metropolis.’54 By the 1860s, however, the efficacy of such schemes was being questioned. According to the historian Douglas Lorimer:
The British rarely found that their schemes for black advancement fulfilled their exaggerated expectations and, rather than question their own vision, they revived the question of the Negro’s racial inheritance and often found it wanting. [ … ] When this association between African descent and lowly social status became more firmly fixed, and was added to the latest suspicions and aversions produced by xenophobia and ethnocentrism, racial attitudes became more rigid and emotive in character, and a new inflexibility and contempt characterized English attitudes to the Negro.55
Few black students left accounts of their time in London. Indian students, however, did. Many of them came to the capital hungry with ambition and hoping to attain the qualifications required to join the Indian Civil Service or, indeed, any other serious profession. They studied medicine and engineering, but particularly law. As late as 1907 an India Office study estimated that 380 of the 700 Indian students in Britain resided in London and that 320 of these were based at the Inns of Court.56 They did not come just to pore over books. They had the scent of power in their nostrils. ‘As colonials living on the periphery of the empire Indians are naturally attracted to the metropolis,’ one student wrote. ‘The English are the ruling people in India and naturally ambitious Indian youth want to come to the centre of the life of these people, just as they used to go to Delhi in olden days.’57 Their behaviour attracted much adverse comment back home in India and helped to create a largely negative image of metropolitan culture. S. Satthianadhan claimed that
it is most imprudent to send young Indian lads to live in that great metropolis without proper friends to take care of them. I have known young men who have been leading the most reckless lives, squandering their money, and giving in easily to all the debasing temptations of the place, instead of making the best use of the opportunities as students.58
According to Behramji Malabari, the average Indian student in London ‘learns to smoke, drink, gamble, to bet, and to squander his substance in worse ways. The life “in apartments,” that he has often to accept, does not offer any relief from this round of vulgar dissipation.’59 In partial confirmation of this point, Mohandas Gandhi recounted in his Autobiography (1927) how he strove to become a gentleman while studying for the Bar between 1888 and 1891. He frittered away his money on expensive chimney hats and Bond Street evening suits as well as lessons in dancing and French.60 A fellow Indian who met him in Piccadilly Circus during this period dismissed him as ‘a nut, a masher, a blood – a student more interested in fashion and frivolities than in his studies’.61 Some English commentators, too, weren’t enamoured of Indians in London. C. Hamilton McGuiness barked: ‘It is positively nauseating to see them on the tops of buses, in the streets, at the theatres and almost everywhere one goes – coloured men and white women. These women have not the slightest idea of what grave risks they are running.’62 Elsewhere, landlords and housekeepers were routinely portrayed as grasping and exploitative whilst life in lodgings was held to be solitary and secluded.63
Such rhetoric contrasts sharply with that of Harriet Jacobs and William Wells Brown. They saw London as a uniquely moral and civilized city, a joyous corrective to the unremitting degradation they faced back home. Black English writers of the eighteenth century also envisioned London as a giant pillar of virtue. In contrast, a number of Indian travelogues reveal that it wasn’t only students who risked soul-pollution by living in London – even the most respectable gentlemen who journeyed there were thought to be vulnerable.
The first major travelogue was written by the Lucknow-born Mirza Abu Taleb Khan. He stayed in London during 1800 and 1801 during which time he was known as ‘The Persian Prince’. His book, published in 1814, began a tradition of wealthy or well-connected subcontinentals describing at considerable length their stays in the imperial metropolis. Their accounts varied in length: from the hundred pages of T.B. Pandian’s England To An Indian Eye (1897) to Khan’s three-volume opus. Some – such as Behramji Malabari’s The Indian Eye On English Life (1893) – focused almost exclusively on London. More commonly, as in T.N. Mukharji’s A Visit To Europe (1889), portraits of France, Germany and Italy were also included; these visits were the Indian equivalent of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour. Publication in diary form was common – Jehangeer Nowrojee and Hirjeebhoy Merwanjee’s Journal of a Residence of Two Years and A Half In Great Britain (1841) and K.C. Sen’s Diary In England (1894) are examples. Romesh Chunder Dutt’s Three Years In Europe (1896) was crammed with extracts from some of the many letters he’d sent to friends in India from England, whilst Malabari’s book was as much waspish social commentary as it was travelogue. Taken collectively their accounts challenge the widespread view that travel writing is synonymous with whiteness – echoed below by the Indian critic and novelist Pankaj Mishra.
It is worth remembering here that very few writers from India or the Caribbean have published travel books. This is probably so because while a novel can be written anywhere, the modern travel book is a primarily metropolitan genre: part of the knowledge that a powerful culture accumulates about its less privileged others or adversaries in the world. It is usually difficult to write one without the support of a trade publisher and there is also the problem of tone and perspective. The exuberant persona of, say, Bruce Chatwin is not easily worn by a writer from the colonies, no matter how anglicized he is; the certainties of the great power and the wealth of the West that protected Chatwin on his adventures are not available to him.64
The authors in this chapter were, to say the least, ‘respectable’. The Rajah of Kolhapoor was a descendant of Sivajee, founder of the Mahratta Empire; Bhagvat Sinh Jee was Thakore Saheb of Gondal; Bhawani Singh was Raj Rana Bahadur of Jhalawar; Malabari edited the Indian Spectator; Jhinda Ram was Pleader at the Chief Court of the Punjab; even the students Nowrojee and Merwanjee were, respectively, son and nephew of the master builder of the Honourable East India Company’s dockyard in Bombay. Such social standing distinguishes these writers from those discussed earlier. They weren’t dragged to London against their wishes; they didn’t flee there to escape slavery; unlike Wells Brown, they weren’t even required to tour the nation delivering Abolitionist broadsides. Nor did they require scholarships or subsidies: they paid for themselves and came here out of curiosity and in pursuit of pleasure.
Though they may not have encountered quite as much resistance back home as the students, still the impression abided: London was a moral abattoir. Gandhi’s family told him that the food was terrible there, that he was bound to turn to meat, cigars, drink and shameless dress.65 Ramakrishna delayed coming for forty years after his mother lamented that he would become ‘a “walking corpse”, a living dead body, a being socially and religiously lost to her, to our family and clan’.66 Crossing the Kálápani (the black waters) was thought to breed discontent. It also implied a rejection of caste, an embarrassment at one’s birthright. Some authors shared this fear that things would never be the same after leaving for England: T.N. Mukharji worried that, ‘The elders of the family on whose bosom I prattled in my infancy will shun me as an unclean thing’.67
This anxiety about London spoliating its visitors stems from the puritanical rigidity that characterizes the
