THE EMPIRE WRITES BACK

Part 1: Indian Views on Britain and Empire, 1810-1915, from The British Library, London

Publisher's Note

Travel writing continues to inspire provocative, inter-disciplinary scholarship in English, History, and Cultural Studies. It has been looked at for evidence of the dynamics of encounters, core-periphery relations, race theory, and for the formation of notions of national identity.

Much good work is still being done examining the writings of the colonisers and examining the way that they organised knowledge and described their surroundings. To counterpoint this, it is invaluable to examine the writings of those who travelled in the opposite direction.

This project looks at the writings of Indians, Africans, West Indians, Australians and Canadians who travelled to Britain. Part 1 commences with writers from India:

• What did Indian writers make of the sprawling metropolis of London?

• How do their views compare with those of English observers seeing India for the first time?
• What did they make of the great imperial project?

This microfilm collection makes available seventeen memoirs recording the views and experiences of Indian visitors to Britain. Many of these works are extremely rare and most were published in India (in Bombay, Calcutta, Lahore, Madras, Poona, and Sukkur).

We have made good use of the impressive and burgeoning scholarship in this area, including the work of Kusoom Vadgama, Rozina Visram, Mary Louise Pratt, Antoinette Burton and Shompa Lahiri who have done much to uncover this literature.(1)

The accounts are extremely varied in style and substance. Many are written by Indians who came to Britain to further themselves, either educationally or commercially (eg Samuel Satthianadhan at Cambridge and J Nauroji & H Mihrbanji, the naval architects, at Chatham); others are written by those who came to England as ‘exhibits’ (eg Trailokyanatha Mukharji at the Anglo-Indian Exhibition); and Joseph Salter provides accounts of Indians at the poorest end of the scale.

Predictably there are many comments on the vast scale of London and its crowds. Contemporary marvels such as gas lighting cause one writer to describe London as ‘Fairy-land.’ But these are balanced by reactions of horror and disgust at the poverty of the East-End and at the smoke wreathed industrial hubs of Manchester and Glasgow:

“Poor as India is, I thank God she knows not much of the poverty to which parts of Great Britain have been accustomed – the East End of London, for instance, parts of Glasgow, and other congested centres of life. Men and women living in a chronic state of emaciation, till they can hardly be recognised as human, picking up food what even animals will turn away from; sleeping fifty, sixty, eighty of them together, of all ages and both sexes, in a hole that could not hold ten with decency; swearing, fighting, trampling on one another; filling the room with foul confusion and fouler air. This is not a picture of occasional misery; in some places it represents the every day life of the victims of misfortune. … And side by side with such heart-rending scenes of misery, one sees gorgeously dressed luxury flaunting in the streets, dragged along by horses better fed and better looked after than many a human family in the same neighbourhood.” (2)

Others are critical of beggars in the street (particularly ‘street-Arabs’) and at the demeaning profession of being a sandwich-board advertiser (carrying adverts in front and behind).

The role of women in Western society also engendered strong reactions. Seeing women going about their business in the street or taking important positions such as that of post office clerk, provoked amazement. And just as Western observers regarded the ‘Orient’ as a place of sultry desire, Indian writers about England were astonished at the indecency of women on the stage:

“As for the immorality associated with the British stage, I do not care to say much; but I cannot help condemning the unseemly want of modesty that enables young and pretty actresses to exhibit themselves to the public gaze in costumes and attitudes that would call up deep blushes of shame to the faces of much maligned dancing girls of my own native land.” (3)

Above all, the volumes are valuable for the insights they give into perceptions of race. Pratapachandra Majumdar is one of many authors who describe in detail how he was treated and how he felt. The choice of European or Indian dress was also a significant decision that they had to take. Satthianadhan’s accounts are particularly interesting because he visited London twice with a fourteen and a half year gap in between. He felt far more comfortable on his second visit and thought that attitudes had changed:

“During my present stay in London I have also been deeply struck with its cosmopolitan character, which becomes more and more pronounced as years roll on. All nations on the face of the earth are represented in this great city. It is quite a common sight to meet Indians in all the principal thoroughfares of London, and a dusky individual does not attract the notice he did a few years ago. At the Kennington Oval, where I went to witness the great cricket match between Australia and England, I counted nearly fifty Indians.” (4)

There are descriptions of university life and medical instruction. There are accounts of cultural and trade exhibitions and of English domestic life. London is compared with other European capitals and the British Empire is compared with rival European empires. Some of the authors were grateful for the personal opportunities that being a part of the Empire afforded, others were destitute in the street as outcasts of Empire. Issues of race and class are fully explored and the experience of being an Indian in England in the nineteenth century is vividly depicted.

We have also taken the opportunity to include a number of important related works. Charles Stewart’s The travels of Mirza Abu Talib Khan in Asia, Africa and Europe (1810) and Mary Carpenter’s Last days in England of Rajah Rammghun Roy (1866) (London and Calcutta editions included) both describe the experiences of early travellers to England.

Ramesachandra Datta’s England and India: a record of progress during a hundred years, 1785-1885 (1897) and Joseph Salter’s The Asiatic in England (1873) and the East in the West (1896) describe Anglo-Asian experiences in the 18th and 19th centuries, with much on life at the lower end of the scale.

For Malabari we have also included a number of his other publications including Infant marriage and enforced widowhood in India (1887), An appeal from the daughters of India (1890) and the journal that he edited, East and West (1895).

Similarly, we feature a number of additional works by and about Samuel Satthianadhan such as England and India (lectures given in Madras, 1886), Theosophy:An appeal to my countrymen (1893), and A holiday trip to Europe and America (1897).

The Empire Writes Back forms an essential complement to the 300 plus volumes of writing about India and Empire provided in our Colonial Discourses series. It emphasises the cosmopolitan nature of Victorian London and lets us see it through Indian eyes.

Notes

(1) In particular we are indebted to:

Kusoom Vadgama, India in Britain: The Indian contribution to the British way of life, 1984
Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700-1947, 1986;
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 1992;
Michael Fisher, The First Indian Author in English – Dean Mahomed, 1996;
Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in late Victorian Britain, 1998;
Shompa Lahiri, Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880-1930, 2000;
Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 years of History, 2002.

(2) Behramji Mehrbanji Malabari, The Indian eye on English life, or rambles of a pilgrim reformer…(London, 1893), pp80-81.

(3) Thomas Pandiyan, England to an Indian eye (London, 1897), p93.

(4) Samuel Satthianadhan, A holiday trip to Europe and America (Madras, 1897), p61.

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