Home Page for Michael Fisher.

Link to Fisher CV

Link to Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain, 1600-1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004)

People from India have been visiting or settling in England since the early 1600s. Forming 'counterflows' to colonialism, tens of thousands of Indians entered Britain, lived among Britons, and produced knowledge which compelled British responses. By the mid-nineteenth century Indian seamen, servants, scholars, soldiers, women and children, students, diplomats, royalty, merchants, tourists, and settlers were participating in varying ways within British society, depending on their gender, social origin, and personal circumstances. In multifarious and contested ways, their self-representations and activities influenced British attitudes and policies towards them as individuals and towards India generally. Some settled, but most returned to India after months or years living in Britain. Most also sent or brought back to India direct information about Britain which disseminated in complex ways within Indian society. The context for these interactions and representations was colonialism and its processes, which powerfully altered what being 'Indian' meant, both culturally and legally. Using case studies and developing broader patterns, this book surveys and analyses the range of Indians that ventured to Britain over 250 years, their reasons for travel, their diverse lived experiences, and their contrasting representations of colonizer, colonized, and colonial rule.

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/