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Sumita Mukherjee, "Imperial Footprints: A History of South Asian Child Migrants in Britain" (Hurst, 2026)
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Dr. Sumita Mukherjee
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Sumita Mukherjee about her book titled Imperial A History of South Asian Child Migrants in Britain, published by Hearst in 2026. Now, this book has a very nice helpful subtitle that tells us exactly what we're going to be talking about. Right. South Asian child migrants in Britain. But let's think about that for a minute. That's a very specific kind of experience. Right. We talk about migrants today as going through a lot, in many cases, how much more so is that when one is a child, in many cases, when one is a child by oneself, as we might be discussing, and we're not talking about a handful of children here. Right. This book covers quite a long time period and we're talking millions sometimes of children across this. So there's clearly a lot to get into to understand kind of what's going on, what their experiences were like in various ways. So thank you so much, Samita, for joining me to tell us about your work.
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Dr. Sumita Mukherjee
Thanks, Miranda. Looking forward to talking to you.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I am as well, but before we get too far into the books detail, could you tell us a bit about yourself and why you decided to embark on this project?
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Dr. Sumita Mukherjee
Yeah, of course. So my name is Samita Mukherjee. I'm a historian. I'm currently based at the University of Bristol and I'm a historian of South Asian migration in the 19th and 20th centuries, South Asian migration outside of the Indian subcontinent and during the time of the British Empire. The reasons behind the book are multiple. I could go on forever explaining why I wanted to write this book, but comes out of both research reasons and personal reasons.
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So.
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So my first book was on, which came out of my PhD was about Indian students at British universities and their return to India and their role in Indian nationalism. And this is largely a story of 19th and early 20th century and largely about male students. And then my second book, which was called Indian Suffragettes, was about Indian women involved in the Sapaj movement in the early 20th century and their engagement with international networks, their migration movement outside of the Indian subcontinent. And this is about adult women. And so during the course of the research for both books, I often came across examples of children, examples of these men and women when they were children, having also moved and traveled, but also other examples. And then during the course of my research and conversations with scholars who. Who've been working on histories of childhood, I realized that there was this gap in histories of migration, especially in migration of South Asians, a lack of scholarship on the history of children in these migratory experiences. So I wanted to write something about that. And also there's so much contemporary interest in child migrants. We know so much about these kind of horrific images of. Of children on boats and the kind of the way in which child migrants are often evoked in rhetoric around migration. So I wanted to look historically, because I'm a historian at this kind of phenomenon, looking at my own interest in the history of salvation migration. So, yes. So this became, through all these various reasons, also personal reasons. My mother was a child migrant herself in the 1950s to Britain. But this is a book that looks between 1830s and 1947 is very much an interest in imperial history and the history of child migration in that period.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you for that introduction. I think it's often that projects come from a combination of interests and motives, and often I find it's a combination of the academic interest and the personal too. So thank you for giving us a sense of kind of the multiple things that drew you into this, then covering then obviously to less detail than the book does, but hopefully we can give a sense of the time period that you cover. As you said, it's a pretty extensive one and one that comes up in popular media at the time. And since. Right. I mean, the sort of middle of the 1800s, the middle of the 1900s is like still a period we're fascinated in in popular culture. I mean, for instance, you discuss in the book the 2018 film of David Copperfield, the Dickens story, which I understand was pretty popular. I don't have the figures in front of me, but it definitely not a niche story then or now. And of course, in this version made in 2018, some of the discussion around it was, hang on a second, there are South Asians in the film that can't possibly be historically accurate. And yet you've written a book covering pretty Much exactly that time period. So is this an instance of kind of the thing we have now in a lot of films of colourblind casting, or is this actually more historically accurate than people might have thought?
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Dr. Sumita Mukherjee
Yeah, I think that's so interesting. I'm right about as well. I mean, the film David Copperfield was, I think, done as a form of colorblind casting. And we know around this debates around Bridgerton. Right. And these conversations around the historical accuracy of people of color in these. These stories of 18th, 19th century. So although the film itself was this example of colorblind, colorblind casting, with Dev Patel taking on the titular role of David Copperfield at the time of Dickens and this period of Victorian England, especially Victorian London, there were many, many people of South Asian heritage living in London, including children. And David Copperfield is the story of a child who grows up to become David Copperfield. So it's not historically inaccurate at all for any literary media representations of Dickens novels or contemporary novels of 19th century to include South Asians, especially in the kind of crowd scenes that would not be historically inaccurate at all. So in my book I talk about this kind of quite veritable presence of South Asian figures in the East End of London in the 19th and early 20th century. We know this because Charles Dickens own contemporary, Henry Mayhew, wrote a book about Victorian London and he included lots of sketches, both pen sketches as well as drawing sketches of South Asians, including South Asian children. We know this from newspaper accounts and adverts for runaway servants. So many British families had servants from south asia in the 18th and 19th century who they brought over, colonial families brought over, including lots of young children who acted in domestic service. Many of them ran away. So we have these runaway notices of them. We know this because there was a huge industry in shipping where Indian sailors, who are often known as Laskers, worked on ships, on the ships that were very much part of the imperial enterprise, the trade of empire. And many of those sailors came to Britain as ships docked, Britain bringing spices and trade and everything else. And many of those sailors stayed in Britain. Many of them were young children who worked in these ships. But also many of those sailors had relationships with women in Britain, and then their children lived in Britain as well. So, yes, Victorian London was very racially diverse and lots of historians have shown this now. So it's not a bizarre thing to have a racially diverse cast in these kind of depictions, which is very helpful
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
perhaps for people to understand, because that may not be what the assumption is. So love a good bit of myth busting. Thank you for starting us off with that. You mentioned the obviously business aspect of this, with the kind of imperial shipping, manufacturing merchandise. That's obviously a massive part of this. But there's also the business you talk about of the raising of, quote unquote, white Indian children. How big a business was that in the UK and in India?
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Dr. Sumita Mukherjee
Yeah, that was pretty. A pretty big business. So that my book is called History of South Asian Children. I do discuss, I guess my. I tried to be expansive around this idea of race and the migration that's taking place between India and Britain in the imperial period. And many white British colonial families lived in India. It was. You had lots of British officials who would. With who many men with their wives who would work and live in India and would have families, would have children. We know that many children, white children born of these British families were born in India across the 19th and early 20th century. I think the 1901 sentence is about 20,000 white British children live in India who are under the age of 12. And although many colonial families lived in India and had children in India, there was a huge imperial concern, part of the imperial mentality, concern about these children growing up in India beyond around the age of five. So up to about the age of five, it was okay for these white children to live in India and to live with their parents, but once they kind of reached primary school age, there was concern that they would become too Indian if they went to Indian schools, if they stayed in the Indian climate. So children were sent back to Britain for their schooling, but many of the. Their parents would stay on in India to continue in the colonial service. So there was then a big business of catering for this migration of these white British children who would come to Britain to be educated. Many of them went to boarding schools. And there's so many boarding schools across Britain in the 19th century who would cater for them? But in the holidays or when they were perhaps too young to join school at 5 years old, there was then a kind of subsidiary business of looking after these children. This included boarding houses, lodging houses, tutors, guardians, who would all look after these children who were aware of this process and look after them. We know this again through newspaper adverts, through memoirs and stories. One of the most famous examples of someone who. Who kind of takes this journey is Rudyard Kipling, the writer. And he wrote a lot about this, both in his fiction and his stories, but also in other accounts about this process of leaving India as a very young child with his young sister, living with a Guardian going to boarding school and being separated from his parents for a long time.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
I mean, as you said, that is one of the most famous examples of this. And so the assumption is that this sort of trajectory, I suppose this sort of boarding school experience, the separation from parents is more racialized around kind of white children that are being sent sort of quote unquote home. To what extent do Indian children or South Asian children get sent to Britain for the same sorts of reasons like this? Is this only something that happens to children who were seen as white?
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Dr. Sumita Mukherjee
No. And it's really interesting that at the very same time that we have this movement of white children from India, we also have a movement of, I guess, brown children, children of racially categorized as South Asian or Indian to Britain. And there's a number of reasons why they, they can kind of do the same journey. Some of them are very Anglophiliac, they wish to imitate. They, they see the British colonial, so very aristocratic families in India see this process that British colonial families are doing and think that in order to get ahead in the imperial system that they should also be sending their children to Britain. In the 19th and early 20th century, up to 1947, although Britain ruled British India, India also had lots of princely states, lots of Indian royal families, kind of minor royal families existed across the Indian subcontinent. So especially for those kind of elite aristocratic families, there was a sense that they should be sending their children to Britain to learn the kind of the classics and everything else that British families were learning. I guess the difference is that there wasn't a fear that there would be, they were becoming too Indian in the way that white British families were concerned. But it was very much a sense that this was a way of being part of an imperial kind of mission, I guess. But what's really interesting, and I talk about this in the book and kind of large extent of the book discusses this, it's not just elite aristocratic princes and princesses who are following this route, but also quite middle class families who increasingly by the 20th century are sending their mainly sons, but also daughters to British boarding schools. Increasingly seeing those who kind of aspirations, who have enough wealth to do this, either coming as whole families and settling in Britain in order to educate their children in Britain, or equally sending their children to boarding schools. Again, sense that education in Britain is going to be the way to get ahead back when they would, and they expect that these children will return back to India and get ahead with that education.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So this is very clearly then, as you said, big business, right? For a number of different kinds of families. So I want to talk a little bit more about the sorts of education that these children are getting, Right. What their experience was like in these sorts of environments. And obviously there's many things we could discuss there. But I wonder if we could talk specifically about sport, because maybe perhaps the assumption is like, well, it's the official kind of exam curriculum that makes the big impact. And obviously it does. But you talk about as well that things like sport that might be seen as sort of extra from the official learning is actually a really important space where questions of empire, race and belonging really come up. So can we talk about that?
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Dr. Sumita Mukherjee
Yeah. And there's so many reasons why sport becomes so influential for these children and for kind of notions of empire. I guess it's important to note that many British boarding schools are become and are kind of understood to be breeding grounds for people who are going to work in empire. It's kind of like a bit a circular thing right at catch 22, because many children are coming from India and other colonies, from these colonial families, to British boarding schools. It's kind of a real sense within boarding schools about the imperial mission. But equally, many of the people who are kind of the teachers and headmasters and mistresses behind these schools are very aware that Britain has an empire at this time and that the children that they are educating are going to be part of empire in many ways, Whether they stay at home and become politicians, or they go out to the different colonies, or they become industrialists or shipping magnets, whatever else, or missionaries and priests, or work in the army. And so much of kind of elite British society is immigrated, embroiled in empires. The schools are very much aware of this and kind of educating this young generation to work in empire. And sports and sporting societies are a big part of boarding schools, you know, like rugby, football, hockey, lacrosse. So in boys and girls schools. And sports are seen as this great kind of breeding ground for children to learn about teamwork, about hierarchies as well. You know, you've got a captain in these teams as well, and the kind of. Also a kind of adventurous spirit which is often associated with empire, but also that it's about kind of school loyalty. So if you are good enough in sports to get into the kind of sporting team and you play against other sporting teams from other schools, you win trophies, and this all brings honor to your school. So sports is such a big part of schooling and kind of imperial mentality in this time period. And as we, as you know, a relatively significant proportion of South Asian boys, particularly in girls, are attending British boarding schools in this period. They're aware of the importance of sports to these schools, and they increasingly join these sporting societies. India and Pakistan are very famous nowadays for being good at cricket, or pop cricket being a popular sport in these countries. So. And something that's kind of encouraged in the subcontinent in Pakistan. And so many of these children would take up cricket when they came to Britain, but also rugby, football, table tennis, squash. And what's interesting, and what I talk about is, and we see this in the contemporary era as well, that when these children of South Asian heritage do well in sports, then they are lauded and praised and they feel very much part of the British school system. They are praised as British children. And when they are. Are not involved in sports, there's a sense of not belonging and not being part of this system. I guess just as an important note to make here is because I look at the period between the 1830s and 1947 when India is part of the British Empire. At this time, people from the Indian subcontinent are technically British subjects. They are British then. They don't have, like, Indian passports. There's no such thing then, of kind of Indian nation. So this sense of Britishness is something that's really being evoked in schools, especially through sports.
- [22:49]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's really helpful to understand because it does make, as you said, a direct link to things we even have still today with the popularity of cricket, for example, in South Asia. But it makes a lot of sense, as soon as you start to explain it, that these sorts of questions have kind of who's literally on the team and who's not, right? Like, that does have so many parallels to questions of empire and kind of what the official policy is and kind of who is toeing the line, as it were. Interestingly, though, you also talk about these educational institutions, right? These often very elite places being not just about kind of buying into the ideology of the British Empire, but also places where Indian nationalism develops, where leftism develops, which at the time, you know, talking early 1900s, for instance, are not things the British Empire is super excited about. So how does this also happen in those same environments?
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Dr. Sumita Mukherjee
Yeah, good question. So, like, the question I'm often asked about when I talk about South Asian migration to Britain, these children, like, how much racism did they experience? And this is something that's obviously really important to think about. So, although, as I mentioned, many children are being sent because their families have kind of sense of Anglophilia, there's a sense that they want to get ahead in imperial system. I've just talked about how schools are kind of bred on this again, this kind of imperial mentality. And in reality for many children, which is same for lots migrants, whether they're white or, or had brown skin. School can be lonely, right? And especially boarding school can be an incredibly lonely experience when you are so many miles away from what you know as home and you're often away from your family. And so for some children, that experience of disconnect, of not feeling a part of a British Empire became incredibly acute at boarding schools when they would experience teasing and bullying from other pupils. Bullying and teasing also from teachers often and in. Although they were Indians were British subjects at this time. And there was a. In India itself there was a. They would learn a lot about Britishness and British history and British literature when they. And see British officials in India subcontinent. When they came to Britain they clearly met a much wider range of people from British society, were living in Britain and just had a much better sense of British society and culture. So what this did for many Indian children, and there are some famous examples like Jawahar Nehru who went on to become the first prime minister of India, this kind of experience of seeing Britain firsthand, experiencing as a child allowed them to understand that this whole imperial idea of Britain being superior to India was not necessarily accurate. That everyone is the same. You know, this kind of idea of socialism that you, you, you, you realize as you engage with a wider range of people that we're all, you know, we're all humans. There's nothing inherently different between us because of the color of our skin. And kind of understanding that as a child was particularly powerful for these children to understand that hey, there's also that the empire could be quite fragile and there were ways to dismantle it. British boarding schools also had. Debating societies are a big feature of boarding schools. So and children who went to the kind of elite born schools were trained in that kind of art of debate, of political debate and political understanding. So these ideas of kind of dismantling the empire were kind of fostered for some children, but also this sense of what it meant to be Indian. So India is and was incredibly diverse. So many different religious backgrounds, vernaculars, cultures, climates and so on. Even now and then, you know, people from different parts of indisponent would find it had very few opportunities to meet Indians from different parts of that subcontinental. But coming to Britain in this smaller island, people from different parts of the Indian subcontinent could meet each other as well and realize the commonalities that they had as Indians and kind of get the sense of what it might be, this kind of the possibility of an Indian nation. So, yeah, the experience of these Indian children at school was really important for development. These ideas of nationalism. And then as we go into the. Especially in the 1930s, when socialism, leftist politics, leftist internationalism is so vibrant in Europe and in Britain, it's inevitable that children are also picking this up from. From the news, from kind of other inferences in school and kind of in their extra curricular activities. And that enables many young South Asians to engage with a broad range of leftist politics while they are young people in the country.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really interesting to think about. Kind of the ability to meet people from different parts of what is your country, but doing that abroad and kind of the impact that that would have. And I know you've mentioned kind of you've taken us across a few decades there, which is obviously relevant going up to the 1940s, but I do want to sort of go back a little bit in time for a moment, because, of course, when we're talking about young people, especially kind of at elite educational institutions in the UK in this early 1900s period, sort of canonically in the popular imagination, one of the moments where that really comes to the fore is World War I.
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Dr. Sumita Mukherjee
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Is the boys in those posh schools signing up en masse and dying en masse too.
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Dr. Sumita Mukherjee
Right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Something still very much embedded in the cultural consciousness. So given what you've been telling us about the white Indian and the South Asian children who are also in these sorts of schools, what should we kind of add to that story in terms of the involvement of Indians in World War I? I mean, that's kind of something we're beginning to talk more about in terms of the involvement of people in the Empire in the war. How does that influence, you know, how is that part of this conversation where we're talking about children?
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Dr. Sumita Mukherjee
Yeah. So alongside sports, British boarding schools, one of the other popular extracurricular activities was something called the Officer Training Corps. And this is for boys border schools. And this was a kind of paramilitary training ground where young boys could practice kind of regimental marching, a little bit of shooting and so on. This was at schools, right? So, yeah, kind of after school activity, which was incredibly popular. So Indian student, Indian boys, these kind of elite boarding schools would often join the Officer Training Corps, and again, kind of like sports as well. It was a place where you were encouraging ideas of teams of manliness, masculinity, imperial masculinity and kind of imperial Adventure and so on. When the war is declared in 1914 and Britain becomes involved, many young Indians who had been part of these OTCs, as they're called, the Officer Training Corps, who, as I've mentioned, you know, were very loyal to empire and were. Had kind of just been bred at school, wanted to join immediately, wanted to enlist in. In the war effort. Again, as I mentioned, you know, Indians were British subjects. Britain was enjoying the war. They felt that they. They should join. But in Britain itself, in terms of joining up in the British Army, Indians were excluded initially. So in 1914, they were excluded. People of color were explicitly excluded from joining up. So this led to, for some, a bit of resentment, but also a determination to join when they could. And we see from, especially from 1916 onwards, I mean, it's not lots, but we have a handful of Indian students who had grown up through the school system who then who join the Wafet from the kind of the British side. There's a famous example of a young boy called Indrilal Roy, also known as Ladi Roy, who joins rafael when he's 17. He fudges his age because he's so desperate to join in the war effort. And I talk about other boys as well in the book. So, as you mentioned, Miranda, there's increasingly lots of histories about the Indian contribution to the war. We know that about 1.5 million Indians were involved in fighting in the First World War through the British Indian army and the Indian armies. But what I look at in this book is also what's happening through the recruitment through Britain and the tragic cases of young Indians who are dying kind of through that British effort. There's a tragic case of the SS Persia, for example, which is. Is bombed. It's. It's in. In Sea in 1915, and on that ship there are three young boys, young Indian boys who had been at school who were. Who were just going back to India and who die. And I talk in the book about various other Indians who. Young Indians who. Who die through. Through the war and also after the war, kind of afterwards, and the Second World War as well, and how some of these stories are still yet to be unpicked. And they continue the story that I'm telling in this book about how young South Asians in this period were really being educated to think of themselves as British and yet at various stages, whether it's in the First World War, whether it's through exclusion from sports, sports, whether it's through that loneliness and racism, bullying that they find at school and content nationalism the various stages are turning them against the empire and turning them into nationalists in ways in which was never, ever the kind of ambition behind bringing young Indians to Britain in this period.
- [34:57]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that was definitely not the intention. And yet, as you're describing, kind of all of these pieces come together, it definitely is making sense. And of course, as you described there, the sort of war aspect of this is very gendered. Right. It is boys that we're talking about. A lot of these schools are specifically for boys, but there are girls who are part of this too. So can we talk about the questions of sort of women's rights and suffrage that are of course relevant, particularly right after World War I? How are those questions also bound up in these discussions of empire and belonging?
- [35:35]
Dr. Sumita Mukherjee
Yeah. So as I'm sure many people know who listen to this, in the 1910s, Britain has a very vibrant suffrage movement. Many of us will be aware of the kind of popular depictions of suffragettes, British suffragettes, who are chin themselves to railings and so on, and marching in the fight for the vote. And this is curtailed by the First World War. So British suffragettes kind of stopped those efforts in 1914. But in 1918, some women in Britain are given the vote. And what's interesting is again, like this questions of freshness is that when people in the UK, some women are given the vote in 1918, this includes British subjects who are residing in Britain. So if you were, for example, from India and you lived in Britain and you could register to vote and vote in UK elections after 1918. So in the 1910s, while women were fighting for the vote in the UK, there were actually a number of Indian women who lived in the UK who were part of that struggle and part of those campaigns who were campaigning for the vote. And many also young girls who were involved in those campaigns, or South Asian women who had been girls in Britain and grown up in Britain. So the most famous example is Sophia Dulip Singh, the princess, whose family, her father had been exiled from the Punjab. And she's a relatively well known now example of an Indian woman or a woman of Indian heritage. Her father was Indian, her mother was Egyptian and German, sorry, Ethiopian and German, who was heavily involved in the suffrage movement in the 1910s. But she'd been born in Norfolk and grew up in Britain. And I guess in the 1910s, this question of women's rights is so vibrant. It's something, of course, people can be immune to it, but especially girls who are going to kind of elite boarding schools, it was quite difficult to not be aware of this campaign and this kind of, as I would say, quite sensible claim for equality for political rights. So there are a number of examples of young South Asian girls who are involved in the campaign. I mentioned Indra Lal Roy a minute ago, who, who fought in the First World War in the raf. He had three sisters who, who went to school to a school called St Paul's Girls School in London. And they, in the 1910s, along with their mother who lived with them, was also engaged in suffrage campaigns. And so what we see after 1918 though, and again, like these kind of questions of belonging and Britishness and Indianness are being raised by these young people as they spend their time in Britain, is that in the 1910s, so much of the intention had been to getting the boat for women in Britain, that it's young Indians as well as older Indians who kind of say, hang on, why are we only thinking about the vote in Britain? We should be thinking about democracy and representation back in the Indus subcontinent as well. And when Britain is kind of. And they're learning all these ideas in school as well about democracy and liberty and all these kind of the history of, of British liberty and democracy, you know, across the ages, it's that kind of the clicking right in their minds that why, why, why then do we not talk about this for, for the Indian subcontinent? And so we have some young girls from the 1920s onwards and in the 1930s, people like someone called AB Mehta, someone called Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, who had been educated in schools in Britain, who start to take the fight to India, the fight for the vote. And some of that fight happens in the subcontinent, but also because they are based in Britain, they are actively discussing this with women's organizations in Britain itself and say, we need your support because India is part of the empire. And the only way in which we can actually introduce parliamentary democracy and introduce the vote for women in India, unfortunately, it's through Britain, it's through MPs in Britain and we need your support and your lobbying to do this. So it's again, a really interesting point about the connections between Britain and India in this period of empire, the kind of influences that they both have on each other. So you have South Asian girls who are influencing the boat for British women in Britain and then trying to get that reciprocated back in the innocent continent.
- [41:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
It's really interesting how all of these issues that we're talking about all are interwoven, right? It's not like, oh, here's the British Empire piece. And separately The Indian nationalism piece and separately, suffrage. It's like, no, no, no. They're all kind of building on and layering on top of each other. So thank you for taking us through those different pieces and through sort of the decades of the early 20th century. Now, as you've mentioned, your book does mostly stop with 1947, but do we want to spend a brief moment at least looking at the ways in which the immigration of South Asian children to Britain changes after partition?
- [41:41]
Dr. Sumita Mukherjee
Yeah, yeah. So I did talk a little bit about what happens after 47. I've got a whole chapter on partition and an epilogue of what happens to the present day. And I guess the key point that I've been kind of stressing and what changes after 1947 is that before 1947, people from the inner continent are British subjects. And there's kind of a fluidity to movement between the two areas from the Indus continent to Britain. It's not always easy. It's not like borders are totally open. You know, there's kind of issues of money and there are some kind of other restrictions, but there's that kind of freedom of movement. But after 1947, when India, Pakistan become independent countries, the political situation changes. And now, although in 1948 there's the British Nationality act and people from India and Pakistan are allowed the right to take up British citizenship, there's now a kind of a new formal identity of understanding oneself as either Indian or Pakistan and later Pakistanis. Right. Or later Bangladeshi. And the other kind of massive difference that happens from kind of 1948 onwards compared to the period that I look at in the book, is that the scale of migration massively changes to Britain and globally. So in, in my, in the book, you know, there's many, many, many, it said like we kind of counted up all the children that I kind of kind of numbers, I put together, you know, thousands, hundreds of thousands. And because talking about the beginning, right, there's all the sailors and their children, it's not just all the elite children who go to boarding schools, there's a lot of children who are of South Asian heritage in Britain. Also children who are being born multiple generations on from the 9th century onto the 20th century who have South Asian heritage in Britain. But after 1948, with the British Nationality act, which gives, as I mentioned, people from India, Pakistan the rights to British, British citizenship, there's a huge wave of migration to Britain from the subcontinent. This is also part of that kind of post war period where Britain is rebuilding its economy, is actively recruiting people from The Commonwealth or the New Commonwealth and its colonies. We know the story of Windrush, Right. In the Caribbean and elsewhere, and encouraging people from the Caribbean and subcontinent, Indian, subcontinental, to work in the nhs, to work in transport and building different kind of industrial economies. So what happens after, in this period is also we see a much more diverse range of migrants in terms of class background, and also much more of a migration on kind of family lines. So it's not in the period that I look at, you often get children who are coming by themselves of all classes, because you have young children who are coming as laborers to Britain, as well as the elite children who come into boarding schools. But after 1947, 1948, after partition, migration is much more commonly happening as families kind of the heteronormative idea of a husband and a wife and their children is kind of much more common than the kind of single people who are coming up before 1947. I guess the other point that I talk about in the book, in terms of just thinking about this story of migration and identities and the trauma of migration, is that partition in itself is this huge upheaval and in itself brings about a lot of migration across in the subcontinent, between the new borders that are created between west and East Pakistan and India. And in that process, a lot of children are going through upcoming refugees and losing their homes, are seeing horrific violence. And then some of those children who kind of come out of that trauma and violence do come to Britain in that kind of immediate aftermath of 1947 and are looking for security and safety in Britain out of the trauma of partition.
- [46:37]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I mean, there's a ton going on at that point. So it definitely makes sense that people would be making lots of decisions as well about kind of how to move. And of course, then there's the legal aspect. I mean, lots happening there. But obviously in our discussion and in the book, we've covered quite a big time period, really. Obviously, there's lots of additional details in the book too. But was there anything that particularly surprised you in sort of piecing all of this together?
- [47:03]
Dr. Sumita Mukherjee
Yeah, I think I kind of knew from my previous research and we talked a lot about the boarding schools. I kind of had a sense of that. But what surprised me, actually doing the archive research, engaging with school archives, was the extent, the numbers, the kind of the scale of South Asian migration by children in this period. But one of the most interesting examples that I love, and I don't think I would have come across if I hadn't been specifically looking for and doing the research into looking for South Asian children in Britain across the 19th and 20th century is example in 1896 there's a India and Ceylon next exhibition held taking place in London. And across 9th century we see. We have various examples of imperial exhibitions, usually in London, but also in Glasgow and in other places. And people like Sadia Qureshi Salini Mata have talked about this. These exhibitions where often people from different parts of the world are brought to Britain and put on display as anthropological exhibits in themselves. And as part of these exhibitions you often had children who also put on display. But what's interesting in 1896 is that one of the artisan exhibits, one of the people who's been put on display in this exhibition, a woman from Ceylon, so Sri Lanka, as we now call it, was pregnant and she gives birth to a baby during, like, during the time of the exhibition. This baby is called London, named after the city that she is born in. And there's huge press interest in this, this birth of this young girl who comes from a Buddhist family. So she's given a Buddhist ceremony when she is born, which the exhibition people sell tickets to. So people from, so, you know, the British public buy tickets. There's huge interest in coming to the ceremony to see this young girl, to see her go through this Buddhist ceremony. Some really interesting depictions of the girl in media reports. And then the girl London, this young girl is taken to meet Queen Victoria as well, because she was also interested in seeing this, this baby. And there's this really funny account, a bit bizarre, but also funny account in one of the papers where they say that the girl salaams Queen Victoria, which just like this idea of even a baby who's only a few days or weeks old is like, understand somehow that she should be bowing down to the Queen Victoria and understanding the kind of notions of imperial hierarchy already, which I find so interesting. But yeah, this interest in this young girl, this baby I think is just a fascinating example of again, it's different, right from the stories of the elite children who are going to board in schools, but this very kind of ordinary girl who's born and has so much interest in her.
- [50:16]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that is a really interesting find. So thank you for sharing that with us. And I think it's a good place to end our discussion about the book. Leaving me to just ask what you might be working on now that it's out in the world. Anything you want to give us a sneak preview of.
- [50:30]
Dr. Sumita Mukherjee
So I'm just. My interest, as I said, is on migration, South Asian migration so I'm continuing to work in that field. A lot of my work, often because of childcare, my own reasons, my illness, often travel, has focused on Britain and then the migration to Britain. But I'm increasingly working on a broader global sense of the scale of South Asian migration in the 19th and 20th centuries. And not just to Britain, not just. And this is so interesting, as I talk about in the book, there's kind of this relationship between Britain and India, but also the migration of Indian laborers to the Caribbean, to Fiji, to South Africa, to Uganda, to Malaysia, to Mauritius, the migration of South Asians to Europe and North America and Canada. And I'm trying to piece together something a bit larger that brings together the global scale and the connections between the migration of Indians before 1947. Because in the contemporary period, now the South Asian diaspora is one of the largest diasporas in the world. You can find people of South Asian heritage in nearly every continent. And I'm really interested in that kind of historical background to how and why and experiences of this dispersal of people of South Asian heritage around the world.
- [52:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds like lots to keep you busy. So best of luck with the project. And of course, while you are pursuing it, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Imperial Footprints, a History of South Asian Child Migrants in Britain, published by Hearst in 2026. Samita, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [52:22]
Dr. Sumita Mukherjee
Thanks, Miranda. It's been a pleasure. Thanks so. Much.