‘Ancient cosmopolitanism’ and the South Asian diaspora

Abstract

When considering the South Asian diaspora in Britain, attention is more often than not drawn to migration and settlement patterns in the country from the mid-twentieth century. A more extended scope has been provided in terms of considering movements between the two regions in the colonial period, particularly from the nineteenth century with a couple of studies focusing on the period since the 1600s. This article considers a frame further back in time when European cities like London first became a site of ‘ancient cosmopolitanism’ open to migration from regions including South Asia during the period of the Roman Empire. The approach adopted in this article is critical of colonial, regional and nationalist blinkers on the tracts of history, and enables a means of considering ancient connections between Europe and South Asia as well as other modes of interpretation of the cultural and material legacy of the Roman era.

Keywords:

• cosmopolitanism
• heritage
• religion
• Roman Empire
• British Asian
• interpretation of myth

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Museum of London staff who enabled the research for this article in 2008 (funded by the London Museums Hub), particularly to Francis Grew, Jenny Hall, Giles Standing, Darryl McIntyre and Charlotte Samuels. I would also like to thank Martin Henig, John Manley, Roberta Tomber, Nicky Boyd, Jatinder Verma, Seema Anand, Chandan Mahal, the anonymised participants of a focus group, and the anonymous reviewers of this article. Last but not least, thanks to Suraya and Sohana Bains who inspired it all.

Notes

Examples include Lahiri (2000), Burton (1998) and Tabili (1994).

See Scullard (1974) and Warmington (1974). Scullard notes that for a long time the Greeks believed that ‘elephants only understood the language used by Indians’ (1974, p. 131). Such was their regional association that even into the Roman era, whatever the individual's background, mahout were referred to as ‘Indians’.

These include Ball (2000), Cimino (1994), Miller (1998) and Parker (2008), and the focus on trade around the Indian Ocean, Red Sea and the Mediterranean as provided by Tomber (2008).

Large-scale excavations are on-going at Pattanam by the Kerala Council of Historical Research directed by P.J. Cherian.

The Susruta Samhita, one of the earliest collections on medicine (ca 600 CE) informed of aloe-wood used as a fumigant, a technique which was known to have existed in the Ganges Valley in the first millennium BCE. The smoke was used to perfume the body as well as an anodyne after surgical wounds, a practice that was deployed by the Greeks and Romans.

This cookbook is ascribed to Apicius, a wealthy patrician-gastronome in the first century CE but was probably compiled by an anonymous cook in the fourth century CE (Ricotti 1994, p. 102).

Ancient studies propose that the Romans were originally a small tribe of Indo-European speakers who migrated from the area north of the Black Sea. One group migrated westwards towards Europe; the other eastwards to the north west of the Indian subcontinent. They brought with them the language of Sanskrit around 1500 BCE which is considered the ‘eldest sister’ to Indo-European languages, including Latin, all of which ‘proceeded from a common but nameless and unknown parent’ (Monier-Williams 1999, p. xii).