Asians in Britain

400 Years of History

Rozina Visram

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2002
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783715572
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is a comprehensive history of Asians from the Indian subcontinent in Britain. Spanning four centuries, it tells the history of the Indian community in Britain from the servants, ayahs and sailors of the seventeenth century, to the students, princes, soldiers, professionals and entrepreneurs of the 19th and 20th centuries. Rozina Visram examines the nature and pattern of Asian migration; official attitudes to Asian settlement; the reactions and perceptions of the British people; the responses of the Asians themselves and their social, cultural and political lives in Britain. This imaginative and detailed investigation asks what it would have been like for Asians to live in Britain, in the heart of an imperial metropolis, and documents the anti-colonial struggle by Asians and their allies in the UK. It is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the origins of the many different communities that make up contemporary Britain.

1

A Long Presence

On 22 December 1616, at St Dionis Backchurch in the City of London, in the presence of a distinguished gathering of the Privy Council, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, and the Governors of the East India Company (EIC), an Indian youth, ‘the first fruits of India’, brought to Britain two years previously in August 1614, was publicly baptised. The church was packed and a crowd of curious onlookers was gathered outside. The Archbishop of Canterbury, who had been consulted, had given his approval, while the name given in baptism was chosen by King James I. The parish register records the ceremony as:

22nd December 1616. An East Indian was Christened by the name of Peter.¹

This is the first known record of a baptism of an Indian brought to Britain, within years of the Charter being granted by Queen Elizabeth I to a group of London merchants, on 31 December 1600, establishing ‘The Governor and Company of Merchants of London, Trading into the East-Indies’. Given the hazy notions of Elizabethan geography, the East covered a wide area, embracing the Indian sub-continent, China, Japan and the East Indian archipelago. The founding of the EIC and its exploits in India, first through trade and later through conquest and colonisation, leading to the British Raj, set in motion forces that would profoundly affect both India and Britain, altering their historical relationship and development.

Who was Peter and why the public baptism? Little is recorded about Peter’s life. According to the EIC Court minutes, the Reverend Patrick Copland, the Company’s Chaplain to Masulipatam on the Coromandel Coast in India, who had taught him to read and write English, was instrumental in bringing Peter to England in 1614. His aptitude for learning prompted the Company to vote ‘20 markes per annum’ for his schooling in England, so that he could be instructed in religion and sent back as a missionary to proselytise his own people. Thus, under the influence and auspices of the EIC, Peter became the first Asian convert to Christianity on English soil.

Peter did not long remain in Britain. In 1617, within weeks of his baptism, and less than three years after his arrival, accompanied by the Revd Patrick Copland, he left on the EIC ship, the Royal James. Nothing further is recorded about his subsequent career. However, the three surviving letters written by him in Latin in 1620, ‘in the East Indies’, to Sir Thomas Smith, the Company Governor and to Martin Pring, the commander of the Royal James, show that by 1620, Peter had acquired mastery of both English and Latin. Further, his letters, signed Petrus Papa (Peter Pope), suggest that he had gained a second name. What his original Indian name was, or his age, or where in India he came from, history does not record. His birthplace is mentioned simply as ‘borne in the Bay of Bengala’.²

Peter was a transient. But other Indians settled here as evidenced in Parish registers:

26 May 1769. Flora an East Indian (buried at Woolwich).
5 October 1730. John Mummud a Larskar Indian died at Ratclif (St Anne’s Limehouse).³

Starting in the seventeenth century, Indian servants and ayahs (nannies) were brought over by British families returning from India. Indian sailors, the lascars, crewed the Company ships and, later, the steam-powered liners. Some of these servants and sailors formed the earliest Indian working-class settlers in Britain. From the eighteenth century, a trickle of Indian emissaries, visitors and Indian wives of some European men and their children came to Britain.

From about the middle of the nineteenth century, a growing number of Indians began arriving in Britain. Some came as a result of the political, social and economic changes brought about in India under imperialism. Others came out of a sense of adventure or to see the land of their rulers. Exiled princes settled in Britain. Students, some on scholarships, came to obtain vital professional qualifications to enable them to secure entry into the structures of colonial hierarchy. Some stayed to practise their professions. Political activists brought the struggle for colonial liberation to London, the centre of imperial power. Businessmen and entrepreneurs came to seek economic opportunities.

By the mid-twentieth century, then, there was a small population of students and activists, petty traders and merchants, industrial workers and professionals, artists and performers, from different religious backgrounds and regions of the Indian sub-continent in Britain. More would come after the 1950s in response to the post-war labour needs of the British economy. Asian history in Britain thus, goes back almost 400 years.

2

Early Arrivals, 1600–1830s

Sir Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to the Court of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir, in 1616, describing the ‘curtesie’ extended to him, wrote that an ‘earnest’ proposal had been made that on his return to England, he should be accompanied by an Indian ‘gentellman to kysse his Majesties [James I] hands and see our countrye’.¹ The idea for an Indian ambassador came to nothing. But the founding of the East India Company (EIC) set in motion a chain of events leading to the movement of peoples in both directions. As trade expanded, the Company sent out a growing number of agents, both civil and military, to service its commercial enterprises, and its factories at Surat, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta consolidated, becoming little English enclaves on Indian soil.

THE COLONIAL CONTEXT

Young men, as young as 16, usually from the clergy and merchant families, through patronage or even by bribing their way, obtained posts as Company agents in India, a growing number of Scots among them after the 1707 Act of Union. Despite low salaries and hazards to health, employment in India was popular. Work was not arduous, hours were short and, with an army of Indian servants, agents were able to live like lords, adapting oriental conditions to suit English tastes and lifestyles. William Hickey, ‘the gentleman attorney’, the son of an Irish lawyer, vividly describes the opulent lifestyle of the European elite in eighteenth-century Calcutta: their clothes of velvet and lace, their coach and horses, their recreations, the enormous quantities of food – curried meats, rice and pilaus – and liquor consumed, their Indian mistresses, and their servants, some with titles like wig-bearers and houccaburdars. Hickey, by no means a wealthy man, had a staff of 63, including eight table servants, four grooms, one coachman, three grass-cutters for the garden, two cooks, two bakers, one tailor, one hairdresser, nine valets and two washermen. Alexander Mackrabie, who became Sheriff of Calcutta in 1774, shared the home of Philip Francis with two other friends. Their establishment consisted of 110 servants, while the Revd William Tennant, a chaplain, stayed with a private family who employed 105 servants.² Because wages were so low – one Indian visitor to England in the eighteenth century calculated that the cost of ‘a common servant’ in England was eight times more than in India – it was possible for the Company officials to employ many more servants than in comparable country homes in Britain.³ Officers in the Company’s army, too, were equally well provided, their servants never left behind, even during marches and battles. An English captain in the Mysore campaign of 1780, for instance, brought with him his steward, cook, valet, groom, groom’s assistant, barber, washerman, and ‘other officers’, besides 15 ‘coolies’ to carry his baggage, wine, brandy, tea, live poultry and milch-goats. If a gentleman of fashion really wanted to flaunt his status and wealth, then he could obtain the ultimate in luxury, an African slave, especially imported from Bourbon or Mauritius. Slaves could also be purchased in Calcutta.⁴ But because African slaves were expensive, about ten times more than Indian domestics, most Englishmen preferred Indian servants. And it was these that they brought to Britain.

A grand lifestyle was not the only advantage of employment in India. There were also opportunities for making money by private trade, or by other means. And fortunes were made. For instance, Sir William Langhorne, the Governor of Fort St George, Madras from 1672, purchased Charlton House, a fine Jacobean mansion in Greenwich with the fortune he amassed through private trading. Another, Elihu Yale (1648–1721), also Governor of Madras, and later a director of the EIC, endowed the American University named after him. His collection of Mughal miniatures is said to have inspired John Vanderbank’s designs for a series of tapestries, ‘after the Indian manner’, so popular in England at the time, and made at his factory in Soho.⁵ Thomas Pitt made a fortune, first as an interloper in defiance of the Company’s monopoly, and later as Governor of Madras, acquiring the famous Pitt Diamond, which enabled him to become a landed magnate and the founder of one of the most famous political dynasties of the time.

The years after 1757 (battle of Plassey), which virtually turned Bengal into a Company province, are particularly notorious for the plunder of India, as Company agents reaped for themselves wealth undreamed of, earning the title of ‘Nabob’ (Nawab, Muslim nobleman). Robert Clive, at the age of 35, extorted a fortune worth over £230,000 in settlement with Mir Jafar, in addition to an annual income of £30,000 from his jagir (land titles). This was by no means exceptional. John Johnstone, a Scot and the founder of the House of Alva, collected over £300,000; Sir Thomas Rumbold, having gained one fortune in Bengal, returned to make another in Madras.⁶ Having made their money, these nabobs retired to Britain with their wealth, their Indian artefacts, their Indian servants and, occasionally, their Indian wives and children.

MAKING INDIA IN BRITAIN

Like the sugar barons of the West Indies, the India-returned nabobs settled down to the role of country gentlemen in Georgian society. They bought estates (and sometimes seats in Parliament), and built large mansions. As Head points out, it was Indian money that financed some of the most magnificent houses in eighteenth-century Britain.⁷ Clive purchased an estate on the borders of Worcestershire and Shropshire, a house in Berkeley Square, London, and Claremont in Surrey, where, in 1769, ‘Capability’ Brown designed for him a mansion in neo-classical style. Woodhall Park in Hertfordshire, designed in Palladian style by Thomas Leverton, was commissioned by Sir Thomas Rumbold. Town Hill Park, South Stoneham in Hampshire was built for Nathaniel Middleton. Basildon Park, Berkshire, built in 1776 in Bath stone, and described by Nikolaus Pevsner, the architectural historian, as ‘the most splendid Georgian mansion of Berkshire’, was the home of Francis Sykes, who justified his loot from India as the question of choice: ‘whether it should go into a black man’s pocket or my own’. Stanstead Park in Sussex, built for Richard Barwell, Preston Hall in Scotland, Middleton Hall in Carmarthenshire and Gore in Kent are some other examples. Here the nabobs housed their priceless collections of Indian paintings, manuscripts, miniatures and other objets d’art. Newbridge House Museum, County Dublin, is a fine example of one such extraordinary collection of Indian objets, belonging to Thomas Alexander Cobb (1788–1836), who married Nazir Begum, the daughter of Aziz Jehan of Kashmir.⁸

Other nabobs brought India more directly to Georgian Britain, building homes in architectural styles reminiscent of India. William Frankland’s modest two-storey house, Muntham in Sussex, with its portico and a verandah, hints at his Indian life. But the two most Indianised mansions were Daylesford House, commissioned by Warren Hastings, and Sezincote, built for Charles Cockerell. Both buildings in Gloucestershire were designed by Samuel Pepys Cockerell, the brother of Charles, and a descendant of Pepys, the diarist. Daylesford House, with its central dome and Indian motifs, costing over £60,000, was filled with Hastings’ collection of magnificent ivory furniture, Mughal miniatures, oil paintings and Indian prints by Hodges and the Daniells. Even plants from India were introduced on his estate. And Sezincote, the ‘Taj in the Cotswolds’, is architecturally reminiscent of the Taj Mahal.⁹

The nabobs also brought their Indianised habits and tastes to cities such as London, Bath, Cheltenham and Edinburgh where they settled, adding to the Indian influences already becoming fashionable as a result of the trade with the east: Indian shawls, muslins and Madras prints for dress, changes in furnishing and furniture. For instance, as early as 1618, a ‘Benguella Quilt’ had been auctioned for a substantial price at a sale in London. At Kensington Palace, Queen Mary had a large collection of porcelain, lacquered screens, cabinets, chairs and textiles, including tapestries made ‘after the Indian manner’. From John Evelyn, the diarist, we learn of a room in Lady Mordaunt’s house, hung with Pintado (painted calico-chintz) with its extraordinary design depicting ‘figures great and small, prettily representing sundry trades and occupations of the Indians, with their habits [costumes]’, while Pepys wrote enthusiastically of buying some pretty ‘chinte … that is paynted calico’ for his wife’s new study.¹⁰ Spices and new foods altered diet. As early as 1652, the first coffee house opened in London; by 1709, few had not heard of or tasted tea. The India-returned nabobs introduced their taste for ‘curry’. By 1784 curry and rice had become house specialities in some fashionable restaurants in London’s Piccadilly, the Norris Street Coffee House advertising it as such as early as 1773. How popular curry was among these India-returnees is seen from the fact that Sarah Shade, a widow, was able to support herself for ‘a year and a half’ by making curry, for which she was well known, for different East Indian families in London. Cheltenham and Edinburgh, where so many of the nabobs had settled, were famed for their delicious curries. The fact that Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, published in 1747, contained a recipe ‘to make a curry the Indian way’ as well as for making ‘a pellow’ (pilau), further demonstrates that Indian cuisine was sufficiently well known to be included in an eighteenth-century cookbook.¹¹

INDIAN SERVANTS IN BRITISH HOMES

Another distinguishing feature of nabob life was the presence of their Indian servants and ayahs. In his study of continental and colonial servants in Britain, Hecht has implied that the custom of importing Indian servants began in the eighteenth century, a thesis largely accepted by other historians.¹² But there is evidence to suggest that the custom may have begun a century earlier. Among the burial notices for the parish of St Botolph without Aldgate, 1618, mention is made of ‘James (an Indian) servant to Mr James Duppa Brewer’. Further, from a small sample of the parish of St Olave, Hart Street, between 1638 and 1682, three baptisms and two burials of ‘Indians’, among them the 16-year-old Chirugeon, and a woman, Loreto, are revealed. The City of London, the heartland of the EIC, might be expected to show traces of Indian servants. But elsewhere, in Greenwich for instance, there are stray entries of baptisms and burials of Indians in the parish registers of the seventeenth century, including ‘Sampson Samuell, an Indian’ buried October 1680.¹³ Another curious entry, the marriage of ‘Samuel Munsur a “Blackamore” to Jane Johnson’ at St Nicholas’s Deptford, in 1613, might well be that of an Indian, giving us the first reference to Indian family life in seventeenth-century Britain. The Company Court Books for 1690–1702 contain several applications from EIC employees to return their Indian...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 A Long Presence
• 2 Early Arrivals, 1600–1830s
• 3 A Community in the Making, 1830s–1914
• 4 Through Indian Eyes
• 5 Parliamentarians, Revolutionaries and Suffragettes
• 6 Indians in the First World War
• 7 Citizens or Aliens?
• 8 Lascar Activism in Britain, 1920–45
• 9 Asians in Britain, 1919–47
• 10 Radical Voices
• 11 Contributions in the Second World War
• 12 Conclusions
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Illustrations