Articles

As I keep telling my family (and academic colleagues) all historical roads lead to India and sometimes on special occasions to Gujarat. This exhibition tells a history of modern London which is dependent on many countries East especially the northern realms of India. The exhibition is a fine example of telling hidden histories which unravel in the labdscape of London. The exhibition is rich in material cultures, despite it's small space and situation. It tells us that as a result of the violence of trading cultures which were at the heart of British capitalist and Imperial expansion layers of Ilford society were codependent on the ancestral artisanry of British Asians living in the region today. Landscapes 'over there' are material to those over here. We find out how the original practice of gunboat diplomacy was crucial in the expansionist agenda of East India Trade from the 1600s, successfully enabling the Palladian landscapes of Wanstead, Woodford and the City of London.

Interestingly, in the 1800s the Coromandel coast and Gujarat was the site of availability of raw cotton silk and dyestuffs. Trade with the company simulated a massive, village based handloom industry employing hundreds of thousands of highly skilled weavers dyers and washers. Gujarat had earlier importance in the 1500s under the Mughal empire, when European merchants traded with India and Asia as junior partners. For example in Bikaner, Raja Rai Singhiji (1571-1611) accepted rule under Mughals and was eventually given Gujarat, which was the centre of a wealthy textile trade. To illustrate this historical tale of the East India company and its dependency on the 'oriental others' in trade, in 1601, on its first voyage to Bantam, in Java, English seamen met Arab, Turkish, Iranian, Gujarati, Tamil, Bengali, Malay, Javanese and Chinese merchants. English culture thus evolved from these exchanges, from sweet tea, fashion, textiles, and language; even the word cash comes from Tamil word 'kasu' meaning coin!

The displays evidence brilliant craftsmanship from needle boxes from Surat in ebony and ivory (circa,1800s) to a Tea caddy 1790 from Vizagapatam. During these potentially enriching trade exchanges, the exhibition hints that, as was bitterly common, the colonised experienced a lack of dignified life. Home, health, work and housing were not always assured, as it was for the elite merchants who profited from trade with the colonies, in the Redbridge area in this period. One key moment that exemplifies this is that in around 1900, as a result of an extensive famine affecting millions in India thousands were forced to migrate to other parts of the empire. Punjabi's, Gujarati's, both Hindu and Muslim, and many other tribes of our ancestors were scattered accross the then British Empire to build the Greatness of British economy, rule and civic society. This has been a story of mobility and circulation; one where the colonised return with another layer of material and social culture in the 20th century. Hence the final legacy of today's rich and ethnically diverse London.

Divya P. Tolia-Kelly

Reader in Geography Durham University

Author of Landscape, Race and Memory: Material Ecologies of Citizenship by Divya Praful Tolia-Kelly reviewed here by Untold London