September 13, 2023 • 39 mins
After Dean Mahomed sailed to Cork in January of 1784, he continued to work for Godfrey Evan Baker. But after Baker's death, Mahomed became an entrepreneur.
Research:
- Bartlett, James. “Dean Mahomet: travel writer, curry entrepreneur and shampooer to the king.” History Ireland. Issue 5. September/October 2007. https://www.historyireland.com/dean-mahomet-travel-writer-curry-entrepreneur-and-shampooer-to-the-king/
- Carpenter, Gerald. “The Travels of Dean Mahomet, The Travels of Dean Mahomet, a Native of Patna in Bengal, through Several Parts of India, while in the Service of the Honourable The East India Company. Written by Himself, in a Series of Letters to a Friend.” The Literature of Autobiographical Vol. 2. Diaries and Letters.
- Dharwadker, Vinay. “English in India and Indian Literature in English: The Early History, 1579-1834.” Comparative Literature Studies , 2002, Vol. 39, No. 2 (2002). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40247335
- Fisher, Michael H. "Mahomed, Deen [formerly Deen Mahomet] (1759–1851), shampooing surgeon and restaurateur." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. September 01, 2017. Oxford University Press. Date of access 22 Aug. 2023, https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-53351
- Fisher, Michael H. “From India to England and Back: Early Indian Travel Narratives for Indian Readers.” Huntington Library Quarterly , Vol. 70, No. 1 (March 2007). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/hlq.2007.70.1.153
- Fisher, Michael H. “Representations of India, the English East India Company, and Self by an Eighteenth-Century Indian Emigrant to Britain.” Modern Asian Studies , Oct., 1998, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Oct., 1998). Via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/313054
- Mahomet, Dean. “The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth-Century Journey through India.” Edited with an introduction and biographical essay by Michael H. Fisher. Berkeley: University of California Press, http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4h4nb20n/
- Mahomet, Sake Deen. “Shampooing, or, Benefits resulting from the use of the Indian medicated vapour bath, as introduced into this country, by S.D. Mahomed, (a native of India) : containing a brief but comprehensive view of the effects produced by the use of the warm bath, in comparison with steam or vapour bathing : also a detailed account of the various cases to which this healing remedy may be applied, its general efficacy in peculiar diseases, and its success in innumerable instances, when all other remedies had been ineffectual : to which is subjoined an alphabetical list of names (many of the very first consequence,) subscribed in testimony of the important use & general approval of the Indian method of shampooing.” Brighton, Casey & Baker. 1826. https://archive.org/details/b22374632/
- Mixed Museum. “Sake Dean Mahomed and Jane Daly.” https://mixedmuseum.org.uk/amri-exhibition/sake-dean-mahomed-and-jane-daly/
- Narain, Mona. “Dean Mahomet’s Travels , Border Crossings, and the Narrative of Alterity.” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 49, Number 3, Summer 2009. https://doi.org/10.1353/sel.0.0070
- O’Connell, Ronan. “Sake Dean Mahomed: the Muslim trailblazer who opened London's first curry house.” National News. 2/6/2022. https://www.thenationalnews.com/travel/destinations/2022/02/06/sake-dean-mahomet-the-muslim-trailblazer-who-opened-londons-first-curry-house/
- Panigrahi, Tanutrushna. “Revisiting the Narrative Powers of the Global South through The Travels of Dean Mahomet.” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities. https://dx.doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v12n3.25
- Satapathy, Amrita. “The Idea of England in Eighteenth-Century Indian Travel Writing.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. Purdue University. Vol. 14, Issue 2, June 2012.
- Singh, Amardeep. “A Closer Look
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
This is the second part of a two parter on
Dean Mohammad, who was born in Putna in northeastern India
in seventeen fifty nine and was a camp follower and
then a soldier in the British East India Company's Bengal Army.
Where we left off in this whole story, Captain Godfrey
Evan Baker, who was basically Mohammad's patron, had been accused
(00:40):
of extortion and had resigned from the military, and then
Muhammad followed his example and together the two men sailed
to Cork aboard the Danish vessel Christiansborg in January of
seventeen eighty four. Dean Mohammed was by far not the
only Indian person who went to what's now UK during
(01:01):
the late eighteenth century, but this was something authorities were
actively trying to discourage. Officers often wanted to bring an
Indian servant with them on their voyage when returning home
from India, but officials in London were worried that this
could create a community of impoverished Indian immigrants in major
port cities. So the East India Company was required to
(01:23):
provide return passage for Indian servants, and white officers were
required to pay a bond of fifty pounds to ensure
that their servant would return to India. Baker and Mohammad's
return aboard a Danish ship raises some questions about whether
this happened. In Mohammed's case, the British East India Company
(01:43):
had informed the Danish East India Company of this requirement,
and in theory, the Danish company collected this bond when
officers from Britain or Ireland returned on one of their ships.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
It is clear though that they did not.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Actually feel obligated to do this. It could be kind
of relax whether it was enforced. Baker and Mohammad also
boarded this ship outside of Kolkata proper, apparently because the
Christiansborg was also carrying some kind of secret cargo, so
it was loaded outside the city. A lot of kloak
and dagger stuff going on with this ship. Seems like
(02:20):
maybe there is a smuggling situation.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Not sure. Yeah, the Christiansborg arrived in Cork in late
seventeen eighty four, when Mohammed was about twenty five and
Baker was about thirty three. Baker was from a Protestant
Anglo Irish family that is, of English descent but born
in Ireland, part of a class that's known as the
Protestant Ascendancy. He seems to have quickly found a place
(02:44):
for himself within Cork's more elite Protestant society, marrying the
daughter of a wealthy baron.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
This means that Mohammed was basically moving from one colonized
place to another, moving from India, which was in the
process of being colonized through the efforts of the British
East India Company, to Ireland, in which a Protestant English
ruling elite was governing a predominantly Catholic Irish population. Although
he was not the only Indian person living in Cork,
(03:14):
he was also something of an outsider there, even within
that sort of Indian immigrant community. Cork was a port city,
so most of its Indian population were sailors or servants
who had been working on ships. Others were the wives
or girlfriends of white sailors or soldiers who had brought
them to Cork from India, but Mohammed had been an
(03:37):
officer in the Bengal Army and had reached the second
highest rank that it was possible for an Indian to attain.
He was also closely connected to a white officer, albeit
one whose record was maybe a little spotty. But Mohammed
was seen as having a higher social rank than say,
a soldier looking for work on a departing ship. But
(04:00):
he was also lower in rank than Indian dignitaries and
officials who arrived from Southeast Asia for business or personal
or educational reasons. He also wasn't really seen as equal
to the Anglo Irish community that he was connected to.
Through this relationship with Baker, Mohammed seems to have been
regarded as something of a curiosity in Cork, not really
(04:23):
part of the Anglo Irish society that Baker was part of,
but not entirely outside of it either. Mohammed would have
already spoken English through his time in the Bengal Army.
That was one of many contexts in which an Indian
person might learn English in the eighteenth century, but it's
clear from his writing and the literary references in that
writing that he made a serious study of the language
(04:45):
and of material written in it. He again seems to
have worked in Baker's household as a valet or a butler,
a higher position than a regular servant, but not Baker's equal.
Godfrey Evan Baker died in seventeen eighty seven, and that
same year Dean Mohammad eloped with a young woman named
Jane Dally, who was described as a student and a
(05:07):
member of the Protestant gentry. We are not sure exactly
how old she was. Her gravestone and some obituaries give
a birth year of seventeen eighty That does not line
up with a marriage six years later. She was definitely
not a young child when they got married. It does
seem like she was young, though possibly in her like
(05:29):
mid to late teens. The couple also paid a bond
to the Anglican efficient who conducted the wedding ceremony, rather
than going through the usual process of posting the bands
ahead of the ceremony and having them read from the pulpit.
It is possible that they paid a bond rather than
posting the bands because they were trying to avoid controversy
(05:50):
around their respective ages or Mohammed's ethnicity. Marriages between white
people and people of color weren't unheard of in Britain
and Ireland at this points, especially in major cities that
had established immigrant communities, but most of the time these
marriages happened between servants or working class people, not with
members of the gentry. It's also possible that this was
(06:12):
something that the efficient demanded. This bond when people paid
it protected the Efficient in case it turned out that
the marriage was actually illegal in some way, such as
if a Protestant were marrying a Catholic, which was outlawed.
So Mohammad was definitely not Catholic. He did convert to Anglicanism,
he probably converted before this marriage took place, but it's
(06:37):
possible that this efficient still kind of looked at him
and regarded him as not Protestant. One last question mark
about the marriage between Dean Mohammad and Jane Day. It's possible,
but not totally certain, that something happened to Jane and
that he later remarried to someone else who was also
named Jane. Or it is possible that there was just
(06:58):
one Jane and that she and Mohammad were married for
the rest of their lives. There doesn't seem to be
clear documentation to clarify whether there was one Jane or two,
but it is confusing in the historical record. Yeah, and
I read some more modern write ups that definitively said
his first wife died and he remarried someone also named Jane,
(07:20):
and others that just proceed as though there is only
one Jane without getting into it at all. In seventeen
ninety three, Muhammad started placing advertisements for his forthcoming book,
looking for subscribers to help cover the cost of publication.
This was a common way for people to get their
books into print. He also seems to have visited a
(07:41):
number of prominent people in person to ask them to subscribe. Ultimately,
he got three hundred and twenty subscribers. A lot of
them were gentlemen, members of the nobility, other affluent and
prominent people.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
They weren't all men.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
There were a lot of like high ranking women among
the subscribers. It seems to have been very well connected
among the more elite people.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Four hundred and fifty copies of his book, The Travels
of Dean Mohammad, a native of Patna in Bengal, through
several parts of India. While in the service of the
Honorable the East India Company, written by himself in a
series of Letters to a friend in two volumes, was
published on January fifteenth, seventeen ninety four. The book was
(08:26):
dedicated to William A. Bailey, Esquire Colonel in the service
of the Honorable the East India Company. This dedication may
explain why the book describes one of Bailey's defeats as
a victory. As we noted in Part one, this was
written specifically for an English speaking audience, people from Britain
or Ireland who might have reason to visit India. So
(08:49):
epistolary travel narratives and epistolary novels were a really popular
genre in eighteenth century Britain, and Mohammad wrote this as
a series of thirty eight letters to a fictional addressing
these letters only as dear sir. And it's really obvious
from his writing that he had studied other travel narratives
(09:09):
as well as other English language literary styles and conventions.
This was written so skillfully that he had some detractors
who claimed it was impossible for an Indian to have
written such an English work. Again, there were a lot
of ways.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
That people in India like Indian people in India were
learning English. This is not actually unusual to speak English,
but people were like, there's no way that an Indian
wrote this. It sounds way to English.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
He assumes that his reader is educated and knowledgeable, and
subtly reinforces the idea that he is educated and knowledgeable
as well, including leaving Latin quotes in Latin untranslated, with
the implicit assumption that both he and his readers know
what those quotes say. He also includes terms from multiple
other languages, including Hindi, Persian, Bengali, and local dialects from
(10:01):
different parts of India. At other points, he used terminology
that would be accessible and understandable to his audience rather
than local terms that would have been more accurate. For example,
he describes a number of Muslim practices around birth and
circumcision as baptism. No actual baptism was involved, but he
(10:21):
was trying to make what he was describing more relatable
and understandable to the people who would read it. Muhammad
meant this also as an account of his own life
in India, including his time with the Bengal Army, and
as a travel guide for people who might want to
visit or work in India, whether this was in a
military or a civilian role. So he included extensive descriptions
(10:45):
of the Indian subcontinent's cities and landscapes, its plants and animals,
including elephants, rhinoceroses, and camels, and its cultures and religions,
primarily in terms of Muslims and Hindus. He also included
a glossary, and he printed this work as two small
volumes so that it would be more easily portable. We're
(11:05):
going to talk about the book in more detail after
we paused for a sponsor break.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Dean Mohammet's Travels of Dean Mahammet was not the first
English language book written by a traveler from somewhere outside
of Europe, was the first one by an Indian person
in English. We do know that this is unique though,
in terms of Muhammad's role in his place in both
Indian and Anglo Irish society. This is a work about
(11:40):
the peoples and the cultures of India written by an
Indian for an English speaking white audience.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Overall, it is far more.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Sympathetic to its Indian subjects than similar work by white
writers generally was in the eighteenth century, although it does
still describe tribal peoples who were living outside of the
more mainstream Indian society as savages. This book could be
kind of romanticized, but it was not really sensationalized in
(12:10):
the way that most white writers work on India was.
At the same time, broadly speaking, it was supportive of
the British East India Company's endeavors in India. Again, it
was specifically written for people who were likely to see
those endeavors as a good and necessary thing, but he
could also be critical both of the company's more extreme
(12:32):
efforts to control the Indian population and of the decline
in the power of the Mughal Empire that the British
had both taken advantage of and contributed to. So you
can read this book as an attempt to give an
English speaking European audience a more accurate idea of what
India and its peoples were like, or you can read
it as complicit with British efforts to colonize and control India,
(12:56):
or both. As an example of what this book is like,
he wrote this description of Bnaris, also called Varanasi as
an example of sort of the glories of India's past. Quote,
there was once a very fine observatory here, and a
few years ago some European gentlemen, led hither by the
love of science and antiquity, discovered a great many astronomical
(13:19):
instruments of a large size, admirably well contrived, though injured
by the hand of time. It was supposed they might
have been constructed some centuries ago under the direction of
the Great Okper, the fond votary of science, and the
distinguished patron of the Brahmins, who applied with unwearied assiduity
to the study of astronomy. So Akpa was the third
(13:43):
Mughal emperor. I've had him on my list for an
episode forever. I've maybe may yeah. I feel like a
lot of what I have about him is written from
a more Muslim perspective and not as much detail about
like how did the Hindus that he was ruling over
(14:06):
feel about Olivis. Muhammad described the decline of the Mughal
Empire this way. Quote the history of the revolutions of
his court is fraught with so much fiction that it
would be impossible to reconcile it to reason or reflection. Yet,
if we believe the records and traditions of the natives.
Its sovereigns were the greatest and most arbitrary monarchs in
(14:27):
the world. Their orders, though ever so extravagant, were submissively obeyed,
and their mandates observed by the remotest nations. Their very
name struck terror into the hearts of their enemies. But
so rapid has been the decline of their power that
the race of the great Tamerlane is now little respected.
Since the days of Nazam al Mulud, the royal tenure
(14:50):
of the throne is grown so insecure that the Mogul
has been of late years deposed at pleasure to make
way for such of his servants as could gain over
the people that great engine of power to their cause.
His authority, which prevailed in former ages over most of
the kings of Earth, now reaches little farther than his saraglio,
(15:10):
where he dreams away life, drowned in the enjoyment of
dissolute pleasures. Muhammad also described India in a lot of
passages in terms of like the India of the present
day as truly beautiful. As one example quote, the country
around Banaras is considered as the paradise of India, remarkable
(15:31):
for its lubrious air, fascinating landscapes, and innocence of its
inhabitants to simple manners, and had a happy influence on
all who lived near them. While wasteful war spread her
horrors over other parts of India, this blissful country often
escaped her ravages, perhaps secured by its distance from the ocean,
or more probably by the sacred character ascribed to the scene,
(15:54):
which had, through many ages been considered as the repository
of the religion and learning of the Brahmin and the
prevailing idea of the simplicity of the native Hindus, a
people unaccustomed to the sanguinary measures of what they term
civilized nations. Several of the letters in the book are
devoted to different aspects of culture and religion, with more
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detail in terms of Muslim beliefs and practices. Since Mohammed
didn't have as much familiarity with the practices of Hinduism
or other religions. When English language writing on India was
full of descriptions of its people as savage, backward, and alien,
Mohammed wrote this description of Muslims quote, the Mohammedans are
(16:35):
in general, of very healthful people, refraining from the use
of strong liquors and accustomed to a temperate diet, they
have but few diseases for which their own experience commonly
finds some simple, yet effectual remedy. When they are visited
by sickness, they bear it with much composure of mind,
partly through an expectation of removing their disorder by their
(16:56):
own manner of treating it. But when they perceive their
grows too violent to submit even to the utmost exertions
of their skill, they send for Amolna, who comes to
the bedside of the sick person, and, putting his hand
over him, feels that part of his body most affected,
and repeats with a degree of fervency, some pious prayers,
by the efficacy of which it is supposed the patient
(17:19):
will speedily recover. The Mahometans meet death with uncommon resignation
and fortitude, considering it only as the means of enlarging
them from a state of mortal captivity and opening to
them a free and glorious passage to the mansions of bliss.
Those ideas console them on the bed of sickness, and,
even amid the pangs of dissolution. The parting soul, struggling
(17:42):
to leave its earthly prison and panting for the joys
of immortality, changes at bright intervals, the terrors of the
grim monarch into the smiles of a cherub who invites
it to a happier region. He also tried to dispelse
some misconceptions that he thought his readers probably had about
Islam as a religion. For example, quote the Mohammedans are
(18:03):
strict adherence to the tenets of their religion, which does not,
by any means consist in that enthusiastic generation for Mohammad,
so generally conceived, it considers much more as its primary
object the unity of the Supreme Being under the name
of Allah. Mohammed is only regarded in a secondary point
of view as the missionary of that unity, merely for
(18:25):
destroying the idle worship to which Arabia had continued so
long under bondage, and so far from addressing him as
a deity, that in their orations they do not pray
to him but for him, recommending him to the divine mercy.
It is a mistake in though generally received opinion that
pilgrimages were made to his tomb, which in a religious
(18:46):
sense were only directed to what is called the Kahaba
or Holy House at Mecca, an idle temple dedicated by
him to the unity of God. His tomb is at Medina,
visited by the Maham's purely out of curiosity and reverence
to his memory. As we mentioned before the break, this
book also included a glossary. Here are some examples. Bang
(19:11):
and intoxicating juice of a vegetable bizarre a market beetle,
a leaf growing on a vine and chewed by all
ranks of people, brahmin a priest, daggas custom house officers
or collectors, duly a woman's chair like a sedan, hackeries,
carts or coaches drawn by oxen, paddy grounds, rice fields,
(19:34):
pagoda an Indian temple. Raja the highest title claimed by
the Gentoo princes. He defined Gentoo as a native Indian
in a state of adulatry. Seepois Indian foot soldiers hired
and disciplined by Europeans. Zemindary an officer who takes care
of the rents arising from the public lands. I like
(19:55):
how some of the words that needed to be defined
in the eighteenth century are words that are just commonly
used in English now, like bizarre and pagoda. There were
also poems. Some of the poems weren't attributed to anyone,
they were presumably written by him. Others were quotes from
writers like John Milton. It's clear that Mohammed was influenced
(20:18):
by European writing about India, especially John Henry Gross's Voyage
to the East Indies published in seventeen sixty six, and
Jemima Kindersley's Letters from the Islands of Tenerif, Brazil, The
Cape of Good Hope and the East Indies that came
out in seventeen seventy seven. In fact, according to Michael H. Fisher,
who has written a number of works on Dean Muhammad,
(20:40):
about seven percent of this text comes from Gross's book,
but rewritten in Mohammed's voice and sometimes reframed to create
a more neutral or positive view of the people and
places that are being described. For example, Gross included a
passage on the practice of chewing beatle leaf, describing it
as a vicious habit and saying people did it to
(21:00):
fortify the stomach or preserve the teeth, but dismissing the
idea that it could do either thing. A very similar
passage is in Mohammed's book, but it doesn't dismiss the
idea that chewing beetle could fortify the stomach or preserve
the teeth, and it presents the chewing of beatle leaf
as a luxury for great men, not as a vicious habit. So,
(21:21):
as we've talked about before on the show, attitudes about
plagiarism were really different in the eighteenth century than they
are today. At that time, people were sort of picking
up and copying from one another all the time without
a lot of furor over it. It's likely that Muhammad
used some of this borrowing to kind of fill in
gaps in his own knowledge. Since he was Muslim, he
(21:42):
could not speak from experience about Hindu beliefs and practices.
He also couldn't really talk in detail about the cultures
and the practices of people who were living in areas
really far away from where he had grown up. There
there's enormous cultural diversity in the Indian subco and he
was talking about the other side of the region like
(22:04):
he might not actually know much detail. At some points, though,
like this description of the chewing of beatle leaf, he
borrows descriptions of things that he probably.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Would have known about. We don't totally know why he
chose to go with those passages and not ones of
his own. Beyond that, this book seems to line up
really well with East India Company records on where Mohammed's
units would have been during his fifteen years connected to it.
This is incredible considering that that meant he was writing
(22:33):
about things that had happened between ten and twenty five
years before. And there's no evidence that he kept detailed
notes during his time in the army. So he's kind
of the exception that proves the rule of memory being
pretty faulty. Yeah, yeah, And I don't maybe there were
notes though, or maybe he did a lot of research
(22:55):
going through old newspaper I don't know. He seems to
have done pretty good job though, of keeping the timeline correct.
I will talk about his life after this book came out.
After another quick sponsor break in seventeen ninety six, Godfrey
(23:19):
Evan Baker's younger brother, Captain William Massey Baker, bought an
estate outside of Cork. William Baker had a daughter named
Eleanor whose mother was Indian, and it's possible that Dean
Mohammad set up a household somewhere on that estate. He
definitely spent time there. On December seventh, seventeen ninety nine,
(23:39):
an Indian visitor to Cork named Abu Talib Khan visited
while traveling to London to reconnect with an old patron.
He wrote an account of his travels which was in
Persian and that included writing about this meeting with Dean
Mohammed at this estate. In eighteen oh seven, after a
little more than twenty years in Cork, Mohammad and his
(24:00):
family moved to the fashionable neighborhood of Portman Square in London.
At this point he had at least one son, William,
born in seventeen ninety seven. He and Jane went on
to have several other children, Emilia in eighteen oh eight,
Henry in eighteen ten, Dean in eighteen twelve, Rosanna in
eighteen fifteen, Horatio in eighteen sixteen, Frederick in eighteen eighteen,
(24:26):
and Arthur Eckber in eighteen nineteen.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Their living in Portman Square suggests that while they might
not have been fully accepted into British society, they weren't
entirely excluded from it either. As we said, this is
a really fashionable neighborhood. They also must have been making
a pretty comfortable living to be having a lodging there.
Muhammad started working for a Scottish nobleman named Basil Cochrane,
(24:50):
who had returned from India very wealthy, so wealthy that
he repeatedly faced accusations of embezzlement. At this point, so
called exotic treatments from the East had become a fad
in England, drawing inspiration from both Southeast Asia and Egypt.
Both of these places were being occupied or colonized by
(25:12):
England and France, and so people were kind of bringing
things inspired from those places back to Britain, Ireland's continental Europe.
Cochrane tried to find a business niche that could capitalize
on this fad, and he established a steam bath. Muhammad
got a job. They're doing shampooing. This was not washing
(25:32):
people's scalps and hair. It was a style of Indian
therapeutic massage, with the term shampooing coming from the word chumpy.
In eighteen ten, Muhammed established the Hindustani Coffee House in
Portman Square. This was more of a restaurant than a
coffee shop. He served meat and vegetable dishes with seasoned
rice in what sounds like almost a British and Indian
(25:54):
culinary fusion. The restaurant's decor was inspired by Indian fashion
and art, or possibly by Asian art more broadly. An
adjacent room had hookahs for smoking with tobacco blended with
herbs from India.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
The reason we say Asian art more broadly possibly is that,
like one observer wrote a description of it that included
the word Chinese, and we don't really know if there
was Chinese art or if that this person just kind
of lumped everything, if they were trying to sound as
though they knew about other cultures. Yes, this was the
first known Indian restaurant in England and here is an
(26:29):
advertisement that ran for it. Quote Hindu Stanny Coffee House,
number thirty four George Street, Portman Square, Mohammed East Indian
informs the nobility and gentry. He has fitted up the
above house neatly and elegantly for the entertainment of Indian gentlemen,
where they may enjoy the hookah, the real chimed tobacco
and Indian dishes in the highest perfection and allowed by
(26:52):
the greatest epicures to be unequal to any curries ever
made in England with choice wines in every accommodation, and
now up to them for their future patronage and support,
and gratefully acknowledges himself indebted for their former favors and trusts.
It will merit the highest satisfaction when made known to
the public. People seem to have liked the food at
(27:15):
this restaurant, but Mohammed struggled to keep it afloat. It
wasn't in a good location to have a dedicated regular
clientele or to attract lots of attention from visitors and travelers.
After about a year, he brought in a partner named
John Spencer to try to salvage the operation, but this
just did not work out, and in eighteen twelve Mohammed
(27:35):
filed for bankruptcy. He wasn't involved in the restaurant after
this point, but it does seem like someone else took
over the space and ran a restaurant with the same name,
possibly for years afterward. Bankruptcy obviously was a huge financial
loss for the Mohammed family. They moved into a boarding house.
It's possible that Mohammed's eldest son took a job to
(27:58):
try to help out. Mohammad also advertised his services as
a valet or a butler, and eventually wound up working
at another steambath. Eventually the family moved to Brighton, which
was growing into a popular resort town with a focus
on sea bathing, bathing machines and wellness spas. Mohammed again
worked as a valet, then found a job at a
(28:19):
bathhouse and started selling his own cosmetics. By eighteen fourteen,
he and Jane were both working as bathhouse keepers at
the Indian Medicated Vapor Bath, where Mohammed used Cochrane's steambath
designs but with more Indian inspired elements. Jane learned to
do shampooing as well, and she supervised the women's baths.
Seawater was seen as having health benefits, and Mohammed drew
(28:43):
in seawater, heated it into steam, and customers bathed in
a contraption sort of like a steam room. In December
of eighteen fifteen, Muhammad opened a new business called Battery
House Baths, in a building that, as its name suggests,
had been a battery for the British Border Ordinance Apparently though,
all the cannon fire that went on there, combined with
(29:05):
ongoing erosion issues kind of weakened the foundation that made
it not a great idea to keep firing cannons around
there anymore. Within three years, Mohammad was billing himself as
a shampooing surgeon. He wasn't performing surgery like we would
describe it today. People were using the word surgeon to
mean more along the lines of doctor. So he was
(29:27):
using steam baths and massage to treat all manner of ailments.
And as his success grew, he opened another facility up
the cliff from the battery that was known as.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
The West Cliff Baths. In eighteen twenty, Mohammad printed a
book that was basically a collection of customer testimonials for
his wellness treatments. This was called Cases Cured by Sheik
Dean Mohammed, shampooing surgeon and inventor of the Indian medicated
vapor and seawater bath. Sheik was the honorific chic which
(29:58):
he had begun using. Also started building Mohammed's baths on
King's Road in Brighton along with business partner Thomas Brown.
This bathhouse opened when Mohammad was sixty two, and he
and his family lived next door. In eighteen twenty two,
Mohammad published another book, Shampooing or Benefits Resulting from the
Use of the Indian Medicated Vapor Bath, as Introduced into
(30:21):
this Country by S. D. Mohammad, native of India, containing
a brief but comprehensive view of the effects produced by
the use of the warm bath in comparison with steam
or vapor bathing. This built on that earlier booklet of
testimonials outlining how he used shampooing and vapor baths to
treat various ailments. The book started with quote, Shampooing is
(30:46):
a process which I feel it incumbent on me to acknowledge,
cannot be practiced by any person unaccustomed to it, or
who has not frequently witnessed and been instructed carefully in
the operation. Several pretenders have since my establishment has been formed,
entered the held in opposition to me, who professed to
know the art. Yet I am sure their ignorance must
(31:07):
appear manifest to the world when it is known friction
is applied instead of another and less violent action. In
the vapor bathing too. I have my imitators, but the
public alone must decide on the merit of the copies
by a comparison with the original. The herbs with which
my baths are impregnated are brought expressly from India and
(31:28):
undergo a certain process known only to myself before they
are fit for use.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
He described using his methods to treat asthma contractions, which
were spasms, paralysis, or palsy as in what might follow
a stroke, rheumatism, and sprains. Each description was followed by
several customer testimonials for how people had recovered. He also
gave a brief explanation that he said he did not
(31:56):
think all ailments could be cured through his methods, but
that he followed that with a number of testimonials that
were related to various other complaints. This included hoarseness, knee pains,
a spinal complaint, a nervous disorder, abscesses, piles that's hemorrhoids,
(32:16):
general weakness. Et said it was a wide range of
things covered in these additional testimonials. Listen, he's covering himself
by saying not everything is going to be cured, but
I'd have cured an awful lot of stuff. And he
also included several poems that were written in his honor,
like this one from Missus Kent of Wimpole Street, London.
(32:38):
Worn out by anguish and excess of pain, hope seemed
delusive and assistance vain. Oppressed by sorrow, languid by disease,
deprived of health, all pleasure ceased to please the bath
whose influence o'er the shattered frame, like the mild soothing
of a parent, came bade her. Now hope, who felt
(32:58):
afflictions rod and blessed with health, now breathes her thanks
to God, to thee Mohammed led a grateful heart its
warmest thanks ingratitude. In part by the great skill and
unremitting care, one has been saved that might have perished here, who,
while she feels a pulse within her veins, will bless
thy name if memory remains. There were several of these
(33:23):
very flattering poems. I love this whole thing, obviously. There
were also newspaper clippings praising his bathouse, a list of subscribers' names,
and a brief account of his own biography. This presented
him as ten years older than he really was, with
that ten additional years spent working at Calcutta hospital before
joining the Bengal Army.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
This did not happen.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
It was made up, as with that copied in paraphrased
parts of his travel book. Though this is also an
incredibly common for people who were working in this sort
of pseudo medical wellness spots base the do like making
up a medical biography for yourself.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Yeah, cooking up credentials.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
Yeah. I'm not saying that's a great thing to do.
I'm just saying he was not doing anything unusual given
the time or the fact that he was working in
wellness in Brighton. In eighteen twenty five, Muhammad published a
revised version of his book that was more in line
with prevailing medical discourse around the ailments he was treating.
He also received a warrant of appointment as Royal shampooing
(34:26):
surgeon from two consecutive monarchs, Kings George the fourth and
William the fourth. Muhammad's bathhouses were incredibly popular. They were
described as very fashionable and elegant, and he tried to
open new branches in London and to fend off various
competitors in the eighteen twenties, but by the late eighteen
(34:46):
thirties his popularity was really starting to wane. In the
later years of his reign, King William the Fourth kind
of moved on to other resorts and other establishments, and
a lot of clients just kind of followed where the
king went. Although Mohammed extended numerous invitations to William's successor,
Queen Victoria, she apparently never visited one of his baths.
(35:09):
Mohammed's business in Brighton also suffered as it was disrupted
by the construction of various other buildings and sea walls,
and also other people just built bathhouses and those were
newer and more modern. In eighteen forty one, Mohammed's partner,
Thomas Brown died and Mohammed's baths were auctioned off. Even
(35:30):
though he seems to have made a very successful living
from his business, Mohammed did not have the money to
buy these bathhouses himself. He hoped the buyer would hire
him and then keep him on for running the baths,
but instead the space was leased to one of his competitors.
Mohammed tried to keep offering treatments in his home during
(35:51):
the last years of his life. Indians in England are
being seen less as a curiosity and more as an annoyance.
And as racially inferior to White Britain's life.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
This wasn't new.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
This had been the case before, especially among the more
less affluent classes of people, but it was just becoming
more obvious and more pronounced. Mohammed and his family seem
to have fallen from public site in Brighton. Jane died
of uterine cancer on December twenty sixth, eighteen fifty and
then Dean Muhammad died two months later on February twenty fourth,
(36:22):
eighteen fifty one, at the age of ninety one. They
were both buried at Saint Nicholas's Parish Church in Brighton.
Mohammad had been really well known while living in Cork
and then in London, and he had been famous during
the heyday of his Brighton baths, but by the time
he died, he and his businesses had largely been forgotten.
(36:44):
On September twenty ninth, two thousand and five, a historical
marker was unveiled in London at the site of the
Hindustani Coffeehouse and a Google doodle. On January fifteenth, twenty nineteen,
marked the two hundred twenty fifth anniversary of the publication
of the travel of Dean Mohammed. As a final note,
Dean and Jane Mohammad obviously had a very large family.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
One of their.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Grandchildren has actually come up on the show before, not
that long ago. Frederick Henry Horatio Apera Mohammed lived from
eighteen forty nine to eighteen eighty four and worked at
Guy's Hospital in London, where he made a number of
important discoveries related to blood pressure, hypertension and kidney disease.
So of course we talked about him a bit in
our hygh pertension episode. Sadly, he died of typhoid at
(37:31):
the age of only thirty five. Do you have a
little listener mail to cap off Dean Mohammed's story.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
I do, It's really quick. A quick point from Arturo
who wrote after our.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
Episode on Lcaricia of Winchester and Arturur wrote, Dear Tracy
and Holly, you rightly point out that not all people
engaged in money lending were Jews, and not all Jews
were engaged in money lending, But I wanted to point
out another factor that pushed medieval Jews to banking, finance
and trade. Jews in many countries were forbidden from owning
(38:03):
land so they could not be farmers or landlords. They
were not allowed to join guilds, so many professional trades
were foreclosed to them. There were only so many ways
to make a living in medieval Europe. Regards are Turo.
Thank you for this note, our Turo. I feel like
we had made like similar points from a different direction.
We had talked about people being allowed to live only
(38:25):
in England in London and then other cities, and they're
being restrictions on what professions they could pursue, But we
hadn't specifically talked about land owning or the fact that
having to be a member of a guild cut people off.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
From so many different professions.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
I think, if I am remembering correctly from my research
toward the end of when there was a Jewish community
in England during the medieval period, there were some people
who were allowed to own lands. But don't quote me
on that. I could be misremembering, or I could have
(39:08):
blurred some things together in what I was doing. So
thank you so much our cheer every game giving us
a chance to make that distinction.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
If you would like, you can send us an email.
We're at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. You can
look at our Facebook, our Instagram, our ex that used
to be Twitter. We're at mist in History at all
those places, and you can subscribe to our show on
the iHeartRadio app or wherever you'd like to get your podcasts.
(39:40):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
This is the second part of a two parter on
Dean Mohammad, who was born in Putna in northeastern India
in seventeen fifty nine and was a camp follower and
then a soldier in the British East India Company's Bengal Army.
Where we left off in this whole story, Captain Godfrey
Evan Baker, who was basically Mohammad's patron, had been accused
(00:40):
of extortion and had resigned from the military, and then
Muhammad followed his example and together the two men sailed
to Cork aboard the Danish vessel Christiansborg in January of
seventeen eighty four. Dean Mohammed was by far not the
only Indian person who went to what's now UK during
(01:01):
the late eighteenth century, but this was something authorities were
actively trying to discourage. Officers often wanted to bring an
Indian servant with them on their voyage when returning home
from India, but officials in London were worried that this
could create a community of impoverished Indian immigrants in major
port cities. So the East India Company was required to
(01:23):
provide return passage for Indian servants, and white officers were
required to pay a bond of fifty pounds to ensure
that their servant would return to India. Baker and Mohammad's
return aboard a Danish ship raises some questions about whether
this happened. In Mohammed's case, the British East India Company
(01:43):
had informed the Danish East India Company of this requirement,
and in theory, the Danish company collected this bond when
officers from Britain or Ireland returned on one of their ships.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
It is clear though that they did not.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Actually feel obligated to do this. It could be kind
of relax whether it was enforced. Baker and Mohammad also
boarded this ship outside of Kolkata proper, apparently because the
Christiansborg was also carrying some kind of secret cargo, so
it was loaded outside the city. A lot of kloak
and dagger stuff going on with this ship. Seems like
(02:20):
maybe there is a smuggling situation.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
Not sure. Yeah, the Christiansborg arrived in Cork in late
seventeen eighty four, when Mohammed was about twenty five and
Baker was about thirty three. Baker was from a Protestant
Anglo Irish family that is, of English descent but born
in Ireland, part of a class that's known as the
Protestant Ascendancy. He seems to have quickly found a place
(02:44):
for himself within Cork's more elite Protestant society, marrying the
daughter of a wealthy baron.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
This means that Mohammed was basically moving from one colonized
place to another, moving from India, which was in the
process of being colonized through the efforts of the British
East India Company, to Ireland, in which a Protestant English
ruling elite was governing a predominantly Catholic Irish population. Although
he was not the only Indian person living in Cork,
(03:14):
he was also something of an outsider there, even within
that sort of Indian immigrant community. Cork was a port city,
so most of its Indian population were sailors or servants
who had been working on ships. Others were the wives
or girlfriends of white sailors or soldiers who had brought
them to Cork from India, but Mohammed had been an
(03:37):
officer in the Bengal Army and had reached the second
highest rank that it was possible for an Indian to attain.
He was also closely connected to a white officer, albeit
one whose record was maybe a little spotty. But Mohammed
was seen as having a higher social rank than say,
a soldier looking for work on a departing ship. But
(04:00):
he was also lower in rank than Indian dignitaries and
officials who arrived from Southeast Asia for business or personal
or educational reasons. He also wasn't really seen as equal
to the Anglo Irish community that he was connected to.
Through this relationship with Baker, Mohammed seems to have been
regarded as something of a curiosity in Cork, not really
(04:23):
part of the Anglo Irish society that Baker was part of,
but not entirely outside of it either. Mohammed would have
already spoken English through his time in the Bengal Army.
That was one of many contexts in which an Indian
person might learn English in the eighteenth century, but it's
clear from his writing and the literary references in that
writing that he made a serious study of the language
(04:45):
and of material written in it. He again seems to
have worked in Baker's household as a valet or a butler,
a higher position than a regular servant, but not Baker's equal.
Godfrey Evan Baker died in seventeen eighty seven, and that
same year Dean Mohammad eloped with a young woman named
Jane Dally, who was described as a student and a
(05:07):
member of the Protestant gentry. We are not sure exactly
how old she was. Her gravestone and some obituaries give
a birth year of seventeen eighty That does not line
up with a marriage six years later. She was definitely
not a young child when they got married. It does
seem like she was young, though possibly in her like
(05:29):
mid to late teens. The couple also paid a bond
to the Anglican efficient who conducted the wedding ceremony, rather
than going through the usual process of posting the bands
ahead of the ceremony and having them read from the pulpit.
It is possible that they paid a bond rather than
posting the bands because they were trying to avoid controversy
(05:50):
around their respective ages or Mohammed's ethnicity. Marriages between white
people and people of color weren't unheard of in Britain
and Ireland at this points, especially in major cities that
had established immigrant communities, but most of the time these
marriages happened between servants or working class people, not with
members of the gentry. It's also possible that this was
(06:12):
something that the efficient demanded. This bond when people paid
it protected the Efficient in case it turned out that
the marriage was actually illegal in some way, such as
if a Protestant were marrying a Catholic, which was outlawed.
So Mohammad was definitely not Catholic. He did convert to Anglicanism,
he probably converted before this marriage took place, but it's
(06:37):
possible that this efficient still kind of looked at him
and regarded him as not Protestant. One last question mark
about the marriage between Dean Mohammad and Jane Day. It's possible,
but not totally certain, that something happened to Jane and
that he later remarried to someone else who was also
named Jane. Or it is possible that there was just
(06:58):
one Jane and that she and Mohammad were married for
the rest of their lives. There doesn't seem to be
clear documentation to clarify whether there was one Jane or two,
but it is confusing in the historical record. Yeah, and
I read some more modern write ups that definitively said
his first wife died and he remarried someone also named Jane,
(07:20):
and others that just proceed as though there is only
one Jane without getting into it at all. In seventeen
ninety three, Muhammad started placing advertisements for his forthcoming book,
looking for subscribers to help cover the cost of publication.
This was a common way for people to get their
books into print. He also seems to have visited a
(07:41):
number of prominent people in person to ask them to subscribe. Ultimately,
he got three hundred and twenty subscribers. A lot of
them were gentlemen, members of the nobility, other affluent and
prominent people.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
They weren't all men.
Speaker 2 (07:56):
There were a lot of like high ranking women among
the subscribers. It seems to have been very well connected
among the more elite people.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
Four hundred and fifty copies of his book, The Travels
of Dean Mohammad, a native of Patna in Bengal, through
several parts of India. While in the service of the
Honorable the East India Company, written by himself in a
series of Letters to a friend in two volumes, was
published on January fifteenth, seventeen ninety four. The book was
(08:26):
dedicated to William A. Bailey, Esquire Colonel in the service
of the Honorable the East India Company. This dedication may
explain why the book describes one of Bailey's defeats as
a victory. As we noted in Part one, this was
written specifically for an English speaking audience, people from Britain
or Ireland who might have reason to visit India. So
(08:49):
epistolary travel narratives and epistolary novels were a really popular
genre in eighteenth century Britain, and Mohammad wrote this as
a series of thirty eight letters to a fictional addressing
these letters only as dear sir. And it's really obvious
from his writing that he had studied other travel narratives
(09:09):
as well as other English language literary styles and conventions.
This was written so skillfully that he had some detractors
who claimed it was impossible for an Indian to have
written such an English work. Again, there were a lot
of ways.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
That people in India like Indian people in India were
learning English. This is not actually unusual to speak English,
but people were like, there's no way that an Indian
wrote this. It sounds way to English.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
He assumes that his reader is educated and knowledgeable, and
subtly reinforces the idea that he is educated and knowledgeable
as well, including leaving Latin quotes in Latin untranslated, with
the implicit assumption that both he and his readers know
what those quotes say. He also includes terms from multiple
other languages, including Hindi, Persian, Bengali, and local dialects from
(10:01):
different parts of India. At other points, he used terminology
that would be accessible and understandable to his audience rather
than local terms that would have been more accurate. For example,
he describes a number of Muslim practices around birth and
circumcision as baptism. No actual baptism was involved, but he
(10:21):
was trying to make what he was describing more relatable
and understandable to the people who would read it. Muhammad
meant this also as an account of his own life
in India, including his time with the Bengal Army, and
as a travel guide for people who might want to
visit or work in India, whether this was in a
military or a civilian role. So he included extensive descriptions
(10:45):
of the Indian subcontinent's cities and landscapes, its plants and animals,
including elephants, rhinoceroses, and camels, and its cultures and religions,
primarily in terms of Muslims and Hindus. He also included
a glossary, and he printed this work as two small
volumes so that it would be more easily portable. We're
(11:05):
going to talk about the book in more detail after
we paused for a sponsor break.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Dean Mohammet's Travels of Dean Mahammet was not the first
English language book written by a traveler from somewhere outside
of Europe, was the first one by an Indian person
in English. We do know that this is unique though,
in terms of Muhammad's role in his place in both
Indian and Anglo Irish society. This is a work about
(11:40):
the peoples and the cultures of India written by an
Indian for an English speaking white audience.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Overall, it is far more.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Sympathetic to its Indian subjects than similar work by white
writers generally was in the eighteenth century, although it does
still describe tribal peoples who were living outside of the
more mainstream Indian society as savages. This book could be
kind of romanticized, but it was not really sensationalized in
(12:10):
the way that most white writers work on India was.
At the same time, broadly speaking, it was supportive of
the British East India Company's endeavors in India. Again, it
was specifically written for people who were likely to see
those endeavors as a good and necessary thing, but he
could also be critical both of the company's more extreme
(12:32):
efforts to control the Indian population and of the decline
in the power of the Mughal Empire that the British
had both taken advantage of and contributed to. So you
can read this book as an attempt to give an
English speaking European audience a more accurate idea of what
India and its peoples were like, or you can read
it as complicit with British efforts to colonize and control India,
(12:56):
or both. As an example of what this book is like,
he wrote this description of Bnaris, also called Varanasi as
an example of sort of the glories of India's past. Quote,
there was once a very fine observatory here, and a
few years ago some European gentlemen, led hither by the
love of science and antiquity, discovered a great many astronomical
(13:19):
instruments of a large size, admirably well contrived, though injured
by the hand of time. It was supposed they might
have been constructed some centuries ago under the direction of
the Great Okper, the fond votary of science, and the
distinguished patron of the Brahmins, who applied with unwearied assiduity
to the study of astronomy. So Akpa was the third
(13:43):
Mughal emperor. I've had him on my list for an
episode forever. I've maybe may yeah. I feel like a
lot of what I have about him is written from
a more Muslim perspective and not as much detail about
like how did the Hindus that he was ruling over
(14:06):
feel about Olivis. Muhammad described the decline of the Mughal
Empire this way. Quote the history of the revolutions of
his court is fraught with so much fiction that it
would be impossible to reconcile it to reason or reflection. Yet,
if we believe the records and traditions of the natives.
Its sovereigns were the greatest and most arbitrary monarchs in
(14:27):
the world. Their orders, though ever so extravagant, were submissively obeyed,
and their mandates observed by the remotest nations. Their very
name struck terror into the hearts of their enemies. But
so rapid has been the decline of their power that
the race of the great Tamerlane is now little respected.
Since the days of Nazam al Mulud, the royal tenure
(14:50):
of the throne is grown so insecure that the Mogul
has been of late years deposed at pleasure to make
way for such of his servants as could gain over
the people that great engine of power to their cause.
His authority, which prevailed in former ages over most of
the kings of Earth, now reaches little farther than his saraglio,
(15:10):
where he dreams away life, drowned in the enjoyment of
dissolute pleasures. Muhammad also described India in a lot of
passages in terms of like the India of the present
day as truly beautiful. As one example quote, the country
around Banaras is considered as the paradise of India, remarkable
(15:31):
for its lubrious air, fascinating landscapes, and innocence of its
inhabitants to simple manners, and had a happy influence on
all who lived near them. While wasteful war spread her
horrors over other parts of India, this blissful country often
escaped her ravages, perhaps secured by its distance from the ocean,
or more probably by the sacred character ascribed to the scene,
(15:54):
which had, through many ages been considered as the repository
of the religion and learning of the Brahmin and the
prevailing idea of the simplicity of the native Hindus, a
people unaccustomed to the sanguinary measures of what they term
civilized nations. Several of the letters in the book are
devoted to different aspects of culture and religion, with more
(16:15):
detail in terms of Muslim beliefs and practices. Since Mohammed
didn't have as much familiarity with the practices of Hinduism
or other religions. When English language writing on India was
full of descriptions of its people as savage, backward, and alien,
Mohammed wrote this description of Muslims quote, the Mohammedans are
(16:35):
in general, of very healthful people, refraining from the use
of strong liquors and accustomed to a temperate diet, they
have but few diseases for which their own experience commonly
finds some simple, yet effectual remedy. When they are visited
by sickness, they bear it with much composure of mind,
partly through an expectation of removing their disorder by their
(16:56):
own manner of treating it. But when they perceive their
grows too violent to submit even to the utmost exertions
of their skill, they send for Amolna, who comes to
the bedside of the sick person, and, putting his hand
over him, feels that part of his body most affected,
and repeats with a degree of fervency, some pious prayers,
by the efficacy of which it is supposed the patient
(17:19):
will speedily recover. The Mahometans meet death with uncommon resignation
and fortitude, considering it only as the means of enlarging
them from a state of mortal captivity and opening to
them a free and glorious passage to the mansions of bliss.
Those ideas console them on the bed of sickness, and,
even amid the pangs of dissolution. The parting soul, struggling
(17:42):
to leave its earthly prison and panting for the joys
of immortality, changes at bright intervals, the terrors of the
grim monarch into the smiles of a cherub who invites
it to a happier region. He also tried to dispelse
some misconceptions that he thought his readers probably had about
Islam as a religion. For example, quote the Mohammedans are
(18:03):
strict adherence to the tenets of their religion, which does not,
by any means consist in that enthusiastic generation for Mohammad,
so generally conceived, it considers much more as its primary
object the unity of the Supreme Being under the name
of Allah. Mohammed is only regarded in a secondary point
of view as the missionary of that unity, merely for
(18:25):
destroying the idle worship to which Arabia had continued so
long under bondage, and so far from addressing him as
a deity, that in their orations they do not pray
to him but for him, recommending him to the divine mercy.
It is a mistake in though generally received opinion that
pilgrimages were made to his tomb, which in a religious
(18:46):
sense were only directed to what is called the Kahaba
or Holy House at Mecca, an idle temple dedicated by
him to the unity of God. His tomb is at Medina,
visited by the Maham's purely out of curiosity and reverence
to his memory. As we mentioned before the break, this
book also included a glossary. Here are some examples. Bang
(19:11):
and intoxicating juice of a vegetable bizarre a market beetle,
a leaf growing on a vine and chewed by all
ranks of people, brahmin a priest, daggas custom house officers
or collectors, duly a woman's chair like a sedan, hackeries,
carts or coaches drawn by oxen, paddy grounds, rice fields,
(19:34):
pagoda an Indian temple. Raja the highest title claimed by
the Gentoo princes. He defined Gentoo as a native Indian
in a state of adulatry. Seepois Indian foot soldiers hired
and disciplined by Europeans. Zemindary an officer who takes care
of the rents arising from the public lands. I like
(19:55):
how some of the words that needed to be defined
in the eighteenth century are words that are just commonly
used in English now, like bizarre and pagoda. There were
also poems. Some of the poems weren't attributed to anyone,
they were presumably written by him. Others were quotes from
writers like John Milton. It's clear that Mohammed was influenced
(20:18):
by European writing about India, especially John Henry Gross's Voyage
to the East Indies published in seventeen sixty six, and
Jemima Kindersley's Letters from the Islands of Tenerif, Brazil, The
Cape of Good Hope and the East Indies that came
out in seventeen seventy seven. In fact, according to Michael H. Fisher,
who has written a number of works on Dean Muhammad,
(20:40):
about seven percent of this text comes from Gross's book,
but rewritten in Mohammed's voice and sometimes reframed to create
a more neutral or positive view of the people and
places that are being described. For example, Gross included a
passage on the practice of chewing beatle leaf, describing it
as a vicious habit and saying people did it to
(21:00):
fortify the stomach or preserve the teeth, but dismissing the
idea that it could do either thing. A very similar
passage is in Mohammed's book, but it doesn't dismiss the
idea that chewing beetle could fortify the stomach or preserve
the teeth, and it presents the chewing of beatle leaf
as a luxury for great men, not as a vicious habit. So,
(21:21):
as we've talked about before on the show, attitudes about
plagiarism were really different in the eighteenth century than they
are today. At that time, people were sort of picking
up and copying from one another all the time without
a lot of furor over it. It's likely that Muhammad
used some of this borrowing to kind of fill in
gaps in his own knowledge. Since he was Muslim, he
(21:42):
could not speak from experience about Hindu beliefs and practices.
He also couldn't really talk in detail about the cultures
and the practices of people who were living in areas
really far away from where he had grown up. There
there's enormous cultural diversity in the Indian subco and he
was talking about the other side of the region like
(22:04):
he might not actually know much detail. At some points, though,
like this description of the chewing of beatle leaf, he
borrows descriptions of things that he probably.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Would have known about. We don't totally know why he
chose to go with those passages and not ones of
his own. Beyond that, this book seems to line up
really well with East India Company records on where Mohammed's
units would have been during his fifteen years connected to it.
This is incredible considering that that meant he was writing
(22:33):
about things that had happened between ten and twenty five
years before. And there's no evidence that he kept detailed
notes during his time in the army. So he's kind
of the exception that proves the rule of memory being
pretty faulty. Yeah, yeah, And I don't maybe there were
notes though, or maybe he did a lot of research
(22:55):
going through old newspaper I don't know. He seems to
have done pretty good job though, of keeping the timeline correct.
I will talk about his life after this book came out.
After another quick sponsor break in seventeen ninety six, Godfrey
(23:19):
Evan Baker's younger brother, Captain William Massey Baker, bought an
estate outside of Cork. William Baker had a daughter named
Eleanor whose mother was Indian, and it's possible that Dean
Mohammad set up a household somewhere on that estate. He
definitely spent time there. On December seventh, seventeen ninety nine,
(23:39):
an Indian visitor to Cork named Abu Talib Khan visited
while traveling to London to reconnect with an old patron.
He wrote an account of his travels which was in
Persian and that included writing about this meeting with Dean
Mohammed at this estate. In eighteen oh seven, after a
little more than twenty years in Cork, Mohammad and his
(24:00):
family moved to the fashionable neighborhood of Portman Square in London.
At this point he had at least one son, William,
born in seventeen ninety seven. He and Jane went on
to have several other children, Emilia in eighteen oh eight,
Henry in eighteen ten, Dean in eighteen twelve, Rosanna in
eighteen fifteen, Horatio in eighteen sixteen, Frederick in eighteen eighteen,
(24:26):
and Arthur Eckber in eighteen nineteen.
Speaker 2 (24:29):
Their living in Portman Square suggests that while they might
not have been fully accepted into British society, they weren't
entirely excluded from it either. As we said, this is
a really fashionable neighborhood. They also must have been making
a pretty comfortable living to be having a lodging there.
Muhammad started working for a Scottish nobleman named Basil Cochrane,
(24:50):
who had returned from India very wealthy, so wealthy that
he repeatedly faced accusations of embezzlement. At this point, so
called exotic treatments from the East had become a fad
in England, drawing inspiration from both Southeast Asia and Egypt.
Both of these places were being occupied or colonized by
(25:12):
England and France, and so people were kind of bringing
things inspired from those places back to Britain, Ireland's continental Europe.
Cochrane tried to find a business niche that could capitalize
on this fad, and he established a steam bath. Muhammad
got a job. They're doing shampooing. This was not washing
(25:32):
people's scalps and hair. It was a style of Indian
therapeutic massage, with the term shampooing coming from the word chumpy.
In eighteen ten, Muhammed established the Hindustani Coffee House in
Portman Square. This was more of a restaurant than a
coffee shop. He served meat and vegetable dishes with seasoned
rice in what sounds like almost a British and Indian
(25:54):
culinary fusion. The restaurant's decor was inspired by Indian fashion
and art, or possibly by Asian art more broadly. An
adjacent room had hookahs for smoking with tobacco blended with
herbs from India.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
The reason we say Asian art more broadly possibly is that,
like one observer wrote a description of it that included
the word Chinese, and we don't really know if there
was Chinese art or if that this person just kind
of lumped everything, if they were trying to sound as
though they knew about other cultures. Yes, this was the
first known Indian restaurant in England and here is an
(26:29):
advertisement that ran for it. Quote Hindu Stanny Coffee House,
number thirty four George Street, Portman Square, Mohammed East Indian
informs the nobility and gentry. He has fitted up the
above house neatly and elegantly for the entertainment of Indian gentlemen,
where they may enjoy the hookah, the real chimed tobacco
and Indian dishes in the highest perfection and allowed by
(26:52):
the greatest epicures to be unequal to any curries ever
made in England with choice wines in every accommodation, and
now up to them for their future patronage and support,
and gratefully acknowledges himself indebted for their former favors and trusts.
It will merit the highest satisfaction when made known to
the public. People seem to have liked the food at
(27:15):
this restaurant, but Mohammed struggled to keep it afloat. It
wasn't in a good location to have a dedicated regular
clientele or to attract lots of attention from visitors and travelers.
After about a year, he brought in a partner named
John Spencer to try to salvage the operation, but this
just did not work out, and in eighteen twelve Mohammed
(27:35):
filed for bankruptcy. He wasn't involved in the restaurant after
this point, but it does seem like someone else took
over the space and ran a restaurant with the same name,
possibly for years afterward. Bankruptcy obviously was a huge financial
loss for the Mohammed family. They moved into a boarding house.
It's possible that Mohammed's eldest son took a job to
(27:58):
try to help out. Mohammad also advertised his services as
a valet or a butler, and eventually wound up working
at another steambath. Eventually the family moved to Brighton, which
was growing into a popular resort town with a focus
on sea bathing, bathing machines and wellness spas. Mohammed again
worked as a valet, then found a job at a
(28:19):
bathhouse and started selling his own cosmetics. By eighteen fourteen,
he and Jane were both working as bathhouse keepers at
the Indian Medicated Vapor Bath, where Mohammed used Cochrane's steambath
designs but with more Indian inspired elements. Jane learned to
do shampooing as well, and she supervised the women's baths.
Seawater was seen as having health benefits, and Mohammed drew
(28:43):
in seawater, heated it into steam, and customers bathed in
a contraption sort of like a steam room. In December
of eighteen fifteen, Muhammad opened a new business called Battery
House Baths, in a building that, as its name suggests,
had been a battery for the British Border Ordinance Apparently though,
all the cannon fire that went on there, combined with
(29:05):
ongoing erosion issues kind of weakened the foundation that made
it not a great idea to keep firing cannons around
there anymore. Within three years, Mohammad was billing himself as
a shampooing surgeon. He wasn't performing surgery like we would
describe it today. People were using the word surgeon to
mean more along the lines of doctor. So he was
(29:27):
using steam baths and massage to treat all manner of ailments.
And as his success grew, he opened another facility up
the cliff from the battery that was known as.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
The West Cliff Baths. In eighteen twenty, Mohammad printed a
book that was basically a collection of customer testimonials for
his wellness treatments. This was called Cases Cured by Sheik
Dean Mohammed, shampooing surgeon and inventor of the Indian medicated
vapor and seawater bath. Sheik was the honorific chic which
(29:58):
he had begun using. Also started building Mohammed's baths on
King's Road in Brighton along with business partner Thomas Brown.
This bathhouse opened when Mohammad was sixty two, and he
and his family lived next door. In eighteen twenty two,
Mohammad published another book, Shampooing or Benefits Resulting from the
Use of the Indian Medicated Vapor Bath, as Introduced into
(30:21):
this Country by S. D. Mohammad, native of India, containing
a brief but comprehensive view of the effects produced by
the use of the warm bath in comparison with steam
or vapor bathing. This built on that earlier booklet of
testimonials outlining how he used shampooing and vapor baths to
treat various ailments. The book started with quote, Shampooing is
(30:46):
a process which I feel it incumbent on me to acknowledge,
cannot be practiced by any person unaccustomed to it, or
who has not frequently witnessed and been instructed carefully in
the operation. Several pretenders have since my establishment has been formed,
entered the held in opposition to me, who professed to
know the art. Yet I am sure their ignorance must
(31:07):
appear manifest to the world when it is known friction
is applied instead of another and less violent action. In
the vapor bathing too. I have my imitators, but the
public alone must decide on the merit of the copies
by a comparison with the original. The herbs with which
my baths are impregnated are brought expressly from India and
(31:28):
undergo a certain process known only to myself before they
are fit for use.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
He described using his methods to treat asthma contractions, which
were spasms, paralysis, or palsy as in what might follow
a stroke, rheumatism, and sprains. Each description was followed by
several customer testimonials for how people had recovered. He also
gave a brief explanation that he said he did not
(31:56):
think all ailments could be cured through his methods, but
that he followed that with a number of testimonials that
were related to various other complaints. This included hoarseness, knee pains,
a spinal complaint, a nervous disorder, abscesses, piles that's hemorrhoids,
(32:16):
general weakness. Et said it was a wide range of
things covered in these additional testimonials. Listen, he's covering himself
by saying not everything is going to be cured, but
I'd have cured an awful lot of stuff. And he
also included several poems that were written in his honor,
like this one from Missus Kent of Wimpole Street, London.
(32:38):
Worn out by anguish and excess of pain, hope seemed
delusive and assistance vain. Oppressed by sorrow, languid by disease,
deprived of health, all pleasure ceased to please the bath
whose influence o'er the shattered frame, like the mild soothing
of a parent, came bade her. Now hope, who felt
(32:58):
afflictions rod and blessed with health, now breathes her thanks
to God, to thee Mohammed led a grateful heart its
warmest thanks ingratitude. In part by the great skill and
unremitting care, one has been saved that might have perished here, who,
while she feels a pulse within her veins, will bless
thy name if memory remains. There were several of these
(33:23):
very flattering poems. I love this whole thing, obviously. There
were also newspaper clippings praising his bathouse, a list of subscribers' names,
and a brief account of his own biography. This presented
him as ten years older than he really was, with
that ten additional years spent working at Calcutta hospital before
joining the Bengal Army.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
This did not happen.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
It was made up, as with that copied in paraphrased
parts of his travel book. Though this is also an
incredibly common for people who were working in this sort
of pseudo medical wellness spots base the do like making
up a medical biography for yourself.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Yeah, cooking up credentials.
Speaker 2 (34:05):
Yeah. I'm not saying that's a great thing to do.
I'm just saying he was not doing anything unusual given
the time or the fact that he was working in
wellness in Brighton. In eighteen twenty five, Muhammad published a
revised version of his book that was more in line
with prevailing medical discourse around the ailments he was treating.
He also received a warrant of appointment as Royal shampooing
(34:26):
surgeon from two consecutive monarchs, Kings George the fourth and
William the fourth. Muhammad's bathhouses were incredibly popular. They were
described as very fashionable and elegant, and he tried to
open new branches in London and to fend off various
competitors in the eighteen twenties, but by the late eighteen
(34:46):
thirties his popularity was really starting to wane. In the
later years of his reign, King William the Fourth kind
of moved on to other resorts and other establishments, and
a lot of clients just kind of followed where the
king went. Although Mohammed extended numerous invitations to William's successor,
Queen Victoria, she apparently never visited one of his baths.
(35:09):
Mohammed's business in Brighton also suffered as it was disrupted
by the construction of various other buildings and sea walls,
and also other people just built bathhouses and those were
newer and more modern. In eighteen forty one, Mohammed's partner,
Thomas Brown died and Mohammed's baths were auctioned off. Even
(35:30):
though he seems to have made a very successful living
from his business, Mohammed did not have the money to
buy these bathhouses himself. He hoped the buyer would hire
him and then keep him on for running the baths,
but instead the space was leased to one of his competitors.
Mohammed tried to keep offering treatments in his home during
(35:51):
the last years of his life. Indians in England are
being seen less as a curiosity and more as an annoyance.
And as racially inferior to White Britain's life.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
This wasn't new.
Speaker 2 (36:01):
This had been the case before, especially among the more
less affluent classes of people, but it was just becoming
more obvious and more pronounced. Mohammed and his family seem
to have fallen from public site in Brighton. Jane died
of uterine cancer on December twenty sixth, eighteen fifty and
then Dean Muhammad died two months later on February twenty fourth,
(36:22):
eighteen fifty one, at the age of ninety one. They
were both buried at Saint Nicholas's Parish Church in Brighton.
Mohammad had been really well known while living in Cork
and then in London, and he had been famous during
the heyday of his Brighton baths, but by the time
he died, he and his businesses had largely been forgotten.
(36:44):
On September twenty ninth, two thousand and five, a historical
marker was unveiled in London at the site of the
Hindustani Coffeehouse and a Google doodle. On January fifteenth, twenty nineteen,
marked the two hundred twenty fifth anniversary of the publication
of the travel of Dean Mohammed. As a final note,
Dean and Jane Mohammad obviously had a very large family.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
One of their.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
Grandchildren has actually come up on the show before, not
that long ago. Frederick Henry Horatio Apera Mohammed lived from
eighteen forty nine to eighteen eighty four and worked at
Guy's Hospital in London, where he made a number of
important discoveries related to blood pressure, hypertension and kidney disease.
So of course we talked about him a bit in
our hygh pertension episode. Sadly, he died of typhoid at
(37:31):
the age of only thirty five. Do you have a
little listener mail to cap off Dean Mohammed's story.
Speaker 1 (37:38):
I do, It's really quick. A quick point from Arturo
who wrote after our.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
Episode on Lcaricia of Winchester and Arturur wrote, Dear Tracy
and Holly, you rightly point out that not all people
engaged in money lending were Jews, and not all Jews
were engaged in money lending, But I wanted to point
out another factor that pushed medieval Jews to banking, finance
and trade. Jews in many countries were forbidden from owning
(38:03):
land so they could not be farmers or landlords. They
were not allowed to join guilds, so many professional trades
were foreclosed to them. There were only so many ways
to make a living in medieval Europe. Regards are Turo.
Thank you for this note, our Turo. I feel like
we had made like similar points from a different direction.
We had talked about people being allowed to live only
(38:25):
in England in London and then other cities, and they're
being restrictions on what professions they could pursue, But we
hadn't specifically talked about land owning or the fact that
having to be a member of a guild cut people off.
Speaker 1 (38:44):
From so many different professions.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
I think, if I am remembering correctly from my research
toward the end of when there was a Jewish community
in England during the medieval period, there were some people
who were allowed to own lands. But don't quote me
on that. I could be misremembering, or I could have
(39:08):
blurred some things together in what I was doing. So
thank you so much our cheer every game giving us
a chance to make that distinction.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
If you would like, you can send us an email.
We're at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. You can
look at our Facebook, our Instagram, our ex that used
to be Twitter. We're at mist in History at all
those places, and you can subscribe to our show on
the iHeartRadio app or wherever you'd like to get your podcasts.
(39:40):
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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Tracy Wilson
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