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  • Our earliest Pravasis

    Our earliest Pravasis
    by Indrajit Hazra

    Hindustan Times, India
    Sept 5 2004

    Long before the Kumars had moved into No. 42 or Bombay Dreams wowed
    West End, an Armenian lady from the Mughal court of Jehangir in Agra
    married William Hawkins, an English representative of the East India
    Company in 1609. Two years later, they set sail towards Britain.
    Unfortunately, Mariam was widowed before she reached her husband's
    land. But in between Hawkins' death and Mariam's arrival, she became
    romantically involved with Gabriel Towerson, another Englishman
    travelling on the ship. In London, the two married and lived happily
    ever after -- or, at least, till Towerson returned with Mariam to
    India in 1617, after which their marriage went to pieces.

    What is revealing is that in her three years in London, an Indian
    married (twice) to an Englishman -- something that in later centuries
    may have been considered 'inter-racial' -- did not evoke any adverse
    comments. In fact, like Mariam, there were many other Indians who
    noiselessly fitted into the cubbyholes of class and gender of British
    -- marrying Britons, keeping English servants, going to church. Like
    the Cambridge-educated Guy Perron in Paul Scott's Raj Quartet three
    centuries later, who feels a great affinity with the Indian Hari
    Kumar, who went to the same public school as he did, pre-Company and
    Company Raj Britain was class driven in its interactions with
    Indians.

    Counterflows to Colonialism traces Indian responses to Britain and
    the interactions of Indians with Britons in the latter's 'natural
    habitat' from 1600 to the year of the Sepoy Mutiny, a pivotal point
    in the history of two cultures looking at each other. The book is
    also about two other aspects of this gradually one-sided
    cross-cultural exchange. Apart from providing rich streams of
    narratives on the first Indian travellers to Britain and the 'first
    NRIs', it also explores a much neglected part of British history --
    the existence of a multicultural Britain that wasn't just a
    pluralising gesture of what a country should be, but what a country
    was. Fisher also charts how self-perception changed for Indians as
    the mirrors available for viewing oneself overwhelmingly started
    carrying the 'Made in England' tag.

    The lay reader learns that in the British-Indian matrix, Indians had
    not always been objects of scrutiny but also observers and of the
    outsiders-turned-colonisers. The first Indians to travel to Britain
    were overwhelmingly seamen, slaves and servants -- and wives of
    Englishmen. (Exchanges between Indians and Arabs, Africans, Persians,
    other Asians predate those with Britons, and the initial interactions
    with Westerners were shared with the Dutch, the French and the
    Danes.) Fisher delves into archival material to tell us what people
    like Mariam, Catherine Bengall, John the Indian and many others faced
    in a country that had not yet turned into the HQs of the British
    Empire.

    Perhaps the most rivetting portion of the book is the section that
    deals with the Indians who went to vilayt to establish themselves as
    teachers. One of the primary figures in this list was Mirza Abu Talib
    Khan Isfahani who went to Britain during 1799-1802 intending to
    establish a British government-sponsored Persian language training
    institute. His writings, especially Masir Talibi fi Bilad Afranji,
    detailing his experiences and judgments about British life was meant
    for both Indian and European (Persian-reading) consumption.

    The reason we know so little about the experience of early Indians
    in Britain even at the archival level -- especially when compared with
    the mountains of archival, historical and popular material about the
    British experience in India -- may be pinpointed to one year: 1837.
    Two years after Thomas Macaulay's 'Minute on Education' ("a single
    shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native
    literature of India and Arabia"), the East India Company changed its
    official language for administration from Persian to English.

    Almost overnight, Company colleges at Haileybury and Addiscombe (and
    at the shortlived Fort William College in Calcutta) changed the
    status of Indian teachers in England and in India forever. Out went
    the earlier 'Orientalist' approach as championed by the likes of Sir
    William Jones, who believed the key to better trade and administer
    was understanding and using the Indian languages and cultures.
    Instead, there was the new 'Anglicist' approach to India, a
    proto-Neocon strategy of 'taming' a land with British values.

    Fisher's immensely readable and scholarly book showcases the two-way
    traffic that took place between two civilisations, and its gradual
    mutation into a one-directional flow -- that is, until Bollywood
    started correcting matters somewhat.

    Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in
    Britain 1600-1857
    By Michael H. Fisher
    Permanent Black
    Rs 795
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