Dean Mahomet's Legacies

Dean Mahomet's life and works illustrate the complex movement of peoples and ideas inherent in the British empire. Over his lifetime, he passed through many worlds: India as it came under British control, Ireland as an English colony, and England as it became an imperial power. In each of these worlds, Dean Mahomet crossed cultural boundaries.

During his youth, India contained a diversity of polities and cultures, with little national unity. As the Mughal imperial state and regional powers —including both indigenous rulers and nominally Mughal appointees —declined, he and his family, as well as hundreds of thousands of other Indians, entered into the service of the English East India Company during its formative years. He remained with the English Company's Bengal Army for fifteen years as it expanded British control over additional Indian territories, suppressed insurrection by enemies and subordinate Indian allies alike, and crushed resistance to this new order among the Indian rural population. Yet, Travels reveals the inherent contradictions of his intermediate position and his conflicted attitudes toward the colonial process. He served the British but also saw the costs of such service.

In 1794, Dean Mahomet published the first account of this imperial process from an Indian's perspective that was intended directly for an anglophone audience in Britain. His very act of asserting his own narrative challenged European assertions of monopoly over representations of the “Orient.” Yet he selected a fashionable English genre and addressed the British elite as his “friend.”^[127] His book's anomalous nature meant that it had limited influence on British colonial attitudes as a whole, however much it added to his personal prestige among the elite of Cork.

Living, writing, marrying, and raising a family in colonial Ireland, Dean Mahomet felt how “hybrid historical and cultural experiences are,…how they…cross national boundaries.”^[128] Over his quarter century in Cork, diverse groups bitterly contended about Irish national identity and its relationship to the developing British empire. He carved out a place for himself distinct from both the Catholic Irish colonized and the Protestant Anglo-Irish colonizers. Besides his own narrative, our most extensive image of him in Ireland comes from an Indian traveler and self-styled “Persian Prince” on a triumphant tour of the British capitals. Unfortunately unavailable to us today are Dean Mahomet's interactions with the Indian sailors, servants, mistresses, and families of the British elite who also passed through Cork. We also know little about his growing Anglo-Irish-Indian family.

For forty-five years in England, Dean Mahomet tried, eventually with some success, to market his version of Indian cuisine and medical practices to the British public. London and Brighton both already contained a variety of “foreign” elements, as the British elite likewise sought to represent the exotic “Orient.” Dean Mahomet's “Hindustanee Coffee House,” his “shampooing,” and his “Indian medicated vapour bath” all founded their appeal on, and sought to profit from, this British attraction for his Indian identity. He merchandised nothing purely Indian yet his services proved particularly attractive precisely because he presented them as exotic. Ultimately, however, Dean Mahomet lacked the capital to sustain his career or establish his independence.

Over the nineteenth century, a growing British sense of imperial supremacy over Asia meant that Britons sought control over such representations of the “Orient.” After his death, his “shampooing” became a name for hair-wash and the Turkish Bath—under British management—displaced his Indian Vapour Bath.^[129] Thus, British society appropriated Dean Mahomet's creations with little recognition of his role.

Dean Mahomet's descendants became British, yet were always marked with a difference. Despite the accomplishments of his progeny, particularly in the medical field, many English contemporaries continued to remark upon their “Oriental” features: “dark and typically Eastern.”^[130] Most of them retained the name Mahomed—although Britain's changing racial prejudices led one branch to change its surname to Dean.^[131] Their stories, and those of other Asian immigrants and their descendants, also deserve to be told in the context of the conflicted development of multicultural British society.

During the late twentieth century, a few scholars and activists have been drawing attention to the achievements of early Indian immigrants. Some have pointed to Dean Mahomet as one of the first Asian professionals in England, making him a symbol of early Indian contributions to British society.^[132] In recognizing Dean Mahomet's achievements, we should ensure that his image is not divorced from his own deeds and writings.^[133]

Overall, Dean Mahomet and his Travels illustrate the circulation of people and ideas brought about by European imperialism. His writings and other accomplishments allow us access to these formative years in the development of the British empire in India, Ireland, and England. As Said asserts: “[T]o ignore or otherwise discount the overlapping experience of Westerners and Orientals, the interdependence of cultural terrains in which colonizer and colonized co-existed and battled each other through projections as well as rival geographies, narratives, and histories, is to miss what is essential about the world. …”^[134]