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

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      It’s difficult to sympathize with Nowrojee and Merwanjee when they complain about the behaviour of the capital’s theatre audiences. These authors, whose book groans with lengthy accounts of the technical specificities of London dockyards, lash the ‘smirking, priggish-looking’ Jews, gripe about Hackney coach drivers, and weary us with their Puritan condemnations of the dissipated young men and improper young females they see hanging around theatres.¹⁰⁶ Always sit in the boxes rather than in the pit or gallery, they instruct their readers, because these latter places are

      resorted to by the humbler classes, as well as by rogues, thieves, and pick-pockets, and should a stranger happen to be there, he is often teased and insulted with grogs and abusive language by these fellows, besides he could not see much of the performances; we state this from the treatment we once experienced at Astley’s Amphitheatre, but on our discovering the error, we immediately left the place.

      And here we would inform our countrymen that the majority of the lower orders in England are very rude in their manners and behaviour towards strangers, whom they do not like to see in their own country.¹⁰⁷

      Although the grousings of Nowrojee and his cousin were unusually severe, they weren’t the only Indian travellers to criticize London life. As with Sancho, much of this condemnation was levelled at metropolitan amorality. The speed and intensity with which life seemed to be lived in the city, whilst thrilling, convinced Nadkarni that Londoners were fixated on instant gratification rather than anything more spiritually deep-rooted.¹⁰⁸ Pandian hated to see ‘Christians wildly careering about the thoroughfares of a great Christian city on Sundays above all other days of the week’.¹⁰⁹ Malabari glossed over the poverty and lack of education that disabled millions of Londoners from pursuing happiness when he casually remarked that, ‘the back parts of not a few streets seem to have been given up to Godless population, foreign and English’.¹¹⁰

      Malabari, like many Indian authors, was appalled by family life in the capital. He could scarcely believe that mothers and nurses let their babies inhale the city’s fetid air, and was shocked by the number of unmarried young men and women – particularly women – who in their ‘scramble after happiness’ filled ‘the streets of London with all that is repulsive in life, and much that is subversive of the welfare of society’.¹¹¹ Mukharji, meanwhile, was aggrieved by the number of children who fled their family homes at the first opportunity, whilst Gandhi was disturbed by the excessive liberalism of those parents who allowed their daughters to flirt with visiting Indian students.

      Many writers inveighed against the dangers of alcohol which, according to Malabari, debased and brutalized even more men and women in London than it did in Paris. Mirza Khan, Nadkarni and Pandian all believed drink was this country’s besetting weakness, driving weak-willed members of the working classes to crime and ruination. The latter’s hatred of alcohol was matched only by his hatred of gambling and smoking; ‘As for the immorality associated with the British stage,’ he wrote, ‘I do not care to say much.’¹¹² His evangelistic fervour extended to his dislike of the nudes at Hampton Court and was rivalled only by Jhinda Ram who claimed that the sight of couples kissing under their umbrellas on Hyde Park benches was ‘astonishing and shocking to my mind’.¹¹³ Although Ram doesn’t mention drama specifically, it seems unlikely that he would have thought any more highly of London’s theatres than Pandian or Nowrojee and Merwanjee who all regarded them as breeding grounds for vice and impropriety.

      Some Indian criticism did address slightly more serious issues than Malabari’s outburst against English food which he felt lacked variety and seasoning.¹¹⁴ Mukharji, in particular, was disappointed by his visit to the House of Commons: he sat in the Gallery eagerly hoping to hear the powerful rhetoric of those charismatic performers he’d read so much about in India. Instead, he felt mortified by the ‘fact that the words that fell there decided the destiny of nations. It looked so like a debating club of old boys!’¹¹⁵ Over a decade earlier in the summer of 1870, the Brahmin reformer Keshub Chunder Sen had sat in the same seats bemused by the absence of women from the Visitors’ Gallery: ‘Why this meaningless exclusion in this land of female liberty?’¹¹⁶

      A suspicion that England was not quite as splendid and all-knowing as he’d been led to believe also underlies Mirza Khan’s claim that vanity was one of the commonest English faults. He argued that they wrote and circulated books on the basis of the most wafer-thin insights on scientific subjects or on foreign languages, and went on to question ‘the transcendent abilities and angelic character of Sir William Jones’, whose Persian Grammar he regarded as defective.¹¹⁷ Other writers also bemoaned the fact that many of the people they had met in London ‘knew nothing else of India except the mutiny’, and had the impression that it was ‘steeped in ignorance and barbarism’.¹¹⁸

      But although their parents and friends had fed them doomy reports about metropolitan decadence, and they were occasionally surprised by the poverty, materialism and ignorance about Indian affairs they found in London, all the travellers who published accounts of their stays left the city with nothing but the fondest affection. Many of them had also visited other leading European capitals such as Paris and Rome but, dizzying, dirty and Godless as it often seemed, London was adjudged to be superior. Whereas a century later authors such as Andrew Salkey and Linton Kwesi Johnson would chart the contempt that was meted out to Caribbean immigrants by white Londoners, Jhinda Ram, Nadkarni and Pandian singled out their friendliness and ‘Christ-like magnanimity’ towards foreign visitors.¹¹⁹ Equally, in a passage which anticipates one of the key themes of The Satanic Verses, T.N. Mukharji wrote:

      England is not so much the home of Englishmen, as it is the home of imperialism, liberalism and human freedom. It is practically the home of all races, as any one can testify who has seen the large number of foreigners marrying and intermarrying there – the pigtailed Chinese, the dark lascars, the woolly-bearded Africans, the straight-nosed Jews, not to say of Germans, French, Italians and other people of Europe. [ … ] Why should we not accept that little strip of land as the great metropolis and common property of the empire of which our continent of India is an important part, and take pride in it just as we take pride in Calcutta, and help always to keep it in the vanguard of human progress?¹²⁰

      Bhagvat Sinh Jee, unwittingly recycling the language of Malabari and Ramakrishna, felt that his voyages had ‘passed like a felicitous dream’, while, according to his editor, the Rajah of Kolhapoor wrote a letter to a friend in India in which he claimed that his experiences in London had taught him ‘what a very insignificant person [he] was out of his own territory’.¹²¹ For Jhinda Ram, London was not only the centre of commerce and wealth but of intellectual and moral life.¹²² Pandian went further and called it ‘by a long way the most remarkable city on the face of the globe’.¹²³ But perhaps it was Malabari who caught the right tone – one that combined scepticism, bitter-sweet comedy and, most of all, head-spinning euphoria:

      And now farewell to London! Dirty little pool of life, that has grown and expanded into an ocean – the biggest, the muddiest, and yet the healthiest of this iron age. Great in varieties, great in contrarieties; unequalled in the power of contrasts and in the wealth of extremes;