After twenty-three years of association with the Baker family, Dean Mahomet and his wife and family moved to London, where he worked first as a "shampooer" and later managed a fashionable "Hindostanee" coffee house. In 1784, the twenty-five-year-old Indian Muslim soldier resigned his commission to accompany his patron, Captain Godfrey Evan Baker, on his return to his native Anglo-Irish Protestant family and their estates near Cork.Īt Cork, Dean Mahomet studied English and worked for the Baker family, eloping in 1796 to marry Jane Daly, a well-educated young woman from a propertied Irish-Protestant family. Between 17, he served in campaigns that extended and consolidated British control in the Gangetic valley.
At first a servant, he was subsequently promoted to be a subaltern officer, a high "native" rank in the evolving British Indian colonial army. Dean Mahomet began his career at age eleven by following his father into service with a British-officered Indian regiment. First published in 1794 by subscription in Cork, Ireland, where the author then lived, The Travels is the work of a man who had by then made several remarkable journeys: from India to Ireland, from traditional Indian Muslim family life to Christianity and marriage to a well-educated Protestant woman, from East India Company soldier to English-language author. The author of this book has performed an important scholarly service by carefully editing a new edition of The Travels of the Indian Muslim author and expatriate "Dean Mahomet" (Din Muhammad).
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
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