A Text and a Life

[W]e have never been as aware as we are now of how oddly hybrid historical and cultural experiences are, of how they partake of many often contradictory experiences and domains, cross national boundaries, defy the police action of simple dogma and loud patriotism. Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous things, cultures actually assume more “foreign” elements, alterities, differences, than they consciously exclude.

Dean Mahomet composed his book Travels in 1793–94 as “a series of letters to a friend,” recounting to the Europeans among whom he lived the world of India from which he came.^[1] He began his autobiographical travel narrative with his wrenching departure in 1769 from his childhood home among the Muslim elite of north India. He concluded it with his voyage of immigration to colonial Ireland in 1784. Through Travels, he presented his personal account of the multitude of peoples and customs he encountered while marching across north India as part of the English East India Company's military conquest of his homeland. His Travels thus represents a fascinating perspective on these peoples, these customs, and this colonial conquest: the first book ever written and published by an Indian in English.^[2]

Dean Mahomet grew up during the tumultuous late eighteenth century, as the largely Muslim rulers of north India—whom his family had served for generations—succumbed to the expanding English East India Company. The Company rapidly shifted from a commercial corporation to the assertive ruler over vast Indian territories—two hundred and fifty thousand square miles by 1800, a million by 1856, with another half million under its indirect control. While the English Company continued to trade (especially in cotton cloth and opium), its extraction of taxes and loot from Indian lands under its sway garnered even larger sums. In this environment, Muslim families such as Dean Mahomet's had to make difficult and potentially dangerous choices about their future and their allegiances. Many chose service to the English: Dean Mahomet recounted the entry of his father, his elder brother, and then himself into the English Company's army.

During Dean Mahomet's twenty-five years in India, he moved among multiple roles. The premature death of his father, and his elder brother's inheritance of their late father's position, left him at age eleven to make his own fortune. In 1769, he attached himself as a camp follower to a teenage Protestant Anglo-Irish officer, Godfrey Evan Baker; the two men remained together until Baker's death eighteen years later. Over the course of their respective careers in the English Company's army (1769–83), Dean Mahomet rose to become a subaltern officer, as Baker rose from cadet to captain and independent command. During these years with the Company's army, Dean Mahomet's relationship with other Indians remained ambivalent. While his Muslim relatives accepted him as an honored guest at their domestic rituals, he nevertheless stood as an outsider to their world by virtue of his attachment to the British. Some Indians in the countryside assaulted him as part of their resistance to British control; others rescued him and gave him shelter. In his life and writings, he revealed the social and cultural tensions inherent within that substantial class of Indians which fostered British colonial expansion over India.^[3]

Through Dean Mahomet's own words and surviving British records, we can retrace his eventful journeys with the English Company's army as it passed up and down the Ganges River, forcing the many peoples and states of north India under British rule. His dramatic narrative of his travels though diverse cities (including Calcutta and Benares) and rural environments (including dense jungles, arid plains, and rich agricultural regions), and his range of interactions with the varied peoples living in each, enables us to understand the complexity and internal divisions within Indian society. We can note the specificity with which he described his natal community's internal social organization and domestic customs, in contrast to his more limited knowledge of those of other Indian castes—for example, Brahmin Hindus. His marches with the English Company's army took him perhaps as far west as Delhi and certainly as far east as Dhaka (today Bangladesh); later he sailed to Madras in south India (see Map). As he traveled, the multiplicity of Indian society meant that each city and region which he encountered struck him as novel. He described each vividly to his British audience.

As we examine Dean Mahomet's life and words, we can see the vital roles taken by many different classes of Indians in the colonial process. The English Company used remarkably few Europeans to conquer and rule India. For example, in 1771 the Company had only 187 British civil officials in Bengal to govern some thirty million people; thousands of Indian subordinate officials at many levels carried out the actual work of administration.^[4] Similarly, the Company's armies which extended and enforced British rule consisted of many times more Indians (officers, soldiers, servants, camp followers, and their families) than Europeans (mainly Protestant English, Anglo-Irish, Irish, Scottish, or Welsh officers, men, and—less frequently—their families). Dean Mahomet brings alive for us this colonial world in which an array of ethnicities and social and economic classes interacted, sometimes in hostility, sometimes in cooperation, always in cross-cultural exchange.

Travels exposes the complex and often alienating attitudes Dean Mahomet—and tens of thousands of other Indians in service of the English Company—held toward the British conquest. Many felt distanced from cultures of the old regimes which their ancestors had served. All remained apart from the Europeans who hired them. Like Dean Mahomet, each worked in distinct ways to create new social spaces for themselves between these cultures.