A South Asian History of Britain: Four Centuries of Peoples from the Indian Sub-Continent (review)

This new survey amplifies and updates the pioneering works of Rozina Visram, whose Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700–1947 took its place in 1986 among survey histories of colonial migration to Britain focusing on the African diaspora. These early histories aimed to counter a political context of racist backlash against postcolonial migrants to Britain, who were denounced as interlopers in a previously homogeneous society. Since then the history of migration from British India and its constituent postcolonial societies has exploded, yielding a wealth of knowledge about individuals and groups who moved from the subcontinent to Britain and often back again during the colonial period and after. All three co-authors have contributed to this literature. Here they pause from their labors to survey and synthesize the state of knowledge in the early twenty-first century.

As Visram’s title indicated, Indian migrants proved kaleidoscopically diverse, from members of the Indian nobility to “lascar” merchant seamen, to ayahs or nannies who arrived with British families: men and women, rich and poor, prominent and obscure, sojourners, settlers and celebrities. The authors of this volume continue to process of repopulating Britain’s historical landscape.

Between the 1600s and 1857, most Indians who traveled to Britain did so for education and training, as merchant seamen, especially in the Asian trade, or as servants or slaves displaying their masters’ wealth as ostentations conspicuous consumption. From the eighteenth century, merchants, aristocrats and diplomats came as well, often seeking to appeal increasingly dictatorial East India Company policies, or to evade them permanently by settling in Britain. Fisher recounts how early settlers, especially those of mixed heritage, often converted to Christianity and married into British society, conforming nominally.

With decisive British dominance of India after 1757, however, Indian travelers to Britain increasingly entered an inhospitable realm in which they were regarded and treated as subordinate, inferior, and out of place. Most arrived as employees such as servants or lascar mariners, a few as dependent wives and children. Some, such as Sake Deen Mahomed, the celebrated “shampooing surgeon of Brighton,” traded on an exotic persona to market products such as therapeutic massage or his Hindostanee Coffee House aka Hookah Club. Teachers of Indian languages such as Abu Talib or Moolvey Meer Alee and Moolvey Mirza Khaleel were recruited for the East India Company Collage at Haileybury, and, by the Victorian period, University College London. Their high salaries put their British colleagues’ noses out of joint, including that of one Thomas Malthus.

British women, as a rule, remained more receptive than men, and many helped integrate Asian men into British society. Mariners or lascars, in particular, married, settled, and converted to Christianity. Although individuals may have proven transient, a permanent population composed of such men married to British women inhabited London’s East End from the early nineteenth century. Yet lascars’ poverty rendered them a source of social “friction” spared the wealthy. Class also made the difference enabling wealthier Indians to retain and exploit their exotic oriental identities. Those of humbler origins found their most prudent course of action proved “merging” through marriage, conversion to Christianity, and outward conformity. Sojourners, both men and women, returned to India to write of their experiences, offering a useful inversion of the imperial gaze now well worked in historical literature.

Since the second world war and especially in the 1950s, Indian migrants consisted mainly of young single men, who aimed to sojourn in Britain, sending remittances back to India. When immigration restrictions loomed from the late 1950s, whole families began to migrate. Asians, like other postcolonial migrants, were channeled into moribund industries such as textiles. These suffered most with Thatcherite deindustrialization, provoking racism in all its forms.

Thandi is most frank in tackling not just differences but class divisions and religious factionalism among recent and contemporary South Asian, including the British-born generations...