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Yusuf Khan
‐
Soldier who wrote a travelogue about his time in England in the 1830s
Other names
Yoosoof Khan
Kambalposh/Kamalposh
Place of birth
Date of arrival to Britain
Place of death
India
Date of time spent in Britain
August 1837 – January 1838
About
Yusuf Khan was born in Hyderabad to a Sunni Pathan Afghan family in around 1803. He followed a broad humanist religion known as Sulaimani. He was an officer in the cavalry of the Awadh ruler Nasir al-Din Haidar.
In the 1830s Yusuf Khan decided that he wished to visit Britain independently. He took a two-year leave of absence and sailed from Calcutta to England in March 1837. Yusuf Khan travelled with his servant Nanku. He reached England in August 1837 and travelled to London. He visited tourist spots and debated Christianity. He left England in January 1838 and returned to Lucknow in India. Yusuf Khan wrote about his travels and experiences in England in a book written in Urdu called Tarikh-I Yusufi, which was first published in 1847. A reprint was published in 1873.
Tarikh-I Yusufi (Travels in Europe by Yoosoof Khan Kummulposh) (1847)
Fisher, Michael H., Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travellers and Settlers in Britain 1600–1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004)
Garcia, Humberto, England Re-Oriented: How Central and South Asian Travelers Imagined the West, 1750–1857 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020)
Hasan, Mushirul and Zaidi, Nishat (eds) Between Worlds: The Travels of Yusuf Khan Kambalposh (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014)
Zaidi, Nishat, ‘Oceanic Encounters with the “Other” in the Age of Empire: Late-Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Travel Accounts of Indian Muslims’, in Dilip Menon, Nishat Zaidi, Simi Malhotra and Saarah Jappie, Ocean as Method: Thinking with the Maritime (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022), pp. 54–88
Image credit
© Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1930s – present
