Namaste London

A new book chronicles 500 years of Indian immigration to Britain, introducing us to a wide cast of characters, including servants, educators and intelligentsia, who once made the imperial city their home

Arup K Chatterjee’s “training in imagining London”, he admits, began quite early in his life. “I was maybe seven or eight years old,” remembers the associate professor at OP Jindal Global University, of the time he was acquainted with the works of Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and later William Shakespeare and Jane Austen in school. These stories, set in the imperial city, helped him realise a place otherwise, unfamiliar to him. Later, as an undergraduate, he came across Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines. “The novel featured London and its protagonist [in London] quite centrally. It was very interesting [for me] to see how a post-colonial protagonist in independent India was helping us imagine not an Indian city, but a foreign city that was central to India’s [colonial] past, but not [part of] its geography,” he says in a telephonic interview.

It was not until 2014 that Chatterjee, who received a Charles Wallace fellowship to the United Kingdom, got to visit the city that had captivated him all through his growing up years. His interests in the history of British imperialism, politics and philosophy, and cultural and historical encounters with India led him to chronicle 500 years of Indian immigration to Britain, specifically the city of London, the beating heart of the empire. The result is a new tome, Indians in London (Bloomsbury India), which has been over three-and-a-half years in the making.

Raja Rammohun Roy’s statue in Bristol. 'Roy’s fame preceded him, because he got a remarkable amount of press, especially after he advocated the abolition of Sati and English education,' says the author. Pic courtesy/Wikimedia Commons

Among the earliest known faces of this wide cast of immigrants in Chatterjee’s book was Peter Pope, the “boy from Bengala” who was “blessed in his Christian rebirth” at the St Dionis Backchurch by the Archbishop of Canterbury in December 1616, and became one of the first Indians to be baptised in London. Peter, as one version claims, was brought to England by Captain Best, and handed over to Reverend Patrick Copland, a chaplain in the East India Company, who was to teach and instruct him in religion, so that he could convert people back home. Peter was in London for over year, before he returned to India. Not much is known about him after that, as he disappeared into oblivion. “Of course, Indians lived in London much before Peter Pope. But, Peter Pope is the first recognisable record that we have. It clearly implies that there might have been more baptisms [in the city], because Salamon Nurr was buried [at St Margaret’s Westminster] in 1550, which was a long time before Peter’s arrival.” He, however, states that this particular event is a “symptom” of Indians coming to London, “and the Britons wanting to incorporate them into their evangelical fold”.

Fifty years later, London witnessed the Great Fire of September 1666, which saw a significant part of the city gutted in, leading to an estimated damage of 10 million pounds (37 billion pounds in today’s currency). It would take nearly a century to rebuild the city, with the East India Company, among many, contributing their wealth to the Crown. “This period neatly coincides with the rise of the East India Company, and increasing imperial traffic between India and Britain. A lot of Indian talent and resources were now coming into London.”  

Arup K Chatterjee at Baker Street station, where Rabindranath Tagore retrieved the manuscript of the English translation of Gitanjali that he had lost on the London Tube

Many Indians came in as servants and labourers; at one point fleeing the homes of their employers became such a common feature that advertisements on real estate, fashion goods and absconding servants “throve side by side in the newspapers of the day”. The opening of new colleges—Haileybury in 1806 and Addiscombe in 1809—meant for educating India-bound officials in basic Indology, and manners and customs, saw a chosen few Indian educators make a career for themselves, among them being Meer Hasan Aly, who compiled the Grammar of Hindoostanee Language.

But it was Indian social reformer and co-founder of the Brahmo Samaj, Raja Rammohun Roy, who really earned a cult status for himself in London. “Roy’s fame preceded him, because he got a remarkable amount of press, especially after he advocated the abolition of Sati and English education. He even became a friend of [Governor-General of India] William Bentinck. His take on religious identity of Indians was also different. Many of his ideas resonated with the Britons,” he says, adding that, “Despite being a Brahmin, he chose to have an English partner in Lucy Aikin. This shows a positive lack of religious and cultural rigidity and stricture in his personal choices.”   

St Dionis Backchurch, Fenchurch Street where Peter Pope was baptised in December 1616; the church was reconstructed after the Great Fire of London. Pic courtesy/Wikimedia Commons

There’s also the fascinating story of Rabindranath Tagore losing his English translation of Gitanjali on a London tube in 1912. He had wanted to show the manuscript to painter William Rothenstein, so that he could request him to urge WB Yeats to write an introduction to the book. “I learnt of this story from an MP from the House of Commons,” shares Chatterjee.  The case with his manuscript was eventually found by the office of the “lost property” at Baker Street Station.

Even more captivating are the stories of the tea imports, emergence of the “curry houses” and evolution of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who went to London as a student of law. “For Gandhi, London was nothing short of a spiritual training. He discovered some of the finest texts on Hinduism, under the influence of the Theosophists, and he also learnt that what was practised in his family as a discipline of vegetarianism, could be reinterpreted in a foreign city, and be used for higher purposes than simply a religious identity.” London, Chatterjee says, became Gandhi’s first laboratory. 

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