Transnationalism in Camilla Gibb’s Sweetness in the Belly

Abstract

In a 1924 silent film, meant to show the ethnic and racial diversity of London, a brief detour takes the viewer to the “Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans, and South Sea Islanders.” The Home, in Docklands (part of the Borough of Tower Hamlets, where Brick Lane is located) was a centre for London’s large (60000+ at the time) and growing population of “lascars” (Indian sailors—primarily Bengali Muslims) and other Muslim groups. The film is titled “Cosmopolitan London”—a prescient choice, given how those two words would be so regularly associated some decades later. The word “Cosmopolitan” stood in for “multicultural” then—and still does, to some extent (in real-estate parlance, a “cosmopolitan neighbourhood” in London means one with a large minority population; one college, catering to ESL students, has named itself “Cosmopolitan College”).

The regular frequenter of Dockland is used to the sight, but the occasional visitor will be interested to see the groups of Asiatic seamen who wander about the streets and quays in their cotton coats and trousers which flap loosely round their spare limbs, their heads covered with tarbooshes, pugarees, dilapidated turbans, or plain peaked caps, It is disconcerting for an Englishman wrapped in a thick overcoat to see Indians leisurely walking along on the coldest day with nothing but the thinnest of pyjama-like garments to protect them. Their walk is usually a flat-footed shuffle which may be necessary to keep their heel-less shoes on. It seems aimless and their preoccupied manner suggests a disregard of time very foreign to the streets of London. Although appearing so out of place in the East End, they are well able to look after themselves, being regular seamen who came to the Docks time after time and have learnt a little English and know how to buy what they want.

(“Lascars in the Port of London,” J. P. Jones [P.L.A. Monthly, Feb 1931)

Where both were the prey of the sailortown harpies and sharks of Wapping and Shadwell, the plight of the Asians adrift in London and ignorant of western city life was the more pitiable. Friendless and forlorn, they were often reduced to street begging until, months later, the time came for them to make the return passage […] Every ship, once she has left port, becomes a completely isolated little State whose well-being reflects the interplay of opposing characters and temperaments. The pattern of life in those vessels carrying Asian crews is both more simple and more complex; more simple by virtue of their unquestioning obedience and more complex because of their allegiance to their own several ways of life.

Is there not in this loyal and disciplined cooperation between different races and creeds a promise of wider harmony which may eventually transcend the narrow horizons of ambitious politicians and allow the human race a smoother passage?

(A Pattern of Loyalty, by “Lighterman” 1957)