The first Indian to publish a book in English, the first to open a curry house in London — and shampooing surgeon to two kings.
In 1810, in a house off Portman Square, a fifty-one-year-old man from Patna opened a dining room and sold London something no one had sold it before: Indian food cooked by Indians, with a hookah of "real chilm tobacco" to follow. The Hindoostane Coffee House lasted barely two years and ruined him. But Sake Dean Mahomed had already done an impossible thing once — sixteen years earlier he had become the first Indian to write and publish a book in English — and he was not finished.
Bankrupt at fifty-three, he moved to the Brighton seafront and sold the English an Indian cure instead: the medicated vapour bath, and champi — the kneading and pressing of the body — which he advertised under its anglicised name, shampooing. Within a decade the man whose restaurant had failed was Shampooing Surgeon to the King.
Patna · Cork · London · Brighton
The lifeline
1759
Born at Patna on the Ganges; his father, a Company soldier, is killed when he is about eleven
1784
Follows Captain Godfrey Evan Baker to Cork, and stays in Ireland some twenty-three years
1794
Publishes The Travels of Dean Mahomet — the first book in English by an Indian
1810
Opens the Hindoostane Coffee House on George Street, Britain's first Indian restaurant
1822
Publishes Shampooing; his Brighton baths make him surgeon to two kings
1851
Dies in Brighton at ninety-one, and is buried beside Jane at St Nicholas'
By the numbers
The measure of him
1794
The year an Indian first wrote and published a book in the English language
38
Letters that make up The Travels — India described to Europe from the inside
2
Kings he served as Shampooing Surgeon: George IV, then William IV
101
The age claimed on his Brighton tombstone. He was in truth about 91
What he wrote, cooked and cured
The work
1794
The Travels of Dean Mahomet — thirty-eight letters on India, printed by subscription in Cork. The first book written and published in English by an Indian author.
1810
The Hindoostane Coffee House, 34 George Street, near Portman Square — the first Indian restaurant in Britain. Curries, he advertised, "unequalled to any curries ever made in England."
1814
Mahomed's Baths on the Brighton seafront — the Indian Medicated Vapour Bath, offered for "rheumatic and paralytic" complaints, gout, stiff joints, old sprains and lame legs.
1820
Cases Cured by Sake Deen Mahomed — his casebook of testimonials, published to answer the doubters of an unfamiliar treatment.
1822
Shampooing; or, Benefits Resulting from the Use of the Indian Medicated Vapour Bath — the book that named the practice for Britain. Three editions by 1838.
Bankrupt, then foundational
Recognition
In his lifetime
The Hindoostane Coffee House closed within two years; he filed for bankruptcy in 1812
The Travels was sold by subscription in Cork, and then largely forgotten
Sold as an exotic novelty — his medicine treated by many as showmanship
The Brighton baths were put up for auction in the late 1830s
Jane, his wife of sixty-four years, died two months before him
Today
Read as the founding text of Indian writing in English
A City of Westminster green plaque, unveiled in 2005, marks the restaurant's site at 102 George Street
Britain's Indian restaurant trade traces its first door to him
His churchyard monument at St Nicholas', Brighton, is Grade II listed
A Google Doodle in 2019 carried his face around the world
The city on the Ganges that made him
Patna
He signed himself, to the last, "of Patna, Hindoostan." The city stands on the south bank of the Ganges in Bihar — one of the oldest continuously inhabited places on earth, the ancient Pataliputra, seat of the Mauryan emperors. In Mahomed's boyhood it was a Mughal provincial capital turning into an East India Company trading town, rich on saltpetre and opium. He left it as a boy in an army's baggage train, and never saw it again.
7,500 km
From the Ganges at Patna to the Channel at Brighton
23
Years, roughly, that he lived in Ireland before he ever set up in London
2,500+
Years Patna has been a city, under one name or another
"It is not in the power of any individual to give unqualified satisfaction, or to attempt to establish a new opinion without the risk of incurring the ridicule, as well as censure, of some portion of mankind."
— Sake Dean Mahomed, Shampooing, 1838
