries of Empire: Nadkarni went to the Bank of England to see Indian currency being printed; Sinh Jee walked along the Thames Embankment to the General Post Office to watch Indian mail sorted; Jhinda Ram marvelled at Tippu Sultan’s girdle and helmet at the Tower of London. Some, like the Rajah of Kolhapoor, were ‘quite surprised to see such a large collection of Indian things’.⁸⁴ Others, like T.N. Mukharji, were less enthralled. He inspected South Kensington Museum’s extensive collection of Indian artware and also attended the Indian Bazaar at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition.

      A dense crowd always stood there, looking at our men as they wore the gold brocade, sang the patterns of the carpet and printed the calico with the hand. They were much astonished to see the Indians produce works of art with the aid of rude apparatus they themselves had discarded long ago.⁸⁵

      This response rankled him. After visiting other shows and galleries, he complained that:

      The Museums in Europe, where ethnographical specimens from all parts of the world have been collected, bring to the mind of an Indian a feeling of humiliation and sorrow. There he finds himself ranked among barbarian tribes with their cannibalism, human-sacrifice, tattooing and all sorts of cruel and curious customs that denote a savage life.⁸⁶

      On the whole, though, Indian travellers enjoyed flitting through the city and taking in as many sites and sights as possible. Some, like Bhawani Singh, were lucky enough to stay at the Alexandra Hotel in luxurious rooms overlooking Hyde Park. Others climbed the steps to the top of St Paul’s Cathedral where, unlike eighteenth-century black writers who only experienced the city at ground level, they viewed London from above. These perspectives allowed them to ‘look down’ on the capital, something that they, patrician and Olympian in mien, were not averse to doing.

      Nineteenth-century Indian writers also grabbed the opportunity to drift through the city imbibing quotidian experiences. Malabari often slipped into the present tense to convey his sense of awe at London’s whirr and whirl: near Regent Street, ‘I stand breathless of an evening, watching what goes on before my eyes’; squeezing into an omnibus, ‘I am between two of the prettiest and quietest, feeling a strange discomfort. As the ’bus hobbles along, I feel my fair neighbours knocking against me every moment.’⁸⁷

      Visitors were most dazed by the clattering locomotion and velocity of the world’s most populous city. Noise and tumult assaulted them as soon as they alighted at Victoria Station. London seemed insomniac, so thronged and labyrinthine as to be utterly unknowable. And no matter how lofty their social station, irrespective of how long they resided in the metropolis, they never quite lost that initial disorientation. Pandian linked this surging energy to the city’s capacity for hyper-manufacturing both ideas and commercial produce, while Mukharji speculated that Londoners, accustomed to confronting a thousand terrors and cacophonies every day of their working lives, had become so immune that they weren’t ‘even afraid of ghosts now-a-days, nor of witches, imps or fairies’.⁸⁸ Speech became comically deformed with bus conductors referring to such places as Chring Cruss, Stren, Oxf Strit, Pidly, Toria, Roloke. Friendship was almost impossible for ‘The Englishman in London seems to have no time to dive after a drowning friend’.⁸⁹ All this led Malabari to observe caustically that:

      People live in a whirlwind of excitement, making and unmaking their idols almost every day. They seem to be consumed by a mania for novelty; everything new serves to keep up the fever of excitement. Today they will set up a fetish, anything absurd, fantastic, grotesque, and worship it with breathless enthusiasm.⁹⁰

      Indian visitors marvelled at the most unexceptional features. Jhinda Ram and T.N. Mukharji were both entertained by the advertisements they came across in the press, on the streets, and upon looking up from the books they read on bus journeys. Both were diverted by the techniques used by Pears to sell soap to the public – Mukharji remarking drily that, ‘The black races need no longer have the fear of being eaten up by white men for the sake of their complexion, for a single application of Mr Pears’ Soap will whiten the blackest of black faces.’⁹¹