Dean Mahomet in Europe (1784–1851)

In crossing boundaries, Dean Mahomet went further than most of his class. Following the abrupt and disgraceful end of his patron Baker's military career in 1783, Dean Mahomet began yet a more distant journey: as an immigrant to colonial Ireland. After marrying Jane Daly, a young Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry woman, he published in Cork his two-volume memoir of his Indian travels. In this 1794 work, he retained a strikingly accurate command of detail long after the events he described. He also demonstrated his elegant command over high English literary conventions.

Modern readers of his Travels can note the ways in which he appropriated the English travel narrative genre—the only Indian to do so in the eighteenth century. His generally sympathetic representations of Indian peoples and beliefs distinguished his work from those of Europeans in revealing ways. He, after all, wrote as someone from India for an audience of Europeans, representing himself and his background for their approval. Their images of India stemmed from their position as the colonizer not the colonized. Yet, Dean Mahomet too had fought to support the English Company's colonial regime in India.

While Dean Mahomet's book apparently bolstered his stature in the eyes of Irish society, it also highlighted his alien origins from the Europeans whom he had served and among whom he lived, married, and wrote. Further, his presentation of India had little lasting effect on prevalent British colonial attitudes toward the land of his birth or its cultures. After over two decades in Cork, he left Ireland, looking elsewhere for a place for himself and his family.

Dean Mahomet and his growing Anglo-Irish-Indian family emigrated to London around 1807. The increasingly cosmopolitan world of the British capital presented both opportunities and constraints for immigrants from India, Ireland, or elsewhere in the burgeoning British empire. In London, Dean Mahomet served for a time as a medical practitioner in the fashionable mansion of a rich Scottish nobleman and veteran of the East Indies. Then he started an Indian coffeehouse catering to members of the British elite with “Oriental” tastes. By 1812, however, he had exhausted his financial resources. Searching around for yet another way to market his Indian attributes to the British public, he moved to the resort town of Brighton, on England's south coast.

Starting over again at age fifty-five, Dean Mahomet struck upon a profession, combining Indian and British medical practices, that would bring him fame if not fortune. In Brighton, he created appreciation for his medical arts as an Indian therapeutic masseur. Through skillful practice and publicity that elicited the patronage of the British elite including the English royal family, he rose to the top of the professional world of medical bathhouse keepers. Claiming exclusive access to “Oriental” medicinal arts, Dean Mahomet negotiated for himself a distinguished place in British society. He left for us carefully crafted newspaper advertisements, his second autobiographical book (about Oriental and Western scientific medicine), evidence of the architecture of his bathhouses, and his medical innovations. From these, we can explore the ways that he created images of himself, combining Asian and English elements in ways that for two decades proved highly attractive to British society.

Dean Mahomet lived, however, during a time of expanding British imperialism. As the Victorian era proceeded, British attitudes toward Indians, Muslims, and the Orient generally, hardened into doctrines of British racial superiority. These English ideologies of an essential “difference” between English and Indians diminished the space available for his own representations of India to the British.^[5] In the years before his death in 1851, he lost control over his career and reverted to the margins of British society.