Home Page for Michael Fisher.

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Link to online edition of Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth Century Journey through India. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)

This work combines two books in one: the 1794 autobiographical travel narrative of an Indian, Dean Mahomet, recalling his years as camp-follower, servant, and subaltern officer in the East India Company's army (1769 to 1784); and Fisher's portrayal of Mahomet's sojourn as an insider/outsider in India, Ireland, and England. Emigrating to Britain and living there for over half a century, Mahomet started what was probably the first Indian restaurant in England run by an Indian and then enjoyed a distinguished career as a practitioner of "oriental" medicine, i.e., therapeutic massage and herbal steam bath, in London and the seaside resort of Brighton. This is a first-hand account of life in late eighteenth-century India--the first book written in English by an Indian--framed by a mini-biography of a remarkably versatile entrepreneur.

Link to Oberlin College History Department. http://www.oberlin.edu/history/