At this point came a proposal from a Scottish friend, Captain David Richardson, who was planning a trip home and invited Abu Taleb to accompany him. Richardson promised to teach him English during the voyage and to bear all his expenses. Abu Taleb accepted the invitation, and the two friends embarked on a Danish ship on 7 February They encountered an east india company vessel that had caught fire and was abandoned.
The Danish captain and his men plundered the ship and carried on, but at the Cape, where they had to stop, the law caught up with them. Abu Taleb and Richardson then took a South-sea whaler bound for London. The European nations were at war with each other, and consequently there were tense moments when they had to wait to see if an approaching ship was hostile or friendly.
The first European port of call was Cork in Ireland, where Richardson and Abu Taleb went ashore and were warmly entertained. At the house of one of their hosts Abu Taleb met Sake Shaikh deen mahomed , an Indian who had settled in Cork, married and published an autobiographical work in English. On the overland journey to Dublin he was struck as much by the beauty and lushness of the countryside as he was by the poverty of the peasants, which he found to be greater than that of their Indian counterparts.
He was so taken with Dublin and its citizens that he decided to linger while Richardson went on to London. One chapter of the Travels is devoted to an astute portrayal of the Irish character. Eventually Abu Taleb reached London on 21 January , and for the next two and a half years led a life devoted almost entirely to pleasure. He was very much a bon vivant and was lavishly entertained by the aristocracy, becoming something of a celebrity.
As he himself sums up his life in England: 'I may perhaps be accused of personal vanity, by saying that my society was courted, and that my wit and repartees, with some impromptu applications of Oriental poetry, were the subject of conversation in the politest circles. I freely confess that during my residence in England I was so exhilarated by the coolness of the climate and so devoid of all care that I followed the advise of our immortal poet Hafiz, and gave myself up to love and gaiety'.
Once, when he accepted an invitation to an entertainment at the Vauxhall Gardens, the newspapers reported 'that the Prince Abu Taleb would honour the gardens with his presence on the appointed night'. Whenever he went to Court he was received by the king or called on one of the Princes or a minister of state the press would report the event, invariably describing him as 'the Persian Prince'. Abu Taleb avers that he never assumed the title, 'but I was so much better known by it than by my own name, that I found it in vain to contend with my godfathers'.
Besides the nobility, Abu Taleb also cultivated the friendship of numerous personages eminent in the arts and in trade and industry. He sat for six portraits, one of which was painted by Northcote the Royal Academician, who had also painted Mirza Sheikh I, and met Debrett of Peerage fame , Christie the auctioneer, and Wedgwood the chinaware magnate. In , the orientalist scholar Charles Stewart translated and published an extraordinary travel narrative written by a Persian-speaking Indian poet and scholar named Mirza Abu Talib Khan.
At the turn of the century, Abu Talib travelled from India to Africa, and on to Ireland, England, and France, where he recorded his observations of European culture with wit and precision. This Broadview edition includes a critical introduction and chronologies of the lives and works of Mirza Abu Talib and Charles Stewart. The appendices offer contemporary reviews of the narrative, selections of British orientalist discourse, and examples of proto-ethnographic writing from the period.
As they did for contemporary readers, they have much to tell us now—about political cultures, social interactions, the colonial context, and the attractions as well as fears of the European metropolis. Abu Talib casts a fresh eye on the sites and personalities of Georgian London, combining a sense of wonder at the technical and aesthetic achievements of Britain at the dawn of the nineteenth century with a sharp social and moral critique of the new masters of Bengal. He kept notes on all the sites he visited, from Calais to Karbalah, but it is his account of Paris that best embodies the peculiarities of his position.
Abu Taleb was charmed by French culture and its sophisticated art de vivre art of living. He admired the statues and fountains at public parks such as the Tuileries. He seems to have also savoured the French language, learning at least enough to slip French phrases into his later Persian poetry. Abu Taleb was not the first Indian visitor to enjoy the delights and artistic treasures of Paris.
Fourteen years earlier, in , the city had hosted an embassy from Mysore , whose ruler, Tipu Sultan, hoped for an alliance with France against the increasingly aggressive East India Company. He seems to have regarded Napoleon in much the same light, and insisted that the French were an apathetic and feeble people who would never be able to defeat the manly and energetic British.
Its servants and waiters were lazy, its streetwalkers brazen and wicked. It was amazing, Abu Taleb reported, that they had managed to hold out for so long against the British, given that they were inferior to them. Indeed, as long as he had been travelling from Calcutta westward to England, he wrote, civilisation seemed progressing — but the moment he stepped on French soil to begin his return to India, signs of decay appeared.
The decadent East began at Paris. In short, Abu Taleb had absorbed all the anti-French and Orientalist stereotypes of his former British hosts.
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