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

attended expensive firework-shows which lit up the night sky above places such as Vauxhall Gardens. Nowrojee and his cousin cruised around the capital on the evening of Queen Victoria’s marriage to Albert in 1840 ogling the specially illuminated streetscapes. The hidden subtext to this focus on light (so vastly superior, according to Mirza Khan, to that in Paris!⁹²) is made transparent in T.B. Pandian’s florid encomium:

      Old King Gas still holds his old sway as a lamp-lighter, but his throne totters, as his light itself pales before the more potent effulgence of the coming Raj – the Imperial brilliance of the electric light in perfected power and majesty.⁹³

      London’s lighting is being praised here not just as a technological feat of the highest order, but as concrete proof that the country of which London is the administrative capital is a superior political overlord. The quote makes clear what many of the Indian travellers in this chapter had already suspected – that London was not only ‘a pinnacle of magnificence and luxury’ whose ‘beauty and grandeur’ led it to outshine any other city they had previously visited,⁹⁴ but that it was the most blessed, the most radiant

      Mecca for the traveller in search of truth, a Medina of rest for the persecuted or the perplexed in spirit. Though centre of perpetual motion, it is still the Persepolis of human grandeur in repose. To the searcher after enlightenment it is a Budh-Gaya; a Benares for the sinner in search of emancipation. Damp, dirty, noisy London, thou art verily a Jerusalem for the weary soldier of faith.⁹⁵

      Mukharji contrasted favourably the ‘soft subdued and mellowed shine’ of the sun in London to that of India which ‘rides roughshod over our head burning and parching everything with incessant darts of liquid fire’.⁹⁶ Even the artificial lighting found in the capital’s streets and alleyways symbolized how majestically London rose above the rest of the world which was, if not swamplike, certainly ancillary, definitely not as resplendent as the imperial metropolis. London was a beacon calling out across the oceans, a lighthouse summoning people from the dangers of backwardness. It was a chandelier of near-blinding loveliness.

      Meanwhile, Nadkarni and Malabari praised the metropolitan constabulary for being consistently cheerful and helpful; the latter contrasting ‘Dear old Bobby’ to ‘the stupid, peevish, insolent Patawala in India!’⁹⁷ Cabmen, equally, were seen as ‘very clever and civil people’ who not only knew the capital’s streets backwards but were very personable to their passengers.⁹⁸ What a difference a century makes. The Stephen Lawrence débâcle illustrates the difficulty faced by London’s police force in countering the widespread perception that they are racists; the xenophobic loquacity of city cabbies is a staple butt of many stand-up performers stepping on to the boards at Leicester Square comedy clubs. Yet before 1900 both professions were felt to symbolize a security and ease that Indians lacked. Malabari articulated this belief, later revived by Tambimuttu and Naipaul, when he claimed that his countrymen lacked European people’s ‘order, discipline, presence of mind’.⁹⁹

      Unlike many of the black writers in this book, Indian travellers were spectators as much as they were recipients of attention.¹⁰⁰ They came to London on short-stay visits with the specific intention of viewing as many famous people and edifices as possible. Brimming with the confidence that their wealthy backgrounds had granted them, they didn’t instinctively avert their gazes when Londoners stared at them. Unlike Mary Prince and Una Marson, nineteenth-century Indians weren’t haunted by the fear that they were somehow illegitimate, that their presence in the capital was unlicensed or likely to be penalized. They did, nonetheless, undergo the experience of being scrutinized. Local Londoners routinely flocked round freshly disembarked travellers to gawp at their tawny flesh, their Parsee costumes, and their accompanying coteries. Nowrojee and Merwanjee found themselves surrounded by a mob almost a thousand strong and struggled to reach their waiting carriage.¹⁰¹ Public response was largely benign: Ramakrishna announced with relief that, ‘My oriental dress wherever I went, in the buses, in the underground railway carriages, in the London streets and in public places of resort, secured for me every attention and respect’.¹⁰² Unlike Prince – unlike Sancho even – Ramakrishna didn’t feel threatened by people gazing at him or commenting on his outfits. Nor did Mukharji, who was cannily waspish in his analysis of the public attitude to travellers like himself. Attending a colonial exhibition, he noticed a group of women staring at him, one of whom, after a long while, plucked up the courage to approach him, at which point she

      expressed her astonishment at my knowledge of English, and complimented me for the performance of the band brought from my country, vis., the West Indian band composed of Negroes and Mulattos, which compliment made me wince a little, but nevertheless I went on chattering for a quarter of an hour and furnishing her with sufficient means to annihilate her friend Minnie, Jane or Lizzy or whoever she might be, and to brag among her less fortunate relations for six months to come of her having actually seen and talked to a genuine ‘Blackie.’¹⁰³

      Following the Great Exhibition – held at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park during 1851, and visited by six and a half million people – London regularly staged huge colonial exhibitions. In 1876 a number of snake-charmers, nautch-girls, jugglers and artisans were brought to the city to perform at the ‘Indian Villages in London’ show at Royal Albert Palace, Battersea. The later Ceylonese Exhibition at Agricultural Hall, Islington, required over eighty performers to be shipped in from Ceylon and Madras together with elephants and tigers. Such events were a curious mixture of conference, trade fair, and museum show. Shawls, sculptures, even reconstructions of foreign streets could all be seen here. Between 1883 and 1886 four exhibitions were held in South Kensington – on Fisheries, Health, Inventions, and Colonial and Indian produce – with the last, which T.N. Mukharji had been deputed to attend by the Indian Government, by far the most popular. The sequence of these exhibitions revealed, according to the historian Paul Greenhalgh, ‘a good deal about British attitudes to empire; it was variously considered as a resource, as a commodity, as something the British had created, as an abstract concept; it could be many things in fact, except people with lives and traditions of their own’.¹⁰⁴

      To the extent that this is true – and it’s always difficult to gauge what the public ‘feels’ about any issue as vast as the Empire – it may be the case that the whispering and finger-pointing that Indian travellers in the nineteenth century attracted arose precisely because they were non-abstract, people whose vocabularies and dress codes gave evidence of the fact that they possessed lives and traditions of their own. Staring didn’t objectify or dehumanize them. Rather, Londoners squinted at them because they were palpably not objects, all too human. That Malabari, Ramakrishna, Nadkarni and Mukharji never complained about being stared at, whilst writers such as Mirza Khan and K.C. Sen were lionized, confirms this point. They didn’t feel intimidated by the white gaze as black women writers such as Buchi Emecheta and Una Marson later did. Nor were they angered by the suspicion that they were under constant surveillance as do the characters in Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poetry and in Caryl Phillips’s plays.

      Two Indian authors did complain vociferously about their treatment by Londoners. Could it be that they were, simply, pompous stick-in-the-muds? Jhinda Ram, who worked in a Punjabi court, where deference and hushed respect were compulsory, sounds positively Pooterish when he balks at the cheekily demotic village boys in Battersea Park who gathered round and gave him gyp:

      with as much indifference as if I were a stuffed figure. I never gained so much uncompromising information about my colour, nose, teeth, &c. as on that occasion. I need hardly tell you,