CHAPTER I
The Voyage In

English social life is still English social life, and trying to enter it is like trying to enter a club.
Nirad C. Chaudhuri, A Passage to England (1972)

When Doctor Thorndike, the late-nineteenth-century forensic scientist and rival to Sherlock Holmes, walked at a leisurely pace along Upper Bedford Place, he observed that "the Asiatic and African faces that one sees at the windows of these Bloomsbury boarding-houses almost suggest an overflow from the ethnological galleries of the adjacent British Museum."1 Thorndike's casual observation is one among many traces of evidence testifying to the nature of the encounter between Victorian Britons and colonial peoples on British soil. It illustrates the ways in which that encounter, however impersonal and apparently nonchalant, was startling and could prompt English men and women to articulate some revealing presumptions. Here Doctor Thorndike, with all the detachment of a scientist, classified contemporary Africans and "Asiatics" as fit for exhibition: he could only imagine them behind glass, as curiosities overflowing from the storehouse of Britain's "national collection." And, as most museum-goers are encouraged to do, he evinced no interest in how these artifacts of British imperial rule got to Upper Bedford Place or what they might be doing there. As such they remained a decorative backdrop to the larger narrative—a micro-museum of "collectibles" in and of themselves—thereby ensuring for the reader that Bloomsbury, like the British Museum itself, would be

seen as "a storehouse of consumable goods that could be brought back to England" and as evidence of the aestheticizing influence of British colonialism at home.2

The people Thorndike saw at the window were most likely African, Caribbean, and South Asian men who had come to Britain seeking either employment or educational opportunities. Although colonial students tended to live all over London in the Victorian period and often moved from one lodging house to another during their educational course, Bloomsbury was as popular a location then as it is now because of its proximity to the British Library, the Inns of Court, and Temple Bar. The National Indian Association estimated in 1885 that there were upward of 16o Indian students at British universities; by 1910 the number was 700 and climbing.3 Looking back on his student days in England the Indian nationalist Surendranath Banerjea remembered a thriving "Indian colony" in London, while another contemporary recorded that "the Bar [was] thronged with native Barristers-at-law" in the late-Victorian period.4 Among the men who studied for the bar in fin de siècle London was Mohandas K. Gandhi, whose autobiography details his impressions of Britain, his encounters with the "natives," and his ongoing attempts to dress as an English man.5 Although this book focuses chiefly on Indians in the south of England, it is worth underscoring that candidates for the Indian Civil Service and other degrees from India took up not just the life of English students but also their vacation culture as well, traveling all over the British Isles between terms and recording their impressions of rural and provincial life in addition to their encounters with the urban West. Thus even as images of and commodities from India populated Victorian culture at home, Indians themselves were traversing English, Irish, Welsh, and Scottish landscapes, making their way into the most localized of metropolitan spaces, seeing and being seen by a variety of native Britons.

Before proceeding, I wish to make explicit the parameters of the kind of "voyage in" I am tracking in this chapter. First and foremost, I am concerned with the later nineteenth century, which for heuristic purposes I will periodize as 1880-1914. I do so in order to combat the presumption that if historians want to talk about people of color in Britain they must talk exclusively about post-1945 population displacement; I want to resist the notion, in other words, that the phenomenon of colonial "natives" in the metropole is a twentieth-century phenomenon from which the Victorian period can be hermetically sealed off. There is detailed historical work available—as well as more work yet to

be done—on colonial peoples, slave and free, who traveled to, lived, and worked in the United Kingdom in the centuries before the Empire Windrush brought immigrants and especially West Indian labor to Britain in a highly publicized wave of post-World War II emigration. According to Peter Fryer, "Black people—by whom I mean Africans and Asians and their descendants—have been living in Britain for close on 500 years."6 Folarin Shyllon puts it ever more bluntly: "[B]y the middle of the seventeenth century at least, a thriving black community had been established, and Britain ceased to be a white man's country."7

Despite recent monographic attention to the question, scholarship on the multiracial, multicultural makeup of Britain has yet to make its way into the grand narratives of British history.8 This disjuncture persists despite the fact that, as Kim Hall has argued, blacks were coming to the metropole and blackness was being consolidated as a cultural category at the very same moment that the term "Great Britain" was first being articulated in the early modern period.9 And yet English men and women of the modern era ("Britain's white natives," to borrow from Roger Ballard) could not have been totally unaware that people of color circulated in the metropole, at least in urban areas.10 With the triangular slave wade serving as the "spinal cord" of commercial capitalism, the traffic in slaves "was carried out before the full gaze of the public" into the early nineteenth century. People of color, slave and free, were everywhere to be seen on the streets, in the docks, and even on evangelical hustings, as the career of the mulatto Methodist minister Robert Wedderburn attests. Even when they were not actually present, images of slaves were everywhere inscribed—on the Liverpool Town Hall or in electoral placards and on all manner of ephemeral materials both before abolition and after. At the general election of 1831, "the abolitionists dragged Negroes to elections with golden chains and, where they could find no Negroes, chimney sweeps."11 Refugees from Madagascar, "native converts" from China and Malaya, "colored" visitors to the Great Exhibition, held in 1851, and the occasional tour of colonial royals represent some of the more spectacular evidence of colonial peoples that Britons might have witnessed before the 1870s.12 Nor was the figure of the metropolitan "black" limited to slaves or Africans. Well into mid-century and beyond, Britons would have been able to remember "when in the streets of London, Liverpool, Southampton and other ports, there was no more familiar spectacle than of Indian beggars, dancing and rapping their tom-toms under the windows," as one late-Victorian observer recalled. "Many were seamen, who had been robbed of their

wages in the purlieus of the docks," he remembered, while "others were brought from various lands by speculators, to be exhibited at shows and theaters, and then likewise turned adrift."13

If British historians are alert to the demographic effects of Victorian and pre-Victorian imperialism, they cite them rarely enough. Until quite recently, when Victorianists have addressed empire they have tended to construe it as a rather abstract phenomenon "out there"—to be recaptured either through analyses of English men's and women's travel writings or through the high political discourses of government proclamations and official policies. Empire has also been viewed as a sporadically manifest phenomenon "at home," embodied in eruptions like the Crimean War, the Mutiny or the Governor Eyre controversy—events that intruded on a domestic culture that is presumed to be otherwise oblivious to the fact of empire. Christine Bolt's pioneering monograph, Victorian Attitudes to Race, is one of the few comprehensive studies to examine how racial discourses shaped nineteenth-century British culture, even as it firmly locates those discourses as exterior to Britain proper. "During the middle years of the nineteenth century," she writes," 'race,' like 'civilization,' became one of the great catchwords of those Victorians who concerned themselves with events outside Britain."14 The work of Lorimer, Rich, Walvin, Shyllon, Fryer, Visram, Killingray, Tabili, Hall, McClintock, and others has been an important intervention in this regard, even while as a corpus of scholarship it remains as yet underutilized by historians concerned with plotting the "national" histories of modern Britain.15 When empire has had a face in domestic Victorian historiography, it has been that of the primitive and geographically distant savage or, even more telling, of the overburdened, cheerfully civilizing English man or woman who is equally far-removed from the comforts of "Home." Spatial remoteness—itself historically an indicator of backwardness and civilizability—has been a kind of unspoken requirement for defining an event, a discourse, or a physical site as properly "imperial" in Victorian culture. Despite the availability of primary evidence and secondary sources that point to the preoccupying presence of colonial peoples in nineteenth-century Britain, "the colonial encounter"—like empire itself—is presumed to have occurred out of sight, off-center, definitively "over there."16

The question of visibility inevitably raises the problem of numbers as well as of descriptors. In empirical terms, populations "of color" (a designation Kathleen Wilson argues was an eighteenth-century phrase) were both small and elusive of measurement in the Victorian period.17

Africans in the United Kingdom numbered 30,000 in the eighteenth century, though as Dorothy George remarked over fifty years ago, "their great number . . . has been little commented on."18 Statistics are hard to come by, and categories are even more slippery. Peter Fryer estimates that there were 10,000 "black people" in Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century; David Killingray puts the number of "Africans" at 4,540 in 1911 and 11,000 in 1951; Visram quotes sources testifying that there were almost 4,000 "lascars" alone in London in 1873-74—a figure that included Indians, Africans, Malaysians, Chinese, Arabs, Turks, and South Sea Islanders. Nor do these kinds of numbers necessarily account for diasporic movement.19 While statistics are scarce for the early nineteenth century, scholars agree that the 1850s witnessed a drop in numbers for the nonwhite community that rose again at the end of the century—a drop in keeping with the city's overall population decline in the 1860s and after.20 In comparative as well as in absolute terms the "black population"—by which is meant, after Fryer and others, Afro-Caribbeans, South Asians, and their descendants—was a minority. Clearly the racialized nomenclature used to define these groups itself prevents, or at the very least problematizes, a cultural reading of their presence because it forces us back to skin color as the determinant of "Otherness," when in fact some "whites" (the Irish, the Jews) occupied the same socioeconomic status and discursive position as migrants from the Caribbean, India, and "the East."21 Such facile categorizations also do little to account for the even more statistically elusive Eurasian population in Victorian Britain. Olive Christian Malvery, an Anglo-Indian Christian woman who captivated turn-of-the-century metropolitan audiences with her photojournalist investigations of the "dark" side of London life, has been recently "rediscovered" by James Winter and Judith R. Walkowitz. Like Ramabai, Sorabji, and Malabari, Malvery represents just one of the more spectacular, and in her case, mixed-race, "Britons" available for historians' scrutiny. Her canny manipulations of images of the Indian, the Jew, and the Cockney suggest how precarious these identity categories could be and how contingent their production was on recognition by an urban middle-class audience.22

The "voyage in" of Jewish and Irish immigrants, in addition to a variety of European nationals, Arabs, and Chinese toward the end of the century, meant that black Britons were one of many "non-English," "nonwhite" groups inhabiting the British Isles, with the vast majority of them living in cities. From Mayhew's "Hindoo tract sellers" to the "lascar's room" in Edwin Drood to the mysterious Indian jugglers in

Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, colonial figures crossed the Victorian field of vision, representing themselves in fiction, protoethnography, journalism, and a variety of more ephemeral locations.23 Late twentieth-century race relations experts, surveying the migration trends of five centuries, commented in 1970 that although a diversity of people had come to settle in Britain since the early modern period, "their variety pales to the sameness of a monochrome print when they are compared with the immigrants of the tropical Commonwealth who have arrived here in the last twenty years."24 The late twentieth-century "scopic feast" notwithstanding, there was a mosaic of communities in the British Isles well before the First World War. George Sims's Edwardian London provides incontrovertible textual and visual evidence that while they may have numbered only in the thousands, by the end of the nineteenth century immigrants to the United Kingdom had created a kaleidoscopic effect across the landscape that caught—and held—the metropolitan eye.25 By 1901, journalists referred to the "Indian and Colonial side of London" as part of a terrain routinely "inundated" by "representatives" from "the utmost frontiers of the Empire."26

There will be some for whom these demographics signify a negligible presence at best and, indeed, the relative statistical fewness of colonial "natives" in the metropole may help explain the historiographical invisibility of colonial encounters in Victorian Britain until the crop of work on "coloured minorities" appeared in the 1970s and 1980s. This brings me to my second point. For although I am not unmindful of population statistics, mine is not an argument about the ratio of white English to black Britons in the nineteenth century; nor is it contingent on the number of Africans or Indians that we can count as having lived in the British Isles before World War I. I am less interested in patterns of residence or even communities per se than I am in the fact of colonial peoples' travel to and movement through a variety of British landscapes in the Victorian period—what Paul Gilroy calls "traditions of ceaseless motion" that are particular to, though perhaps not exclusively identical with, the "black Atlantic" experience.27 I believe with Toni Morrison that the habit of ignoring the presence of even these continuously mobile colonial subjects in and across Britain may be "understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture" but that "it requires hard work" and "willed scholarly indifference" not to see nonwhite peoples on the Victorian landscape, however numerically few they may have been.28 For there is abundant evidence that they were eye everywhere—on street corners, in West End theaters and lodging houses, in traveling road shows and

exhibitions, in slums and working-class neighborhoods, in university lecture courses and medical school laboratories, speaking from public platforms and on the floor of the House of Commons. In all these spaces they encountered Britons who also encountered them, even if, as Ruth Frankenberg has observed, "the Other [has been] more palatable [when] confined within the white imaginary than in person."29 Taking notice of these encounters puts Edward Said's insights about the centrality of empire to work in the context of a "national" metropolitan history like Britain's, thereby challenging historians of western European modernity to face some of the limitations inherent in writing domestic histories as if empire had left no trace of itself in either human or commercial capital "at home." Said and those who dialogue with him are thereby compelled to acknowledge that the colonial periphery can be found at the metropolitan center not just contemporaneously but historically as well.30

My third and final preliminary point is this: while there has been a tremendous amount of work done on the Afro-Caribbean diaspora by an international congeries of scholars, less attention has been paid to the South Asian diaspora in historical terms. In fact, despite a growing body of work around this subject—both in terms of academic books and novels and shorter fiction—the concept of a "South Asian diaspora" has to compete for legitimacy in academic circles with the African and Jewish diasporas and has, by implication, to prove its own historical viability.31 One result of this phenomenon is that scholarly work on peoples of African descent in Britain has been carried on not only in isolation from the mainstream of British social and cultural history, but also without benefit of the insights to be gained by historical work on the Indian diaspora in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Historically as today, minorities in Britain have not necessarily been political allies, partly because of racism within communities of color and partly because of the ways in which the dominant culture depends on, and even requires, divisive stereotypes and intranational apartheid in order to exercise what hegemonies it does.32 One notable exception to this was the Indian-Irish alliance in parliamentary circles in the 1880s.33 Another wasé Mohammed Ali, a Pan-Africanist who endeavored to create ties with the Asian community and to forge Afro-Asian solidarity among displaced colonial peoples in imperial Britain in the decade before World War I and after its outbreak. Ian Duffield's work on Ali and on the communities surrounding the African Times and Orient Review in particular sug gests possibilities for alliances between a variety of "black Britons" that

have not for the most part been realized since. And there is some evidence to suggest that Indians in the Victorian period exhibited the same kind of racism toward Africans as "native" Britons did.34 Nonetheless, Indians did participate in the creation of a particular kind of diasporic corridor between South Asia and the Victorian metropole, compelling white Britons to meet them on equal ground in the motherland and to take them seriously as British imperial subjects instead of viewing them simply as the exotic objects of the domestic, civilizing gaze. As we shall see, Indians used their experiences in imperial Britain to strengthen their various personal and political commitments to professional advancement, to reform, and in some cases to Indian nationalism on the world stage. Neither the imperial cultural politics of daily life in the late-nineteenth-century metropole nor indeed the fate of the British Empire itself can properly be understood without reference to their presence in Britain at home in the Victorian period.

Although Ramabai, Malabari, and Sorabji were exceptional in many respects, they were part of a continuous stream of colonial travelers, students, and reformers who made their way to and through the British Isles in the nineteenth century. Indian students and Indian princes are among the colonial people most visible to historians of Victorian Britain because of the texts they left behind and the kinds of middle- and upper-class cultural spaces many of them traveled through. The arrivals and departures of well-heeled Indian visitors were regularly noted in the Indian Magazine andReview , the journal of the National Indian Association. Papers like the London Times and periodicals like the Illustrated London News and the Saturday Review gave regular attention to Indians resident in the United Kingdom and their activities. Indians of all castes, classes, religions, and ethnic communities had been a presence in the British Isles for a century and a half by the time Ramabai, Malabari, and Sorabji took up temporary residence in southeast England in the late-nineteenth century. Ayahs, lascars, and princes, students and reformers, politicians and maharanis—all traveled to the heart of the empire in the Victorian period. Some remained; others were just passing through. Still others—like seamen who jumped ship—were forcibly returned to India through the combined efforts of the India Office, elite Indians, and metropolitan reformers.35 Dadhabai Naoroji, known as "the Grand Old Man of India," was elected a member of Parliament for Central Finsbury in 1892. His election, together with that of M. Bhownaggree to the House of Commons in 1895, marked the high tide of Indians' visibility

at the national political level in late-Victorian Britain.36 In addition to these men in high places, there were other colonials in London with a different but equally revealing relationship to the corridors of power who caught the public eye. As Joseph Salter, a member of the London City Mission who took a special interest in the Indian poor at home, told his audience in 1873, "[W]ithin a short distance of the Houses of Parliament some twenty Asiatic vagrants are living."37

Salter continued to do work for the mission into the 1890s, recording the sites around the city where destitute and working-class Indians lived and chronicling the comings and goings of Indian elites like the Queen of Oude and the fate of dozens of lascars as well.38 Indian women were less frequent travelers to Britain than Indian men were, though some of the most famous Indian women of the nineteenth century—Pandita Ramabai, Cornelia Sorabji, Rukhmabai, and Sarojini Naidu, among others—came to England in the 1880s and 1890s in search of educational, professional, and reform opportunities. Sunity Devi, the Maharani of Cooch Behar and the daughter of Keshub Chunder Sen, was one of a number of dignitaries' wives who traveled to Britain for ceremonial occasions like the Queen's Jubilee celebrations.39 Wives of lascars and destitute Indian women are much less visible in traditional archives, but a variety of popular sources suggest that they too were scattered across the domestic, and perhaps especially the urban, landscape. Many seamen and presumably impoverished women too died of diseases contracted during the passage to Britain, of cold and starvation on the docks and on the streets of London, or else by violence in the byways of the city. Salter's two treatises, The Asiatic in England and The East in the West, provide evidence that for every Indian who ended up on the floor of the House of Commons or returned to India as a barrister there were several at least who either died or lived out their lives in poverty in the urban neighborhoods of Btitain's port cities.40 Indian beggars were also a common sight on the streets of Victorian London, and "colonial na-fives" were to be observed as woodworkers, dancers, "villagers," and visitors in 1886, when the Indian and Colonial Exhibition made a huge and successful spectacle of empire in the capital city.41

It is worth emphasizing that the flow of Indians to England and back again was just one dimension of diasporic movement out of South Asia into the rest of the world and that not all Indians who came to Britain did so out of unconstrained choice. The end of slavery and the Africa slave trade in the 1830s provoked a crisis of labor in British colonies, and efforts to recruit workers were directed toward India; in addition to

settling in the United Kingdom, Indians ended up in the West Indies, South Africa, Fiji, Burma, and elsewhere, often as indentured workers. The ostensibly "free" labor they provided served the postemancipation imperial economy extremely well, guaranteeing as it did that the production of colonial commodities could continue uninterrupted and that the myth of Britain's leadership in fostering economic progress through the mobilization of a "self"-governing "colored" workforce would be consolidated in new historical forms.42 In fact the problem of Indians abroad was an important topic for the early Indian National Congress, as for example when the British government tried to regulate labor practices or, as in the 1890s, to oust "free" Indians through literacy tests because they were threatening the commercial viability of white traders in South Africa.43 Gandhi's own formative experiences and his agitation on behalf of expatriate Indians there is powerful evidence of the far-reaching political impact of South Asians in diaspora worldwide. As Hugh Tinker has observed, Indians have always been a "people on the move." Even in India itself, "population mobility was inherent in the social order and the peasantry lived in a state of flux." The great diversity of motives and circumstances that have prompted this diaspora notwithstanding, Western stereotypes have emphasized Indian emigrants as impoverished laborers—with Gandhi himself typically referred to as "the Coolie lawyer."44

Determining with certainty how Britons, in all their social complexity and variation, received Indians who crossed their paths in the United Kingdom is a difficult proposition. A Times correspondent reporting on the visit of a Muslim dignitary in May of 1884 remarked that "the individuality of a Asiatic makes but little impression on the mind of a European observer, who is apt to consider him as a type of his race and creed, and not as a man with some personal qualifies and feelings which make him different from his neighbors."45 As Kim Hall has observed with regard to Africans in Jacobean England, "[T]he status of black people as curiosities or oddities meant that they were considered both as individual 'cases' and as emblematic of a larger group."46 How interchangeable one "Asiatic" might be with another in early Victorian Britain may be evidenced from reports that when Rammohun Roy, the Indian theist who visited England in the late 1820s, appeared on the streets of London, he was greeted by cries of "Tippoo! Tippoo!" For English people well versed in the history of British conquest in India, Tipu Sultan—a powerful late-eighteenth-century Indian leader based in Mysore who repeatedly tried to thwart British attempts to consolidate

colonial rule under Cornwallis and Wellesley—was perhaps the most recognizable embodiment of an Indian man they could conjure.47 In fact, Roy's impact on public perceptions of India and Indian people was ultimately enormous, in part because he died while in Britain and was buried at Stapleton Grove near Bristol. That he was a theist and was willing and able to converse with contemporary English evangelicals about the possibilities of reconciling Hinduism and Christianity made him all the more celebrated as a martyr to Indian reform among a certain segment of the British public. One reviewer of his memoirs described him as "a vigorous opponent of Hindu superstition" and "a subtle disputant with Christian ministers"—two qualifies that led to some interesting encounters with English men and women.48

While in London, Roy was the guest of families living in Bedford Square and Regent Street, and he met a wide variety of people at dinner parties and At Homes given in his honor.49 After his death, Mary Carpenter, who had hosted him in Bristol and was present at his death, organized a volume of memoirs to commemorate his passing as well as his impact on the English people he encountered. Matthew Hill recalled as follows: "I only met the Rajah Rammohun Roy once in my life. It was at a dinner party given by Dr. Arnott. One of the guests was Robert Owen, who evinced a strong desire to bring the Rajah over to his socialistic opinions. He persevered with great earnestness; but the Rajah, who seemed well acquainted with the subject, and who spoke our language in marvelous perfection, answered his arguments with consummate skill, until Robert somewhat lost his temper, a very rare occurrence which I had never witnessed before. The defeat of the kind-hearted philanthropist was accomplished with great suavity on the part of his opponent."50 English women who met Roy "in public" were often eager to do so because they believed that he was either on the verge of converting to Christianity or that he all but embraced it. Religion prodded a respectable cover for the kind of social intercourse with a man of color on British soil that would have been otherwise unthinkable at the time and, for that matter, for some years to come in India.51 The following anecdote, supplied by an unnamed "estimable lady," gives some inkling of the sensation Roy caused "in society," not just to those women who spoke with him but to those who observed such exchanges as well.

At a small evening party at my house in Grenville Street, [organized] principally to meet the Rajah, he referred to the doctrine of original sin, in a

way that startled a lady of low church, a very charming and amiable woman, who had brought her daughter. "But surely, sir," she exclaimed, "you don't believe in original sin?" He looked at her, and she blushed deeply. After a minute, he seemed to comprehend the whole, and very gently inclining, he said, "I believe it is a doctrine, which, in many well-regulated minds has tended to promote humility, the first of Christian virtues; for my own part, I have never been able to see evidence of it."

The next morning my sweet friend called to apologise for what she said, and added that she had never seen or heard anything so beautiful as this in society.52

Whether on the city streets of London when taken for "Tippoo" or in the more privatized space of the London drawing room, Roy was made into something of a spectacle by onlookers, many of whom were invested in representing him as a "manly figure," not to be confused with the portly "Baboos who babble." One contemporary, who left an account of Roy's sojourn in Britain, assured readers that "in the prime of manhood his figure was beyond the common height, and was stout and muscular in proportion."53 The traditionally Western feminine qualities of "gentleness" and "sweetness" through which he was constructed by middle-class English women legitimated their interactions with him at the same time that it enabled them to feel a part of the British civilizing mission. "Who knows," wrote one of Mary Carpenter's correspondents, "but this man may be one of the many instruments by which God, in his mysterious providence, may accomplish the overthrow of idolatry?"54 As the above passage indicates, Roy was no pawn in these imperial parlor games. While he pursued discussions about the relationship of Christianity to Hinduism both in private and in the public forums of the British periodical press, he steadfastly, if politely, resisted attempts to brand him as a convert—and no doubt vexed many acquaintances by proffering the view that "Jesus was an oriental."55 He attended several different Unitarian chapels, but as one observer remarked, "it was his system to avoid . . . identifying himself with any religious body." And he remained until his death puzzled and somewhat bemused by his own popularity in Britain. "I must confess I have done very little to entitle me to your . . . admiration of my conduct," he told a Unitarian meeting in 1831. "What have I done?—I do not know what I have done!—If I have ever rendered you any services they must be very trifling—very trifling I am sure."56

As with a number of Indians visiting Britain in the Victorian period, Roy was made into a celebrity by well-meaning Britons interested in

shaping his work, his image, and above all his Indianness to their own ends. Despite the fact that he had traveled to the United Kingdom as a political observer and consultant—he was interested in the Reform Bill and had business with the East India Company—he was lionized as "the Apostle of the East" and cast before the public primarily if not exclusively as a religious reformer.57 His commentaries questioning the Shastric origins of sati were used to transform him into an authority on social questions and, posthumously, to justify, English women's intervention in women's condition in India.58 The celebrity that British social and political reformers afforded him in Britain, and particularly his ties with Mary Carpenter, helped attract Indians to Britain, not least because he was buried near her Red Lodge home in Bristol. His mausoleum was an important pilgrimage site for Indians in the nineteenth century, and few who came to Britain to study did not make the journey to pay their respects. More often than not in the 1860s and 1870s they also visited Mary Carpenter and were thus drawn into the ever-growing circle of social reformers and feminists in Britain interested in and organizationally committed to Indian reform.59

It would be an exaggeration to say that Roy alone precipitated or even prompted the flow of Indians to Britain. But the publicity given to his visit in Britain and in turn in India made travel to the British Isles a mark of progressive social commitment and reform leadership—especially for a certain class of Indian men. In the 1870s, Roy's image as the quintessentially cosmopolitan Indian was briefly overshadowed for the next generation of metropolitan social reformers by Keshub Chunder Sen, who toured the British Isles in 1870. Like Roy before him, Keshub Chunder Sen was a theist who had been instrumental in the formation of the Brahmo Samaj, a reformist Hindu organization in Bengal. Brahmoism has been described as a "halfway house" between Christianity and Hinduism. Its members were theists who opposed idol worship and believed that "personal religious adaptation and wider social reform could take place within the embrace of Hindu tradition."60 The Brahmo Covenant established by Debendranath Tagore in 1845, with its call for the worship of a Supreme Being and the doing of good works, would seem to ratify this definition, though the split between Tagore and Keshub Chunder Sen over doctrinal issues as well as the ramifications of conversion for caste status suggests how contested it could be.61 Why Keshub decided to visit England in the first place is not entirely certain. His seven-month sojourn (March to September) followed on the heels of his rise to prominence as the leader of the Brahmo Samaj.

The consolidation of a variety of smaller sects he carried out under its umbrella in the 1860s came at the expense of old friendships and some supporters in Bengal, and he may have felt the need to escape organizational and sectarian-political pressures for a while. He told Frances Power Cobbe that he wished "to study the social institutions and customs of the country" and to spread "knowledge of the social and moral condition of India" among Britons.62 In any event, Keshub Chunder Sen's trip was a tremendous success insofar as publicity was concerned, and it confirmed in the minds of many Britons the possibility that there was great scope for English social reform schemes in India.

"English cities sometimes take strange fancies to . . . certain individuals for a season, and London specially suffers from such fits of sporadic hero-worship. . . [Keshub Chunder Sen] became the rage of the day. There was no newspaper that did not chronicle his doings, and there was no English town to which his fame did not spread." So wrote Pratap Chandra Majumdar, a young disciple of Keshub Chunder Sen's who was one of several attendants to accompany him on his first and only trip to Britain.63 As Keshub's biographer, Majumdar was invested in proclaiming the success of the trip. And yet it would be difficult even now to gainsay the accuracy of his account. Sen was mobbed by an English public for whom the memory of Roy was fading and the cause of India was becoming extraordinarily popular—due in part to the publication of Mary Carpenter's Six Months in India, which narrated her first trip to the subcontinent in two volumes. In it she described what she viewed as the lamentable condition of women's and gifts' education and called for English women especially to throw themselves into the work of colonial reform.64 Keshub's diary records the whirlwind of visits, talks, dinners, services, and tea parties he attended not just in London but all over the United Kingdom. He was so busy and so exhausted by all the demands made on him by an eager British public that he had a break-down two months after arriving.65 Given Roy's fate under similar circumstances he could not but be alarmed and after his collapse he undertook a more measured routine.66

Like his celebrated countryman before him, Keshub Chunder Sen was introduced to a variety of prominent English men and women from all walks of life. He met with Lord Lawrence, the former viceroy, conversed with John Stuart Mill, and was presented to the Queen at Osborne. He visited Frances Power Cobbe, a well-known theist and women's rights supporter who commented that he was the only Indian she knew "who could enjoy a joke thoroughly, like one of ourselves."67 He mixed socially

with Max Muller, the orientalist at Oxford, met the historian J. R. Seeley, breakfasted with William Gladstone, attended soirees organized by Elizabeth Adelaide Manning, and participated in a Female Reform Society meeting where Millicent Fawcett, John Bright, and Harriet Taylor were all in attendance.68 For recreation he watched the university boat races, toured Westminster Abbey, and sampled the paintings at the Royal Academy of Arts. In addition to the social whirl, Keshub gave literally dozens of talks at Unitarian chapels, temperance societies, city halls, theistic and philosophical societies, and private meetings all over England and Scotland, many of which have been reprinted with his diary by The Writers' Workshop in India. These documents, together with contemporary newspaper accounts of his visit, lend credence to both Meredith Borthwick's estimate that Keshub Chunder Sen was seen by as many as forty thousand Britons and Max Mullets claim that he was a "household name" in Victorian Britain.69

Keshub's popularity among the British bordered on obsession, and this tells us something about how ready a certain stratum of English people was to recast what they "saw" in Keshub Chunder Sen according to their own scruples and prejudices. His eating habits (he was a vegetarian) were such a source of fascination that the Reverend Robert Spears of the Foreign Unitarian Association "drew up a routine of his daily habits which were published in handbills" and circulated all over the south of England.70 Newspapers reported on his lectures, tours, and receptions, and not always in flattering terms, as Punoh's sarcastic little ditty "Baboo Kcshub Chunder Sen" testifies. "Have you heard—if so where and when—/ of Baboo Keshub Chunder Sen? / The name surpasses human ken—/ Baboo Keshub Chunder Sen! / Big as an ox, or small as wren / . . . Let's beard this 'lion' in his den. / So come to tea and muffins, then, / With Baboo Keshub Chunder Sen."71 Commentators routinely dwelled on his physical appearance, which the Pall Mall Budget reported as "striking." He had, the author continued, "a certain quiet dignity, in harmony with the simplicity of his dress and the absence of any formal gesticulation. His features are well cut, and combine a certain sweetness with an expression of marked decision."72 This was very much in keeping with the tensions inherent in descriptions of Roy some forty years earlier: there is a process of effeminizing going on here that was apparently necessary to reconcile Keshub's Indian "simplicity" with his reformist intellect and his appeal to British women. Sen was lionized by the latter, many of whom commented on his physical appeal. Frances Power Cobbe, for example, thought he was "the ideal of a great

teacher." "He had a tall, manly figure, always clothed in a black robe of some light cloth like French soutane, a very handsome square face with [a] powerful jaw; the complexion and eyes of a Southern Italian; and all the Eastern gentle dignity of manner."73 Cobbe also commented on how well he and Majumdar spoke English; Keshub in particular spoke "without error of any kind, or a single betrayal of foreign accent." Although the Unitarian chapels would appear to have been chiefly responsible for his wide circulation around London, in her autobiography Cobbe recalls that it was she who "gathered many influential men to meet him and they were impressed by him as much as I was."74

Keshub, for his part, professed to be as baffled as Roy had been by the attention, especially from "the ladies." "Is it because they are more kind and hospitable to strangers or are they more hearty in their sympathy with Theists?" he wondered in his diary. By no means were all of his encounters with women easy ones. In the middle of April he recorded receiving a letter from a Mrs. Bevan, whom he had never met, "saying she had something very important to communicate to me and that she would be very glad to see me at lunch someday. . .. With great curiosity I drive down to see her. But how bitter and sad is my disappointment when I find that after giving me a somewhat cold reception she begins to preach and catechises me as to what my difficulties are in accepting Christ in an orthodox way. It shows her warm and firm faith indeed, but to me it is anything but agreeable after the trouble and expense incurred in coming all this way."75

His dealings with Mary Carpenter were even more discomfiting. Although he did not record any of it in his England diary, Keshub Chunder Sen's attendant Majumdar gave the following account of what he witnessed his master experiencing at Carpenter's home in Bristol: "[She] took in hand her oriental guest most completely and, with her well-known discipline, gave him incessant direction about the usages and etiquettes of English society. Her restless spirit of reform criticised his dress, his diet, even the manner of combing his hair; in fact she hemmed him in with so many warnings, injunctions and engagements that the mild Hindu reformer felt inconveniently straitened. We are afraid Miss Carpenter at times found Keshub an intractable pupil, and in the end something like a coolness sprang up between them, but Keshub bravely pulled through the crisis at Red Lodge."76 Keshub proved intractable in matters other than his personal grooming habits. He resisted embracing Christianity "in an orthodox way," and while he preached extensively in chapels, on Sundays, on subjects like "God Is Love," "Whom Have I in

Heaven but Thee" and "Christ and Christianity," he rejected all attempts at proselytizing and finally (possibly because of other unrecorded instances like his tea with Mrs. Bevan) decried many of the tenets and cultural forms of British Christianity at his lecture for the Swedenborg Society in June.77

What's more, although he approved of English women's schemes to help Indian women's education and suggested that Carpenter found what was to become the National Indian Association for this purpose, Keshub Chunder Sen was not as supportive of women's rights issues as some in Britain might have hoped. These expectations were in any event somewhat misplaced, since although he had supported widow remarriage as part of the Brahmo program, he had not declared himself in favor of women's emancipation before coming to Britain. His biographer, Meredith Borthwick, argues that he believed in women's equal access to religion but never saw emancipation as an end in itself.78 At his lecture "Female Education in India," given in conjunction with the East India Association at the Society of Fine Arts in London in May of 1870, Keshub Chunder Sen condemned child marriage as "pernicious" and recommended zenana (secluded, single-sex) instruction for Indian women. This in itself was not at odds with what English women envisioned for Indian girls, but Sen's later reversal on child marriage was. At least one of his English female correspondents, Sophia Dobson Collett, broke with him when he allowed his underage daughter Sunity to be married to the Maharaja of Cooch Behar—this, after he had helped to ensure the passage of the Native Marriage Bill in 1872, which conferred legality on Brahmo marriages, set an age minimum of sixteen for boys and fourteen for girls, and sanctioned both intercaste marriage and widow remarriage.79 Sen, for his part, was undaunted by what his English friends thought of him. In his last public address in Southampton in the fall of 1870 he declared to the listening crowd that "as I came here an Indian, I go back a confirmed Indian . . . [F]arewell, dear England; with all thy faults, I love thee still."80

Keshub's position on his daughter's early marriage effectively retarded the momentum his reputation had gained after over half a year in England. It was "the most controversial event" in the history of the Brahmo Samaj as well, and Sen's reputation in India never really recovered from it either.81 Although he and Roy were conventionally paired in British imperial discourse as models of progressive Indian manhood and social reform leadership, Roy underwent something of a revival as a cult figure and a model in Britain in the aftermath of the Cooch Behar controversy.

By the 1880s he was being compared not just to Keshub Chunder Sen but to a new generation of Indian men coming to Britain in greater numbers to plead the case of Indian nationalism before the British public. The Saturday Review held Roy up as an exemplary figure in 1888—calling him a masterful orator and a dispassionate advocate of reform and change—in explicit contrast to the "Bhoses and Ghoses," who were nothing but "bombastic," "turgid," and capable of repeating nothing but "stale arguments" from public platforms.82 The markedly hostile response that the British press exhibited toward these later reformers is something I will return to. For now it bears reiterating how foundational the images that the British constructed of Roy and to a lesser degree of Keshub Chunder Sen remained to notions of what an Indian gentleman should look like and how he should behave in the imperial metropole—and how crucial these images were in shaping a variety of other colonial encounters in Victorian Britain.

The Victorian, and particularly the London public's, preoccupation with Rammohun Roy and Keshub Chunder Sen, as significant as it was, should not prevent us from seeing how far beyond the capital city these men traveled, or that there were other Indians, mostly men and some women, who made their way across the British landscape and hence were there to be seen and observed by native Britons. As I have noted, both Brahmos not only toured England but traveled all over the British Isles. Although most Indians who came to the United Kingdom had business of one kind or another in London, they often combined school-work or official duties with more leisurely tours of the countryside. Two naval architects from Bombay, Jehangeer Nowrojee and Hirjeebhoy Merwanjee, lived and worked for two years in England between 1839 and 1841 and are good examples of how mobile colonial natives in Britain could be. Their almost five hundred-page journal details the hundreds of places they went in and around London and beyond—from Madame Tussaud's to Windsor Castle to Maidstone to Bristol to Gloucester to Glasgow. Everywhere they went they drew crowds of local people, large and small, eager to catch a glimpse of them and their retinue of three servants. When they arrived at London Bridge "an immense number of persons flocked round us to view our costumes . . . [We] five persons in the Parsee costume collected quite a mob . . . [W]e think a thousand persons congregated."83 They may have overestimated the number, but they also repeatedly testified that people gathered as they traveled, and not always unobtrusively. On one occasion people called out to ask them whether they were Chinese, Spanish, or Turkish.

The two men did not record an explicit objection to this, but they understood that they were being scrutinized and exoticized. On their visit to the Zoological Gardens, they remarked that they attracted "a very great number around us for the peculiarity of our dress, and we were objects of very great curiosity to the visitors—as much so perhaps as the winged and four footed animals of the place."84 Even in small towns they were mobbed by curiosity-seekers: "[In] all the little places through which we passed, poured forth nearly their whole population to gaze upon us in our foreign costume." So great were the numbers in one town that Nowrojee and Merwanjee had trouble getting back into their carriage.85

It might well be argued that country people traveling to London or city folk walking Victorian English country lanes would have attracted as much attention as Indians in either place. Like the more famous Roy and Sen, the Bombay architects were nonetheless made a spectacle of in the streets—an experience that prompted them to comment on the apparent precariousness of British imperial power. As if to dwarf the imperial metropole in return, they observed in passing that "we thought it a great wonder that such a small and insignificant speck as England appears [to be] on the map of the world, can . . . attract so many nations . . . to her."86 Remarking on and grappling with the experience of being made a spectacle of in the imperial metropole was in fact one of the chief preoccupations of Indians writing about their experiences in Victorian Britain. Indeed, there is hardly an account written in English by an eastern traveler to England in the nineteenth century that does not mention the public scrutiny to which Indians were subject, due mostly, they believed, to their "Oriental" clothing but also to their "dark" visages in a sea of white faces.87 Some, like the Persian dignitaries visiting Bath in the 1830s, surely exaggerated when they claimed that "over ten thousand men and women" gathered outside the window of the house they were staying in. Such hyperbole was no doubt designed to convey that oppressive sense of being watched which other colonial travelers would echo down the century. What began as amusement ended in annoyance, and they were "obliged to leave the windows and conceal our caps."88 Lesser personages did not perhaps attract the same kind of attention, but walking about unhindered by an obtrusive public gaze was difficult even for the average Indian traveler. Behramji Malabari, whose Indian Eye on English Life was published in 1893, was accosted by "street arabs" and well-meaning English ladies wanting to take his photograph. Nor was he alone in believing that on several occasions he was the object of

solicitation from streetwalkers—or that he had been singled out because he "looked" Indian.89 If Indian men were subject to commodification and aggressive consumption as they walked the streets of the mother country, the relatively few Indian women who aspired to be flaneurs experienced the constraints imposed on them by the simultaneous burden of being female and colonial in public. As Cornelia Sorabji, who studied at Oxford in the 1880s, recalled in her autobiography, she was stopped on the street by a passerby who, unsolicited, exclaimed that she looked "so very heathen."90 Negotiating what Michael Levenson calls the many "interior spaces" of urban life produced its own kind of spectacle as well.91 T. N. Mukharji, who came to London in an official capacity for the Indian and Colonial Exhibition in 1886, recounted what a stir he caused by sitting down to eat in one of the refreshment areas inside the exhibition hall. He was particularly aware of the curiosity of one family, who spent the better part of ten minutes pointing to and whispering about him, until the father finally approached and engaged him in conversation about the Indian wares on display. He obliged, and even pulled up a chair to sit with them. But he was not unaware of the spectacular effects of this rather intimate, albeit public, colonial encounter. "I went on chattering for a quarter of an hour," he reported, furnishing the daughter of the family "with sufficient means . . . to brag among her less fortunate relations for six months to come of her having actually seen and talked to a genuine 'Blackie.'"92

The fact that the culture and artifacts of India were everywhere on display—both formally and informally—throughout Britain in the Victorian period shaped the social and cultural terrain through which Indian travelers walked and complicated the terms upon which they were obliged to negotiate their own spectacularity in the eyes of native Britons. Dr. Thorndike's casual observation, quoted at the beginning of the chapter, suggests some of the stereotypical representations produced at the intersection of commodity capitalism, museum culture, and imperialism at home with which Indians in the metropole had to reckon. The Great Exhibition of 1851, which displayed the raw materials and the wares of Britain's most celebrated "possession," also brought a number of colonial people under the gaze of the British public.93 As Annie Coombes has so skillfully demonstrated, by the end of the century a wide spectrum of the British public was quite used to consuming colonial Others in exactly the same fashion; for many who had been school children in the 1890s and after, to do so was a regular and unremarkable feature of school outings and later of childhood memory.94 In addition

to the British Museum, there was the Museum at South Kensington, which by the 1870s housed a celebrated collection of Indian artifacts, some belonging to the former East India Company, some the leftovers from the 1851 exhibition; Madame Tussaud's, which had displays of the Indian Mutiny and a variety of Indian princes in wax; and finally, the Indian and Colonial Exhibition, whose lavish Jeypore, Bombay, Punjab, and other Indian courts drew over five million visitors in the several months it was open to the public.95 Indians traveling to Britain in the late-Victorian period made the rounds to these sites as well as to other more ephemeral exhibitions.

Their reactions to "India on display" varied from nonchalance to bemusement to sadness and satire. Rakhal Haldar Das, who studied at University College, London, in the early 1860s and later became a civil servant in Bengal, recorded his disappointment with the India Museum (in South Kensington): "It was painful to see the state chair of gold of the late Lion of the Punjab with a mere picture upon it; shawls without Babus; musical instruments without a Hindu player; jezails and swords without sipahis and sawars . . . and above all, hookahs without the fume of fantastic shapes!"96 Where Thorndike smirked at the spillover of colonial "collectibles" into London streets, Das mourned the absence of "real" Indians and hence, for him, the fundamental inauthenticity of Western curatorial inventions of "the Indian way of life." His lament might be read as a contestation of what Donna Haraway calls "the effective truth of manhood, the state conferred on the visitor who effectively passes through the trial of the Museum." In this case, Das seems to be challenging the possibility that the colonial body could successfully be (re)produced or made permanent through exhibition.97 That Das visited the exhibit six or seven times in the course of his year and a half in Britain gives some indication of the contradictory responses temporary exile at the heart of the empire could evoke.98 P. J. Ragaviah professed to be frightened by what she saw of the Indian Mutiny in Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors: "[T]he illustration is so very exact that I thought I was on the battlefield, and so did not stay long for fear of swooning." Significantly, she did not record the slaughter scenes but claimed that all that she could recall in the end was the rather noble figure of the Nana, "whose model is placed in a sitting posture, of pale dark colour, with a brahminical thread across his shoulder."99

Such organized spectacles were not, in other words, passively consumed. R. C. Dutt, for example, thought that the Indian and Colonial Exhibition proved that "backward as India is in machinery and in prac-

tical and useful products, her ancient arts, her exquisite workmanship in gold, silver and ivory, and her fabrics of fine texture and unsurpassed beauty, are still the wonder of the modern world, and were the themes of unbounded admiration among hundreds of thousands of English ladies who visited these Courts."100 Spectacles like the exhibition of 1886 were quite purposefully reproduced by Indian observers both as critiques of how the British saw India as well as evidence of Indians' capacity to consume British (imperial) culture like any other "native" Britons. At times the didacticism of museum display worked in interesting ways. Nowhere was this more powerfully evident than at the British Museum, which Inderpal Grewal has aptly termed "an embodiment of aesthetic classifications."101 Jhinda Ram waxed eloquent about the Egyptian galleries in the British Museum in his 1893 travelogue, My Trip to Europe, identifying apparently quite effortlessly with the orientalist readings of Egypt as a classical but finally primitive culture ripe for collection at the imperial center.102 Differentiating India as not just any colony but a special and culturally superior British possession was constitutive of the late-Victorian exhibitionary impulse, and it was a message appreciated by a number of Indian visitors to Britain.103 Even so, such distinctions were neither uniform nor predictable: India was at times displayed in "ethnological galleries" alongside African materials, and "West" Indian performers could be read by naive Britons as "South Asian" Indians, as Mukharji discovered to his distress when talking to some English visitors to the 1886 Exhibition.104 He did his best to disabuse them of this misapprehension, thus revealing his own investments in appearing as a certain kind of colonial person: closer to a citizen perhaps than to a subject, if citizenship meant the capacity to distinguish a subject from an object—the capacity, that is, to recognize and to appreciate the "real" colonial.

It could be argued that Indians exhibited aspirations to both Englishness and British citizenship by embarking on a kind of Grand Tour and producing narratives of that tour for consumption at home in India. Significantly, a number of the travelogues written in the 1880s and after were entitled some variation of "My Trip to Europe," of which an account of Britain might be proportionally the largest part, with the majority of that in turn devoted to London. The resulting guidebooks were written to be of general use to Indian travelers and students and, one has the impression, to satisfy a middle-class, English-educated or-speaking Indian public eager to devour a commodified Britain as armchair tourists as well. Westminster Abbey, Saint Paul's, the Inns of Court,

Buckingham Palace—all these attractions were displayed in fairly formulaic terms, with appropriate digests of English history rehearsed in order to contextualize in both space and time the map of London that inevitably emerged. As Jhinda Ram wrote enthusiastically of London, the entire city was a "living museum."105 If this is a return of the imperial gaze, an objectification of the imperial metropole in response to the kinds of relentless scrutiny to which Indians were subject in Britain in public, it is also of course a shrewd and canny advertisement for the consumability of Britain by an Indian reading public. Given the fact that crossing the ocean threatened to violate caste proscriptions, the proliferation of guidebooks and similar texts suggests the secularization of a certain stratum of Hindu society that orthodox reformers in India feared; their end-of-century rhetoric may even have been in part a response to this phenomenon. The popularity of such productions may in any event be gauged by a remark made by R. C. Dutt in the preface to his 1890 book, Three Tears in Europe. His publisher had been pressing him for a long time "to bring out my travels to Europe," but he had been skeptical. "'It is an old story now,' I said, 'many of my countrymen have waveled in Europe, and all know about Europe.' 'It may be an old story,' [the publisher] rejoined, 'but [it is] none the less interesting to us.'"106

The 1886 exhibition undoubtedly helped to galvanize this literature. It was advertised in the Bombay Gazette as well as in other Anglo-Indian newspapers in India from the moment of its inception in 1884 until its dismantling in the fall of 1886. Thomas Cook and Sons offered special tours from India designed to reassure Indians worried about fulfilling caste requirements on the sea voyage over, and a number of Indian men wrote travelogues occasioned by their visit in 1886 which had originated as columns in Indian newspapers about their experiences.107 The exhibition also provided a spectacular opportunity for a number of Indians to articulate their relationships to empire and, most important, to engage that overdetermined signifier of civilization, English culture. Eighteen eighty-six was crucial, therefore, not just because it displayed so much Indian cultural material, and not simply because it brought so many Indian and other colonial visitors to London, but because it provided an opportunity for Indian men to reveal the failure of the will to imperial power intended by the exhibition, as well as to articulate their own views about what such an abortive bid meant for the future of India. R. C. Dutts account is significant here. Like other such travelogues, it is full of the sights and sounds of London, of amazement at the traffic, the shops, the sheer vastness of the city—all the conventions,

in short, of the London guidebook. Although he happened to be in London at the time of the exhibition, he made it clear in his narrative that he was dragooned by the reception committee into being put on display, along with other "colonial visitors," at various parties, fetes, and ceremonies connected with the exhibition. His insistence that they pursued him, in spite of the fact that he had not registered his name anywhere, suggests not just how conspicuous he felt he was, but how many controls, albeit unofficial, were in place to monitor the mobility of Indians in Britain.108

One of the exhibition excursions was to Bristol, where the "colonials" were given a tour of local manufacturing concerns—but not before being paraded with flags and banners all through the city streets.109 Dutt recounted how he struck up a conversation with one of the owners, who warned him not to be misled by the apparent prosperity of London and, by implication, by the confidence displayed by the exhibition. "Times were never harder," Dutt was told. "Our ships remain in our harbors, our manufactures find no markets, our men are unemployed . . . all the markets are glutted, all nations are competing." At the dinner that followed, one of the organizers made a speech in which he hinted that the white settler colonies like Australia might repeal their import duties on English goods, and there was a spirited debate on the notion of imperial federation—an idea that the "colonials from Australia spiritedly reject, arguing that colonies should be given 'permission to manage their own affairs their own way."'110 What happened next is a telling rhetorical maneuver on Dutt's part. He segued almost immediately into a discussion of the 1886 election, in which debates about Irish Home Rule rocked the country, and in which Gladstone's Home Rule proposal was roundly defeated. Dutt did not miss a beat:

But one need not be a prophet to see that Ireland shall have some kind of a home rule before long . . . and is it a bold prophecy to make that the time is not so far distant—that some of our young men may live to see it—when it will be considered unwise to govern any country or any people without consulting the people's wishes, without some kind of representative institutions? Men in power at the present day will laugh at the idea—but nevertheless, the wave of liberal opinions in England is advancing with a rapidity which is remarkable and significant. Measures which were considered radical 15 years ago are now considered practicable or even not advanced enough, and conservatives in the present day are, it is a well-known fact, purloining and adopting one by one those measures which 20 years ago one could only broach as ideas. The conservatives cannot help themselves—they

must either do this or go to the wall—for the nation wants these measures. And in no respect is the advance of these liberal ideas more conspicuous than in . . . the relation of England with her dependencies. Many of us who are young and even many of us now in our middle age will probably live to see the day when the people of India will have a constitutional means of expressing their views on the administration of their country, when their views will to a large extent shape that administration, and when their hands will to a great extent manage that administration. The divine right of conquerors will be as obsolete a phrase in the political dictionary of the twentieth century as the divine right of kings is in the nineteenth, and the people of India will be [as] proud of their connection with England as the sons of Englishmen in Australia and Canada.111

Here, Dutt moved from a critique of the exhibition to a critical reading of another quintessential product of English culture: the parliamentary election. He argued that the political system that had just turned out the liberals did not know the true desires of "the nation" and suggested that if the Liberal-Whig interpretation of history was correct, home rule for India was inevitable. Not least, he implied that the passage of Indian colonial administration into the hands of Indians was a foregone conclusion. And finally, because it was after all the exhibition that had originated this narrative, he referred back to the conversation over free trade at Bristol with no small irony; for if Indians proved to be as "proud" of their connections to the motherland as the Australians at the Bristol banquet, the continuation of Britain's economic stability in this brave new world was by no means guaranteed.

When Indians traveled to the heart of the empire, then, they discovered themselves as "colonial subjects" and worked to remake that very category by reappropriating the imperial gaze and, in some cases, explicitly challenging the aim and direction of British imperial politics at the highest level. Others ostensibly less concerned with returning the imperial gaze have nonetheless left evidence behind to show that they were neither contained by London nor constrained by being exoficized in the ostensible motherland. Rabindranath Tagore, who studied at University College, London, in the late 1870s, rode the omnibuses and railways all over the city and into the suburbs. He also spent time in Brighton and at Torquay where his brother's wife lived with her children.112 Indians studying for the bar or for medicine were often buttonholed as speakers for local temperance, education, or female reform gatherings. The National Indian Association, which had branches all over England in the 1870s, would have been one such venue.113 Indians took holidays

like any other university students and they would have been seen traversing the lake region, the Scottish highlands, and even Ireland in increasing numbers after the 1880s. University towns like Cambridge, Oxford, Glasgow, and Edinburgh had their share of colonial migrants and immigrants as well. How they were received in these diffuse spaces is difficult to know; their memoirs are not usually detailed on this score, and the nature of their encounters was no doubt peculiar to time, place, and context. Das, for example, commented obliquely after his return from a visit to Brighton that "I can afford to bear the ridicule of men who are dazzled by mere appearances"—suggesting that he might have been accosted either verbally or physically on the street.114 This kind of direct physical assault was not uncommon. Gandhi mentioned it, but only in passing, as having happened to an Indian friend of his in London, while for Behramji Malabari, it was an unwelcome, an unpleasant and, finally, a bewildering experience.115

Indians recording such experiences in Britain did so with various degrees of criticism as they looked back on "the voyage in." Nellie Blair (née Bonnerjee, daughter of W. C. Bonnerjee) spent much of her childhood in Croydon boarding with an English family, where "it was always impressed upon us that we being Indians were inferior, that our parents paid too little for us in return for what we got, that our hands could not be clean being dark-skinned, etc., etc."116 Tagore, for his part, waxed eloquent about the English family he lived with and praised the mother of the household for embodying the "ideal of the Indian wife." At the same time he remembered that the headmaster at the public school he briefly attended remarked, "What a splendid head you have!" a characteristic of which he was acutely conscious for the rest of his life.117 And his account of being made to sing upon command for one elderly English female acquaintance was an experience whose embarrassment Tagore could scarcely contain in his memoirs.118 On the other hand, Syed Ameer All, a Muslim student in London in the early 1870s, recalled that when asked what he thought of Britain at the time, he had replied, "I love it," and in his memoirs he insisted that English society was more open to "foreigners" then than it was to become in later years. He was not alone in this opinion.119 Das was amused at being "salaamed by rustics" in the early 186Os, while Sasipada Banerji's son remembered his father being "kindly received by everyone from the Secretary of State for India down to the common English working men and women" on a visit in 1871.120 Regardless of their reception, what remains certain is that colonial natives were to be found both upstairs and downstairs in

Victorian society. It would have been difficult not to notice their presence, if only fieetingly, at least in the capital city of the empire: for "natives of the east" could be seen from the West End to Whitechapel, "clad gaily in attire of many colors, or in peerless white."121 Even Britons who were otherwise unaware of Indians in their midst would probably have known that the Queen herself had two Indian servants, Abdul Karim and Mohamet, whom she took on in the year of her jubilee (1887). Victoria was reported to be "as excited about them as a child would be with a new toy," and she tried to learn Hindustani in order to be better able to communicate with them. Abdul eventually advanced to the position of secretary, and the Queen had a special cottage built for him; both Indians remained in her service until the end of her reign and could be seen posed with her in a variety of photographs and other representations in the Victorian period.122

The majority of Victorians who met Indians personally or saw them from afar seldom fully appreciated the risks they took in crossing "the black waters" to come to Britain.123 Nearly every account of the sojourn of a Hindu in the United Kingdom begins with a discussion of the family, friends, and community leaders who had to be persuaded to let the would-be traveler depart. Gandhi's mother's fear that he would be breaking caste by going to London and that once there he would not be able to keep up with Hindu dietary regulations was not untypical. The promise he made to her to adhere to his vegetarianism proved a greater challenge than he had anticipated; his search for acceptable food and his personal battle to justify his eating choices to Indians and Britons alike structured much of his time in Britain. Among other things, it made attending the requisite Temple Bar dinners very awkward and drew attention to his Hinduism among his fellows, who hesitated in any event "to mix on terms of social equality with a[n] . . . [Indian] gentleman."124 P. M. Majumdar, who was later W. C. Bonnerjee's son-in-law, "learnt to be very clever at pretending to drink without really doing so . . . quietly disposing of his glass of whiskey in some convenient receptacle."125 Disapprobation at home could have serious consequences: having taken the decision to study abroad, Gandhi was treated like an outcast, while Sasipada Banerji and his wife were stoned as they paid a visit to his ancestral home before leaving India for Britain.126 Surendranath Banerjea made all his preparations in secret and although he was not stoned, crowds flocked to watch him set sail fearing he would not return alive. As it turned out, his father died before he could return, a twist of fate that remained, even fifty years later, "one of the saddest

moments of my life."127 R. C. Dutt had the same tragic experience, made even more difficult because his father had strenuously opposed his going to study in Britain and even cut him off financially while he was there.128 Muslims had no such caste proscriptions, though as in the case of Syed Ameer Ali, they might have had to negotiate other kinds of disapproval before they set out for Britain. Ali, who was called to the bar in 1873, recounted how he went to see Sir William Grey, then-Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, before setting sail. Grey was "a stiff man, quite typically bureaucratic" who made it clear that he "did not see why I was going to England." In the end Lord Mayo, the viceroy, was more helpful and gave Ali letters of introduction that connected him to Henry and Millicent Fawcett and other politicians and reformers in Victorian London.129

If the voyage in brought with it the potential for disgracing and out-casting Hindu men, it was all the more culturally and socially perilous for women—with the result that until the 1880s, and even after, relatively few high-caste Hindu women traveled to the British Isles. Some who came were the wives of Indian social reformers or would-be barristers. Sasipada Banerji, who was invited to come to Britain by Mary Carpenter after Carpenter's third visit to India, was anxious about bringing his wife with him. He wrote the following letter to Carpenter in anticipation of his visit: "I accept your invitation with some hesitation. [My wife] does not know English. Your friends must not expect much from her visit. You know how difficult it is for a Hindu lady to give up idolatry and various superstitious notions of her country. I accept your kind invitation to take her with me, not that she will be able to do anything to satisfy your friends, but only to show to my country women that they could have their due position in Society."130 Having his wife with him in England may have been intended as a display of his progressiveness either by him or Carpenter or both. At the same time, Banerji's protectiveness of his wife and his warning to Carpenter that her sensibilities must be considered demonstrates a shrewdness about the possibilities for spectacle that their togetherness might provide in Britain. As it was, the Asiatic of London for 1872 proudly declared Mrs. Banerji "the first Hindu lady who has ever visited England," and the couple named their first child, a son born in England, Albion.131 It was rare enough for law students to bring their wives to London while they were studying for the bar; most left their young families at home and some kept their marital status ambiguous if not hidden when they circulated in public. Gandhi was later ashamed at having done just this, though it

did not prevent him from confessing at some length how he lived the life of a carefree English bachelor, walking out with his landlady's daughter and allowing himself to be lured by various unspecified sexual temptations during a vegetarian conference at Portsmouth.132

Not all Indian women came as wives. Toru Dutt, the Bengali poetess later acclaimed by Edmund Gosse, came as a teenager to Britain with her family. She and her sister attended lectures for women at Cambridge in 1869, and her poem "Near Hastings" describes how conspicuous she and her sister felt as Indians outside London.133 All of W. C. Bonncrjee's daughters (and sons) were educated in England; his wife Hemangini was often left to run the household in Croydon alone when Bonnerjee returned to Calcutta to attend to Indian National Congress business as well as to his law practice at the Calcutta High Court.134 Sarojini Naidu, the poet and Indian nationalist, was sent by her parents to Britain to study in order to put off a marriage decision. She spent three years in England, studying at King's College, London, and Girton College, Cambridge.135 Among the best known women to leave India was Anandibai Joshi, who went to the United States to train as a doctor at the Philadelphia Medical College for Women. Her premature death while in America made her a martyr and an object lesson about the dangers of travel abroad among many Indian reformers, men and women.136 Pandita Ramabai and Cornelia Sorabji were just two of the most prominent Indian women of the nineteenth century to try to follow in her footsteps. They both came to Britain in the 1880s to become doctors, though each was dissuaded by English benefactors who had other plans for them.137 For Hindu women, getting to Britain might require the defiance of norms that brought different though equally perilous consequences from those that followed on a Hindu man's departure: Anasuya Sarabhai, for example, came secretly to England to study medicine to escape a child marriage and prevent her husband from exercising his conjugal rights.138 As an interesting sidelight, Gandhi also wanted originally to become a doctor, but he had decided in favor of the law at the suggestion of family advisors well before he arrived in Britain.139

Because Indian women who came to Britain tended to be more dependent on the financial support of English reformers and philanthropists (Sorabji competed for but was denied the Government of India scholarship in 1887 on the grounds that it was reserved for men), they had less structural control over their movements, career plans, and encounters than did most Indian men. All the same, as the cases of Ra-mabai and Sorabji both demonstrate, Indian women did not necessarily

allow well-meaning Britons to control their destinies. While those two did not end up becoming medical doctors as they had initially wished, their contributions to reform along the paths they had chosen after they returned to India were virtually unmatched in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. And Indian women did become doctors in the Victorian period, despite all odds. Rukhmabai, who had gained publicity in Britain in the mid-1880s because she refused to remain the child bride of an unsuitable husband, trained as a physician at the London School of Medicine for Women, qualifying at Edinburgh in 1893. She was made famous in Britain not just by the British newspapers' attention to her divorce case, which was considerable, but by Rudyard Kipling's 1887 ditty, "In the Case of Rukhmibhaio" as well.140 Kadambini Ganguly also traveled west to train as a doctor.141 Increasingly after 1885. Indian women were eligible for medical training in Britain under the auspices of the Dufferin Fund for Supplying Female Medical Aid to Indian Women.142 Sorabji, living perhaps vicariously and in any event determined that at least one member of her family should succeed where she had not, arranged for her sister Alice to come to Britain to study at the London School of Medicine, where she qualified as a doctor in the early twentieth century.

If colonial natives were wandering all over the map of Britain, there arose in the Victorian period a number of institutions concerned with regulating their movements, assaying their numbers, and supervising their encounters with native-born Britons. The earliest such institution was the Strangers' Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders, which was established in 1856-57 by Henry Venn, the secretary of the Church Missionary Society, in West India Road, near the Church of Saint Andrews, Limehouse. According to Rozina Visram, the Strangers' Home served three purposes: it was a lodging house for a variety of foreign sailors (at a cost of about eight shillings a week); a repatriation center for Asian sailors who wanted employment on ships returning to the East; and finally, a center for propagating the Christian gospel among "heathen" sailors.143 Significantly, some of the initial monies had been contributed by the Maharajah of Duleep Singh, and the scheme was supported in principle as well by some Indian gentlemen traveling to Britain during this period who were distressed and even annoyed to find Indian beggars approaching them on the streets of London.144 The India Office had a more official interest in keeping tabs on the colonial destitute, in part because complaints about wayward Indian seamen in the London streets were often in the news. It contributed £zoo a year

to the home.145 Joseph Salter, who did evangelical work at the home and among Indian, Chinese, and African seamen and their families all over London, claimed that its philosophy was to "give rest to the bodies of travelers who have reached us from the distant East"—by which he meant especially "spiritual rest."146 Like others who supported the home, he argued that "our Christianity is our fairest jewel" and that by ignoring this particular colonial population, England was failing to do her Christian duty by them.147 And he took great delight in detailing the visual effects of this failure, reminding his readers that "Westminster has always had its contingent of Asiatic mendicants, with the usual undergrowth of half-castes" and highlighting one pub in east London called the Royal Sovereign, which ``stood in the midst of an Asiatic jungle of courts and alleys."148 But the directors of the Strangers' Home were not concerned simply with lodging and converting lascars. As Visram details, they used the 1823 Merchant Shipping Act to try to coerce servants and others who were found destitute in England onto ships sailing back east.149 According to one source, over a period of twelve years approximately five thousand "Asiatics, Africans and Polynesians" were "received" into the home.150 Thus although the Strangers' Home was committed to dealing with the colonials in their midst, ensuring the voyage out rather than encouraging the voyage in was actually its raison d'être.

At the other end of the social spectrum was the Northbrook Indian Club (later, Society), founded in 1879 through the efforts of Lord Northbrook, the former viceroy, and British civil servants returned from India. According to a statement issued by Northbrook himself, the club was "intended to be a common centre of social community for English gentlemen interested in India, and Indian gentlemen who may be in England, either as students or travelers." He added that "the want had long been greatly felt of some club in London where Indian gentlemen coming to this country might find a place to mix with European gentlemen interested in or connected with India."151 During the first few years of its existence, the dub attracted more Indians than Britons, leading its organizers to move it in 1883 from Bedford Row to Whitehall Gardens—which was considered both a more "central . . . and a more suitable situation." It was also a more expensive location and the club's officers, in an attempt to drum up support in India, circulated an appeal for funds that raised £12,000 from Indian subscribers alone. Northbrook felt justified in this tack: "[A]s the society was intended for the benefit of natives of India, [we] have relied on the necessary funds being supplied in India."152 Among the contributors was the Maharajah Rawal

Shree Takhtsingjee, who, along with M. Bhownaggree, attended the reopening of the club in Whitehall Gardens in May of 1883.153

The Times heralded the Northbrook Club as a welcome and much-needed effort to bring Indians and Britons together "on a footing of social equality." "Natives who come to this country have hitherto been at a certain disadvantage," the editorial continued.

To the majority of Englishmen India is distant, and unknown, and though Englishmen are rarely slow to offer hospitality to foreigners entitled to claim their acquaintance, yet it must be admitted that the opportunities afforded to Indians of entering English society have hitherto been less frequent than is desirable. The reason is to be sought not so much in any lack of goodwill on the part of Englishmen as in the great want which has hitherto existed of those common facilities of inter-course which other foreign visitors enjoy in various forms . . . [T]he Northbrook Club will tend to abate that supposed air of superciliousness which natives in India often attribute to Europeans, and it will convince native Indians of culture and refinement that there is no barrier between themselves and English gentlemen which cannot be surmounted by a better knowledge of each other and by the intercourse which such knowledge engenders.154

To this end, the newly furnished club had a billiards room, a library, and a dining room that looked out over the Thames Embankment. Lest native Indian gentlemen forget where they were or the world-historical circumstances that had brought them there, the reading room was decorated with portraits of viceroys and engravings "illustrative of notable events in the history of India."155

For all its uptown appointments and clubland atmosphere, the Northbrook establishment had at least one feature in common with the Strangers' Home: it aimed to oversee as well as accommodate Indians in Britain, albeit those in different circumstances than their compatriots in the East End. The original object of the club was "to provide a proper system of guardianship for persons of good family in India sent to England for education." The promotion of "social intercourse" was, in other words, a secondary aim. "The evils which resulted from young men from India being sent to this country to study for the Bar, the Indian Civil Service, and . . . medicine, without being placed under proper guardianship," the London Times intoned, "were of the gravest character, and had been frequently brought to public notice."156 We can only speculate on what these "evils" were. No doubt London society was as disapproving of young Gandhis walking the streets with the daughters of English landladies as Gandhi was ashamed of that kind of

conduct many years later. At least one late-Victorian novelist cruelly mocked the behavior of Indian "Baboos" who courted their landlady's daughters while hiding the fact that they were already married in India.157 By the 1880s Indian gentlemen "on the loose" in London were enough of a concern among former Indian officials and their set to warrant the creation of a special space for "intercourse" between British and "colonial" gentlemen at the heart of the empire. With its emphasis both on guardianship and the careful screening of natives of acceptable "culture and refinement" for mixing with English gentlemen, the Northbrook Club, like the Strangers' Home at the opposite end of the city, did as much to manage the colonial encounter at home as it did to promote it.158

Occupying the middle ground between the West End clubs and the East End docks—figuratively if not exactly literally—was the National Indian Association, located at the home of Elizabeth Adelaide Manning at Bloomfield Road, Maida Vale. The NIA had been founded by Mary Carpenter in Bristol in 1870 in the wake of Sen's visit and the interest in Indian female education his tour of the British Isles stimulated. It came under the capable supervision of Manning, who had been the treasurer of the London branch since the early 1870s. She moved the association to London after Carpenter's death in 1877, where it continued to serve as the primary clearinghouse for Indian students until World War I. Its monthly journal, entitled the Indian Magazine andReview , from the mid-1880s onward, provided a unique public space in Britain for debates on Indian women's education and colonial social reform more generally in which Indians and Britons, both in India and at home, vigorously participated. Several organizations involved in Indian affairs were affiliated with it, including the Northbrook Club, which had originated as an NIA subcommittee, and the Dufferin Fund, which had ties to the NIA through female physicians at the London School of Medicine for Women.159 There were few Indian students or travelers who came to Britain in the nineteenth century who did not attend the At Homes, soirees, or lectures sponsored by the association. Several Indian women, including Sorabji and Rukhmabai, lived temporarily with Manning or visited her home, which doubled as the NIA office. Manning was keen not just on bringing English people together with Indians—which was among the purposes of the association—but on linking up expatriate colonials with each other for the duration of their stay in the United Kingdom as well. Sorabji, who privately told her parents she did not enjoy Rukhmabai's company, was nonetheless

thrown together with her at Miss Mannings during their term breaks and had to make the best of it.160 Even Gandhi could be found at Miss Mannings events during his student days in London. He recalled in his autobiography that whenever he went to NIA gatherings at her home he "used to sit tongue-tied, never speaking except when spoken to." She introduced him to Narayan Hemchandra, a Bengali writer, at an NIA function, and their friendship helped sustain Gandhi during the rest of his time in England, not least because Hemchandra was also a practicing vegetarian.161 There were, to be sure, other informal social settings where expatriate Indians could meet, among them W. C. Bonnerjee's home in Croydon, dubbed "Kidderpore Croydon" in honor of the family's Indian residence. As Mrs. Arthur Alexander recalled many years later, "[O]n Sunday afternoons . . . all the servants were set free and in the evening Mrs. Bonnerjee prepared an Indian meal for family and guests. What an oasis Kidderpore must have been to the dozens of young Indian students in London who came there on Sundays and were transported in spirit to their own country!162

The NIA soirees at Miss Manning's were, however, the most regular public functions where Indians and Britons could mix in southeast England. The objects of the association were, at least originally, rather general: "to extend a knowledge of India" throughout the United Kingdom and "to promote by voluntary effort the enlightenment and improvement of our Hindu fellow-subjects."163 Because of its founders commitment to Indian female education, the NIA always had a vested interest in promoting the cause of Indian education in general and the careers of Indian students in particular. Just before her death Carpenter had, together with Lady Anna Gore-Langton, developed a scheme for female teacher training. Elizabeth Manning carried on that tradition, linking the NIA with the Froebel Society and other metropolitan training schools and trying to interest Indian women in considering education as a career. As debates about English women entering the medical profession gained publicity in the 1870s and early 1880s, the NIA also provided a forum for the free exchange of ideas on the subject. It was at an NIA meeting in December of 1882 that Elizabeth Beilby, a former missionary in India, first brought before the British public her conviction that British women needed credentialed medical training before they could go to India in a healing capacity. In this sense the NIA anticipated the creation of the Countess of Dufferin's fund (1885), though relations were friendly and the association remained an enabler for women seeking a medical education with a view to practicing in India.164

It helped advertise women's educational successes, bring Indian women's writing before the British public, and sponsor speakers, gallery talks, and other public forums having to do with colonial conditions and reform, all over Britain. In the wake of Carpenter's death it also raised money for scholarships in her name and regularly reported on events sponsored by its regional branches in the United Kingdom and throughout India. The NIA was, together with the British feminist community, the lifeblood of domestic Victorian reform interest in India. As the Indian Magazine and Review phrased it, the association served as "the needed link" between Indians and Britons in the empire and at home.165

Theoretically, the NIA was committed "to co-operat[ing] with enlightened natives of India in their efforts for the improvement of their countrymen."166 But although Sen took credit for founding it and Syed

Ameer All for suggesting its name, in practice Manning ran the London-based association virtually single-handedly.167 And, at least in the case of Sorabji, she tried to override one young Indian woman's desires to study medicine, so that Sorabji could fulfill Mannings dream of obtaining a native female head for a teacher-training school in India.168 In fact, as more and more Indian students came to Britain in the 1880s to pursue courses of study at London, Oxbridge, and Edinburgh, the business of "superintendence" began to emerge as a preoccupying function of the NIA. To be sure, Indians already in Britain contributed to this effort, writing articles for the Indian Magazine and Review detailing what life in a British university was like, for readers in India who were either considering studying in the United Kingdom or who were, as the parents of potential students, worried about sending their children into unknown cultural waters thousands of miles away.169 As one correspondent remarked, "[T]en or twenty years ago the visit of a Hindu in London was a thing almost unknown." Thanks in part to the influence of the NIA, "the advantages of a stay in this country are [now] more and more appreciated in India every day."170 Sorabji's arrival in Somerville prompted an article by the college principal and a collaborator specifically aimed at Indian women interested in coming west for higher education, though the majority of the information the NIA broadcast applied to men.171

The NIA was not the only institution in late-Victorian Britain concerned expressly with Indian students. Since the 1870s, the health, both physical and mental, of Indian students in Britain had been of some concern, in large part because a number of them who had come to study

had committed suicide.172 The Oriental Institute at Woking, founded in 1884, was established partly to address the pressures facing Indian students who were away from home for the first time and found themselves under the stress of "the cram." Not only was it to be "a center for Oriental learning in England" but an establishment dedicated to providing "the special appliances that alone enable natives of the East of good family to preserve their religion or caste while residing in England for educational or official purposes."173 Faced with this competition, the NIA's role grew to encompass more than just making information on the opportunities available in Britain to "hopeful travelers" coming from India.174 In September of 1885 the Association announced that it was producing a circular advertising what the NIA was prepared to do to help Indian students who came to the United Kingdom. Among the services offered was help in securing lodgings, in gaining exposure to "English home life," and in choosing clothes and disbursing monies for fees, and so on. Indian students were advised to consult the association's Handbook before leaving India, to follow its recommendations, to make the kinds of housing arrangements it suggested, and to take seriously the precautions it offered—down to what kinds of clothes to wear and where to buy them:

Students arc advised to bring only such clothes with them as are necessary for the voyage, which should include a thick overcoat and warm underclothing.

English clothing is procured better and at less cost in England. Indian costume, being unsuited to the climate, is not ordinarily worn by Indian students, but it is desirable that the student should provide himself with such dress, for use on special occasions.175

The "special occasions" mentioned were probably an allusion to the royal audience. Indians in Britain from "respectable" families were often presented to Queen Victoria, who insisted that they dress in their "native costume" on such occasions.

More broadly, the advice on clothing suggests how far some Britons were willing to go to shape the appearance of Indians in public, in an era when dress reform, as Himani Bannerji has shown, was a prominent feature of bhadralok culture in India.176 It explains in part why Gandhi was so intent on procuring the outfit of an English gentleman while he was a student in London: whatever anxieties Indians might have experienced about their appearance were not just anticipated but intensified by the NIA—and by some anglophilic Indians as well. As Janaki Agnes

Penelope Majumdar recalled, her father, W. C. Bonnerjee, "always insisted upon our wearing English dress and would never allow us to put on saris, even for fun. This was, I imagine, because of the disrepute sari-wearing women had been in 40 years earlier if they went about, and he retained this early prejudice as long as he lived."177 Not everyone conformed. Sorabji often wore saris during her time at Somerville, even though she had worn more Westernized clothing growing up in Poona. And although she was quite anglophilic in other respects, she routinely used her dress as part of a defiant performance of a certain kind of Indian womanhood rather than submit to the kind of Anglicization that the NIA apparently encouraged.178 Significantly, Indians who contributed pieces to the Indian Magazine and Review on life in the metropole or at British universities were all but silent on the dress question, focusing instead on what courses students were advised to take, what sights they should be sure to see or, most tellingly, the kinds of money problems they were likely to have.179

The "Superintendence Committee" of the National Indian Association saw itself as promoting "friendly guidance" to Indian students whom it believed were disinclined to live "under supervision" while in Britain.180 The association's concern, however genuine, was also pater-nalistic: an editorial in the Indian Magazine and Review of 1891 worried that Indian students were "frequently sent to England when they have scarcely passed boyhood," and that in these circumstances they were in danger of falling into bad company.181 If the Indian Magazine and Re view's editor was prepared to be euphemistic, there were others ready and willing to declare the civilizing mission behind the whole notion of "superintendence." Mary Pinhey wrote a lengthy piece for the Indian Magazine and Review in May of 1891 in which she was quite candid about her concerns· "The astute Oriental mind rather delights in crooked ways," she wrote. She continued: "There is a certain lumpiness about the Oriental character, a want of pluck and backbone, and a general ignorance of what is expressed by the word 'honour,' which can only be got rid of, if at all, by a thorough immersion in the spirit of English life . . . [N]othing can be more dangerous than to send youths to England, at a most critical age, to live far away from their natural guardians; deprived of the sanctions of caste and of their religion; entirely free for the first time in their lives from all control; well supplied probably with money and exposed to all the temptations and seductions of a great city like London."182

Like the patrons of the Strangers' Home and the Northbrook Club,

Pinhey wanted to control not just Indians but their encounters with their fellow subjects in the metropole. Nothing less than the preservation of imperial nile and with it, the social-cultural hierarchies of colonialism in everyday life at home, was at stake. For "even where no serious evil comes of their sojourn in England, young men are tempted to forget here their real place in the social side of their own country." The average English man who encountered "Orientals" on his own soil, she concluded, "regards all . . . [of them] as of one class"—and this was clearly a mistake.183 The ramifications of such a misreading were implicit, if unspoken. Failure to notice that Indian gentlemen were neither equivalent to the masses of India nor on a par with English men might lead to notions about the possibilities of political equality—possibilities that m the Victorian period, even among Britons sympathetic to the cause of Indian reform, were quite unthinkable.

Whether her opinions were the result of Pinhey's personal encounters with Indians—at NIA events, perhaps—is not known. Less than a decade earlier the debate over the Ilbert Bill (which proposed to grant Indian civil servants criminal jurisdiction over some European British subjects, among whom numbered white women) had polarized this kind of opinion in India and England. In the post-Mutiny period, British female reformers sympathetic to Indian women's education, like Annette Ackroyd Beveridge, had made it clear that there were certain boundaries that were to be maintained at all costs, the boundary between white women and Indian men being chief among them.184 It should be noted that Indians were not necessarily always pleased when their children "married English": as Janaki Majumdar recalled, Sir Tarak Nath Palit drove his son out of the house in which they were living in Britain because the son wanted to marry an English girl, and "they were never reconciled in spite of all the efforts of their friends."185 Even those Britons not offended by mixed marriages worried about social ostracism facing Indian men who took English wives—ostracism that at least one English female observer believed to be stronger in India than in England.186 Pinhey may have been among those who agreed and who found it necessary to reiterate that position given the increase in Indians coming to Britain and making their way into London society in this period. In any event, her views did not go unchallenged. Angry and disheartened responses from Indian correspondents appeared in the June issue of the IndianMagazine and Review , and while the NIA appeared in its editorial to side with Pinhey, the weight of "colonial" opinion was against her. One contributor called her account "fiction," while

another insisted that for every Indian student who foundered, there were plenty who succeeded and returned to India having achieved their educational goals. Another claimed that she had exaggerated "the dark picture of the life of an Indian student in London," while still another called her article "nothing but very painful reflections cast on the natives of India." "All pleasure must go," wrote one correspondent who signed himself or herself "S.A.M.S.," "if we are spoken of thus, or . . . [if] English people think of us in the way intimated in the article."187

This short-lived contretemps does not appear to have affected the operation or the direction of the NIA in any significant way. Indians continued to submit articles for the Indian Magazine and Review detailing their views of "the modes of living in England" and even occasionally waxing rhapsodic about the joys of imperial citizenship. Professions of loyalty sometimes bordered on the saccharine, but they should not necessarily be dismissed as such. They often had their own subtle political effects, if not their expressly political purposes. Syed A. M. Shah, who spent an afternoon at the Tower of London in the spring of 1893, for example, wrote enthusiastically about his afternoon out and expressed his pride at having been "born in the glorious reign of our noble Queen-Empress Victoria. Through her government we are protected from all sorts of dangers, and also our property and our sacred religions: this is the real blessing which we, the British subjects, enjoy under our good Queen-Empress, upon whose rule the sun never sets."188 Shah's attitude may have been prompted by heating about all those who had been subjected to execution at the Tower through the ages, and indeed, he expressed thanks that he had not been born under the reign of a medieval English monarch. But the historical function of the Tower and its message about the benefits of subjecthood—and the dangers of disloyalty—were not lost on him. As did other British visitors no doubt, Shah came away from the Tower feeling grateful for being a "British subject." And along with his delight at the many "wonders and curiosities" London had to offer, his essay for the Indian Magazine announced his confidence that his claim to that status was as sound as that of any other Briton.

It was this confidence that made would-be barristers and Indian Civil Service (ICS) applicants a potential threat to the cultural norms of national life in the imperial metropole no less than to the future of the empire itself. For more than one Indian student who came to Britain in order to obtain credentials in the law or the colonial bureaucracy in the 1860s and 1870s rose to prominence in the Indian nationalist movement and returned to the metropole in the late 1880s and 1890s to demand a

measure of political equality and representation for his fellow subjects in India. As Visram notes, the list of those who studied in Britain reads like "a roll call of the Indian [political] elite," with Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, and, in the twentieth century, Indira Gandhi, representing just four of the names best known outside of India today.189 For some if not many it was partly their experiences in Britain that honed their appreciation for the injustices of imperial rule and enabled them to see dearly and with personalized conviction that the promise of equality allegedly implicit in the civilizing mission was hollow indeed. Surendranath Banerjea, one of the founders of the Indian National Congress, is a case in point. He came to London in 1869 to study for the ICS exam. He traveled with R. C. Dutt and Behari Lal Gupta, both later involved in Indian nationalist politics, and was shepherded through London by W. C. Bonnerjee, another future INC leader who was on scholarship in the capital city at the time to prepare for the bar.190 Banerjea lived variously in lodging houses and with an English family who, as he later recalled, "impressed me with the clean, orderly methodical lives of the English-middle class."191 After studying hard, he passed the first competitive exam, but within a few weeks of his name being published among the list of successful examinees, the legitimacy of his candidacy was questioned because of an alleged discrepancy between his age at matriculation and the age required for examination. The removal of his name from the list of successful candidates sparked outrage in India, where the newspapers were full of articles condemning the decision of the Civil Service Commissioners. Banerjea recalled that "I was not prepared to take this decision lying down," and he hired two English lawyers to fight it in the courts. The judge ruled in favor of Banerjea and one other Indian who had been the subject of similar objections, and while the ICS contested the ruling, they were both ultimately reinstated.192 Although Banerjea lost almost a year in fighting the case, he sat the final exam in 1870 and finally qualified. He remained remarkably free of bitterness about the incident years later and praised the English men who had helped him through the ordeal, confessing to "a genuine admiration for those great institutions which have helped to build up British life and the fabric of British constitutional freedom."193 Like Shah at the Tower of London, Banerjea's professed identification with the hallmarks of British culture and civilization had a critical edge. His experiences as a student in Britain left him secure in the knowledge that "an Englishman, no matter what his station or calling may be, has a soft

corner in his heart for a good fighter"—a maxim that leaders of the Indian National Congress put to the test for almost eight decades.194

In the late nineteenth century, reform of the colonial civil service was one of the first avenues through which ambitious and nationally minded Indians sought to equalize the structure of imperial power. Even the London Times recognized it as being among "the first rank of national problems."195 Among the Indian leaders of this reform effort was Mon-mohun Ghose, who, along with his brother Lalmohun, was an English-educated barrister who had been supportive of Banerjea's court case as part of a larger campaign for bureaucratic reform. The Ghose brothers, who traveled back and forth between Britain and India from the 1860s (when Monmohun was among Carpenter's favorite visitors at the Red Lodge) were among the most active Indians in Britain in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. They made deputations to Gladstone and Kipon, promoted conferences on Indian questions, and, in 1883, Lal-mohun ran unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate for Deptford.196 It was in his capacity as a delegate for the Indian National Congress that Mon-mohun traveled to England in 1885 in order to try to influence the parliamentary elections—and it was on this occasion that he was among those branded a poor imitation of Ram Roy on the public platform by the Saturday Review.197 In response to this delegation and to the increasingly visible presence of Indian nationalists generally, the Review offered one of the most succinct and unguarded statements about the threat such Indian men posed to the fate of the British Empire to be articulated in the Victorian period: "[W]hen the question of admitting native Indians to civil employment was first raised, it can scarcely have occurred to the most zealous advocate of equality that they would claim seats in the House of Commons.198

As an example of understatement such a view is quite remarkable, especially when juxtaposed with the rather more impassioned responses to which Indian nationalists in Britain and, in the process, the British reading public, were treated. The 1885 delegates were cast as "a batch of young cuckoos" who "talk as men might whose fathers had defended the Star Chamber or lost their heads on Tower Hill." Not only had they failed to live up to Roy's example, they were "vapouring, gushing rhetoricians," and the Congress they represented, "an irresponsible association" peopled with "busy-bodies, notoriety-seekers and incendiaries." Congress's claims to government were nothing more than "pretensions" and their desire to "superintend the reconstruction of the Government of India can be regarded as a dull joke."199 The vehemence of these

reactions can hardly be surprising; indeed, it resonates with the kinds of ridicule and satire directed at suffrage women and working men seeking political inclusion in the Victorian imperial nation-state during this period as well.200 As with these other groups, proof of masculinity was the test of political participation; and it was the capability of Indian men qua men to speak for, to represent, a nation, of which these Britons were contemptuous. To be sure, the very concept of India as a nation was unimaginable, if not reprehensible, to those who ruled the Victorian empire. As one journalist put it, "[T]he Nation of India is a pure fiction."201 But it was at base the capacities of Indians—and their inadequacies as "English" men as evidenced by their behavior in Britain—that was at issue. Those who proposed self-government, wrote a contributor to the Saturday Review, "must have an amazing trust in their own impudence and in the credulity of Englishmen . . . [O]ur Empire was not built by the Baboo's oratory, but by Englishmen's force of character."202 Resisting the nationalist onslaught thus became a test of the mettle of English manhood in the face of Indians who were pretenders by any other name. It also provided an opportunity to consolidate definitions of English manliness at a historical moment contemporaneous with the Criminal Law Amendment Act when challenges to "modern" Western modes of masculinity were being worked out and renegotiated in the Victorian public domain.203 Attention to Indian nationalism in Britain did not just reflect metropolitan interest in empire, therefore, but helped reconstitute "national" interest as an imperial social and political concern. The INC's activities in Britain, in conjunction with the women's suffrage movement, the anti-Contagious Diseases Acts agitation, and other feminist campaigns, helped to remake the boundaries of colonial rule and to undermine the sovereignty of "Britain" proper by signaling that Indian reformers claimed that ostensibly "domestic" space as their own.

Eighteen eight-five was not of course the first moment when Indian men who had come up through the ranks of either business or professional training dared to criticize British rule on British soil. Dadhabai Naoroji and W. C. Bonnerjee, both of whom had been instrumental in organizing the East India Association in Britain, sponsored lectures and spoke out themselves from public platforms about the need for ICS reform and self-government in India. AS early as 1 867 Bonnerjee had called for "a representative Assembly, and a Senate sitting in India, with a power of veto to the Governor General, but under the same restriction as exists in America, with perhaps an absolute power of veto to the

Crown."204 By 1889, Indian students with nationalist aspirations were publishing a newspaper from England designed "to give expression to the Bona Fide Opinions of the Native and Anglo-Indian Press on Indian National Politics, etc."205 The Indian Appeal was short-lived, but it was quickly followed by India: A Journal for the Discussion of Indian Affairs, a paper published at Charing Cross Road and connected with the British Committee of the Indian National Congress.206 It was perhaps in order to remain distinguishable from these kinds of platforms that the NIA disclaimed involvement in "political" as well as proselytizing matters, though its work could hardly be called apolitical, as at least one of its subscribers recognized.207 But it was not until the mid-1880s, when the INC was organized and nationalist aspirations had a regular, if geographically mobile, yearly meeting that Indian men in Britain began to come under such intense public scrutiny and such fierce ridicule. Rudyard Kipling, who had satirized Lord Ripon and the Ilbert Bill the year before, now added a ballad called "The Indian Delegates" to the chorus of disapproval that greeted Ghose and his countrymen in 1885. It was a mockery of "platform men" who allegedly swallowed English education whole but who, despite all their learning, could not possibly represent the masses of India: "And we thought at the very least, / These gentlemen of the East, / Stood man by man as ally and as brother; / But we find it is not the case, / And one half of the civilized race / Objects to eating dinner with the other."208 And if this were not enough, the lengthy poem was published with a subheading that read: "A farcical comedietta now running, with enormous success, in London."209

Indians in Britain were undaunted. In 1886 Dadhabai Naoroji canvassed for a parliamentary seat at Holborn on the Liberal ticket and lost. Lord Salisbury made a speech, which quickly became infamous, in which he attributed Naoroji's defeat to the fact that he was a "black man." He went on to declare that "however great the progress of mankind has been, and however far we have advanced in overcoming prejudices, I doubt if we have yet got to that point when a British constituency will take a black man to represent them . . . [A]t all events he was a man of another race who was very unlikely to represent an English community."210 Roy had been dismissed as "a black man" by an East India Company official during his sojourn in Britain, but not as publicly as Naoroji was decried.211 And Salisbury was not the only one. Sir Lepel Griffin, former chief secretary of the Punjab, attacked Naoroji's candidacy in the Times and in so doing revealed the racism and xenophobia that lay only just below the surface of English and late-Victorian man-

ners and "civility" where the subjects of empire were concerned. Griffin argued that Naoroji "had nothing to recommend him to an English constituency except for a 'gift of fluency common to all Orientals.'" According to Griffin he was "an alien in race, in custom, in religion; destitute of local sympathy or local knowledge, no more unsuitable representative could be imagined or suggested. As to the people of India, Mr. Naoroji no more represents them, than a Polish Jew settled in Whitechapel represents the people of England. He is a Parsee, member of a small foreign colony, probably Semitic in origin, settled in the West of India. The Parsees are the Jews of India; intelligent, industrious, and wealthy . . . But they are quite as much aliens to the people of India as the English rulers can possibly be."212 In addition to being an unwittingly persuasive indictment of British justifications of colonial rule—and a remarkable commentary on the complexities of mulficultural community in Victorian Britain as well—Griffin's diatribe laid bare the realities at the heart of some colonial encounters at home in Britain. His public assault must have been particularly galling for Naoroji since Griffin was then the chairman of the East India Association, which Naoroji had patronized since the 1860s in an effort to bring Indians and Britons together in support of the economic and political reform of the Raj. Even Naoroji's supporters in the Liberal party were cautious, with some urging him to try a seat in Scotland instead, because Scots had a reputation for being "more liberal than English liberals." Recommendations that he play the proper part were also forthcoming. William Digby, founding member of the British Committee of the Indian National Congress in London and a friend of Indian political reform, advised that he exchange his Parsi headdress for an English hat, as it was "better to appear altogether like an Englishman." Visram argues that the fact that he was a light-skinned Indian who had lived in Britain for many years helped Naoroji's candidacy when he ran again in 1892 and was elected a member of Parliament for Central Finsbury. Given the hostility, intra-party. politics, and unbridled racism that surrounded his second run, it is no inconsiderable achievement that he won at all. It is also a testament to the partial and contested nature of colonial hegemony, even and especially in Britain proper.

Former colonial officials like Griffin were partly responsible for encouraging hostility toward Indian nationalists and their claims to citizenship and belonging. Anglo-Indians and former India men were also crucial in circulating colonial knowledge around Britain through newspapers, museum displays, and other forms of popular culture and en-

tertainment in the Victorian period. The Indian and Colonial Exhibition, for example, was largely a Government of India enterprise, as were both the plans for the Imperial Museum and the India collection that ended up in the Museum of South Kensington.213 This is not to say that what was offered in newspapers or grand spectacle was passively consumed by English readers or exhibition-goers, who were undoubtedly as diverse in their responses to stereotypes produced in the metropole as Indians themselves. Interest in India was moreover diffused through British culture at home in a host of institutional and commercial sites as well, providing opportunities for engagement and contestation in a variety of milieus. Projects like the India Museum or the Queen's Jubilee began as instruments of high culture but they inevitably permeated other cultural spaces so that Indians, like India itself, came to be imagined as the "natural" possessions of public discourse and the national imaginary by different classes and under a variety of conditions at home. This was especially true of images of famous Indian men like Roy and Sen and the Maharaja of Duleep Singh, whose trajectory from India to England and France and back again was a regular feature of newspaper coverage in the 1880s, and not just in a metropolitan daily like the Times.214 Snide remarks and toplofty criticisms directed at members of Congress by the domestic press may be read as declarations of ownership of Indian colonial subjects being articulated at the same historical moment that Indian nationalism emerged as a political force—again suggesting the precariousness of colonial power and the kinds of strategies used to shore it up at moments of crisis.

The sputtering contempt with which some prominent Britons at home met Indian nationalism and its representatives lasted for decades. Events took a murderous turn in 1909, when Sir William Curzon-Wyllie, the political aide-de-camp, was killed at an NIA soiree. His assassin, Madan Lal Dingra, together with a number of other Indians before World War I, embraced radical tactics in pursuit of their political goals. Not unlike the British suffragettes whom Gandhi admired so much on one of his return trips to London in the early twentieth century, these nationalists choose revolutionary politics over the reassurances of Whig historical progress offered to more than one group seeking a place at the table on the grounds of equality before the twentieth century.215 In the Victorian period, before the hope of democratic inclusion had been exhausted, the British public's attention was fixed on India as spectacular evidence of the power of British civilization, while its inhabitants who ventured to the heart of the empire were routinely made spectacles of.

As the 1880s gave way to the 1890s, public attention became divided between Congressmen and the fate of Indian child wives, widows, and girls, as some Indian reformers sought an age-of-consent law to raise the legal age of marriage for girls and boys. Rukhmabai's trial, Malabari's agitation, and Ramabai's home for widows in Poona were considered by some to be the real story of reform in India, and the machinations of INC delegates and supporters took something of a backseat to these issues, at least in metropolitan public forums like the London Times and the SaturdayReview .216 With the exception of continued interest in the scheme to supply India with "lady doctors," both English and Indian, the focus was increasingly on social reform events in India rather than on Indians in Britain. And yet of course there were still colonial natives traveling back and forth between India and imperial metropole in search of education, professional training, or simply a tour of the motherland. There, for better or worse, they observed "the cosmopolitan character" of British society and negotiated the unique and complex colonial encounters that the fact of empire guaranteed.217

It is this diasporic movement that is important not to lose sight of. So many of the "colonial natives" who made their way to the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century were cultural migrants drawn to Britain in search of self-improvement and, with it, social and political regeneration for the motherland that ultimately claimed them—India itself. Like Ramabai, Sorabji, Malabari, Naoroji, Gandhi, Banerjea, and the Ghoses, all returned to India; and while each one's relationship to the nationalist movement was enacted differently, if at all, their commitment to India and to their countrymen and women was their motive purpose. As one historian has observed, Indians abroad may be said to have helped "pave the way . . . for Indian emancipation within the frontiers of India."218 If they came to Britain with illusions about the politics of everyday life in the imperial metropole, they may have been ultimately disabused. Even when they were anglophiles, as Sorabji was, they left evidence of their struggle against the operations of imperial power, at both micro- and macrolevels, from which we can reconstruct a history of the colonial encounter at the metropolitan centers of empire.

AS Edward Said argues at the very beginning of Culture and Imperialism,

The world has changed since Conrad and Dickens in ways that have surprised, and often alarmed, metropolitan Europeans and Americans, who now confront large nonwhite populations in their midst, and face an im-

pressive roster of newly empowered voices asking for their narratives to be heard. The point of my book is that such populations and voices have been there for some time, thanks to the g1obalized processes set in motion by modem imperialism; to ignore or otherwise discount the overlapping experience of Westerners and Orientals, the interdependence of cultural terrains in which colonizer and colonized coexisted and battled each other through projections as well as rival geographies, narratives, and histories, is to miss what is essential about the world in the past century.219

It is also crucial, as I hope I have made clearer, for understanding what was foundational to British culture in the last century. The point is not to leave the nation in place simply by rematerializing heretofore under-represented populations or even by noting the mobility of colonial peoples, but rather to interrogate the assumption that the nation has always been an a priori, coherent whole and that fragmented identities and cultures of movement are characteristic of contemporary postcolonial modernity exclusively. As Ann Stoler observes, such assumptions "not only buy into a foundational colonial script . . . they undermine any effort to identify the historical construction and subversions of those categories themselves."220 By finding, seeing, and confronting the fragmentary evidence of "the voyage in" in the Victorian period, we can perhaps more fully appreciate the ways in which the United Kingdom itself was an imperial terrain upon which some of the earliest and most energetically contested struggles for cultural space, political self-representation, and colonial independence were waged before the twentieth century. Only then is it possible to countenance the historical fact that "the modern state did not have a pristinely metropolitan existence that then got transported . . . to the colonies."221 In contrast to what Ann Stoler has persuasively argued for the Dutch East Indies context, rarely is the "precarious vulnerability" of imperial systems the starting point for histories of the British Empire, even among practitioners of the "new imperial history."222 Indeed, the very concept of Britain, and of England within it, seems to have what Renata Salecl calls a "fantasy structure" that is more resilient and more resistant to its own displacement than almost any other "national" imaginary today.223 If attention to colonial ethnographies destabilizes notions of the integrity—geographical and cultural—of "Britain" as it has been traditionally understood, then the critical geography they help illuminate must be counted as one of the lingering effects of Britain's nineteenth-century empire itself.