Читать книгу London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City - Sukhdev Sandhu - Страница 7

WILLIAM SANCHO – ‘Billy’ in the Letters – was almost as successful as his father. During the 1790s he worked as the librarian of the distinguished botanist Joseph Banks, and in 1803 became the first black publisher in the Western world when he brought out the fifth edition of Ignatius’ correspondence. Four years later he also published Voltaire’s La Henriade.

Another black man to strike it rich was Cesar Picton. Inheriting a legacy of a hundred pounds from a former employer, he added this sum to his own not inconsiderable savings and in 1788 began operating as a coal merchant in Kingston upon Thames. By the time he died in 1836, he was sufficiently wealthy to bequeath a house with a wharf and shops attached, as well as another house with a garden, stables, coach house and two acres of land.¹

Sancho and Picton are exceptional in two ways – their financial success, and the social distinction they achieved. Most of their fellow black Londoners enjoyed neither. After the spate of books by and about black people that spewed from the printing presses at the height of the Abolitionism debate in the 1780s, references and allusions to them become far less common. Fashions changed and the prosperous classes began to regard negro servants as passé. At Knole there had been a black page – invariably named ‘John Morocco’ – since the reign of James I; after a house steward had killed the latest John Morocco in a fight in Black Boy’s Passage, Chinese replacements were used. The most famous of these was Hwang-a-Tung, renamed Warnoton, who was educated at the grammar school in Sevenoaks and appears in a Reynolds portrait of Knole.²

By 1800 there were almost no famous blacks left in London. Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, Julius Soubise – all had died, the last ignominiously in a riding accident in Calcutta. Sensationalist accounts of the slave revolts in Haiti from 1791 onwards led to a resurgence in the belief that blacks were bloodthirsty savages. This made it less easy to sentimentalize and patronize them, even if the motives for doing so were humanitarian – as with Thomas Wedgwood’s pro-Abolition medallion which showed a kneeling slave in chains with the slogan ‘Am I not a man? And a brother?’ But the chief reason for the lack of black celebrities was that the number of Africans in the city had begun to shrink. After Parliament abolished the slave trade in 1807, few new blacks were brought to the capital. Those Africans wrenched away to the West Indies to labour on plantation estates were now regarded as commodities far too valuable to be ferried over to England as decorative knick-knacks. Many of the black people who chose to stay in London died of poverty and ill-health. Some went to sea; others moved to different parts of Britain (Equiano was married near Ely in Cambridgeshire, the county where his eldest daughter, Anna Maria, died in 1797; Francis Barber set up home in Lichfield). Some blacks were transported to America or, far more commonly, to Australia. Widespread racial intermarriage led to the steady blanching of the black population. A member of the London City Mission claimed that it would surprise many people

to see how extensively these dark classes are tincturing the colour of the rising race of children in the lowest haunts of this locality: and many of the young fallen females have a visible infusion of Asiatic and African blood in their veins. They form a peculiar class, but mingle freely with the others. It is an instance of depraved taste, that many of our fallen ones prefer devoting themselves entirely to the dark race of men, and [ … ] have infants by them.³

Furthermore, the increasing reluctance to bestow upon slaves such demeaning names as Mungo or Pompey means that hundreds, if not thousands, of Africans and Asians still lie undetected in the dusty pages of parish registers.

A small but visible rump of black people did, remain in London. Among the most celebrated of these were the street beggars who attracted disproportionate alms and affection from contemporaries. They tended to be called Jumbo or, yet more commonly, Toby – after Mr Punch’s dog. They liked to gather in Covent Garden and Angel-Gardens, though one beggar who stood by a tea warehouse near Finsbury Square in 1813 was reputed, according to a Parliamentary report on mendicity, to have returned to the West Indies with a fortune of about £1500.⁴ Some blacks, not least those who played musical instruments or who pretended to be blind, were seen as charming; others less so:

There is one whose real name I do not know, but he goes by the name of Granne Manoo; he is a man who, I believe, is scarcely out of gaol three months in the year; for he is so abusive and vile a character, he is very frequently in gaol for his abuse and mendicity; he is young enough to have gone to sea, but I believe he has been ruptured, consequently they will not take him. I have seen him scratch his legs about his ancles, to make them bleed; and he never goes out with shoes. That is the man that collects the greatest quantity of shoes and other habiliments; for he goes literally so naked, that it is almost disgusting for any person to see him in that situation.⁵

The most famous mendicant was Billy Waters. Born in America, he lost his leg in a maritime accident, and was forced to take to the streets around Covent Garden to support himself and his family. Success was instant; sporting a ribbon-decked cocked hat and feathers, a smile rarely leaving his face, he would sing so mellifluously (signature tune ‘Kitty will you marry me./Kitty will you cry’) and clowned with such skill that he was known as the ‘Ethiopian Grimaldi’. Sometimes he would jazz up his performances outside the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand by kicking away his wooden leg and dancing around on the spot. His fans were legion and he was featured in Pierce Egan’s best-selling Life in London. For W.T. Moncrieff’s stage adaptation of the book, Waters was asked to play himself – this time inside the Adelphi. He was elected King of the Beggars by his fellow blackbirds. He was also made into a Staffordshire pottery figure, as part of the ‘English Characters’ series. His celebrity outstripped his financial success. He liked his gin and died in the workhouse in 1823. Covent Garden was brought to a standstill the day his funeral cortège passed through. Mourners included his friend and stage opposite African Sal, a legless man on a wheeled trolley, and Billy’s young son who knocked back one bottle of liquor after another. A broadsheet published after his death summarized his life:

Billy endeavoured up to the period of his illness to obtain for a wife and two children what he termed an honest living by the scraping of cat-gut by which he amassed a considerable portion of browns (halfpence) at the West-end of the town, where his hat and feathers with his peculiar antics excited much mirth and attention. He was obliged prior to his death to part with his old friend, the fiddle, for a trifling sum at the pawnbrokers. His wooden pin had twice saved him from the Tread-Mill. He lost his leg in his Majesty’s Service, for which he received a pension. Every child in London knew him.⁶

Another popular figure was Joseph Johnson. Injury had forced him to retire from his job as a merchant seaman but he was refused a pension or parish relief and was forced on to the streets. He cadged lifts to rural villages and to market towns such as Romford or St Albans where his tatty cloth cap was soon filled with pennies from farmers delighted by his renditions of such patriotic tunes as ‘The British Seaman’s Praise’ or ‘The Wooden Walls of Old England’. There, and at Tower Hill in East London, he drew on the repertoire of sea shanties he had sung below deck with his fellow sailors (now without a tankard of ale in hand to jolly up affairs). Johnson’s particular genius was to come up with the idea of building a model of the ship Nelson which he fastened to the cap he wore. This allowed him, ‘by a bow of thanks, or a supplicating inclination to a drawing-room window, [to] give the appearance of sea-motion’.⁷ All who saw him giggled and were enchanted. They were also reminded of his itinerancy, of the fact that he was a stranger much of whose life had been spent in the ‘grey vault’ of the Atlantic where so many of his countrymen perished during the slave trade.

Black beggars, then, were entertainers of a sort. They turned the pathos of their skin and their poverty into a visual spectacle from which they could profit. Their popularity and the affection in which they were held encouraged many white Londoners to black up as minstrels to earn a penny. According to the chronicler of London’s underclasses, Henry Mayhew, by the early 1850s no more than one in fifty of the black buskers singing in the city hailed from Africa or the Caribbean: they were white locals who had frizzed their hair and blacked up the better to win the attention of passers-by.’⁸

Other blacks in nineteenth-century London were performers of a more conventional type. Chief among them were the bare-knuckle boxers who trickled in from America. Perhaps the most famous of these was Bill Richmond. Born in New York in 1763, he was brought over to Yorkshire as a fourteen-year-old by General Earl Percy, later Duke of Northumberland. Here he trained as a cabinetmaker before coming to London as a journeyman. He also took up boxing. During the first decade of the nineteenth century he could regularly be seen fighting whipmakers and coachmen in Blackheath, Kilburn, Wimbledon and Golders Green.⁹ His most celebrated bout was against Tom Cribb, later the champion of England. He lacked stamina and was beaten in a fight that lasted ninety minutes. Later, with the help of his wife’s savings, he became landlord of the Horse and Dolphin pub near Leicester Square. He also exhibited his fistic skills at the Olympic Pavilion and Regency Theatres, and ran a boxing academy at which one of his pupils was William Hazlitt.¹⁰ He died near the Haymarket in 1829.

Blacks could also be found tumbling and gyrating at circuses across the city, where they performed as acrobats, dancing girls and French-horn players. Here they contributed to the spectacle of novelty and exotic glamour, to the feeling that for one exhilarating evening the world was turned upside down – racially as well as gymnastically. Did dazzled audiences conflate these exuberant negroes with those beasts alongside whom they starred? Harriet Ritvo has argued that the representation of black people and zoo animals (a growing number of whom were being shipped to London) was remarkably similar:

Zoo pets represented not Britain, but their native territories, which were invariably British colonies in Africa and Asia, and never colonies which, like Canada and Australia, had signified European populations. It is probably no accident that they were often accompanied by exotic human attendants who [ … ] were presented in the press as equally curious if not equally lovable.¹¹

The exhibited creatures were often likened to human beings. Bartholomew Fair posters trumpeted orang-utans as ‘Ethiopian Savages’ or ‘Negro Men of the Woods’.¹²

One of the most famous black performers was Pablo Fanque (1796–1871). Born William Darby in Norwich, he went on to become an equestrian, acrobat, rope-walker, and later a circus proprietor. He toured extensively in northern England, where stories about his achievements were passed down from generation to generation. The Beatles allude to him in ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!’ on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967):

There will be a show tonight on trampoline

The Hendersons will all be there

Late of Pablo Fanque’s Fair – what a scene

Over men and horses hoops and garters

Lastly through a hogshead of real fire!

Fanque appeared at Astley’s Amphitheatre in February 1847 where his talent was widely plaudited. ‘Mr Pablo Fanque is an artiste of colour’ stated the Illustrated London News, ‘and his steed [ … ] we have not only never seen surpassed, but never equalled.’¹³

There were other black circus performers of note: Alexander William Beaumont, known as ‘The African Lion King’, wore a coat made from leopard skin and died at the age of twenty-seven in 1895 after being mauled by his favourite lion ‘Hannibal’, at the Agricultural Hall in Islington; George Christopher, whose father used to balance cartwheels on the streets of London, christened himself ‘Herr Christoff’, and became one of the finest ropedancers in the world.

Celebrity did not guarantee financial security. Performers grew frail and ended up destitute. Tightrope-walker Carlos Trower, also known as ‘The African Blondin’, died at the age of forty in 1889. Two months earlier his wife wrote to The Era appealing for help:

My husband has been ill for some time and three weeks ago went quite out of his mind. There are no hopes for his recovery, and he has been removed to Grove Hall Asylum, Bow. I am left with three children unprovided for. If you will mention this I am sure there will be a few friends that will help me.¹⁴

Not all black people in nineteenth-century London performed freely. There was a longstanding tradition of putting Africans and West Indians on display for the delight and wonder of city-dwellers: Amelia Lewsam, ‘the White Negro Woman’ was exhibited in 1755 at Charing Cross, as was Primrose, the ‘Celebrated PIEBALD BOY’ at Haymarket in 1789.¹⁵ In 1810 Saartjie Baartman was brought over to England by her Boer keeper. Promising her that she would make a fortune and be allowed to return home after two years, he renamed her the ‘Hottentot Venus’ and charged visitors two shillings to see her standing in a cage at 225 Piccadilly (where, reputedly, Eros stands today).

Baartman soon became widely known and featured in street ballads and political cartoons. Many of the spectators who flocked to see her noticed that she looked tearful and depressed as she was shunted to and fro across the cage for their benefit. One visitor ‘found her surrounded by many persons, some females! One pinched her, another walked round her; one gentleman poked her with his cane; and one lady employed her parasol to ascertain that all was, as she called it, “nattral”.’¹⁶ Baartman’s humiliations never ceased. She was later displayed in Paris where, upon her death in 1815, not only was her body dissected, but plaster casts and wax moulds were made of her genitals and anus. Replicas of these moulds were presented to the Royal Academy of Medicine. Baartman’s skeleton and brain were also preserved and, until the decision in early 2002 by the French senate to return her remains to South Africa, could be seen together with a plaster cast of her body at the Musée de L’Homme in Paris.¹⁷

In such cases two ideas about the nature of black people were crucial. First, the assumption that Africans were simply not human, which legitimized their ill-treatment as well as their enslavement. Secondly, the fact that blacks were not regarded as ‘one of us’ permitted them to be seen as mute and passive vehicles for the diversion and delectation of white Londoners. Blacks who, it was thought, lacked the powers of rationality, computation or, indeed, agency, were reduced to the status of spectacles. They became living, breathing, and, in Baartman’s case, steatopygous incarnations of the cabinets of curiosities so popular during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Black people, whether descendants of those who had come to London during the eighteenth century or themselves recent arrivals from Central Africa and the Caribbean, could also be found living in the portside communities at Shadwell, Limehouse and Poplar. They worked on boats, lifting crates and bales, clearing decks, rolling casks, arranging ropes and sails. Those without regular employment could be found at West India Docks at six in the morning queuing up with hundreds of other men – ex-clerks, discharged sailors, Irish immigrants – for the chance to lug boxes of tea from wharf to warehouse. This state of affairs angered some. A dock-labourer’s wife interviewed in John Law’s Out of Work (1888) cried out, ‘“Why should they come here, I’d like to know? London ain’t what it used to be; it’s just like a foreign city. The food ain’t English; the talk ain’t English. Why should all of them foreigners come here to take food out of our mouths, and live on victuals we wouldn’t give to pigs?”’¹⁸

Not all blacks found jobs. Those who didn’t were likely to be sent to workhouses, the raw and unsentimental nature of whose inhabitants is ably captured by Henry Mayhew and John Binny:

their behaviour was very noisy and disorderly, coarse and ribald jokes were freely cracked, exciting general bursts of laughter; while howls, cat-calls, and all manner of unearthly and indescribable yells threatened for a time to render all attempts at order utterly abortive. At one moment, a lad would imitate the bray of the jackass, and immediately the whole hundred and fifty would fall to braying like him. Then some ragged urchin would crow like a cock; whereupon the place would echo with a hundred and fifty cock-crows! Next, as a negro-boy entered the room, one of the young vagabonds would shout out swe-ee-p; this would be received with peals of laughter, and followed by a general repetition of the same cry. Presently a hundred and fifty cat-calls, of the shrillest possible description, would almost split the ears.¹⁹

The East End in which blacks lived became synonymous in Victorian times with spiritual degradation. It was a man-trap, a Satanic stronghold, a dumping ground for human flotsam. It wasn’t just that the area was blighted by poverty; the colour of its inhabitants encouraged reactionaries to see it as a place of contamination, of moral canker. The problem was one of poor (racial) hygiene. In sensationalist newspaper reports as well as in the accounts of social workers, it was seen as a dark zone which needed Christian reclamation just as urgently as those heathen lands thousands of miles away which were being penetrated by explorers and missionaries. General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, wrote a tract about London entitled In Darkest England (1890) that portrayed the East End as a ‘lost continent’, and argued that, ‘The foul and fetid breath of our slums is almost as poisonous as that of the African swamp’.²⁰ Jack London claimed that, ‘No more dreary spectacle can be found on this earth than the whole of the “awful East”, with its Whitechapel, Hoxton, Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, and Wapping to the East India Docks. The colour of life is grey and drab. Everything is helpless, hopeless, unrelieved, and dirty.’²¹ James Greenwood described the area as a ‘modern Babylon’ and in The Wilds of London (1874) wrote of how

Everybody addicted to the perusal of police reports, as faithfully chronicled by the daily press, has read of Tiger bay, and of the horrors perpetrated there – of unwary mariners betrayed to that craggy and hideous shore by means of false beacons, and mercilessly wrecked and stripped and plundered – of the sanguinary fights of white men and plug-lipped Malays and ear-ringed Africans, with the tigresses who swam in the ‘bay,’ giving it a name. ‘God bless my soul!’ remarks the sitting magistrate.²²

It wasn’t only East End blacks who attracted press attention. The spotlight fell on lascars too. These were sailors – Bengalis, Muslims, Malays, Chinese – who sailed to England aboard trading merchant vessels. Many thousands arrived each year in London and in other port cities such as Greenock, Hull and Liverpool. Their voyages had been taxing: poor ventilation and nutrition led to high mortality rates. Dead lascars were often thrown overboard in the English Channel.

Upon disembarking, lascars would go looking for somewhere to lodge until they could find a ship that was heading back to where they came from. They settled near to the docks in Shadwell, an area commonly referred to as ‘Tiger Bay’ or the ‘Black Hole of East London’. Here they lived in dreadful accommodation in dark alleys, narrow streets and blind courts, areas that were considered off-limits to many of the locals. As many as fifty lascars could be found sleeping on the floor of a damp and fever-fogged room. Some slept in tar-boiling sheds in the East India Docks. The floors were hard, the windows unglazed. One eyewitness spoke of how he had reeled from the stench and at the appalling sound of so many ragged-trousered Indians crying out to him for ‘blanket’, ‘more blanket’.²³

Lascars were sitting targets for opportunistic criminals. Often these criminals were themselves Indians or Chinamen who lured them to their lodging houses with the promise of cheap rents and ethnic camaraderie. The day-to-day running of these houses was left to the proprietors’ English mistresses. Here and in nearby tap-houses, much to the chagrin of city missionaries, the lascars would sing, drink, smoke opium, dance and jollify with women. They’d also while away their time listening to native fiddlers and musicians. They wanted a bit of fun as well as forgetfulness. A description of Indians in the Royal Sovereign public-house off Shadwell High Street evokes this well:

Here they squatted on straw, passed round a hookah and listened to a turbaned musician play the sitar: He sometimes appeared to work himself up to such a pitch of excitement as to seem about to spring on some one, when he would suddenly relax into comparative quietness, to go through the same again. The song recited the adventures of a rajah’s son who had been carried away to fairyland, and his unhappy father sent messengers everywhere to find him, but without success, till the jins and fairies, after he had married one of them, escorted him back to his father’s house.²⁴

If contemporary accounts are to be believed, landlords were simply buttering up their lascar clientele in order to fleece them. Within a short time they were encouraging their guests to run up huge gambling debts and fobbing snide currency upon them. Sooner or later the guileless lascars would end up in Horsemonger-lane Gaol or City Prison, Holloway, among a motley assortment of maimers, larcenists, brothel-keepers, dog-stealers, bestialists, embezzlers, fortune-tellers and pornographic print sellers. The fate of those who avoided jail was hardly much better. Some ended up in workhouses, others in hospital. These, though, were the lucky ones, for, as Joseph Salter put it:

The captain sails off to another land, and the lascar sinks into the stream of human life, and is noticed no more till he is seen shivering in rags, crouched in the angle of the street, and soliciting, in broken English, the beggar’s pence, or is found dead by some night policeman in Shadwell.²⁵

Small wonder that lascars became a cause célèbre in some philanthropic circles. Reverend James Peggs contrasted the public’s indifference to their plight to the largesse directed towards black slaves during the Abolitionist campaigns of the previous century. ‘Has the Asiatic less claim upon our sympathy, than the Negro?’ he asked, before adding, ‘we want, for Britain to be loved, and her benevolence to flow “through every vein of all her empire.” But should it not be most powerful in the heart of her empire, the seat of her commerce, and the altars of her metropolitan devotion?’²⁶ The eventual establishment in 1846 of the Strangers’ Home For Asiatics went some way, though by no means all, to alleviating the worst distress.

Some Indians did manage to muster a living of sorts – even if only through begging; a gentleman named Kareem was widely known for the diverting spectacle he made by standing under a railway arch in Westminster with his four young children all of whom were dressed in white garments. It was a fleeting vision of purity in a landscape of blackened murk. Indians were most commonly found peddling scarves and foodstuffs in Petticoat Lane, as well as at St Giles and Whitechapel where they performed as contortionists and tumblers for rapt audiences, swept crossings, vended curry-powder, played ‘tum-tum’ while spinning round and round, and sold Christian tracts from boards suspended in front of them. An 1848 issue of Punch depicted one sweeper at St Paul’s churchyard who allegedly demanded a toll for crossing the street. Such contributions to the daily economic life of the city and to the cosmopolitan crosstown traffic were not confined to South Asians. Reflecting on the changing face of the metropolis during Queen Victoria’s reign, one popular historian claimed that many people ‘would not like to lose the courteous negro omnibus conductor nor the picturesque black shop porters who now and again help us to realize that London is the capital of an empire which includes many different races of people’.²⁷

Grim and inglorious as London was for very many blacks and South Asians during the nineteenth century, it seemed like heaven to black people on the other side of the Atlantic. For those toiling as slaves or indentured labourers in the States and the Caribbean, the English metropolis was but a vague and impossible dream. To be poor and vagrant was a small price to pay for individual liberty. It was a place of escape and comfort, just as Paris was to be for novelists such as Chester Himes, Richard Wright and James Baldwin a century later.

Such sentiments are expressed, albeit fleetingly, in the autobiographies of black American fugitive slaves such as Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl (1861). Memoirs like these rarely deal with life in England for more than a few pages at best. They were published to abet American Abolitionism and, consequently, focused on the physical and moral savagery inflicted by Southern plantation owners, as well as on the terrors and hazards slaves faced during their bids for liberty. London, inasmuch as it cropped up at all in the autobiographies of slaves such as Moses Roper or William and Ellen Craft, was a place whose value lay in what it wasn’t (Carolina, say, or Virginia) rather than what it was. London was not a city they fled to; rather, it was a city away from their real homes. If any place was to be romanticized or celebrated, it was the former slave port of Liverpool which was the English city where most fugitive slaves arrived. William Farmer, agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, claimed in his preface to William Wells Brown’s memoirs that Liverpool was ‘to the hunted negro the Plymouth Rock of Old England’.²⁸

Not all writers, however, were insensitive to the freedoms and advantages that metropolitan life offered. Having travelled via Liverpool from New York to London, Harriet Jacobs booked into her lodgings at the Adelaide Hotel and reflected that

for the first time in my life I was in a place where I was treated according to my deportment, without reference to my complexion. I felt as if a great millstone had been lifted from my breast. Ensconced in a pleasant room, with my dear little charge, I laid my head on my pillow, for the first time, with the delightful consciousness of pure, unadulterated freedom.²⁹

William Wells Brown marvelled in his autobiography at the capital’s teeming excitement: ‘If one wished to get jammed and pushed about, he need go no farther than Cheapside. But every thing of the kind is done with a degree of propriety in London, that would put the New Yorkers to blush.’³⁰

Brown, like Douglass and Jacobs, encountered little colour prejudice in London. Sent here because American Abolitionists thought it expedient for the English to meet ‘some talented man of colour who should be a living lie to the doctrine of the inferiority of the African race’, he was given an enthusiastic reception at The Music Hall in Stone Street and was also elected – ‘as a mark of respect to his character’ – an honorary member of The Whittington Club whose other members included Charles Dickens and Douglas Jerrold.³¹ Brown was buoyed by such friendliness. It freed his tongue and made him more brash. Whilst visiting the Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park in 1851, he had an opportunity to compare English and American racial attitudes.

I was pleased to see such a goodly sprinkling of my own countrymen in the Exhibition – I mean coloured men and women – well-dressed, and moving about with their fairer brethren. This, some of our pro-slavery Americans did not seem to relish very well. There was no help for it. As I walked through the American part of the Crystal Palace, some of our Virginian neighbours eyed me closely and with jealous looks, especially as an English lady was leaning on my arm. But their sneering looks did not disturb me in the least. I remained the longer in their department, and criticized the bad appearance of their goods the more.³²

One of Brown’s proudest moments in the capital was on the evening in 1851 when he joined runaway slaves, MPs and Anti-Slavery activists from both sides of the Atlantic to address a packed Hall of Commerce in the City of London where his call for Abolition in the US was greeted with deafening applause.³³ Following the instant success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, chapters from which had been published in serial form throughout the summer and autumn of 1851, black speakers were even more of a prize draw on the capital’s lecture circuit. At Exeter Hall, in particular, they would recount their life experiences and display the scars and welts from slaveholder lashings before packed houses. Some were advised to tell their stories as simply as possible for fear that excessive eloquence would detract from their ‘authenticity’. Indeed, black speakers were often sandwiched between white orators who supplied what were purported to be more sophisticated political and theoretical perspectives.³⁴

In the metropolis black people could also see in person those grand and penetrating thinkers who blithely dismissed them in print as savage and degenerate niggers. Returning from the Crystal Palace by bus, Brown caught sight of Thomas Carlyle who

wore upon his countenance a forbidding and disdainful form, that seemed to tell one that he thought himself better than those about him. His dress did not indicate a man of high rank; and had we been in America, I would have taken him for a Ohio farmer. [ … ] As a writer, Mr Carlyle is often monotonous and extravagant. He does not exhibit a new view of nature, or raise insignificant objects into importance, but generally takes commonplace thoughts and events, and tries to express them in stronger and statelier language than others.³⁵

Though his resources were limited, Brown managed to range across more of the capital than most of the black seamen, students and musicians who flitted through London during the nineteenth century. He spent ten days sight-seeing in September 1850, with two of those days at the British Museum alone. He embraced both high and low culture – visiting the National Gallery and the Tower of London as well as applauding the Punch and Judy show in Exeter Street off the Strand. ‘No metropolis in the world presents such facilities as London for the reception of the Great Exhibition,’ he gushed. ‘Every one seems to feel that this great Capital of the world, is the fittest place whenever they might offer homage to the dignity of toil.’³⁶

Wells Brown wasn’t the only black writer in the Victorian era to attack the ignorant prejudices of leading public figures. Perhaps the most heroic counterblast, almost completely unknown today, came from the pen of J.J. Thomas in his acid polemic Froudacity (1889). The target of his derision was the famous historian James Anthony Froude. A brilliant speaker whose lecture tours attracted huge audiences, a prolific journalist and a writer whose books, like those of his friend Thomas Carlyle, sold tens of thousands of copies, Froude rose to become Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford in 1892.

His work celebrated the buccaneering hardiness of English mariners and eulogized the Elizabethan age’s commercial entrepreneurialism, its pioneering individualism. His upbeat rhetoric struck a chord with Victorian audiences basking in the knowledge that maps were painted ever pinker; that with every passing decade the Empire was growing bigger, broader, faster. Froude also produced accounts of his voyages including, in 1888, a typically forthright volume entitled The English in the West Indies, which expressed his disgust about the islands becoming ‘nigger warrens’ and lapsing into barbarism.³⁷

Out in Trinidad the book was read by a local schoolmaster called John Jacob Thomas. Born in 1840, he had spent most of his life in rickety classrooms trying to teach restless agricultural workers in return for little glory or pay. Along the way he had taught himself Greek, Latin, French and Spanish. More unusually, and without linguistic training, he learned Creole and in 1869 produced a groundbreaking book on the language, The Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar. It won him, in 1873, election to the Philological Society.

Now, twenty years later, bedridden by rheumatism, with no institutional support and precious few resources, he wrote a devastating critique of the professor’s scholarship. He labelled Froude a ‘negrophobic political hobgoblin’ and accused him of methodological slackness (conversing chiefly with the Anglo-West Indian communities, from whose balcony windows he would gaze down on the sable throngs), lechery (lionizing black women, while claiming black men were truculent layabouts), and gross political naivety (he ridiculed Froude’s assertion that West Indian negroes enjoyed ‘no distinction of colour’ under British rule).³⁸ In 1888 Thomas came to London to study at the British Museum. He was short of money and his health was still poor. A previous visit had had to be abandoned because of sickness. He lived in Guildford Street, off Russell Square, near enough to the library to be able to visit it each day in order to examine etymological texts unavailable in the Caribbean. He also polished his book on Froude only to discover that publishers feared it lacked commercial appeal and wanted him to raise his own subscription list. This he did. Shortly afterwards, in September 1889, he died of tuberculosis at King’s College Hospital.

Froudacity attracted scant attention when it first came out. It did little to topple the Oxford historian off his self-constructed pedestal. In that sense, but only in that sense, it was a failure. Now it reads as a heroic but doomed effort, well in advance of twentieth-century anti-colonialist historiography, to retard the flow of metropolitan propaganda about non-white people. That it was written by one enfeebled, impecunious Trinidadian without the kind of research budgets or institutional backing that many academics today enjoy, makes it yet more admirable. Its wit, lucidity and venom have not been surpassed.

Published a few decades earlier, the autobiography of another West Indian, Mary Prince, had more success than Thomas’s history book. Prince was born around 1788 at Brackish-Pond in Bermuda on the farm where her mother was a household slave. They were sold together and for the next twelve years Mary lived a blissful life, partly because her new owner’s daughter treated her as a pet, leading ‘me about by the hand, and [calling] me her little nigger’, and partly because ‘I was too young to understand rightly my condition as a slave’.³⁹ Her happiness was soon cut short. Around 1800 she was sold again, this time to a couple who regularly abused her and flogged her with cowskins. Such mistreatment continued for many years, even after she had been bought by a new owner who took her to the Turks Islands. By 1814 she was a washerwoman for the Wood family in Antigua: during the day she was underfed and overworked so ferociously that she developed rheumatism and became lame; by night she was forced to sleep in a bug-infested and verminous outhouse. The floggings and lashings didn’t abate for years. Nonetheless, this was the period in which she began to attend the Moravian Church, members of whose congregation taught her to read; she also met her husband, a carpenter named Daniel James; and, when her master and mistress were away, sold provisions to ship captains in order to save up enough money to buy her freedom.

In 1828 the Woods came to England and brought Prince along with them to look after their son who was to be educated here. Prince was delighted. She, like later writers such as V.S. Naipaul and Fred D’Aguiar, saw the metropolis as a healing zone, a place where the torments of Caribbean servitude would cease. The capital offered the possibility of both psychological and physical release: not only had she heard that her master might free her after their ship had docked, but she also hoped to have her rheumatism cured.

Predictably no medicine was forthcoming. Instead,

the rheumatism seized all my limbs worse than ever, and my body was dreadfully swelled. When we landed at the Tower, I shewed my flesh to my mistress, but she took no great notice of it [ … ] I grew worse, and could not stand to wash. I was then forced to sit down with the tub before me, and often through pain and weakness was reduced to kneel or to sit down on the floor, to finish my task.⁴⁰

Prince’s rheumatism hampered her mobility. The plenitudes and freedoms of London suddenly receded from view. It wasn’t only her aching limbs that prevented her from roustabouting through the city: Mrs Wood forced her to clean piles of clothes so mountainous that even her English colleagues complained on her behalf. Prince’s health grew worse, yet her mistress continued to scream and bawl. She was constantly threatened with expulsion from Leigh Street, but ‘I was a stranger, and did not know one door in the street from another, and was unwilling to go away’.⁴¹ After repeated humiliations she decided to leave and, with the help of Moravian missionaries based in Hatton Garden, was taken in by the family of Mr Mash, the Woods’ shoe-blacker. After a bitter winter during which her rheumatism became more acute, Prince’s fortunes improved. Charitable Quakers offered her money and warm clothing. She became a charwoman to a Mrs Forsyth who had spent time in the West Indies and was fond of blacks. Finally, following overtures to one of London’s Anti-Slavery offices, she joined the household of the Pringles, a God-fearing couple who accompanied her to church and were happy to help when she suggested that her life story should be published.

Prince, like the first black English male writer Gronniosaw, required an amanuensis to take down her autobiography. Like him, and also Equiano, most of her narrative deals with her vicissitudinal life and the assaults she suffered on foreign islands. Yet Prince’s limited record of her experiences in London also foreshadows many of the accounts written by black women over the ensuing 150 years. There are few references to specific districts or landmarks within London – the key site for Prince is domestic, that of the Wood household. Staying out of trouble there takes up most of her time. She has little energy for flexing her topographical imagination; escaping her Leigh Street imprisonment is her only goal. Her interest in geography is confined to the question of whether she is better off behind or beyond the threshold of her master’s home. Mrs Wood exploits Prince’s lack of metropolitan street wisdom in an effort to stop her leaving: if she were to go out, the story went, the people would rob her, and then turn her adrift. Prince leaves the house as an act of desperation: she does not cruise down the Thames, go sharking for men in taverns or alleyways, or savour London’s pleasure gardens. Having to make her own way through the capital’s open spaces is, for her, a source of shame. Even leaving her wicked owners she deems a kind of social failure. This is compounded by her reliance on the charity and generosity of other Londoners such as Mash, the Quakers and the Anti-Slavery Society.

Prince’s autobiography was mired in controversy almost as soon as it was published in 1831. The Methodist Thomas Pringle assured his readers that the book was not only true but that it was ‘essentially her own, without any material alteration farther than was requisite to exclude redundancies and gross grammatical errors’.⁴² Yet the text’s hints regarding the sexual harassment Prince’s master may have meted out to her are so coyly brief that it’s difficult not to believe that, at the very least, religious prudishness may have induced a degree of self-censorship.

The autobiography was successful and two further editions appeared within a year: the postscript to the first of these referred to Prince’s growing blindness as a way of inducing ‘the friends of humanity to promote the more zealously the sale of this publication’; an appendix to the final edition included a letter from Mrs Pringle to the Secretary of the Birmingham Ladies’ Society for Relief of Negro Slaves which confirmed that the floggings Prince had suffered as a slave had left her body scarred and lacerated.⁴³

In November 1831 James McQueen, a prominent defender of the West India interest and editor of the Glasgow Courier, wrote an article for Blackwood’s Magazine in which he defended the Wood family whom, he claimed, had treated Prince as ‘a confidential and favourite servant’. Only when the ‘prowling anti-colonial fry in London quickly got about her’, he alleged, had she started to malign her beneficent owners.⁴⁴ McQueen’s plantocratic sympathies are evidenced by his assertion that if Pringle were proved to have libelled the Woods, then the Government ‘must tell the country that the West India colonists are no longer to be persecuted as they have been by ignorance, and by zeal without knowledge’.

Pringle successfully sued the publisher of Blackwood’s for libel in February 1832. He in turn was sued a year later by Prince’s former owner, John Wood, who claimed that accounts of his cruelty had been fabricated. Pringle was unable to produce witnesses to back up his claims and Wood won the case by default. At this latter trial Prince herself was briefly called as a witness. A report described her as ‘a negress of very ordinary features’ who ‘appears to be about thirty-five years of age’.⁴⁵ After this sighting, however, she disappears from view altogether.

Mary Seacole – arguably the most famous black woman in Britain before Winifred Atwell and Shirley Bassey – was also forced to rely on handouts and noblesse oblige on a number of occasions during her life. Seacole, often referred to as the black Florence Nightingale, was born around 1805 in Kingston, Jamaica. Like Robert Wedderburn, with whom in other respects she had almost nothing socially or politically in common, she had ‘good Scotch blood coursing’ in her veins and was proud to call herself a Creole.⁴⁶ Her father was a soldier; her mother kept a boarding house and was ‘an admirable doctress’.⁴⁷ Seacole herself soon developed an interest in nursing and in 1851 helped her brother Edward open a hotel in Panama. Returning to Jamaica two years later she tended victims of yellow fever before deciding to head for the Crimea where she hoped to help the beleaguered British army. Rebuffed by the military and medical authorities in London, she went out on her own accord as a sutler and set up a British Hotel between Balaklava and Sebastopol where she cared for sick and maimed troops. Her bravery and devotion were enskied by W.H. Russell in a despatch to The Times dated 14 September 1855, and he later contributed a preface to her 1857 autobiography, the first to be wholly authored by a black woman in England (Prince’s had been transcribed by the minor poet Susanna Strickland). It was published to raise funds following her bankruptcy at the end of the Crimean War.

If the financial dependency into which Seacole sank following her return from the Crimea aligns her with Mary Prince and the hapless anonyms who comprised the black female population in London up until the second half of the twentieth century, there are, equally, other features which make her stand out. The most obvious is her nursing prowess. Seacole came to London to get governmental permission to heal rather than to be healed. Literate, proud of her mixed blood, and coming from a financially stable background, she didn’t suffer from cultural cringe and didn’t think of London as a sanatorium to lint and bandage her contused colonial psyche. Nor did she view it as a place to start her life afresh, a city in which she could satisfy those emotional and intellectual desires which a repressive and brutalized colonial adolescence had prevented her from fulfilling. Seacole claimed to have a ‘roving inclination’ and had already travelled widely before she arrived in England.⁴⁸ She possessed medical skills and was confident in them. By coming to London she was not gingering up to the starting line of a new and more meaningful life. For her, the city’s value was largely functional. It would facilitate and rubberstamp her desire to help those British troops in whose well-being she took as great an interest as her ‘patriotic lady’ of a sister who, according to Trollope, wouldn’t ‘abandon the idea that beefsteaks and onions, and bread and cheese and beer [were] the only diet proper for an Englishman’.⁴⁹

Almost nothing is known about the final two decades of Seacole’s life other than that she left over £2500 when she died in 1881. Even this biographical shard is very revealing. For though Seacole returned from the Crimea financially ruined, it was only a temporary setback. In 1856 The Times printed several letters from potential benefactors who wished to pay off her debts. In July 1857 a four-night Grand Military Festival was held at the Royal Surrey Gardens for her benefit. She was awarded four Government medals and a bust of her was carved by Queen Victoria’s nephew, Count Gleichen. She lived for long stretches in the affluent West End and told a friend that when she visited the Princess of Wales whose masseuse she was, ‘I go up to her private sitting room and we sit and talk like the old friends we are.’⁵⁰

Unlike Mary Prince and most of the black women in London during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Seacole’s lapses into penury were short-lived and remediable. Like Sancho, whose amplitude of girth she shared, Seacole had the kind of access to the upper strata of metropolitan society normally closed to the washed up (and washing up) working classes such as Prince. Her autobiography was not composed for polemical purposes, unlike those of Gronniosaw, Equiano and Prince. This accounts in large part for the absence of hectoring diatribes in her book. She shared with Sancho a strident patriotism which may strike modern readers as assimilationist:

I think, if I have a little prejudice against our cousins across the Atlantic – and I do confess to a little – it is not unreasonable. I have a few shades of deeper brown upon my skin which shows me related – and I am proud of the relationship – to those poor mortals whom you once held enslaved, and whose bodies America still owns. And having this bond, and knowing what slavery is; having seen with my eyes and heard with my ears proof positive enough of its horrors – let others affect to doubt them if they will – is it surprising that I should be somewhat impatient of the airs of superiority which many Americans have endeavoured to assume over me?⁵¹

Yet there were times in London when Seacole feared attitudes towards black people were beginning to resemble those of the Americans. One of the most memorable passages in her autobiography concerns her disappointment upon learning that despite visiting not only Elizabeth Herbert, the Secretary of War’s wife, at Belgrave Square, but also many other Government officials, her offer to go to the Crimea as a nursing recruit had been rejected:

one cold evening I stood in the twilight, which was fast deepening into wintry night, and looked back upon the ruins of my last castle in the air. [ … ] Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs? Tears streamed down my foolish cheeks, as I stood in the fast thinning streets; tears of grief that any should doubt my motives – that Heaven should deny me the opportunity that I sought. Then I stood still, and looking upward through and through the dark clouds that shadowed London, prayed aloud for help.⁵²

The passage heaves with melodrama. While Seacole’s memoirs are normally terse and emotionally brisk, here she wallows in her misery. Yet the extract is a useful reminder that all colonial visitors to London need to recognize the possibility that they are there under licence. However enjoyable and equitable the treatment they receive, they always fear that under the froth of social acceptance bubbles a simmering hatred which at any minute might boil over. Writing about her very first visit to London many years before, Seacole recalled

the efforts of the London street-boys to poke fun at my and my companion’s complexion. I am only a little brown – a few shades duskier than the brunettes whom you all admire so much; but my companion was very dark, and a fair (if I can apply the term to her) subject for their rude wit. She was hot-tempered, poor thing! and as there were no policemen to awe the boys and turn our servants’ heads in those days, our progress through the London streets was sometimes a rather chequered one.⁵³

Both of these incidents, pivoting as they do on Seacole’s colour, took place some years before she was lionized by Punch and consorted with members of the Royal Family. Without the fame and goodwill that her Crimean War exploits elicited, in the eyes of the London public Seacole was just one more derisible ‘fuzzy wuzzy’. Lauded by The Times and by thousands of ex-servicemen, Seacole records no slights or slurs after her return from the Crimea. It’s her (social) capital that makes the difference – not only in terms of where she can go and live, but also in how people respond to her, how the city, its corridors and drawing rooms of power and prestige, open up to her.

Seacole’s autobiography shows how black women didn’t all inhabit identical Londons. It might be expected that in the nineteenth century all black women’s lives would have been equally miserable. Yet Seacole, unlike Prince or the Hottentot Venus, eventually attained both fame and wealth. She mingled in rarefied social circles. Although she also experienced a degree of privation and some racial distress, unlike many of her ‘sisters’ she overcame these hurdles to produce a narrative that’s often humorous, relatively bereft of polemic and, on occasions such as the one quoted above, literary. She wrote a book the style and subject matter of which fly in the face of the generally accepted picture of what it was possible for a black woman to achieve in early nineteenth-century Britain.

As far back as 1798 the philanthropist Zachary Macaulay had brought around forty children from Sierra Leone to Clapham to be educated. Throughout the nineteenth century philanthropists and missionaries had brought young Africans to the University of London, medical schools in the capital and the Inns of Court. Their goal was to produce a cadre of learned blacks who would return home and devote their lives to converting their countrymen into civilized Christians. The numbers involved surprised William Wells Brown who noted that, ‘In an hour’s walk through the Strand, Regent, or Piccadilly Streets in London, one may meet half a dozen coloured young men, who are inmates of the various Colleges in the metropolis.’⁵⁴ By the 1860s, however, the efficacy of such schemes was being questioned. According to the historian Douglas Lorimer:

The British rarely found that their schemes for black advancement fulfilled their exaggerated expectations and, rather than question their own vision, they revived the question of the Negro’s racial inheritance and often found it wanting. [ … ] When this association between African descent and lowly social status became more firmly fixed, and was added to the latest suspicions and aversions produced by xenophobia and ethnocentrism, racial attitudes became more rigid and emotive in character, and a new inflexibility and contempt characterized English attitudes to the Negro.⁵⁵

Few black students left accounts of their time in London. Indian students, however, did. Many of them came to the capital hungry with ambition and hoping to attain the qualifications required to join the Indian Civil Service or, indeed, any other serious profession. They studied medicine and engineering, but particularly law. As late as 1907 an India Office study estimated that 380 of the 700 Indian students in Britain resided in London and that 320 of these were based at the Inns of Court.⁵⁶ They did not come just to pore over books. They had the scent of power in their nostrils. ‘As colonials living on the periphery of the empire Indians are naturally attracted to the metropolis,’ one student wrote. ‘The English are the ruling people in India and naturally ambitious Indian youth want to come to the centre of the life of these people, just as they used to go to Delhi in olden days.’⁵⁷ Their behaviour attracted much adverse comment back home in India and helped to create a largely negative image of metropolitan culture. S. Satthianadhan claimed that

it is most imprudent to send young Indian lads to live in that great metropolis without proper friends to take care of them. I have known young men who have been leading the most reckless lives, squandering their money, and giving in easily to all the debasing temptations of the place, instead of making the best use of the opportunities as students.⁵⁸

According to Behramji Malabari, the average Indian student in London ‘learns to smoke, drink, gamble, to bet, and to squander his substance in worse ways. The life “in apartments,” that he has often to accept, does not offer any relief from this round of vulgar dissipation.’⁵⁹ In partial confirmation of this point, Mohandas Gandhi recounted in his Autobiography (1927) how he strove to become a gentleman while studying for the Bar between 1888 and 1891. He frittered away his money on expensive chimney hats and Bond Street evening suits as well as lessons in dancing and French.⁶⁰ A fellow Indian who met him in Piccadilly Circus during this period dismissed him as ‘a nut, a masher, a blood – a student more interested in fashion and frivolities than in his studies’.⁶¹ Some English commentators, too, weren’t enamoured of Indians in London. C. Hamilton McGuiness barked: ‘It is positively nauseating to see them on the tops of buses, in the streets, at the theatres and almost everywhere one goes – coloured men and white women. These women have not the slightest idea of what grave risks they are running.’⁶² Elsewhere, landlords and housekeepers were routinely portrayed as grasping and exploitative whilst life in lodgings was held to be solitary and secluded.⁶³

Such rhetoric contrasts sharply with that of Harriet Jacobs and William Wells Brown. They saw London as a uniquely moral and civilized city, a joyous corrective to the unremitting degradation they faced back home. Black English writers of the eighteenth century also envisioned London as a giant pillar of virtue. In contrast, a number of Indian travelogues reveal that it wasn’t only students who risked soul-pollution by living in London – even the most respectable gentlemen who journeyed there were thought to be vulnerable.

The first major travelogue was written by the Lucknow-born Mirza Abu Taleb Khan. He stayed in London during 1800 and 1801 during which time he was known as ‘The Persian Prince’. His book, published in 1814, began a tradition of wealthy or well-connected subcontinentals describing at considerable length their stays in the imperial metropolis. Their accounts varied in length: from the hundred pages of T.B. Pandian’s England To An Indian Eye (1897) to Khan’s three-volume opus. Some – such as Behramji Malabari’s The Indian Eye On English Life (1893) – focused almost exclusively on London. More commonly, as in T.N. Mukharji’s A Visit To Europe (1889), portraits of France, Germany and Italy were also included; these visits were the Indian equivalent of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour. Publication in diary form was common – Jehangeer Nowrojee and Hirjeebhoy Merwanjee’s Journal of a Residence of Two Years and A Half In Great Britain (1841) and K.C. Sen’s Diary In England (1894) are examples. Romesh Chunder Dutt’s Three Years In Europe (1896) was crammed with extracts from some of the many letters he’d sent to friends in India from England, whilst Malabari’s book was as much waspish social commentary as it was travelogue. Taken collectively their accounts challenge the widespread view that travel writing is synonymous with whiteness – echoed below by the Indian critic and novelist Pankaj Mishra.

It is worth remembering here that very few writers from India or the Caribbean have published travel books. This is probably so because while a novel can be written anywhere, the modern travel book is a primarily metropolitan genre: part of the knowledge that a powerful culture accumulates about its less privileged others or adversaries in the world. It is usually difficult to write one without the support of a trade publisher and there is also the problem of tone and perspective. The exuberant persona of, say, Bruce Chatwin is not easily worn by a writer from the colonies, no matter how anglicized he is; the certainties of the great power and the wealth of the West that protected Chatwin on his adventures are not available to him.⁶⁴

The authors in this chapter were, to say the least, ‘respectable’. The Rajah of Kolhapoor was a descendant of Sivajee, founder of the Mahratta Empire; Bhagvat Sinh Jee was Thakore Saheb of Gondal; Bhawani Singh was Raj Rana Bahadur of Jhalawar; Malabari edited the Indian Spectator; Jhinda Ram was Pleader at the Chief Court of the Punjab; even the students Nowrojee and Merwanjee were, respectively, son and nephew of the master builder of the Honourable East India Company’s dockyard in Bombay. Such social standing distinguishes these writers from those discussed earlier. They weren’t dragged to London against their wishes; they didn’t flee there to escape slavery; unlike Wells Brown, they weren’t even required to tour the nation delivering Abolitionist broadsides. Nor did they require scholarships or subsidies: they paid for themselves and came here out of curiosity and in pursuit of pleasure.

Though they may not have encountered quite as much resistance back home as the students, still the impression abided: London was a moral abattoir. Gandhi’s family told him that the food was terrible there, that he was bound to turn to meat, cigars, drink and shameless dress.⁶⁵ Ramakrishna delayed coming for forty years after his mother lamented that he would become ‘a “walking corpse”, a living dead body, a being socially and religiously lost to her, to our family and clan’.⁶⁶ Crossing the Kálápani (the black waters) was thought to breed discontent. It also implied a rejection of caste, an embarrassment at one’s birthright. Some authors shared this fear that things would never be the same after leaving for England: T.N. Mukharji worried that, ‘The elders of the family on whose bosom I prattled in my infancy will shun me as an unclean thing’.⁶⁷

This anxiety about London spoliating its visitors stems from the puritanical rigidity that characterizes the upper ranks of the Indian caste system where all interaction with outsiders is viewed with suspicion. Indians who came to London in the nineteenth century were less inclined to revere the metropolis than subsequent writers such as Mulk Raj Anand, V.S. Naipaul and Dom Moraes. Those three, along with the Caribbean novelist George Lamming, were to a greater or lesser extent disappointed, but, unlike Mukharji or Ramakrishna, they did at least arrive in London eager to believe that the city embodied cultural virtue and purity.

Some Indian authors of the Victorian period claimed their travels were pedagogically or philanthropically motivated. Bhawani Singh wrote his book ‘primarily for the benefit of my people in Jhalawar, whose ideas of European civilization were of the vaguest’.⁶⁸ Chunder Dutt wanted his to ‘serve as a guide-book to Indian youths intending to visit Europe’.⁶⁹ Mukharji’s preface-writer, N.N. Ghose, bluntly stated that the

book inculcates the principle of change in the direction of progress, he and others like him are among the main solvent influences acting upon a hardened social regime. No nation, left to itself, has improved to any great extent, and whatever tends to bring Indian life and ideas into contact with English, is desirable even more in the interests of India than of England.⁷⁰

Others, meanwhile, wished to be thought of as cultural ambassadors: Nowrojee and Merwanjee hoped ‘our humble efforts promote and increase the existing kindly feeling towards the natives of the East in the breast of the British public’, whilst Ramakrishna intended to ‘promote a sympathetic understanding’ between Great Britain and India.⁷¹

The latter author also claimed that, ‘To visit England was the dream of my life’, and this trope reappears in Malabari’s rhapsody on the ‘Land of Freedom, the land of my youthful dreams, which holds so much that is precious to me personally, and so much more that is of greater value to the land of my birth’.⁷² Earlier he’d admitted that, ‘A trip to London has been my dream for years, a hope long deferred. More, indeed, than wish or hope, it has been a faith with me, to be rewarded in the fulness of time.’⁷³

Malabari’s dreams, like those of Ramakrishna and nearly all of the Indian students, princes and visitors who came to London throughout the nineteenth century, were realized to glittering effect. These men experienced few hardships or privations. They weren’t forced to seek out cheap, dingy lodgings; nor were they shackled by overweening owners. Upon arrival K.C. Sen could afford to move into very expensive rooms in Norfolk Street, Strand. Jhinda Ram did the same, whilst Bhagvat Sinh Jee stayed at the Great Western Hotel. Even those few Indians who switched to insalubrious quarters weren’t ostracized by polite society: Mirza Khan lived in Rathbone Place, half of whose inhabitants were courtesans, yet ‘my friends had the condescension and goodness to overlook this indiscretion; and not only was I visited there by the first characters in London, but even ladies of rank, who had never in their lives before passed through this street, used to call in their carriages at my door’.⁷⁴

Such ‘condescension’ is unsurprising. Indians were rare birds of passage: socially lofty, exotically dressed with fancy headwear, foreign-tongued and adhering to impressively ancient religious codes, they didn’t have much in common with those filthy and downwardly mobile lascars who were the only other Asiatics most Londoners might previously have come across. According to his biographer, K.C. Sen was ‘lionized’ by London female society during his stay in the capital during 1870. Lionizing, she argues, was ‘a recognized pastime of middle-aged women to take up controversial figures and show them off as their own pet discoveries’.⁷⁵ Similarly, Mirza Khan claimed that

the Nobility vied with each other in their attention to me. Hospitality is one of the most esteemed virtues of the English; and I experienced it to such a degree, that I was seldom disengaged. In these parties I enjoyed every luxury my heart could desire.⁷⁶

‘Hospitality’ and ‘luxury’ aren’t words that crop up too often in this book. Nineteenth-century Indian travellers spent most of their stays in London being generously pampered. They had no financial problems, and could afford to circulate through the city by coach, hansom cabs or, in Bhawani Singh’s case, by motor car. Not only did they make regular trips outside the capital – Brighton, Oxford, Manchester, Liverpool and Scotland were common destinations – but they also ranged freely across London itself. Each day brought new encounters, fresh vistas, a seemingly endless conveyor belt of diversions and entertainments. A typical sojourn in London would include, at the very least, visits to Madame Tussaud’s, St Paul’s Cathedral, Hampton Court, the Crystal Palace, the Houses of Parliament, the Zoological Gardens, the British Museum, the National Gallery and Westminster Abbey. Sporting events such as the annual Eton versus Harrow cricket match at Lord’s and the Henley Regatta were savoured as were theatrical performances: Chunder Dutt acclaimed The Mikado the ‘finest thing on the stage in London’, whilst Bhawani Singh regularly attended the Apollo and Royal Court Theatres.⁷⁷ Many books celebrated the greenery of Regent’s Park, St James’s Park and Hyde Park. Nor were the worlds of science and commerce neglected: Nowrojee and his cousin attended Royal Institution lectures on Daguerreotype and the Gallery of Practical Science in Lowther Arcade near Charing Cross, as well as the Polytechnic Institution, Woolwich Dockyard, Custom House and St Katharine’s Docks. In short, London was, as Syed A.M. Shah claimed, ‘a place (if not the place) of wonders and curiosities, and it is impossible to see everything of note in London’.⁷⁸ For many of these Indian travellers, the metropolis was a massive fruit bowl which they eyed lasciviously, plucking from it the tastiest, the most succulent fancies. It wasn’t the harsh, abysmal hole portrayed by Mayhew, Booth or even Dickens. London wasn’t a city they really lived in – it wasn’t a place where they worked, scraped, or tussled for bricks and money. Instead they skittered through its most celebrated chambers and drawing rooms, stopping only to sign the visitors’ books of royalty, and chatter superficially with other social adepts, before moving on to the next engagement in their crowded itineraries. Their lives, mobile but depthless, busy and unaffiliated, in some ways prefigure those of Kureishi’s flexisexual metro-bohemians.

Indian travellers were honoured and cherished newcomers to London. Both the black population of the eighteenth century and those lascars who cramped into the East End in the nineteenth century led anonymous and rather fugitive lives. Prisoners of their own misfortunes, they rarely had the money or need to shuffle out of their own smoggy enclaves. Apart from the colour of their skins they had almost nothing in common with someone like Bhawani Singh who could inform his readers that, ‘When an Indian Chief visits London he has to call upon the Secretary of State for India. I therefore called on Mr Brodrick in my Indian costume. A red cloth was spread from the carriage to the house; this is a mark of honour paid to Indian princes.’⁷⁹ Meanwhile, the Rajah of Kolhapoor recounted in his diary how he had been greeted by the Political Secretary of the India Office at Charing Cross; Sen met Lord Shaftesbury and Benjamin Jowett, lunched with the Dean of Westminster who introduced him to Max Müller, and breakfasted with Gladstone; not only did Mirza Khan frequently attend the King and Queen’s drawing room, but he was also invited to dinner by Alderman Combe who had just been elected Mayor of London. Allocated a seat at the same table as Lord Nelson, he was amused to find that his foreign garb and apparent air of superiority led many parties to come over throughout the evening, bend their knees and stoop their heads – to Lord Nelson for his victory on the Nile, ‘and to me, for my supposed high rank’.⁸⁰

This is a far cry from the altercations lascars had with washer-women, crimps and prostitutes. Few Indians had the time or inclination to attend to the grimmer, ungilded parts of town. Bhawani sombrely visited the East End one afternoon, only to spend the evening gadding about at a State Ball held at Buckingham Palace. And although some Indian travellers did notice and speak to the city’s destitutes, the registers with which they describe these encounters are frequently patronizing (‘Oh the street arabs of London! Dirty, unkempt little urchins, out at elbow, often out at knee too, if I may use the phrase; lean and hungry as a rule, yet full of life, and always amusing’⁸¹), pompous (‘London appears to a stranger the richest, most prosperous, and happiest city on the face of the earth. But stop for one moment. While you enjoy the magnificence and splendour of the Great Metropolis, do not fail to see the misery and wretchedness in its streets’⁸²), or sanctimonious:

we also think that much of the dissipation, and many of the robberies committed by young men, may be traced to an intimacy with improper females, which commenced within the saloon of a theatre. The saloons of those theatres that are allowed to be infested with such characters, are, instead of being an accommodation to the public, harbours of vice, at which a virtuous man frowns with disgust.⁸³

Far more to the liking of the Indian travellers was the opportunity London gave them to inspect for the first time aspects of their own culture. Here they could see some of the ivory, manuscripts and gold pieces that had been seized from their country. It wasn’t so very surprising that they had to travel to London to see their own arts and achievements displayed. After all, London was the capital of India. Imperial centre, the largest city on earth – it was from there that the treaties, curricula and legislative frameworks which shaped their lives were established. Political and economic issues pertaining to India were frequently discussed: J.S. Mill asked Sen about education, income tax, and the administration of justice in India; the Rajah of Kolhapoor attended an East India Association meeting at the Society of Arts to hear a Paper on Cotton.

London was also the place in which to see the sinews and arteries of Empire: Nadkarni went to the Bank of England to see Indian currency being printed; Sinh Jee walked along the Thames Embankment to the General Post Office to watch Indian mail sorted; Jhinda Ram marvelled at Tippu Sultan’s girdle and helmet at the Tower of London. Some, like the Rajah of Kolhapoor, were ‘quite surprised to see such a large collection of Indian things’.⁸⁴ Others, like T.N. Mukharji, were less enthralled. He inspected South Kensington Museum’s extensive collection of Indian artware and also attended the Indian Bazaar at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition.

A dense crowd always stood there, looking at our men as they wore the gold brocade, sang the patterns of the carpet and printed the calico with the hand. They were much astonished to see the Indians produce works of art with the aid of rude apparatus they themselves had discarded long ago.⁸⁵

This response rankled him. After visiting other shows and galleries, he complained that:

The Museums in Europe, where ethnographical specimens from all parts of the world have been collected, bring to the mind of an Indian a feeling of humiliation and sorrow. There he finds himself ranked among barbarian tribes with their cannibalism, human-sacrifice, tattooing and all sorts of cruel and curious customs that denote a savage life.⁸⁶

On the whole, though, Indian travellers enjoyed flitting through the city and taking in as many sites and sights as possible. Some, like Bhawani Singh, were lucky enough to stay at the Alexandra Hotel in luxurious rooms overlooking Hyde Park. Others climbed the steps to the top of St Paul’s Cathedral where, unlike eighteenth-century black writers who only experienced the city at ground level, they viewed London from above. These perspectives allowed them to ‘look down’ on the capital, something that they, patrician and Olympian in mien, were not averse to doing.

Nineteenth-century Indian writers also grabbed the opportunity to drift through the city imbibing quotidian experiences. Malabari often slipped into the present tense to convey his sense of awe at London’s whirr and whirl: near Regent Street, ‘I stand breathless of an evening, watching what goes on before my eyes’; squeezing into an omnibus, ‘I am between two of the prettiest and quietest, feeling a strange discomfort. As the ’bus hobbles along, I feel my fair neighbours knocking against me every moment.’⁸⁷

Visitors were most dazed by the clattering locomotion and velocity of the world’s most populous city. Noise and tumult assaulted them as soon as they alighted at Victoria Station. London seemed insomniac, so thronged and labyrinthine as to be utterly unknowable. And no matter how lofty their social station, irrespective of how long they resided in the metropolis, they never quite lost that initial disorientation. Pandian linked this surging energy to the city’s capacity for hyper-manufacturing both ideas and commercial produce, while Mukharji speculated that Londoners, accustomed to confronting a thousand terrors and cacophonies every day of their working lives, had become so immune that they weren’t ‘even afraid of ghosts now-a-days, nor of witches, imps or fairies’.⁸⁸ Speech became comically deformed with bus conductors referring to such places as Chring Cruss, Stren, Oxf Strit, Pidly, Toria, Roloke. Friendship was almost impossible for ‘The Englishman in London seems to have no time to dive after a drowning friend’.⁸⁹ All this led Malabari to observe caustically that:

People live in a whirlwind of excitement, making and unmaking their idols almost every day. They seem to be consumed by a mania for novelty; everything new serves to keep up the fever of excitement. Today they will set up a fetish, anything absurd, fantastic, grotesque, and worship it with breathless enthusiasm.⁹⁰

Indian visitors marvelled at the most unexceptional features. Jhinda Ram and T.N. Mukharji were both entertained by the advertisements they came across in the press, on the streets, and upon looking up from the books they read on bus journeys. Both were diverted by the techniques used by Pears to sell soap to the public – Mukharji remarking drily that, ‘The black races need no longer have the fear of being eaten up by white men for the sake of their complexion, for a single application of Mr Pears’ Soap will whiten the blackest of black faces.’⁹¹

Even light became a source of joy. Many of the travellers 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, that those remarks were disagreeable to me, and leaving the bench I walked out of the Park.¹⁰⁵

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; I sit entranced, watching the divergent forces.¹²⁴

Malabari is perhaps the author considered in this chapter whose work affords the most literary pleasure. He’s often sarcastic and grouchy as well as funny and perceptive. 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.