Book Review
A Sylheti in Nineteenth Century London
It was Michael H. Fisher's 2004 book Counterflows to Colonialism that first alerted its readers to the history of people from the Indian subcontinent visiting or settling down in England as early as the seventeenth century. Improbable though it would appear, there were also hundreds of Indians who had either visited England or become integrated into English society by the eighteenth century, that is to say, even before the days of the Raj. And once the English had consolidated their presence in India, there were reasons of trade as well as empire to impel thousands of intrepid or merely desperate Indians to taste life in Great Britain, for a while or forever.
In particular, Fisher's book traces in considerable and fascinating detail the history of lascar settlements in England from the seventeenth century onwards. The word “lascar”, Fisher indicates connoted Indian sailors or labourers who had joined naval labour gangs and had been recruited as a block. It is obvious from Fisher's work that what was a trickle in that century became a stream by the time Queen Victoria had ascended the British throne. In other words, well before the Sylheti diaspora that had become a phenomenon in the second half of the twentieth century, it was entirely likely that there were quite a few Bengalis settled in London or even the English countryside.
LascarBy Shahida Rahman
Stoney Stanton
Leicestershire, England, 2012
286 pages Now Shahida Rahman has woven an absorbing historical yarn about one such Sylheti Bengali sailor's extended stay in London in the mid-nineteenth century in Lascar. Courtesy of an online interview, one learns that Rahman is a Brit of Sylheti origin, who has lived in Cambridge all her life. Even though her father settled down in Cambridge in the nineteen fifties, he was descended from a Lascar and stories of the Lascar ancestor were, quite naturally, part of Rahman's family tradition. But not content with the stories she had grown up with, Rahman began researching the subject of Lascars in Britain until she came up with a novel that was eventually accepted for publication in England and came out there in June 2012. Rahman's novel is about Ayan Miah who is like all Lascars in that he had volunteered to be one because serving on an English ship appeared to be a better option at one point of his life than what his own country had to offer him. The novel begins dramatically though with Ayan in prison-like conditions in a ship called The Bengal, for life on board for an Indian sailor in a British trading ship was never much better than his life on land. But Ayan had been tempted to be a Lascar because his father had been such a voyager too, despite the warning sounded to him by his brother Kazi that he was fated to contempt and racist slurs on board English ships. The brothers, readers learn through flashbacks, had to struggle to make a living in Sylhet selling rice and Kazi had even become an addict to escape the harshness of life in that part of India then. This is why Ayan leaves his brother behind and goes to Calcutta, rather than “accept fate without a whimper” as Kazi did. But life on board The Bengal proves even more hellish than life in Sylhet. Ayan, like many hundreds of real-life Lascars before him, deserts the ship in London, along with another young sailor called Akbar, both opting to be free in an alien city than endure further hardships on the ship. At least initially though, survival here meant resorting to begging. Fortunately for the duo, and like innumerable illegal immigrants who still have to negotiate a foreign land any which way they can, Ayan and Akbar chance upon people who help him to survive. These are men and women like him from other countries who had learnt to cope with adversity after finding themselves stranded in England. The duo thus develop ties with an Italian woman called Louisa, who had chosen to sing her way out of the barriers posed by exile, and soon Ayan learns to accompany her as an entertainer on drums and even sing Bengali songs in nineteenth century London! Lascar is only a medium-sized novel, but it is full of twists and turns. Eventually Akbar dies and Louisa wanders out of Ayan's life as fortuitously as she had walked into it. Ayan now finds himself alone in the huge and forbidding city. Another chance encounter with a kind missionary leads him to a businessman called Lionel Jennings who becomes his first English benefactor. Jennings gives him an English name, Albert, and treats him kindly, and helps him learn English. But racism is endemic in London and despite his newly acquired skills Ayan becomes a street cleaner subject to racist attacks. He is rescued from one such attack by Phoebe Hilary, his benefactor's niece, who is so fascinated by him that she declares her intention to marry the Indian. But the prospects of an inter-racial marriage in the family drive Phoebe's father into torturing Ayan. Phoebe, however, commits herself totally to him and the couple decides to live together as husband and wife, albeit in a marriage that depended on mutual consent than on the law. Eventually, they even find a “government appointed Quadi” to sanctify the marriage, for a subtext of Shahida Rahman's novel is the virtues of living a life based on Islamic covenants, despite all the odds of doing so in a foreign land. Lascar, then, is in the romance mode too in addition to being a historical novel and a work designed to propagate the blessings of living a life according to Islamic tenets. For a while Ayan's life seems to be like a dream coming true, for this Sylheti ex-lascar appears to be settling down reasonably well in Victorian London with an English wife. But another twist in the plot sees Phoebe being forcibly taken away from him by her father who has him arrested for trumped up charges of “theft and blackmail” After spending five years in prison, he is released to drift in London's streets for a while until he chances first on a ship painter named Malik and then a street urchin called Arthur who uncannily reminds him of the son he would have had with Phoebe and whose story of his parents is reminiscent of the life he had led in London with her.
Though Ayan is content to be reunited to what he is sure is his son, he feels he has had enough of England and plans to return to Sylhet with Arthur where he hopes Kazi would be still waiting for him. Lascar, however, ends in Casablanca, where Arthur and Ayan part ways, for the young man is impelled by wanderlust to sign on board a ship headed for North America, while his father is bent on returning home. What Ayan recognizes in the end is that we are all driven by our unique destinies, and no matter what he wanted his son to do, Arthur “would follow the path he was born to follow”.
Shahida Rahman has written a work, then, which despite having many improbable moments in it hangs together as much for the author's skills in weaving a narrative as for the historical research and family legends underlying it. For sure, a new generation of readers who have read works of scholarship like Michael L. Fisher's Counterflows to Colonialism will have no problems in concluding that the story of a Lascar like Ayan wandering in London in the nineteenth century is not that implausible. For sure, too, Rahman has the kind of gifts that a storyteller needs to build on the scanty details available in historical records to create a novel in the romance mode. Moreover, she has the kind of audacious imagination a novelist requires to build on the slender threads of narratives embedded in historical accounts until they coalesce into a full-fledged novel. It must be said also that Lascar is a good read because it has narrative pace, affective passages and the kind of momentum that an entertaining narrative requires to take the reader from its opening pages to its finale. Despite being essentially serious in intent it is light in its movement and the messages it conveys thus does not impede the flow of the tale.
It must be said, however, that the reader is bound to be bothered by instances after instances that betray lack of careful proofreading and scrupulous editing in the book's production process. Especially in the first half of the book, the reader is going to be irritated by lines such as the following: “My father protectively pushed me back and shielded me from the crowed as they pressed away from the street” (19); “A snap woke Ayan from his daydream” (24); “The orphanage taught the new organized government, (24); “'Ayan, why do you struggle in the soil'”? (30); “Stood in the doorway, he looked around the fine house the brothers built with their own hands” (35); “The heat pressed down like heavy weighs making it difficult to breath and Ayan struggled to sleep” (42).
One could go on at this rate, but the point is that publishers of the book did Shahida Rahman a disfavour by printing the book without the kind of care that could have prevented such typos and lapses. Rahman's Lascar is otherwise a neatly written book and deserved a much better fate. It is to be hoped, therefore that Lascar will soon be available in a revised edition that will allow its readers to savour this tale of a Sylheti in nineteenth century London that will surely captivate them and bring an all but forgotten part of our history alive courtesy of the strength of the author's imaginings.
The writer teaches English at Dhaka University.
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