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Bari Chohan
Bari Chohan was born in Nottingham (UK) and his family came to England in the 1870s and practised alternative medicine
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About
Bari Chohan can trace his family coming to the UK in the 1870s. They set up a series of medical clinics across the country. His great-uncle Dr Chirag Din Chohan led these initiatives. He was a hakim, or practitioner of alternative medicine.
Bari Chohan was interviewed in 1999 by Neil Gander for the Millennium Memory Bank, the largest recording project in the history of British radio. It ran from 1998 to 1999, capturing the pulse of the century through the voices of thousands of people from all walks of life. More than 5,000 interviews were recorded with people from all over the United Kingdom; extracts were used in the radio programme series The Century Speaks and the full interviews are archived at the British Library under collection reference number C900. Bari Chohan's interview is British Library reference C900/01572, © BBC.
Listen to Bari talking about his family’s history of practising medicine in the UK.
Interview conducted by Neil Gander, 1999.
BC: My family came into England in the late 1870s, to my knowledge. We have an actual factual record of names and people, and photographic record from certainly the turn of the century. The understatements were that we were a family engaged in ophthalmics and homeopathic medicine in the subcontinent. And at the latter part of the nineteenth century in England, it was very fashionable for people to be involved with Indian doctors because of Queen Victoria's fascination with her Indian doctor, and also, the fact that all medicine was paid for. It doesn't matter if you were poor or rich, you paid for medicines, therefore you had the two strands working in harmony. Not only modern medicine was just coming into the fore in its own right, it was just really being formulated at that time. And you had mostly homeopathic medicines, both in Europe, which are often based on Arabic and Asian homeopathic medicines. And our people came to England. We had one strand of the family in Switzerland even at that part of the century, and in the Far East. But we set up a series of clinics and consultations at various cities throughout the UK, the most affluent being in Brighton and Harrogate, and with others in Sheffield, Bradford, Manchester, the Midlands. And my great-uncle, whose name was Chirag Din, had the practice at Harrogate. And he was practising certainly in the early '20s, throughout the '20s. And his nurse Florence, an apt name for a nurse, was originally from Middlesbrough, and she eventually married Dr Din. And she became very homesick and wanted to come back to Middlesbrough. And in the late '20s, he did acquiesce to live in Middlesbrough and practise in Harrogate. And he was a very well-off individual, and settled into Middlesbrough's life very easily. And being reasonably well off, he built some houses at the top of West Lane, which is now Acklam Road, and had various well-known businesses in the town. And was generally well-liked. He was a bit of a man about the town.
Listen to Bari talking about his great-uncle’s mixed marriage to his nurse, one of the first mixed marriages in the North East.
NG: The other interesting thing is about your uncle, your great-uncle marrying his nurse, who was a Middlesbrough woman.
BC: Right. Yeah.
NG: So I suppose then one of the first mixed-race marriages in the North East at that time as well. Do you know very much about how that went and how it was...?
BC: Yeah. It's like any walk of life, I think, if you're fiscally fairly secure, life was always easier. He would certainly have had very few other people in a similar position. Even though Middlesbrough was a seaport, and you would have had people from all over the world coming here, and you certainly have a culture of obviously seamen and locals mixing and whatever, there would be at different levels, it's totally different I think to somebody who's living and working here and then marrying into a community. Although on Tyneside at South Shields, there was a strong Yemeni and Arab seafaring tradition. And there had been mixed marriages from the turn of the century. I never really knew the problems that were surrounding such marriages because we were brought up to just accept whoever we met. We had a fairly liberal family in that sense. It's not until communities formed in later years that you tend to then get retrogressive and conservative. You know, this is shown in when my mother was here in the early...late '40s early '50s, she certainly wore long dresses, western clothing and so on. And it wasn't until the late '60s when other families came that she became more traditional in her garb. So I find that certainly my uncle's instance, it was easier for him to have no problems because he was financially well off.
Listen to Bari talking about the story of his father’s cousin bringing his father to the UK, and him fighting in the British army during World War II.
BC: So his cousin brought my father over and that would be in the mid-30s, pre-Second World War. And my father lived and worked with my grand-uncle. And he eventually, being in the UK as war broke out in ’39, joined the English Army as opposed to the Indian Army. But within the ranks, there was a regiment for people of Asian origin, because of differences in religion and food. And he was a corporal. And they served in munitions throughout...he served his war in Britain in...Southend and London, and had one spell in Egypt. And really, he lived throughout this whole period in Europe.
NG: So your dad was in England from his teenage years onwards really?
BC: Yes, he would be early 20s, certainly by that time.
NG: From what you know of him, did he consider himself a Brit?
BC: He was always...he was brought up with the whole tradition of being British. His passport was British, because he was a member of the British empire. People have to recall that wherever you lived, you were part of the British empire, and your passport was a British passport. Therefore, it was easy for all subjects of the empire to always think of themselves as British, although culturally and ethnically they would be always looking at their homeland as their original homeland. But in all the years my father lived in England, he came to think of himself as being British.
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Entry credit
Laura Owen
