Subscribe
Controversy has erupted over the latest cinematic adaptation of Emily Bronte’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights. The movie, which releases today in the United States, stars Australian actors Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacon Elordi as Heathcliff. The controversy relates to the casting of Elordi.
Elordi is of Basque-Australian background. However, fans have pointed out that the novel clearly points to Heathcliff being dark-skinned. Elordi’s casting, they say, is ‘whitening’ one of English literature’s best-known protagonists of colour.
Indeed, the descriptions of Heathcliff given in the novel clearly point to a non-white origin. Interestingly, modern and contemporary scholarship have pointed to a South Asian and Bengali origin for him, among others. If what scholars say is true, then Heathcliff would have been a member of one of the pioneering South Asian communities in Britain. One which faced a lot of hardship but ultimately laid the foundation of a powerful diaspora, that calls the shots today in the United Kingdom.
In the novel, Mr Earnshaw, the master of Wuthering Heights, travels 60 miles on foot to Liverpool on a business trip. He finds a young, starving, and “dark-skinned” orphan roaming the streets.
Unable to find the boy’s family and moved by pity, Earnshaw brings him back to the Yorkshire Moors inside his large overcoat.
This child is named ‘Heathcliff’ after a son of the family who died in infancy.
Further on in the novel, we get more (speculative) details regarding Heathcliff’s possible origins.
He is called a ‘gipsy’ (another group with origins to the Indian subcontinent). One of the characters, Nelly Dean, calls him a “dark-skinned gipsy in aspect,” and suggests that his “father was the Emperor of China, and [his] mother an Indian queen”.
And then, another character, Mr. Linton, explicitly refers to the young, filthy, and dark-skinned Heathcliff as “a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway”.
This, and the fact that Mr Earnshaw had found him on the streets of Liverpool, has led scholars to point to the South Asian and Bengali origins of Heathcliff, among the group known as the Lascars.
Today, Liverpool is celebrated globally as the birthplace of the Beatles. However, the city is much more than that.
Located strategically at the estuary of the Mersey river as it ends into the Irish Sea along the northwest coast of England, Liverpool once ruled the seas.
“The city was a center of commerce, and its famous docks formed a continuous line of sea wall for six miles. It surpassed all other English ports in terms of foreign trade particularly in Asia, Africa, and the East in general. In fact, by mid-century, by any criteria, Liverpool was England’s “first port of empire,” writes Diane Robinson-Dunn from the University of Detroit in Lascar Sailors and English Converts: The Imperial Port and Islam in late 19th-Century England.
In Racial Hybridity and Victorian Nationalism: 1850-1901, Alisha Renee Walters writes that, “Susan Meyer underlines that in 1769, “the year in which Mr. Earnshaw found Heathcliff in the Liverpool streets, the city was England’s largest slave-trading port.” She also suggests that Heathcliff may be “the child of one of the Indian seamen, termed lascars, recruited by the East India Company.”
The story of the Lascars begins with the establishment of trade links between Mughal India and Stuart England. The East India Company was established in 1600 AD after being given a royal charter by Queen Elizabeth I. Later, Thomas Roe, Emperor James I’s envoy, led a mission to India and had an audience with Emperor Jehangir in Agra. This led to the opening of English (later British) ‘factories’ across the subcontinent.
British trade with the subcontinent meant that Indian goods like spices, cotton, silk, jute, indigo, tea, porcelain and opium, made their way to docks in London, Liverpool, Hull, Cardiff, Glasgow and other British port cities. By the 1720s, Bengal alone contributed over half of the East India Company’s imports from the Indian subcontinent.
This trade in goods opened passages to migration between India and Britain.
The term ‘Lascar’ is derived from the Urdu/Hindustani and ultimately Persian word ‘Lashkar’ meaning ‘army’. The Portuguese, great rivals of the British, first used it and it soon found its way into the British lexicon as well.
The Lascars really entered the picture after 1757. That year, the British under Robert Clive won the rich province of Bengal after defeating Siraj ud Daulah, its Nawab.
According to the portal South Asians in Britain, “South Asian seafarers, seamen and mariners, known as ‘lascars’, were first hired to work on ships by the East India Company in the seventeenth century. As the Company increased its control of territory in India and trade and merchant shipping expanded during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they were recruited in ever increasing numbers. Employed on so-called ‘Asiatic’ or ‘Lascar’ Articles, which determined their rates and condition of employment, lascars were a source of cheap labour for shipping companies, who paid them significantly less than their European counterparts.”
The heyday of the Lascars was from the 1850s to the 1950s. That was the time when steam ships replaced sail ships. European sailors were not willing to work in the gruelling conditions aboard steamers. The labour shortage thus created was largely filled by Lascars.
Once they arrived in British ports though, the Lascars were in for a tough time. They were often abandoned to fend for themselves and often ended up destitute on the streets.
This was the situation especially before the Revolt of 1857, when the East India Company employed Lascars. Post the Revolt, the Company was abolished and the British Crown took over.
Many Lascars settled in British port cities where they worked as crossing-sweepers, ran lodging-houses or set up cafes and restaurants.
South Asians in Britain notes that “Men from diverse religious, regional and cultural backgrounds signed up as mariners mainly in the large port cities of Bombay and Calcutta. Initially recruited from the coastal regions of East Bengal, Gujarat and the Malabar coast in south-west India, as demand for their labour grew, workers from more rural areas of India, such as Assam, Bengal, the North-West Frontier Province and Punjab also signed up.”
In East Bengal, the Lascars mainly came from the Sylhet region. In his book, Bengali Settlement in Britain, author Faruque Ahmed notes that it was mainly Bengali Muslims, rather than Bengali Hindus, who became Lascars as religious injunctions forbade Hindus from crossing the Kaalapani.
Sylhet today is located in the northeastern corner of Bangladesh. At the time of the Partition of the Subcontinent, it was a part of Assam.
The region, though inland and removed from the sea, is nevertheless a watery paradise. The Barak-Surma-Meghna river system flows through it before the Meghna meets with the Ganges-Brahmaputra.
Moreover, the region is also home to the hoars, massive, saucer-shaped tectonic wetlands primarily spread across Sunamganj, Habiganj, and Moulvibazar districts, covering over 400 interconnected waterbodies. During the monsoon, they transform into vast inland seas (4,450 to 25,000) that recede in winter to form fertile, cultivated plains.
Sylhet was conquered in 1303 by the disciples of the Sufi Hazrat Shah Jalal, who facilitated the spread of Islam throughout eastern Bengal.
By the time, the British conquered Bengal, Sylhet and much of the eastern part of the province were predominantly Muslim.
Sylhet’s forests produced valuable timber and the portal Asian Affairs states that, “Many Muslim lascars came from the province of Bengal — now Bangladesh — and in particular from the fertile region of Sylhet. Although far from the sea, Sylhet’s forests produced timber for ships and some of its young men longed to board the boats they built.”
These details — Heathcliff’s discovery in Liverpool, the town’s association with Lascars, many of whom were Muslim from eastern Bengal, especially Sylhet, point a telling finger towards his background and connect it to the region.
And while the Lascars from Bengal settled in Britain, they, like Heathcliff, were not accepted by English and British society on account of their race and religion.
Robinson-Dunn notes that, “The lascars and their religion may have been tolerated, but the missionaries and other middle-class Victorians who came into contact with them did not consider them to be English, not only because they had been born outside of the country, but ironically because their circumstances and lifestyles resembled those of other English people who seemed to threaten the social order and were, therefore, considered outsiders existing beyond the pale of the true English nation. Lascars were a part of the migratory, laboring poor who had not embraced Christianity.”
She adds that, “Like the underclass in general, lascars were thought to inhabit spaces that existed in England physically, but were removed from it culturally…Thus to be a Muslim lascar in England during the late 19th century was to occupy the uncertain position of sometimes being regarded a part of society and other times being excluded from it or encountering hostility.”
And while the Lascars offered yeoman services to the Royal Navy, their place in British history continues to be marginal. Pretty much like Wuthering Heights 2026 having a white actor play Heathcliff.
Nonetheless, the Sylheti, Bengali, Bangladeshi and larger South Asian diasporas in Britain owe it to the Lascars, who laid the foundation for subcontinental settlement in the country. The story of Heathcliff is thus a story of these men, who settled in an alien land and made it their home, despite terrible hardships.
