My own parents travelled to the United Kingdom from the city of Calcutta in recently independent India (1947) in 1961 in their early twenties and myself and my younger brother were both born here. My parents thought they were coming to the golden world of Shelly, Keats, Byron and of course Shakespeare, but the reality was a lot harsher to begin with. They were graduates from University and spoke English well but struggled for years facing poverty, racism, bad housing and exclusion from employment. They were proud Bengalis, who believed fiercely in giving their children a good education and my father in particular was a brilliant story teller. I grew up hearing the stories of the epic Mahabharata, Ramayana, the history of India and the struggle from independence from British colonial rule, which his family were closely connected to. Through my father’s stories of the injustice of the British Raj in India, through the years, I also became very interested to learn more about British colonialism. It is a fact that at its height the British Empire was the largest empire in history and, for over a century, was the foremost global power. By 1920, the British Empire held sway over 412 million people, and covered 24 percent of the Earth's total land area.
In my early twenties, I read a wonderful book by Rozina Vishram ‘Ayahs, Lascars and Princes, Indians in Britain 1700-1947’. I was fascinated by the book, the stories and photos within it and the alternative history of Indian immigration. I was a history student at University and was always fascinated by how many ‘takes’ there are on different moments in history. What is history after all? The story of the past, things that happened, political events, the way people lived, their influences, wars, kings and queens, brave soldiers, visionary men and women, inventions and revolutions. Visram’s book had it all – but it was a history I had never read before, not even as a History undergraduate. As she writes in her introduction:
It is often forgotten that Britain had an Indian community long before the second world war, and that the recent arrival of Asian people in Britain is part of the long history of contact between India and Britain. The arrival of Asians in Britain has taken place precisely because of these long established connections.
And then I saw this photo within the book and it intrigued me. Who were these women? Where was this Ayahs' Home in Hackney? What were they all doing in Victorian Britain? The picture and the stories in Visram’s book haunted me for many years until one day I told the then Artistic Director at the RSC, Michael Boyd, that I wanted to write a play about British Asians in nineteenth century London. He was up for it and happily commissioned me.
Tanika Gupta, Playwright, The Empress. 2022.
