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How many people know that the first-ever book written in English was by Dean Mahomed from Bihar, asks writer and journalist Tabish Khair as he makes out a case for highlighting the literary achievements of a state whose image needs correction.
It happened more than once to me during my days as a journalist working for a newspaper in Delhi. And every time the question was worded in more or less the same way. When did you go to Jawaharlal Nehru University, I would be asked. On my replying that I never went to JNU, the next question would be: Which college in Delhi University did you go to? I must confess that I derived some perverse pleasure in making my answer drag out. I had been educated, until then, in schools and colleges of my hometown of Gaya. I had a Masters degree from the neighbouring Magadh University of Bodh-Gaya. But having made a career as a writer (of English) and obtained a job with the Delhi office of a newspaper, it was assumed that I must have gone to college in Delhi. That is what almost all aspiring Biharis do. It used to afford me some pleasure to watch the questioner do evaluative somersaults – sometimes revising his opinion of Bihar, sometimes revising his opinion of me – as it dawned on him that I had all my academic degrees from Bihar. I have missed this in Denmark – for, contrary to what people in Delhi or Calcutta might want to believe – for most people in the West, even in universities, it makes very little difference whether you have a degree from JNU or MU. What, above all, would surprise my questioners in Delhi was the fact that I spoke and wrote English. Even among the large-hearted who might concede the possibility of education in Bihar, ‘Laloo’s state’ has the reputation of having nothing much to do with English. This, of course, is a prejudice. E. M. Forster spent some time in Bihar and it can be argued that the Malabar caves in A Passage to India resemble the Barabar Caves outside Gaya too much for it to be sheer coincidence. Rudyard Kipling is reported to have passed through Bihar too, as did a dozen lesser colonial writers. But, what is more significant, Biharis have contributed considerably to Indian English literature. After all the first book in English by an Indian was written by a Bihari. Born in Patna in 1759, Dean Mahomed chose to attach himself to Godfrey Evan Baker, a newly-arrived Cadet from Cork, in spite of the objections of his mother. Dean Mahomed was 10 years old (by one account) when he took this decision, and Baker probably in his mid-teens. However, the decision was to keep the men together for the rest of their lives, until Baker’s death on his return to Ireland, and it was to take Dean Mahomed across much of India and finally to Ireland in 1784. Dean Mahomed claimed to have introduced shampooing in the West, and it appears that his Travels (completed on January 15, 1794) was the first book in English by an Indian. The book was dedicated to Colonel William A. Bailie and written in the form of a series of letters to an imaginary friend. In writing it, Dean Mahomed might have had social prestige in mind – as the language of the text shows, he was a man of literary interests. In 1822, Dean Mahomed wrote and published another book, Shampooing, or, Benefits Resulting From the Use of the Indian Medicated Bath, As Introduced Into This Country, by S. D. Mahomed (A Native of India). He was also the founder of a family that contributed in many ways to British history in spite of racial discrimination at times: two of his sons followed in his footsteps while one established a successful fencing academy and gymnasium. His grandsons were to become doctors, vicars, architects and scientists: one of his grandsons, Frederick Akbar Mahomed (1849 – 84), was a pioneer of clinical research. Two of Dean Mahomed’s great-grandsons died fighting for the British in World War I, one as an engineer in the Scots Guards and the other in the Royal Flying Corps. But Dean Mahomed was by no means the only Bihari to have left his mark on Indian English literature. How can one forget 19th century writers like Avadh Behari Lall, as well as the fact that so many leading Indian English writers and critics today have had something to do with Bihar: Vikram Seth, Meenakshi Mukherjee, Shyamala Narayan. There are, of course, also a few contemporary or recent writers from Bihar who remain quite visible in the English-reading world: Amitava Kumar, Sidhartha Chowdhury, Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen, and others. That all this is so often forgotten has much to do with the fact that there has been a lack of political will in Bihar to highlight its own literatures and arts, and in particular the contributions of Biharis in English. It is in this context that I was pleasantly surprised to receive copies of two anthologies the other month: Spectrum: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry for Intermediate Arts and Commerce, and Prism: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry for Intermediate Science. Nicely produced by Macmillan and carefully edited, the two anthologies not only focus on important literary texts in English, but do so from a Bihari perspective. Hence, they also contain texts by recent Bihari writers writing in English – Amitava Kumar, Siddharth Chowdhury, myself – as well as well-known Bihari figures, such as Jaya Prakash Narayan, all of it mixed with texts by Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Whitman, Nehru, Tagore and the usual textbook suspects. It is heartening to see that finally our experience of life in Bihar might start overlapping with our reading of ‘English literature’ in Bihar. This can only be of mutual benefit – for society and for English writing from Bihar. (Tabish Khair is the author of several books, including the novel, The Bus Stopped, which was short-listed for the Encore Award in the UK.)
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