Indians in London: From the Birth of the East India Company to Independent India

by Arup K. Chatterjee

In September 1600, Queen Elizabeth and London are made to believe that the East India Company will change England's fortunes forever. With William Shakespeare's death, the heart of Albion starts throbbing with four centuries of an extraordinary Indian settlement that Arup K. Chatterjee christens as Typogravia.

In five acts that follow, we are taken past the churches destroyed by the fire of Pudding Lane; the late eighteenth-century curry houses in Mayfair and Marylebone; and the coming of Indian lascars, ayahs, delegates, students and lawyers in London. From the baptism of Peter Pope (in the year Shakespeare died) to the death of Catherine of Bengal; the chronicles of Joseph Emin, Abu Taleb and Mirza Ihtishamuddin to Sake Dean Mahomet's Hindoostane Coffee House; Gandhi's experiments in Holborn to the recovery of the lost manuscript of Tagore's Gitanjali in Baker Street; Jinnah's trysts with Shakespeare to Nehru's duels with destiny; Princess Sophia's defiance of the royalty to Anand establishing the Progressive Writers' Association in Soho; Aurobindo Ghose's Victorian idylls to Subhas Chandra Bose's interwar days; the four Indian politicians who sat at Westminster to the blood pacts for Pakistan; India in the shockwaves at Whitehall to India in the radiowaves at the BBC; the intrigues of India House and India League to hundreds of East Bengali restaurateurs seasoning curries and kebabs around Brick Lane…

Indians in London is a scintillating adventure across the Thames, the Embankment, the Southwarks, Bloomsburys, Kensingtons, Piccadillys, Wembleys and Brick Lanes that saw a nation-a cultural, historical and literary revolution that redefined London over half a millennium of Indian migrations-reborn as independent India.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, India

570 pages, Hardcover

Published July 30, 2021

Reviews

[Suzannah Rowntree · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a mixed bag for me. Drawbacks include how difficult it was to read. The introduction went on for AGES and was incomprehensible, even to me. It came with a warning not to read unless you're familiar with mid-century philosophy and the works of William Shakespeare, and I only get one of those, but even the parts purportedly about Shakespeare were utterly opaque to me. The body of the book was significantly more legible, but was poorly constructed, with more of the undisciplined free-association of ideas that marked the introduction: the train of logic was often unclear, with names and dates all slung in higgeldy-piggeldy, so that we are snatched from the exploits of the intelligentsia to the tribulations of the lascars, or from 1905 to 1981 in the space of a few paragraphs. Add onto that some truly startling howlers, like the author referring to the late Tsarist regime of Russia as "the Soviets", and the book feels both poorly constructed and poorly finished.

On the other hand, this book DID give a very detailed overview - if not particularly granular - of the Indians who from the birth of the EIC under Elizabeth I to the middle of the twentieth century made their way to London and ended up shaping its culture and destiny - as well as that of India. In some ways this book was an immensely encouraging read: Indians made their way to London to learn from their colonisers; identified the hypocrisy of a country that preached democracy and women's rights but did not practice them; joined the women's suffrage, labour rights, and Home Rule movements in droves, as well as law schools and Parliament; and ended up creating the foundations for modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. My own grandpa was born to an Indian father and a Cockney mother in 1930s London, and for the first time this book helped me to recognise just how far back, and how rich, Indian life in London is. The first curry restaurants, for instance, predate the first fish and chips shop by fifty years. The first Indian MP was elected in 1892. And the first female law student to study and graduate from Oxford was an Indian woman, Cornelia Sorabji.

I still remember vividly the title of a book from a few years back - "Londonistan" - which I never read, but the title seemed to signify some alarmist tract about the proliferation of Muslims in London. The truth is, of course, that Britain conquered those places centuries before, carrying out massacres and famines (Churchill, it seems, starved 3 million during WWII to feed British troops in Australia - a Stalin-level accomplishment if true) and requiring Indians to travel halfway across the world to be educated in Britain if they were to enjoy the privilege of participating in their own government. The thesis of this book - which is pretty ably demonstrated - appears to be that London no less than Bombay or Calcutta has been a centre of Indian culture for at least two centuries, and primarily because of its own imperial ambitions. Reading this book made me proud of my Anglo-Indian heritage in new and exciting ways.