COLUMN: We are here because you were there

Published July 13, 2014
Claire Chambers teaches global literature at the University of York and is the author of British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers
Claire Chambers teaches global literature at the University of York and is the author of British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers

IN this column I explore the early migration history and literature of Britain’s largest religious minority, the Muslim community, which comprises approximately 2.7 million people or five per cent of the British population, according to the 2011 Census.

These numbers have risen dramatically since the 1960s, mostly due to the aftermath of empire and the postwar demand for manual labour. However, it’s important to recognise that Muslims have visited, lived and worked in Britain for hundreds of years. As Sukhdev Sandhu observes: “Blacks and Asians tend to be used in contemporary discourse as metaphors for newness. Op-ed columnists and state-of-the-nation chroniclers invoke them to show how Englishness has changed since the end of the war. That they had already been serving in the armed forces, stirring up controversy in Parliament, or helping to change the way that national identity is conceptualised, often goes unacknowledged.”

Right-wingers consistently erase the contributions of Muslims, Asians, Blacks and other Others from British history, portraying migrants in Britain as constituting an unwelcome postwar invasion. They nostalgically recall a mythical ‘Englishness’ which was apparently lost with the arrival of these strangers. By contrast, Black and Asian anti-racist protestors in the 1980s formulated the slogan “We are here because you were there,” showing that it is not so easy to separate ‘here’ and ‘there’ in this island nation with its long history of imperialism and exploitation.

Probably the earliest book-length account by a Muslim about experiences in Britain is Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin’s The Wonders of Vilayet: Being the Memoir, Originally in Persian, of a Visit to France and Britain in 1765, first published in 1780.

This travel book is many ways emblematic of the experiences and cultural production of these early Muslims to visit Britain. Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin (c. 1730-1800) was raised in Panchnoor, West Bengal, in a cultured Sayyid family whose members tended to work in administration and law. I’tesamuddin himself became a tax-collector and then a Munshi, a scholar of Persian at the imperial court. In the mid-18th century, as the East India Company and Robert Clive battled to establish their raj in India, there came an opportunity for I’tesamuddin to travel West. Evoking Allah, as he does at intervals throughout the volume, he departs for England.

I’tesamuddin makes an exciting six-month sea voyage to England via such countries as Mauritius, Cape Town and France. En route, he describes encounters with cannibals, Muslim converts, slaves, mermaids and flying fish. His ship eventually docks at Dover, where I’tesamuddin and others are detained because one of their fellow passengers has brought contraband fabrics into the country.

Despite this inauspicious start, I’tesamuddin is generous in his praise for what he often refers to as the “hat-wearing Firinghees” of “Vilayet”. He writes that Europeans have “attained astonishing mastery over the science of navigation” and that British women are “lovely as houris.” He is occasionally modest about his own abilities (“my life so far has gone by aimlessly, and so will what remains of it”), but more often self-satisfied, as when he claims to have taught the famous Orientalist William Jones much about India. About the various nations and cultures of the world, though, he is mostly even-handed and humanistic.

I’tesamuddin’s reception amongst the English is mixed: people have never seen an Indian wearing such opulent clothing because they are only used to poorly-dressed lascars, so there is much gawking. He is even expected to dance for a group which takes him to be a performer. However, in time he claims to receive “great kindness and hospitality” from the English and to be treated by many “as an old acquaintance.”

One of the most striking things about this book is the way I’tesamuddin constantly compares England to India, just as Nadeem Aslam’s later immigrant characters in Maps for Lost Lovers also translate northern England into subcontinental terms. For example, I’tesamuddin reaches for the right words to praise London and asserts, “Like Calcutta, it straddles a river that falls into the sea.”

A true tourist, he visits St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, and King George III’s palace. He describes the palace with a hauteur common to many upper-class Indians of the period, who compare British monuments, lifestyles and customs with their Indian equivalents and find them wanting. To him, it is “neither magnificent nor beautiful,” and could easily be mistaken for the house of “a merchant of Benares.” However, he concedes that friends say the palace’s interior design is splendid, telling him: “the suites of rooms and the chambers of the harem are painted an attractive verdigris.” Modern readers find it comically incongruous that he describes George III’s private quarters as his “harem” (he also memorably describes Oxford University as a “madrassah”).

Britain also has its depressing side, as I’tesamuddin finds himself shocked at the chasm separating rich and poor. He describes northern England as “a place where it is dark night for nine months of the year and broad daylight for the remaining three months” and where the ice crumbles “like so much papadom.” Similarly, in Scotland we are presented with now commonplace trope of the migrant’s first view of snow; I’tesamuddin describes it as being “like abeer, the powder Hindus sprinkle on each other at the Holi festival, only instead of being coloured it is a brilliant white.” With images of ice cracking like papadom and the snow as powdery as abeer, I’tesamuddin warms up the glacial British landscape with rich subcontinental similes.

At times he trains a quasi-anthropological gaze on local habits, discussing Vilayet’s class system and lack of social mobility, its custom of “love marriage,” or grams and pulses used in farming. One chapter, ‘On History and Religion,’ explores Muslims’, Jews’, and Christians’ views on halal, kosher or permissible food, and outlines the anti-Semitism rampant in Europe at the time. Similarly, whereas in many European nations a Muslim would be “instantly burnt at the stake” for openly practising his religion, he argues that the English are mercifully “free of such bigotry.” Yet he criticises the English for the scant importance they accord to religious observances: “Many of them regard prayer as optional.” This scepticism is an anathema to him: “Allah save us from such misguided ideas.”

What can we do with documents like this one, and to what extent is it possible to recover an authentic voice from I’tesamuddin’s text? This book and others like it by such travellers as Dean Mahomet and Mirza Abu Taleb Khan should not be taken as the authentic voice of Muslims in Britain at this time. They are the traces left behind by an elite with the power to inscribe themselves on history, not the majority working-class migrants also described in Rozina Visram’s wonderful book Ayahs, Lascars and Princes.

But that does not mean they are not revealing. In I’tesamuddin’s travel writing we witness both hostility and acts of kindness from the “host” community. The traveller’s backward gaze towards the home country infuses his descriptions of Vilayet with subcontinental imagery, producing something new. There is much that resonates here — not least the lack of comprehension between I’tesamuddin and Vilayathis on the matter of religion — with depiction of migrant writers of the late 20th and early 21st century.

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