Highlights
- The Ayurveda way of Hair Care, in a nutshell
- Sake Dean Mohamed, a man of many Firsts
- The First Book to be published by an Indian in Britain
- The first Ayurveda style Baths in London
- The First Indian Restaurant in London
- Ayurveda treatments in Regency Brighton and the invention of Shampoo
- Success, Impressive Therapeutic Results, Trending in Dickens and Giving Back to Brighton
- Sake Dean's Legacy
Back in the day, Goodness Gracious Me, a British comedy show, had a recurring bit which we lovingly called, “Indian!” The premise was an immigrant father trying to imbue a sense of Indian identity and belonging into his very British son by claiming Indian roots to people, moments and achievements in history. When I was researching this blog, I asked my brother if he knew where shampoo came from. Without skipping a beat, or even knowing what the answer was, he said, “Indian!” He wasn't wrong.
The Ayurveda Way of Hair Care, in a nutshell
The Ayurveda approach to hair care hasn’t changed much in 5000 years It emphasizes holistic hair care through plant treatments, massage, and diet. Key treatments include
- regular cleansing of scalp and hair using herbal pastes made with boiled reetha (Indian soapberry) blended with herbs and flowers.
- Herbal rinses with ingredients like amla, hibiscus and shikakai (acacia) help to strengthen and nourish hair.
- Oil treatments with castor and neem help to protect hair and promote growth.
- Scalp massages with oils like coconut, sesame, or bhringraj help enhance blood circulation and nourish hair follicles.
- Stress reduction techniques like yoga and meditation are essential to happy hair, as is a balanced diet rich in nutrients.
But how did Ayurveda come to Britain to eventually give the world Shampoo?
Sake Dean Mohamed: A man of many Firsts
Meet Sake Dean Mohamed, an entrepreneur from Bengal who lived Indian-British cultural fusion in Regency England in real, tangible ways. He and his family were Bridgerton in Real Life.
Sake Dean came from a Shia Muslim family that claimed Arab and Turkish roots; and known to be of the Hindu barber caste. Such intersectionality is not unusual in the Indian subcontinent. It tells us that there was a religious conversion in his family at some point, likely for social and economic mobility; and that he likely had some serious Ayurveda hair, skin and healing treatment skills, passed on through generations.
His father served in the British East India Company’s Bengal Army, dying in battle when Sake Dean was 11 years old. Captain Godfrey Evan Baker, an Anglo-Irish officer, took him under his wing, eventually finding him a place in the Bengal Army as a trained surgeon. The word “surgeon” in those days referred to the physical manipulation of body parts. This might have meant that he healed wounds, applied treatments, massaged, put dislocated bones back into place, splinted, and perhaps did some cutting, as required. When Baker resigned his commission in 1782, Sake Dean left with him for Cork, Ireland.
In Cork, Baker introduced Sake Dean into wealthy Anglo-Irish society. He went to school to hone his English Language and culture skills. And he met and fell in love with Jane Daly, whose family opposed their marriage. Sake Dean converted to Christianity and the couple eloped. Then they returned to Cork society, who seem to have embraced them with open arms. Mahomed lived and worked on the Baker estate for 22 years.
The First Book to be published by an Indian in Britain
Sake Dean wrote The Travels of Dean Mahomet: An Eighteenth-Century Journey through India in 1794. It was the first book written by an Indian in the English language to be published in England. Sake Dean wrote in Epistolary style (meaning a story told through an exchange of Letters—today it would be told in e-mails).
He began the book with a brief contrast between Ireland and India, followed by sketching out his early years, and then describing his travels with the Bengal army as it moved around North East India. He shared accounts of Indian culture, trade, military conflicts, food, wildlife and more, concluding with a description of his ship voyage to Ireland.
To market the book, Sake Dean took out a series of newspaper ads. He also published Travels by subscription, which was common at that time. As testimony that he was regarded as a credible literary figure, a total of 320 people pre-ordered the book with a deposit, long in advance of the book’s final delivery.
This was actually quite a feat. It wasn’t easy for those considered "less than" (read, women and people of colour) to be published in England back then. To give you context, Sake Dean wrote at the same time as Jane Austen. An early version of Pride and Prejudice, offered for publication in 1797, was declined. It was eventually published in 1803, but Jane had to agree to not be named as the author because of her gender. Her classic novel, now loved all over the world for centuries, was first published anonymously.
The First Ayurveda Style Spa in London
Back to Sake Dean. And Shampoo. At the age of 47 In 1806, he moved his family to London into Portman Square, a growing, fashionable neighbourhoods for the rich and titled, indicating the Mahomed family’s acceptance into these elite circles.
One such person in Sake Dean’s circle was Basil Cochrane, supply contractor to the British Navy, Investor and Nabob (meaning he made his conspicuous wealth through the East India Company). Cochrane had the idea of installing a steam bath/spa, in his house in Portman Square, to offer Indian style "vapour treatments" and their medical benefits to the public. He claimed to have learned how to perform the these treatments during his time in India.
According to Sake Dean’s son, Horatio, that wasn’t the case. He later wrote in The Bath: A Concise History of Bathing that it was Sake Dean who fitted Cochrane's baths for the treatments. He likely would have had a hand in choosing everything–from the layout to the furniture to the spa’s menu of treatments needed to create the Indian healing experience Cochrane purported to know how to deliver. As well, Sake Dean made his own treatment formulas, using healing herbs, oils and waters.
The baths at Portman Square were a hit. Soon Sake Dean added a practice to his treatment menu, unique to England but de rigueur in India. This was Champo, a Ayurveda massage of the scalp, forehead, neck and shoulders—beneficial for stress, headache, or nervous tension reduction. It could be performed with or without aromatic oils, which, would do double duty in nourishing hair.
However, Sake Dean Mahomet didn’t get the acknowledgement (or likely the fees) he deserved from Cochrane or his rich influential clients for his work in establishing and delivering these Ayurveda inspired treatments in Cochrane’s baths.
Disappointed, he left to reinvent himself again.
The First Indian Restaurant in London
Sake Dean opened The Hindoostane Coffee House, just down the road from the baths, in 1809. It was designed to draw in the kind of clientele he thought would appreciate the experience he was trying to create—Brits who had worked or spent time in India and who wanted to revisit that same cultural experience in London. The interior was decorated Indian style, with sofas, bamboo chairs, and ornate paintings of life in India. A separate smoking room offered gilded hookah pipes with authentic chilam tobacco. The menu offered authentic Indian dishes and home delivery service.
The restaurant folded in 1812 due to financial difficulties. Sake Dean was ahead of his time, the larger British public, not quite ready to embrace Indian food. That wouldn’t actually become a thing until the 1990’s. By the 21st century, Chicken Tikka Masala would become Britain's national dish.
A little sidebar story from my own family history. My father’s family ran a popular Indian restaurant in Nairobi, Kenya called Keby’s Tea Room. In 1959, members of my family arrived in London to expand the family’s base. They opened a tea room, serving an Indian menu alongside a British one. In Nairobi, Keby’s samosas were legendary. But they were not received warmly in London. My fam had to close the tea room within a couple of years.
Ayurveda treatments in Regency Brighton and the invention of Shampoo
When sea bathing became popular as a health habit, Brighton became a popular seaside destination for the fashionable and elite. The Prince Regent commissioned architect John Nash (designer of Buckingham Palace and much of Regency London) to renovate Brighton Pavilion into a kind of Indian exotica fantasy castle.
Though the British took many things from India—land, resources, people, ornamentation styles, the Kohinoor Diamond, pyjamas to name a few—they did so within the European Superiority narrative, constructed to give themselves permission to help themselves to these "spoils" all over the world. This narrative is at the centre of Orientalism, so well explained by Palestinian author and scholar, Edward W. Said in his 1979 book of the same name. So onion domes, arabesque wallpaper patterns, paisley print fabric and turbans were deemed appropriate for decoration, play and leisure. But Indian architecture, design and art were not considered equal to the Neo-classical styles that were adopted to reflect world power and domination.
It was at the time of the Pavilion's renovation that Sake Dean and his family moved to Brighton to start again. In 1814, they opened the Mahomed’s Baths, near Brighton Pavilion.
Full body massages, ayurveda style, were offered; as were vapour baths, for conditions like rheumatism, palsy, gout, lumbago, joint pain, laryngitis, indigestion, and more. Cosmetic services were also offered, Indian style—like henna hair colouring, barbering, hair removal, skin care, tooth whitening, tooth care, and more. Services were divided between genders and Sake Dean’s wife, Jane, took care of the women’s wing.
When it came to seabathing, Mahomed offered a far more convenient, private and certainly less chilly option, facilitated by a steam engine in the bathhouse basement that pumped in both seawater and freshwater, heating them as each treatment required.
First came a form of aromatherapy. The client lay in a heated steam bath infused with aromatic Indian oils and herbs. After the client started sweating, they were taken to a massage area, and covered by a flannel tent with sleeves protruding inwards that would allow the operator, from outside the tent, to knead and vigorously massage the bather.
If this tent contraption sounds familiar at all, you may have met variations of it in Salman Rashdi’s Midnight’s Children and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude as a device used by male doctors to examine female patients while keeping modesty and dignity intact.
This massage was champo again, now anglicised to “shampoo”. Only later did shampoo come to mean hair washing and hair soap, also thanks to Sake Dean. He invented the first shampoo, based on the ancient Ayurveda version that used boiled soap nut water. Sake Dean's used shaved soap instead, mixing it with scented waters, fruits and herbs. The formula was created initially to clean the henna and indigo dye from hair. Later it would be incorporated into spa treatments for general hair cleaning after oil massages. It was such a hit that English hairstylists jumped on the Shampoo trend, offering services that combined boiled shaved soap in water with various herbs to give the hair shine and fragrance. The trend spread to Europe and North America. In 1927, the German chemist and pharmacist Hans Schwarzkopf would create the first commercial liquid shampoo.
But back to Sake Dean’s bathhouse experience. After the massage, clientele amused themselves in reading rooms beautifully painted with Indian landscapes before moving to private marble baths to be cleaned in heated waters with aromatic formulas. The comfort and success of the bathing experience made a visit to Mahomed Baths a must do when visiting Brighton. That led to opening several more bathhouses to meet demand.
Success, Impressive Therapeutic Results, Trending in Dickens and Giving Back to Brighton
The Prince Regent was also a client. When he became King, he appointed Sake Dean his “Shampooing Surgeon”, and had him install a private royal vapour bath next to the his bedroom in the Royal Pavilion. In keeping with the exotica theme of the building, Sake Dean would arrive to “shampoo” the king, wearing an official costume designed for him, modelled on Mughal imperial court dress. He’d change out of costume to something more practical to do the massage and bathing treatments.
In 1826, Sake Dean published, Shampooing, or, Benefits resulting from the use of the Indian medicated vapour bath, as introduced into this country, by S.D. Mahomed, (a native of India). In it, he outlines the treatments offered alongside many healing success stories told by the patients themselves, in both prose and poetry. It was the marketing “social proof” of that day.
Sake Dean was a self-promoter and a marketing genius.—he had to be to succeed. He used the Regency period's Orientalist fascination with India and the Exotic to usher his clients into an entire, holistic wellness experience, based on ancient Ayurveda wisdom and practices. He was also skilled at what he did, innovatively bringing together ancient Ayurveda wisdom with current British technology. His results were positive on the whole, impressing the English medical establishment of the day. But the Superiority narrative prevented it from being wholly accepted and incorporated into everyday medical treatments.
King William, who succeeded King George IV in 1830, kept Sake Dean on as “Shampooing Surgeon”. The new king was as fond of Brighton—and shampooing—as his brother had been. By the mid-1840s, when Charles Dickens was writing Dombey and Son, “shampooing” was sufficiently well-known to the reading public that he was able to describe his fictional character, Miss Panky, as “a mild little blue-eyed morsel of a child—who was shampooed every morning, and seemed in danger of being rubbed away altogether.”
Sake Dean shared his success with Brighton, donating to local charities and becoming the official steward for the Annual Charity Ball. He was known for his kind hearted generosity, helping the poor and needy where he could and offering free treatments or treatments by donation. He lit the Baths up, Indian style, with gaslights to mark significant occasions–like royal events and anniversaries, holidays and shared special occasions. He might actually have inspired a trend that would eventually give us Christmas lights.
Queen Victoria ended Sake Dean’s run of success by declaring Brighton not to her liking, as it did not afford her and her family the level of privacy wanted. She was “not amused”. And so, Brighton Pavilion fell out of royal favour as a holiday destination and Sake Dean lost his royal patronage.
Sake Dean's Legacy
Sake Dean Mahomed died February 1851 in Brighton. The charming, adaptable, intelligent, sharp, innovative, self-promoting Indian entrepreneur with mad Ayurveda and barber skills, was resilience in motion. He left a legacy of Firsts that would be largely forgotten until the later 20th century. The grip of the Superiority narrative Britain and Europe had constructed to give themselves permission to colonize most of the world was finally loosening. British Asians looking for stories of Indian inclusion in British life would unearth Sake Dean's story and restore him to a deserved place in history. In the following century, Google would celebrate his contributions in a doodle.
Sake Dean lived cultural fusion as naturally as breathing, finding ways to confidently bridge gaps between differences. He didn't take NO for an answer, flowing and reinventing himself as needed, while including humility and service to others as part of his formula for being in the world. His contribution went beyond merely selling goods; he crafted holistic healing experiences, bringing Ayurveda wisdom and healing practices together with cutting edge British technology to innovate and inspire treatment trends that are still with us today. And he gave the world Shampoo.
Further Reading:
Michael Fisher (ed with introduction), The Travels of Dean Mahomet, (1997)
https://mixedmuseum.org.uk/amri-exhibition/sake-dean-mahomed-and-jane-daly/
1 comment
As always informative, knowledgeable and an interesting read!