What Birmingham Taught Muslim India

In 1786 the East India Company placed an order for minting coins with the Birmingham industrialists Matthew Boulton and James Watt. Using the revolutionary steam engines at their Soho Works in the suburb of Smethwick, over the next few decades Boulton and Watt produced more than 220 million coins stamped with the elegant Persian script the East India Company had adopted from the Mughal Empire. When Shire horses began pulling barges full of bullion along the canal from Birmingham on the first stage of their journey to Calcutta, it marked the start of the city’s relationship with the Indian subcontinent that has continued to this day.

Birmingham now has one of the largest Muslim populations of any city in Europe. Predominantly of Indo-Pakistani background, this community’s origins are usually traced to the 1960s, when demand for workers in the city’s then-booming factories also attracted Hindu and Sikh immigrants. In fact, the origins of Muslim Brum are to be found more than a century earlier, when the world-changing manufacturing methods pioneered by Boulton and Watt drew a series of Muslim travellers from India on industrial inspection tours. Strange as it may seem today, Victorian Birmingham and the surrounding Black Country were major international tourist attractions.

Several of the industrial tourists who came from India wrote detailed accounts of their visits to inform readers back home about the new world being forged in the city’s steam-powered factories. Written in Persian and Urdu – the main literary languages of South Asia’s Muslims – these travelogues show how the Industrial Revolution was understood and explained to readers not only in British India, but in states such as Hyderabad and Rampur that remained under Muslim rule until 1947. However, before turning to these travelogues, we should complete the links in the historical chain between the minting of those Persian coins and the arrival of their authors in the 1880s and 1890s.

Selling power

Boulton and Watt’s Soho Works was already attracting international visitors by the early 19th century. Such was the versatility of the steam engines they manufactured that Boulton famously quipped to one visitor: ‘I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have—POWER.’ Unsurprisingly, news of the potential of their machines spread far and wide.

In 1813 an order arrived from Nawwab Sa‘adat Ali Khan II, the ruler of Awadh in North India, who requested an engine and pumps to drain water from a dammed off section of river, so as to enable an imported bridge to be assembled. The engine was then to be repurposed to power the fountains in the splendid gardens surrounding the nawwab’s palace in Lucknow. Some 600 miles upriver from the Calcutta headquarters of the East India Company, Lucknow pioneered the Muslim adoption of not only steam engines, but printing presses, too, for neither Indian nor Middle Eastern Muslims had participated in the Gutenberg revolution that had spread through Europe in the previous centuries. In 1820 Sa‘adat Ali’s successor commissioned a British mechanic to set up one of the first Muslim-controlled printing presses in the world.

Lucknow’s Royal Press issued books in Persian and Urdu, requiring expensive metal type in the expanded versions of the Arabic alphabet that both languages used. A decade or so later, local entrepreneurs found a more cost-effective way to print these languages by adapting the new technique of lithography. Invented in Germany in 1796 to print music, lithography was introduced to Calcutta by the East India Company for the printing of maps. Then, in Lucknow, this versatile cultural technology of Europe’s distant industrialisation revolutionised the production of books for Muslims and other Indians alike.

Around the same time that the Royal Press was founded in Lucknow, an Iranian student, Mirza Salih Shirazi, arrived in London to study printing. He ended up learning a lot more, and in his travelogue he recorded all that he could learn about the ‘ulum-e jadid’, or ‘new sciences’, including what was perhaps the earliest description of Birmingham in Persian. Referring to the weapon manufactories that were then supplying the military expansion of the East India Company, he wrote that: 

In Birmingham there is an area that is famous for manufacturing weapons of war, including muskets, swords, pistols, daggers, and other weapons: there are many workstations, and large crowds of people are kept busy at work there. 

This description, however, was based on hearsay, for whereas Mirza Salih had visited several steam-powered brass, textile, and paper mills near Bristol and Oxford, he did not travel to Birmingham himself. The city’s reputation preceded it.

As the 19th century wore on – and Birmingham’s multiplying industries earned it the moniker ‘City of a Thousand Trades’ – Muslim elites decided to experience for themselves this crucible of industrial modernity. In September 1865 three sons of Mansur Ali Khan, the Nawwab Nazim of Bengal, undertook an inspection tour of the Soho Works and other factories. Five years later, Mansur Ali himself toured the surrounding Black Country, visiting the Round Oak Iron Works and Patent Shaft and Axletree Company. (The latter specialised in bridges, not least for export to India, where in 1885 they constructed the first all-steel bridge over the Ganges at Varanasi.) A contemporary article from The Engineer described how Mansur Ali and his Bengali entourage: 

descended to the casting-houses, where they watched with astonishment as molten iron flowed from the furnaces, winding its way in snake-like curves … producing a large volume of flame and sparks, which forced them to make a quick retreat due to the intense heat. 

By the 1950s such conditions were being faced every day by working-class Bengali-speaking Muslims employed by firms such as Lavender & Co. in Smethwick.

Distinguished guests

Several first-hand accounts of these early visits survive. Printed with the same lithographic technology that was transferred to Lucknow, these Persian and Urdu texts were in themselves products of the Indian Muslim encounter with industrialisation.

When Mir La’iq Ali Khan – also known by the honorary title of Sir Salar Jung II – arrived in Birmingham with his Indian Muslim entourage in September 1887, the city formed the endpoint of a grand tour that had also taken in Athens, Rome, Vienna, and Paris. Yet in the lithographic Persian travelogue he published two years later, Midland factories were described in the same embellished prose as the monuments and museums of the Mediterranean. In November 1893 another elite Indian Muslim, Hamid Ali Khan, reached Birmingham at the end of an even longer world tour through China, Japan, and the United States, the entire journey arranged by Victorian travel agent extraordinaire Thomas Cook. Hamid Ali also published a lithographic book about his travels, in his case in Urdu. Then, in 1895, Nasrullah Khan, heir-apparent to the throne of Afghanistan, arrived in Birmingham on what was the first overseas visit by a member of the Afghan ruling house. His travels were recorded in Persian by an official court historian.

These were far from frivolous holidays. As the former prime minister of Hyderabad – a Muslim-ruled princely state in central India – La’iq Ali was a man with serious responsibilities, which included Hyderabad’s nascent railway and mining industry. For his part, Hamid Ali had recently assumed the hereditary position of ruler of Rampur, a princely state in northern India, which had a long craft tradition of metalware and weapon production. As for Nasrullah Khan, Birmingham’s role in supplying guns to the two British armies that had invaded Afghanistan in the previous half-century gave the city a special significance. All three men were therefore fully aware of the importance of the novel manufacturing methods used in Birmingham’s factories, which they were evidently eager to see. Time and again, La’iq Ali used the Persian word tamasha – meaning ‘wondrous spectacle’ – to describe the machinery he inspected.

Having been knighted by Queen Victoria while in Britain, La’iq Ali was feted by the factory owners he met. The first stop on his industrial tour was the Birmingham Small Arms (BSA) factory, which had pioneered the mechanisation of rifle production in the 1860s at a time when the city had been the world’s biggest gun supplier. From tube-casting and hole-drilling, to adding triggers and buttstocks, La’iq Ali described the various stages by which rifles were manufactured on a sequence of different machines. As a consequence, he explained, the thousand workers employed by BSA produced 200 rifles per day. Impressed by their quality, he purchased two dozen sporting rifles.

The city’s famous gun factories were also high on Hamid Ali’s itinerary, perhaps because Rampur had its own gun-making tradition, albeit an artisanal one, centred on the Banduqi Chowk (‘Gun Market’) not far from his palace. He too visited the BSA factory, along with Kynoch & Co.’s munitions factory, followed by the Proof House, which he explained had been established in 1813 in response to a law (namely the Gun-Barrel Proof Act) requiring all guns to be tested and certified before sale. BSA and Kynoch were also visited by Prince Nasrullah of Afghanistan and the sons of Nawwab Nazim of Bengal, who spent several hours watching weapons being made for Britain’s erstwhile ally, the Ottoman sultan, Abdul Hamid II.

Returning to La’iq Ali, his next stop was the Kingston Metal Works which supplied steamships worldwide with high-pressure pipes and boilers, probably including the P&O steamer Peshawur on which La’iq Ali had sailed from Bombay and whose engine room he had described. The equivalent site visited by Hamid Ali was the Cornwall Works in Smethwick, where the young ruler examined hydraulic engines and pumping equipment used in dockyards and mines across the British and Ottoman empires alike.

Having seen such heavy machinery, both visitors subsequently inspected what La’iq Ali called a ‘karkhana-ye sar-e qalam-sazi’ – a pen nib factory. A comparison of his travelogue with local newspaper reports identifies it as that of Gillott & Sons, where La’iq Ali encountered one of the most influential but least celebrated of Birmingham inventions. Back in 1828 the local entrepreneur Josiah Mason had discovered a way to mass-produce pen nibs from sheets of steel. Two years later, Joseph Gillott had founded the company bearing his name, erecting the grand Victoria Works that still stands today, facing its former rival, the Albert Works, which used the excess steam from its engine for what it advertised as a ‘Hammam or Turkish Baths’ on its top floor. (Today the building is home to the city’s Pen Museum.)

Gillott’s Victoria Works attracted many other illustrious visitors, including Emperor Franz-Joseph, President Ulysses S. Grant, the Iranian ruler Nasir al-Din Shah, and Britain’s Prince Albert. By the time the Indian visitors arrived, Birmingham’s pen factories were exporting millions of nibs every year to the subcontinent, where they were packaged with Persian and Urdu brand names, such as ‘Afsar’ (‘Crown’) and ‘Rasikh’ (‘Reliable’). All told, between 1830 and 1914 Birmingham manufactured the staggering sum of 70,000,000,000 steel pen nibs.

After Hamid Ali’s visit, he painstakingly explained to readers each step of the nib-making process, especially the efficient use of machines that could be operated with a single foot, leaving workers’ hands free for other tasks. No less impressive was the delicacy of the process, culminating in the stamping of tiny brand names onto each and every nib. However, since the pen trade was Birmingham’s second biggest female employer after domestic service, what most impressed La’iq Ali and Hamid Ali was the number of women working there. ‘All of the workers were young girls’, La’iq Ali wrote, ‘though there were a few men at the end of the factory in charge of the “steam wheel”’, as he referred to the engine. Hamid Ali added that even the manager was a ‘lady’. When his tour ended, she presented him with an elegant box containing a selection of nibs and holders.

Both Indians also inspected nearby pin factories, where La’iq Ali explained to his readers how the use of steam power allowed each of the 170 workstations at the Newhall Works to produce 200 pins per minute. Five years later, Hamid Ali noted how Phipson & Sons had adopted electric-powered machines for their pin operation. They both again remarked on the number of women at work.

Art of glass

Whereas exported Birmingham pins and pen-nibs were used by millions of ordinary Indian women and men, the products of the city’s glass factories catered to a wealthier class of Muslim consumers in both the Middle East and South Asia. In 1847 the Egyptian ruler Ibrahim Pasha had commissioned F.&C. Osler of Birmingham’s Broad Street to produce a pair of ‘colossal candelabra’ to illuminate the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina. Half a century later the female Indian Muslim ruler of Bhopal placed a special order with Osler to produce a window in the form of a prayer carpet for the Taj al-Masajid (‘Crown of Mosques’) in her capital. And during the Afghan prince Nasrullah’s visit to Birmingham in 1895 he commissioned a crystal chandelier for the shrine of the Prophet’s cloak in Qandahar.

La’iq Ali and Hamid Ali also took an interest in Birmingham’s glass factories. La’iq Ali visited the Osler works, while Hamid Ali headed to Chance Brothers in nearby Smethwick. Hamid Ali praised the seven-floor factory built in 1847 as a ‘vast and splendid edifice’. After supplying the panes for London’s Crystal Palace in 1851, Chance Brothers had diversified into everything from lighthouse lenses to decanters, prompting Elihu Burritt, erstwhile US consul and longtime American resident of Birmingham, to declare that ‘in no other establishment in the world can one get such a full idea of the infinite uses which glass is made to serve as in these immense works’. Echoing this, Hamid Ali described the huge range of products in vibrant colours from ruby to emerald. Contrasting Chance’s methods with those used in India, he explained to readers the various steps of the glassmaking process, before marvelling at the workers’ ability to withstand the furnace-like heat.

Another place both Indians visited was Elkington & Co., which since 1850 had taken out a series of patents on not only electroplating (using electricity to coat base metal objects with gold or silver) but also electrotyping (reproducing metal items in the Victorian precursor to 3D printing). Hamid Ali called the factory an ‘art metal works’ – and rightly so, for Elkington raised their inventions to domestic and even high art. In addition to gilt and silver-plated candelabras and soup tureens that would not look out of place at Versailles, in the 1880s Elkington made electrotype copies of medieval Middle Eastern metal bowls, sherbet spoons, and caskets, including exact reproductions of the Arabic and Persian calligraphy with which the originals had been painstakingly engraved.

After Hamid Ali had the process demonstrated by the Elkington factory manager – the details of which he recorded in his travelogue – he was taken to the sumptuous upstairs showroom, where the manager showed him reproductions of medieval artworks sold for a fraction of the price of originals. Somewhat ambivalently, Hamid Ali noted that two of the items on display were engraved trays from Moradabad, the famous metalworking town nicknamed ‘Pital Nagri’ (‘Brass City’) that neighboured his own principality of Rampur.

Industrial language

Confronted with so many new technologies, the Indian visitors sometimes struggled to find words to describe them. Writing in the classical Persian that for eight centuries had served as the Indian equivalent of Latin, La’iq Ali referred to steam engines as ‘charkh-e bukhar’, literally ‘steam wheels’, in reference to their most striking moving part, and resorted to the same medieval term – dastgah (‘handicraft desk’) – to label the many different machines he saw. Hamid Ali opted to write his travelogue in Urdu, the vernacular language Muslim modernisers were adapting to keep pace with a rapidly changing world. This meant adapting into Urdu English loan-words for new goods and technologies, enabling Hamid Ali to use such terms as injan (engine), mashin (machine), pris (press), and even nib. By the time he was writing in the 1890s – eight decades after the Nawwab of Oudh had ordered his Boulton & Watt steam engine – many North Indian Muslims used such imported British machines in their daily lives. As the University of Chicago’s Amanda Lanzillo has recently shown, by this time Urdu was being used as a language of industrial education through technical manuals that even included the electroplating techniques developed by Elkington & Co. What La’iq Ali and Hamid Ali described for readers, then, was not an entirely unfamiliar world. Rather, they described the sources of so many products and technologies that Birmingham exported to India. Neither La’iq Ali nor Hamid Ali criticised this. Both men were scions of loyal princely states: during the Great Rebellion of 1857 Hyderabad and Rampur had sided with the British, and the era of Indian economic nationalism had not yet dawned.

Not all of their time in Birmingham was spent inspecting factories. La’iq Ali in particular made much of the city’s cultural amenities, including the newly opened Museum and Art Gallery. He took note of the many craft works on display, including Indian silverware from Kashmir and Lucknow donated earlier that year by John Feeney, the owner of the Birmingham Post (whose headquarters La’iq Ali visited). In the evenings, he enjoyed the theatre. After a performance of an unrecorded play, he wrote admiringly of the special effects of a storm at sea; after enjoying The Queen of Fashion at the Prince of Wales Theatre, he wrote about the beautiful singing voice of the ‘lovely leading lady’. When he attended another musical performance, the Birmingham Post remarked that he was ‘said to have a fine ear for an oratorio’.

As for the Afghan prince, Nasrullah, he rounded off his tour of the city’s factories by placing orders with the gentlemen’s outfitter John Wormington for dozens of shirts, ties, braces, scarves, and pyjamas for himself, his brothers, and his father, the ruling amir of Afghanistan. A curious testament to a time when Brum set the fashion for the Afghan royal family, Wormington’s order book still survives in Birmingham’s Wolfson Centre for Archival Research.

When La’iq Ali left the city by train, he wrote a picturesque Persian description of the view, echoing in words the dramatic furnace-lit paintings of local artist Edwin Butler Bayliss. ‘On both sides of the track as far as the eye could see, there lay factories’, he wrote:

Heaps of ashes appeared all along the way, like a chain of little hills … The beauty of it all was that grass and herbs had grown all over them. All the while, flames of fire shot constantly from the chimneys of factories so that, from afar, it seemed as though everything around was pleading to be spared from destruction.

By the end of the 20th century nearly all the factories visited by Mansur Ali, La’iq Ali, Hamid Ali, and Nasrullah had closed down. But before then, during their final boom in the 1950s and 60s, they attracted many more South Asian Muslims as workers rather than tourists. Today in Smethwick, the Victorian library preserves the records of Chance Brothers and other local companies, along with several shelves of books written in Urdu.
 

Nile Green, a Birmingham native, holds the Ibn Khaldun Endowed Chair in World History at the University of California, Los Angeles.