We are here because you were there The title above just about sums up the origins of the South Asian presence in our nation and especially in Birmingham. I first came across this aphorism when the Institute of Race Relations published, under the same name, a set of posters during the 1980s. There has been several works under the same title, now also a book[1] by Ian Sanjay Patel. The ‘you’ in the title of course are the white people who first went out to india that began the process of the ‘we’ us the people of the Indian subcontinent. The key figure who began the process was one Sir Thomas Roe, the first ambassador of the British Crown. Born around 1580 or 1581, Roe was educated at Magdalene College Oxford. He had an interest in theology and Latin. He was made an esquire and knighted in 1604. He was elected MP for Tamworth in 1614. For context[2], the world had become increasingly global. The Spanish colonisation of the Americas had become established and the Portuguese were very much in control of trade in the in the east. This was now forcing the English to consider how to find profitable places in this new world. India[3] was one such place. Their economy of India was healthier in the seventeenth century than it had been for many hundreds of years. The villages in which most of the people lived formed the base of the economy and were normally self-sufficient. Majority of the people made their living off the land. The country possessed many products and industries that gave the country a worldwide reputation for skillful manufacturing. Most of her industrial production for export was in luxury items. The country was particularly well known for cotton and silk cloth, much of which was exported and exchanged for carpets, horses, and luxury goods (in Persia) and in the East Indies they paid for spices and metals, such as the tin of Malaya. A key player in England in this respect was the East India Company which had been established in 1600 who wanted to establish an official embassy to the Mughal Empire. The Company had previously unsuccessfully tried to establish a foothold in India. Now they decided to employ Roe for another concerted effort to achieve their aim. This was an attractive proposition for Roe who had lost his fortune on his voyage to South America. He thus embarked on his Indian journey, knowing that he was heading to a land with huge riches with the aim to impress possibly the richest man in the world, the Mughal ruler Jahangir who ruled over an empire of a hundred million people. He also knew that his task was not an easy one. As well as hostility from the Portuguese he knew that for the Indians the English were a small island, an inconsequential people (so insignificant that England does not appear in any of the Mughal references) with an almost bankrupt monarch, thus with little of real worth to offer them. The Mughal ruler was certainly not impressed by the gifts Roe had taken him. Roe’s sole purpose was to establish a trade relationship. Upon this was built the British Raj (rule) until 1947 when the subcontinent gained independence and the Partition, leading to the creation of the new nation of Pakistan as well as India. During the Raj, there had been two world wars fought with the help of thousands of Indian soldiers. One source has stated that during the first world war 1,440, 500 Indians had served and during the second world war 2,500,000 had done so. Postwar migration So, when it came to the postwar rebuilding of Britain it was obvious to look to places such as India for cheap labour; for work that was dirty and low paid and for which there was not the local labour or which they did not wish to do. The Nationality Act of 1948 was passed which according to Patel, whose book was mentioned above, was one of the more astonishing pieces of legislation ever passed by a British Parliament. It ‘converted the status of some 600 million people who had previously been British subjects into the new status of “citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies”. In our new book, Ethnicity, Religion and Muslim Education in a Changing World[4] which was edited by myself and Professor Tahir Abbas, we open the chapter on history with the writer Satnam Sanghera saying that the reason he talks about the United Kingdom as home is “because several hundred years some Britons decided to take control of parts of the Asian subcontinent”. We hear from Jasvir Singh[5], the co-founder of the South Asian Heritage Month making a case for the inclusion in the school curriculum of South Asian history. We also have Rajwinder Pal telling the story of Bulaka Singh, his grandfather who fought in the first world war, from the perspective of his own son Kabir, who is going through Birmingham school system. From a few hundred South Asians in the 1940s, the communities in Birmingham slowly grew in the 1950s and 1960s. At first it was single men but then women and children arrived as the communities began to settle and make the city their home. According to the Census there were: 1991[6] 2021[7] Pakistani[8] 66,085 195,853 Indian 51,075 66,989 Bangladeshi 12,739 48,401 In the early days the newcomers found home in the run down inner city areas. However, slowly the communities have spread across all of the city wards. According to the 2021 census statistics, areas which were previously wholly white now have sizeable Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (and Asian) population: Bromford & Hodge Hill 67% BAME 44% Asian Quinton 40% BAME 16% Asian Harborne 39% BAME 13% Asian Kingstanding 30% BAME 9% Asian Bartley Green 28% BAME 5% Asian Kings Norton South 27% BAME 6% Asian Sheldon 26% BAME 14% Asian Shard End 23% BAME 7% Asian Sutton Wylde Green 22% BAME 11% Asian Longbridge 17% BAME 2% Asian Rubery & Rednal 16% BAME 3% Asian Here it is worth including the biographies of a few notable South Asians: Avtar Jouhl[9] Mahmood Hashmi[10] Tozammal Huq)[11]. Dr Karamat Iqbal is a multicultural education expert, activist, and academic. His family have been present in Birmingham since the 1950s. Relevant here is Karamat’s book on Asian Birmingham[12]. Further information on Karamat can be found on his consultancy page[13] Thomas Roe https://www.tttpodcast.com/season-6/the-first-english-embassy-to-india-nandini-das-1616 The first English embassy to India: Nandini Das (1616) | Travels Through Time The relationship between England and India is deep and complex. In this episode the academic and author of Courting India, Nandini Das https://scholarworks.umt.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3231&&context=etd&&sei-redir=1&referer=https%253A%252F%252Fscholar.google.com%252Fscholar%253Fhl%253Den%2526as_sdt%253D0%25252C5%2526q%253DThomas%252Broe%252Bsir%252BIndia%2526btnG%253D#search=%22Thomas%20roe%20sir%20India%22 Thomas Roe was born near London in 1580 or 1581 The book Itinerant Ambassador https://web.archive.org/web/20200506223634id_/https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=upk_european_history The voyage to Guiana formed a dramatic prologue to Roe's career, but a more substantial phase began in 1615 when he was sent by King James as ambassador to the court of the Great Mogul at Ajmere. Chosen for this important and delicate work by the East India Company, Roe spent three years in India and succeeded in winning valuable concessions for English mer-chants. On the basis of his experience he offered the company a good deal of sound advice and, in fact, laid down the policy that guided their actions for more than a century. Roe has a strong claim to be regarded as the first of the long line of Englishmen who constructed, over many years, the British dominion in India. This was the dazzling trade that had attracted the mercantile appetites of Europe, and it was the purpose of Sir Thomas Roe to divert what portion of it he could into the ships of the East India Company. If he could persuade the Mogul to enter into a binding agreement, he would liberate English trade from the uncertainties attendant upon agreements made at lower levels and, at the same time, would convince the merchants of the East India Company that the defeat of their European rivals would, in fact, be the prelude to a settled and profitable commercial relationship with India. Those men could hardly be expected to risk their fortunes in competition with the Dutch and Portuguese until there was some assurance that their victory would bring the trade they desired. And that assurance could be provided by only one man: Jahangir, "Con-queror of the World," son of Akbar the Great, and Mogul emperor of Hindustan. Sent by the Crown Paid for by the East India Company His journal is in the British Library Represent a small island whose goods no one wanted He took gifts that were not much appreciated by the Mughal BBC Radio 3 - Sunday Feature, Thomas Roe and the origins of empire 1948 The 1948 Act was momentous because it gave rights of entry and residence in Britain to millions of non-white people around the world, on the basis of their connection to existing crown colonies or independent Commonwealth states. Commonwealth citizens, both of which groups had unrestricted rights of entry and residence in Britain between 1948 and 1962 The racism against so-called ‘coloured immigrants’ in Britain was conceived politically in terms of ‘belonging’ among officials and politicians, as white violence took place on British streets in the late 1950s and beyond. But it was in the 1960s and early 1970s when this hostility transposed itself into law and the key immigration policies of the post-war decades. In particular, the 1968 Commonwealth Immigrants Act and 1971 Immigration Act saw the tiering of British nationality along racial lines. Transcript: We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire | Sarah Parker Remond Centre - UCL – University College London Author Interview: Q and A with Dr Ian Sanjay Patel on We're Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire | LSE Review of Books Hashmi Exhibition Details - Connecting Histories Sarwan Singh Exhibition Details - Connecting Histories Bromford & Hodge Hill 67% BAME 44% Asian Quinton 40% BAME 16% Asian Harborne 39% BAME 13% Asian Kingstanding 30% BAME 9% Asian Bartley Green 28% BAME 5% Asian Kings Norton South 27% BAME 6% Asian Sheldon 26% BAME 14% Asian Shard End 23% BAME 7% Asian Sutton Wylde Green 22% BAME 11% Asian Longbridge 17% BAME 2% Asian Rubery & Rednal 16% BAME 3% Asian [1]https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n22/neal-ascherson/imperial-narcotic [2]The first English embassy to India: Nandini Das (1616) | Travels Through Time (tttpodcast.com) [3]Itinerant Ambassador: The Life of Sir Thomas Roe (archive.org) [4]https://www.routledge.com/Ethnicity-Religion-and-Muslim-Education-in-a-Changing-World-Navigating-Contemporary-Perspectives-on-Multicultural-Schooling-in-the-UK/Iqbal-Abbas/p/book/9781032364834 [5]https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/jasvir-singh-cbe [6] Grosvenor et al 2002. Making Connections. [7] Birmingham City Council, community health profiles. [8] Majority of ‘Pakistanis’ are of Kashmiri origin http://www.forwardpartnership.org.uk/?p=1665 [9] https://www.wearebrig.co.uk/pioneers/avtar-singh-jouhl [10]Exhibition Details - Connecting Histories [11]http://www.forwardpartnership.org.uk/?p=1776 [12]https://www.amazon.co.uk/Asian-Birmingham-Progress-Dr-Karamat-Iqbal/dp/B0CNS9RM22/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.nymzluCs43uPS_8V0slQerYCLZPAzhKBpc1wXi7GmvSB_OD2fA4CGWyxUXproNefUtOyVGNU16Nv0UeKGD4SywKq0TW4WLFIA3DIhDNVaV4.rKdQpVAqze8geDUe50Z0o_5_Y1x0rsmCsEBz7LFWqsA&qid=1721920554&sr=1-1 [13] http://www.forwardpartnership.org.uk/?page_id=15 Manage Cookie Preferences