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Of all the many Indian influences in the ‘outside world,’ few stand out more than Indian food (“curry”), Indian doctors everywhere, and therapeutic massages and shampooing. Imagine if a single man, a proto-NRI if you will, that embodied all these. You do not have to imagine because one such did exist – Sake (Sheikh) Dean Mahomed.
A ‘Shampooing Surgeon’ might be a weird title for us to get our heads around, but that is exactly what Patna-born Dean Mahomed called himself – perhaps the first of the kind anywhere. There were several other firsts also associated with him – the first Indian to write and publish a book in English (The Travels of Dean Mahomet, 1794); among the first Indians to receive royal appointments when in 1822, King George IV appointed Mahomed as his personal ‘shampooing surgeon,’ a post continued to hold under William IV; among the first Indians to elope with a white British lady for which he even converted from Islam to Christianity; the first person to introduce shampooing to the British Isles; and, importantly for us, the man who opened the first Indian restaurant in Britain.
If you are familiar with London, you would also know of the blue and green plaques that dot the city and identify sites where prominent Britons lived or worked. Around Portman Square in Marylebone, not too far from Baker Street and a little north of Buckingham Palace, you will find a plaque that reads “Site of Hindostanee Coffee House 1810 – London’s first Indian restaurant. Owned by Sake Dean Mahomed 1759-1851”. Portman Square was an apt location for an Indian restaurant because it had recently become fashionable among returned Anglo-Indians who also longed for a “taste of home.” Indeed, on the 27th of March 1811, the advertisement to the restaurant even appeared on The Times where it claimed to the retired East India Company officials, the ‘nabobs,’ that they would now be able to enjoy “Indian dishes in the highest perfection.” Michael Fisher, in his 2000 biography of Mahomed says that Mahomed assured his customers that the spices, oils, and herbs, both for the curries and for the hookah tobacco, were all specially procured in India, thus ensuring an “authentic” taste of India. In a scene that would not be unfamiliar to people who have eaten at old Indian restaurants in Britain, the place had bamboo cane furniture and paintings of Indian scenes.
Unfortunately for Mahomed, the venture was far from a success. He filed for bankruptcy two years after starting the venture perhaps because the ‘nabobs’ had brought in their Indian servants to make them the curries they so missed, or perhaps also because Norris Street Coffee House on the Haymarket had been serving curries since at least 1773. Whatever the cause, Dean Mahomed now had to rethink his life and business and that’s when he moved to Brighton.
When Mahomed and his Irish Protestant wife eloped from Ireland to London, Mahomed had found employment with another ‘nabob’, Basil Cochrane, who in addition to owning one of the largest houses in Portman Square, also claimed to have developed something called the ‘vapour cure,’ a technique he learnt in India. Mahomed added the ‘shampooing’ to this technique, thus ensuring the arrival of a phenomenon in the western world. “Shampoo” itself comes from the Hindi word “champo,” meaning to massage. Champo is believed to have come from the ‘champa’ flower that is used to make fragrant hair oil. This technique became a huge hit among the customers but Cochrane wouldn’t credit Mahomed for this. It was because of this that he had to turn restaurateur, and now even that had let him down. So he returned to his champi ways in Brighton, and that was where he found true success. He set up Mahomed’s Baths close to the Royal Pavilion and even published books on the therapeutic benefits of his shampooing techniques.
The world had all but forgotten the contributions of this man of Indian origin until interest was revived by the British-Pakistani poet Alamgir Hashimi and Michael Fisher. Ironically enough, aside from using his Indian origin as a peg to create businesses, Mahomed did not really see himself as an Indian. Even in his writings, he used the pronoun “we” to describe himself and the white Europeans, and does not really challenge the ways in which the East India Company operated or treated Indian citizens. Even more ironic then, that the revival of the legacy of this ‘Indian’ was a result of British people.
However he may have viewed himself, his contributions to British life remain significant. Even he could not have guessed the explosion of curry houses in Britain or ‘chicken tikka masala’ becoming the “national dish of Britain” centuries later, and yet, there he was, right at the beginning of it all. He did what he needed to do – hustled – and the rest is history.
