Abstract
Similar to the Jewish experience, the Indian presence in London from the eighteenth century onwards was always one of uneasy equality. After all, the vast subcontinent might be home to untold millions of peasants but it was also home to extraordinarily wealthy and powerful princes with an infinitely rich culture and religious life. India not only provided the capital with cheap (but fashionable) cloth, new spices and foods and even the use of shampoo (brought by Sake Deen Mahomed during the 1820s), it also brought artists, religious sages and intellectuals who accounted for much of the small elite group who chose to make Britain their home or split their life between living in India and living in London.
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Notes
In Rosina Visram, Ayars, Lascars and Princes, Indians in Britain 1700–1947 (London: Pluto, 1983), p. 83.
Rosina Visram, For Soviet Britain (London: Communist Action Group, 1995), p. 4.
In Nigel Rile and Chris Power, Black Settlers in Britain 1555–1948 (London: Heinemann, 1981), p. 25.
Prince Hoare, Memoirs of Granville Sharp, vol. 2 (London: Henry Colburn, 1828), pp. 176–7.
Peter Fryer, Aspects of Black British History (London: Index, 1993), p. 28.
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© 2010 Clive Bloom
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Bloom, C. (2010). Alien Nation. In: Violent London. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289475_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289475_18
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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