The forgotten firsts of Dean Mahomed: The 18th-century Indian who beat us all to self-publishing

“Indian dishes… in the highest perfection, and allowed by the greatest epicures to be unequalled to any curries ever made in England.”

What this advertisement doesn’t mention: the man behind it had already done something far more remarkable. Sixteen years earlier, he’d published one of the first English-language books by an Indian author, funded by 320 subscribers he hustled up himself – self-publishing, essentially, with a dash of crowdsourcing. He composed it in elaborate 18th-century prose he’d taught himself. The book was called The Travels of Dean Mahomet. And it sank without a trace.

I stumbled across Mahomed quite by accident – a footnote about the word “shampoo” led to a spa in Brighton, which led to a restaurant in London, which led to a book published in Cork in 1794. And then the rabbit hole opened.

Sake Dean Mahomed, the pioneer

It turns out Sake Dean Mahomed got there first. Before the postcolonial canon. Before Indian writing in English had a name. Before the empire had fully consolidated. He translated himself into the language of the coloniser, and used it to publish a memoir. That alone should have made him famous. It didn’t.

Mahomed was born in 1759 in Patna, just as the Mughal Empire was crumbling and the East India...

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