The Travels of Dean Mahomet by Dean Mahomet

When he was 11 years old he joined the East India Company’s Bengal Army. Mahomed was born in Patna, India in 1759. His skill at reinvention enabled him to move from boy soldier in India to our very own Dr Brighton and, along the way, be the first Indian to publish a book, own a restaurant and do “shampooing” in England. Travelling from India to make a home here, Mahomed demonstrated a resourcefulness and adaptability that was quite remarkable. But it also offers an engaging biography of a resourceful, multidimensional individual.The history of Asian immigration to Britain does not begin in the 1950s, with post-war labour demands it goes back much further to the founding of the East India Company in the 1600s and an early and distinctive chapter in this history features Sake Dean Mahomed (also Deen Mohomet). Connoisseurs of unusual travel narratives, historians of England, Ireland, and British India, as well as literary scholars of autobiography and colonial discourse will find much in this book.

'Travels' presents an Indian's view of the British conquest of India and conveys the vital role taken by Indians in the colonial process, especially as they negotiated relations with Britons both in the colonial periphery and the imperial metropole. This is a fascinating account of life in late eighteenth-century India - the first book written in English by an Indian - framed by a mini-biography of a remarkably versatile entrepreneur.

Emigrating to Britain and living there for over half a century, Mahomet started what was probably the first Indian restaurant in England and then enjoyed a distinguished career as a practitioner of 'oriental medicine, i.e., therapeutic massage and herbal steam bath, in London and the seaside resort of Brighton. Fisher's portrayal of Mahomet's sojourn as an insider/outsider in India, Ireland, and England. This unusual study combines two books in one: the 1794 autobiographical travel narrative of an Indian, Dean Mahomet, recalling his years as camp-follower, servant, and subaltern officer in the East India Company's army (1769 to 1784) and Michael H. Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (p.

The Travels of Dean Mahomet by Dean Mahomet