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More specifically, they could consult the glorious Hobson-Jobson Dictionary, a remarkable 1,000-page ‘glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms etymological, historical, geographical and discursive’ compiled by Colonel Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell in 1886, which provides testament to the enormous number of Indian words that have entered English.
India pale ale had originally been developed elsewhere, when the long sea voyage to India was found to greatly improve the taste of ‘stock’ beer – four to five months of being gently rocked by the ship and the gradual introduction of heat as the ship neared India resulting in great depth of flavour – but Bass marketed it brilliantly to the shopkeeper-and-clerk class, and in the process helped to transform the brewing industry and put Burton at its centre.5
The ‘Indian’ food in British curry houses is no such thing, rather a merging of dishes from different regions tweaked for a conservative British palate by mostly Bangladeshi chefs, but many of the staples of what is now our national cuisine – the pakoras, the samosas, the saag – are recognizably Punjabi.
‘More than a century after the Sepoy Revolt and almost a half century following independence, a significant proportion of the army of the Republic of India is still recruited along ethnic lines based on the Victorian theories of the martial races of India.
Or, to put it more simply, British empire not only explains why there are so many British Sikhs in Britain, it also explains the way we see ourselves (especially in relation to other Indian groups) and our continued survival as a community.
To read history as a series of events that instil pride and shame, or a balance of rights and wrongs, is as inane as listing the events in your own life as good and bad.
Britain’s invasion of Tibet in 1903 is rarely more than a footnote in the grand histories of British empire, but it is nevertheless gripping.1 Not least there was the sheer romance of the enterprise: at the time, little was known about Tibet, the only Himalayan state untouched by the British.
That brings us to another remarkable thing about Mahomed. In London, in 1809, he opened the first curry house in Britain. It was called the Hindostanee Coffee House but, as Fisher explains, it didn’t actually proffer coffee – it was instead an ‘eating house’ where Mahomed prepared ‘a range of meat and vegetable dishes with Indian spices served with seasoned rice’, which customers would consume while reclining on bamboo-cane sofas and chairs, under paintings of Indian landscapes.
Together, the men were members of a social elite known and mocked at the time as ‘nabobs’, a term derived from the Persian nawab, signifying officials in the Mughal court, but used in Britain to denote East India Company officials who had lived on the subcontinent, accumulated substantial fortunes and bought up English houses and seats in Parliament.
The ultimate defeat of the Sikh kingdom was achieved not on the battlefield after the Anglo-Sikh Wars but through the British tutoring of Duleep Singh, the last Maharajah of the Sikh empire.
As the former British Museum Director Neil MacGregor once put it: ‘What is very remarkable about German history as a whole is that the Germans use their history to think about the future, where the British tend to use their history to comfort themselves.’
Prime Minister Johnson would mark the start of Black History Month with a social media message celebrating notable black Britons and remarking that ‘all too often we often forget that Black history and British history are one and the same.’ But then he would criticize Black Lives Matter protestors (making the same argument), and insist he was a ‘huge admirer’ of Munira Mirza, the head of the Number 10 policy unit who has previously questioned the existence of institutional racism and hit out at a ‘culture of grievance’ among anti-racism campaigners.4
