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

Although he attended nearly as many upper-class parties and receptions as some of the rajahs, his journalistic instincts also encouraged him to follow those city routes largely ignored by other writers. Malabari made certain that his socially stratified itinerary didn’t limit the range and fervour of his ramblings. He is also exceptional in trying to transcribe the speech patterns of the street arabs who accost him: ‘ “Jim, look at ’is ’at; look at ’is ’at, Jim”’; ‘Of all the expletives I have heard in London streets this “bloody” seems to be the commonest – bloody cheek, bloody hard, bloody fat, bloody fool, bloody flower.’¹²⁵

      Most of the other authors only wrote one book. The likes of Nadkarni and Pandian were writing in the golden age of Empire, that period when scholars, adventurers and traders trotted round the globe looking for terrain to master both intellectually and economically. Their accounts – fetching huge prices at auctions today – are often censured for effacing native voices. They’re commonly adjudged to gloss over important geopolitical issues. Apparently they import their own concerns and prejudices and judge the natives harshly for not living up to those standards. But Indian writers do precisely the same when they lambast Londoners for drinking, for being promiscuous and impious. Their books can be read as early manifestations of the Empire writing back but if this is true, their authors objectify and palsy their subjects just as much (or just as little) as their European counterparts did when cartographizing Asia and Africa. It may just be that travel writing – always prone through limited pagination and the need for authors constantly to keep on the move – must always skim the surfaces of the cultures and histories which it intends to illuminate. As a genre, it has always been grossly deficient in being able to relay the myriad plenitudes and fascinating contradictions of individual societies.

      But it’s not only in its contribution to debates about the nature of colonial discourse that nineteenth-century Indian travel writing is interesting. The authors’ eagerness to savour all the cultural possibilities that London has to offer anticipates Kureishi’s lust for lapping up the capital’s creative and sensory delights. The Indians in this chapter had the time, the contacts and the money to do so, and this not only distinguishes them from most of the other writers in this book, but also helps to scupper any theory about the relationship between colonials and the metropolis which assumes pre-twentieth-century contact was all as disastrous as that of Gronniosaw and Mary Prince. Their stays in what many of them felt was the centre of the earth were overwhelmingly joyful.