Asians in Britain

Rozina Visram

Description

This is a comprehensive history of Asians from the Indian subcontinent in Britain. Spanning four centuries, it tells the history of the Indian community in Britain from the servants, ayahs and sailors of the seventeenth century, to the students, princes, soldiers, professionals and entrepreneurs of the 19th and 20th centuries.



Rozina Visram examines the nature and pattern of Asian migration; official attitudes to Asian settlement; the reactions and perceptions of the British people; the responses of the Asians themselves and their social, cultural and political lives in Britain.



This imaginative and detailed investigation asks what it would have been like for Asians to live in Britain, in the heart of an imperial metropolis, and documents the anti-colonial struggle by Asians and their allies in the UK. It is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the origins of the many different communities that make up contemporary Britain.

Preface

Acknowledgements

1. A Long Presence

2. Early Arrivals: 1600-1830s

3. A Community in the Making: 1830s-1914

4. Through Indian Eyes: Travellers' Perceptions of Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries

5. Parliamentarians, Revolutionaries and Suffragettes

6. Indians in the First World War

7. Citizens or Aliens? Racism, Repatriation and Passport Control

8. Lascar Activism in Britain 1920-1945

9. Asians in Britain 1919-1947

10. Radical Voices

11. Contributions in the Second World War

12. Conclusions

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

Sujets

• Ethnic Studies
• Social History
• Social Science
• HISTORY
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Reino Unido
• Sociology
• General officer
• United Kingdom
• Great Britain
• General
• Royaume-Uni

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 avril 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783715572
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

ASIANS IN BRITAIN
ASIANS IN BRITAIN
400 Years of History
ROZINA VISRAM
First published 2002 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Rozina Visram 2002
The right of Rozina Visram to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1378 7 hardback ISBN 0 7453 1373 6 paperback ISBN 978 1 7837 1557 2 ePub ISBN 978 1 7837 1558 9 Mobi
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Visram, Rozina, 1939– Asians in Britain : 400 years of history / Rozina Visram. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7453–1378–7 (hb) — ISBN 0–7453–1373–6 (pbk) 1. Asians—Great Britain—History. 2. East Indians—Great Britain—History. 3. Great Britain—Ethnic relations—History. I. Title. DA125.A84 V68 2002 941’.004914—dc21 2001005307
Reprints: 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0
Designed, typeset and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG Printed in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, England
For my sister ,
NURBANA
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
1 A Long Presence
2 Early Arrivals, 1600–1830s
3 A Community in the Making, 1830s–1914
4 Through Indian Eyes
5 Parliamentarians, Revolutionaries and Suffragettes
6 Indians in the First World War
7 Citizens or Aliens?
8 Lascar Activism in Britain, 1920–45
9 Asians in Britain, 1919–47
10 Radical Voices
11 Contributions in the Second World War
12 Conclusions
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations 1. Charlotte Fitzroy with an Indian servant, c. 1672, by Peter Lely. (York City Art Gallery) 2. Carte de visite of Alexandra, Princess of Wales, with the baby Louise and an Indian ayah. (Donated to the author by Noel Chanan) 3. Possibly the only surviving portrait of Dr Frederick Akbar Mahomed (1849–84). (King’s College, London (Guy’s Campus) and Dr Anthony Batty Shaw) 4. Lascars on board ship in the East India Dock, London, 1908. (Museum of London, Docklands Collection) 5. Dr Bokanky, the street herbalist as depicted by Henry Mayhew, 1850s. (Museum of London) 6. Britain’s first Mosque, the Shah Jahan Mosque, Woking, built in 1889. (Author photograph, 1998) 7. W.C. Bonnerjee family and friends, 1900s. (Jaya Nicholas) 8. Frederick Mahomed Palowkar with his wife Elizabeth Woodgate and their children, c. 1889. (David Wilson) 9. Sophia Duleep Singh selling the Suffragette outside Hampton Court Palace, 1913. (Museum of London) 10.    Gentlemen Players of Essex, the Essex 2nd Eleven, 1920s. (Muriel Simpson) 11. Group showing Dr Chunilal Katial, the first Asian Mayor (right), Pastor Kamal Chunchie (left), his wife Mabel (centre), daughter Muriel and friends in the garden of the Coloured Men’s Institute, 1929. (Muriel Simpson) 12. A traditional Parsi ceremony: Shapurji Saklatvala, the Communist MP for Battersea, on his 50th birthday with his daughter, Sehri, aged 5. (Sehri Saklatvala) 13. London Sikhs outside the Shepherd’s Bush Gurdwara and Dharmsala, 1939. (The Documentary Photography Archive, Greater Manchester County Record Office and Bhai Gurbax Singh) 14. Lal Khan, ex-sailor and pedlar of Castlecaulfield, N. Ireland, with his wife, Mary, their three children and Mary’s younger brother. (Narinder Kapur) 15. Dr Dharm Sheel and Savitri Chowdhary with son Vijay [George] and baby Shakuntala, Laindon, Essex, 1930s. (Shakun Banfield) 16. The first recorded Indian cremation in an open field on the outskirts of Londonderry, N. Ireland, 1940. (Narinder Kapur) 17. Dr Sukhsagar Datta on a TGWU march in Queen’s Square, Bristol, mid-1930s. (David Datta) 18. London writers and poets reading from their work, 1940s. (BBC and the British Library, T2497. PA.(101.)ORNo.00. E. 50388 P .
Preface
Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700–1947 , my pioneering work, was published by Pluto Press in 1986 at a time of growing interest in the history of black peoples in Britain. However, despite the fact that the past two decades have seen significant advances in research and writing in the history of African-Caribbean communities in Britain, the varied histories of Asians from South Asia (the present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka) – who have been in Britain for close on four centuries – remain little researched. Scholars have tended to underestimate the significant presence of Asians and their contributions to British society, and the perception that their settlement in Britain dates from the 1950s persists. Why so? Part of the problem may be to do with the availability of source material. Records, especially for the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, are fragmentary and scattered. There is, for instance, no comparable important source like slavery and abolition documents. The problem is further compounded by terminology. The terms ‘coloured’ and ‘black’ described Africans and West Indians as well as Asians. A further problem is the nature of Asian settlement, which was both transitory and permanent, including a diverse group of settlers. The lack of interest of researchers and academics, as well as at grassroots community level, is another reason. Research has tended to be concentrated more on the Asian communities who settled here after the 1950s and comes from academic disciplines largely based in university departments of social anthropology and sociology – not history.
And yet, as I have discovered, there is a vast amount of documentation available in the national and local archives in Britain requiring patient and rigorous search. The records of the East India Company and the government of India in the Oriental and India Office Collections (OIOC), form one major source for researchers, as do official British government records at the Public Record Office. But parish and local council records, newspapers and surveys, and contemporary literature, both by whites and Indians themselves, as well as visual sources provide another valuable source for reconstructing the history and experiences of Asians in Britain.
Ayahs, Lascars and Princes , researched and written during the two years of my ILEA teacher fellowship at the Centre for Multicultural Education, University of London Institute of Education, was my pioneering shot at unravelling the complex history of Asians in Britain. During the course of my research for my present study on Asians and their descendants in Britain, I have been fortunate enough to come across several new sources at the OIOC and other repositories (I have by no means tapped every possible collection), as well as being given access to family memoirs, and these appear in the notes. I have not only re-examined the sources consulted previously, but have trawled through contemporary newspapers, journals and reports of various Christian organisations and other bodies, parish registers, Parliamentary papers, and writings by Asians themselves. This study has also benefited from the release in 1997 of the secret Indian Political Intelligence (IPI) records. Unfortunately, as an independent scholar, time and resources did not permit checking the holdings of many other repositories in Britain or the archives on the Indian sub-continent. Nonetheless, the mass of material uncovered has enabled me to trace the history of peoples from South Asia in Britain from 1600, when trading contact between Britain and India first began with the founding of the East India Company. An empirical study, the book examines the nature of Asian settlement, official attitudes to their migration, the varied reactions of the British people to their presence and the differing responses of the Asians themselves. It documents and analyses the economic, political, social and cultural lives of Asians in Britain largely through the experiences of various groups, individuals and their descendants, within the context of colonialism, race, gender and class. The record of their lives challenges accepted notions of migration and settlement patterns. The book also examines the anti-colonial struggle by Asians and their allies in Britain, Asian contributions to British society as well as their role in two world wars. A word about terminology: the terms ‘Asian’ and ‘Indian’ are used interchangeably to refer to the peoples of South Asia and their descendants, while ‘black’ describes both the peoples of African descent and more broadly, in a political sense, Africans, African-Caribbeans and Asians.
Much still remains to be researched and it is hoped that this new, expanded edition will re-awaken interest and stimulate further research to advance our knowledge of this important field of a little known aspect of British history and British identity.
Acknowledgements
I am much indebted to the curators and staff of the record offices, libraries and other repositories named in the bibliography who were invariably helpful and met my requests for information, photocopies, documents and books with courtesy and efficiency. My special thanks to Tim Thomas, Jill Geber and Tony Farrington at the OIOC for patiently answering all my queries and without whose help I would not have been able to locate some of the sources. I am most grateful to the several descendants for providing me with information, and giving me access to family papers and photographs: Shakun Banfield, George Chowdharay-Best, David Datta, Leena Dhingra, Anita Money, Jaya Nicholas, Sehri Saklatvala, Muriel Simpson and David Wilson; and Sqdn Ldr M.S. Pujji, DFC, for telling me about his RAF days. Many scholars, colleagues and friends who generously gave me information and references are specified in the notes. Many others kindly shared their knowledge with me and sustained me with encouragement and a