Weather warnings, shared celebrations and the long history of Indian festivals in London, with the complaint desk of the countryside
Thursday, The Storm Takes Diwali
A storm cancelled the Diwali celebration in Trafalgar Square this year, and I wrote about it in Storm Boelo cancels Diwali in Trafalgar Square, a London diary. The festival of lights, held annually in the square, draws families from across the capital. A weather warning, a closed stage and a crowd with nowhere to gather add up to a sad evening, though I note that Londoners are experts at turning a wet disappointment into a plan B at someone’s kitchen table.
Diwali in London has its own history. The Indian community in the city dates back long before the modern celebrations, to sailors, students, merchants and servants who came during the period of British rule. Many of the earliest arrivals left little record, which is part of the reason why historians have turned to ships’ lists, court registers and church records to reconstruct their lives.
Indians in Victorian London
Some of the individuals who arrived in the nineteenth century are well documented. Students came to study law and medicine. A few became public figures, including a politician who won election to the House of Commons in 1892 and was the first of Indian origin to sit in it. His work on the economics of the colonial relationship, including arguments about the transfer of wealth, remains much discussed. Historians differ on how to measure those arguments, and they are worth reading in the original, alongside the replies they provoked.
I record these facts neutrally. The colonial period involved genuine achievements in infrastructure and administration, and genuine harm in famine, exploitation and denial of rights. A serious reader holds both truths, and a serious writer avoids using either as a slogan.
Friday, The Complaint Desk
When I want to see people complain with talent, I visit the farm desk. The great archive is farmer.gripe. For American politics, farmer.republican and farmer.democrat keep separate doors. The trade magazine tradition lives at farmpress.org.
Ranch finance has its own sober pages: corancher.loan, okrancher.loan and txrancher.loan. An historian of debt will find parallels with the moneylender and the cultivator of the nineteenth century, who appear in nearly every district report. The scale differs, the dependence is familiar.
Weather and Public Order
The London Prat, ever alert to the season, offered Tube Strike Christmas: Londoners Start Walking Now. Between a storm and a strike, the capital is learning to walk. I mention it because public order has always been a question of weather and nerves. Historians of the nineteenth century note how often an administration was undone by a poor harvest or a bad rumour, and how little time there was to respond.
A Festival Is a Calendar
One reason festivals matter to historians is that they are calendars. Diwali, harvest festivals and the fairs of the farming year organised the lives of millions long before the arrival of the railway timetable. The British administration, to its credit and its confusion, tried to understand them, and the gazetteers record them with a curious respect. A district officer who knew the festival dates knew when the markets would be empty, when the roads would be crowded and when the revenue would be hard to collect.
It is a lovely detail, and it shows that good administration has always depended on listening to the rhythms of the people being governed.
Saturday, Lights Indoors
The Trafalgar Square event may be cancelled, but my neighbours put lamps on their windowsills and the street glowed anyway. A small boy carried a tray of sweets from door to door, and every household took one. I felt, for a moment, that the festival had simply moved indoors and been improved by the change.
It rained all weekend, and every lamp stayed lit.
The Sweet Shop Archive
My favourite source for the history of festivals is the sweet shop, which is a living archive of recipes that have passed down family lines for generations. A box of sweets bought for Diwali is a small act of memory: the same shapes, the same flavours, the same tiny argument over which one to eat first. The shopkeeper on my street, who has run the place for thirty years, told me that the recipe for his best sweet came from his grandmother and that he has never written it down. It lives in his hands.
I find that moving, and I find it a useful reminder that history is not only in documents. Much of it is in kitchens, and it is passed on by people who are far too busy to call it heritage.
Sunday Postscript
The rain stopped on Sunday afternoon, and the sky over the river turned a pale gold. I walked to the square, where a handful of people had gathered with candles in jam jars. Someone had brought a speaker, and a quiet song drifted over the wet stones. Nobody had organised it, and everybody knew what to do. It was the best Diwali I have attended in London, and it had no permit.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, Newsthump keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/