India: The first curry house in Britain

Objective & content

This Look Closer episode (India: a feast of food mini-series, episode 193) is a short documentary about Sake Dean Mahomed and the first Indian restaurant in Britain. Born in 1759 in Patna, in the east of India, he worked as a young man in the army of the East India Company, a British company that controlled parts of India. In 1784 he moved to Ireland with a British officer, married an Irish woman and wrote a book about his travels, which came out in 1794 as the first book in English written by an Indian. In London, in 1810, he opened the Hindoostane Coffee House. The episode looks closer at his advertisement in a London newspaper, which offered Indian dishes and a hookah, and at the rooms with their bamboo chairs and Indian pictures. The restaurant was not a success, and in 1812 he went bankrupt. He moved to Brighton, opened a bath house and offered an Indian massage of the head and body that he called shampooing, a word that comes from Hindi. A green plaque in George Street, in London, now shows where his restaurant stood. The narration is in the past simple, with relative clauses (which he called shampooing, the money that he owed); no grammar point is taught. It is a listening comprehension episode: learners listen, then answer the 10 questions in the app: 7 on facts and 3 on vocabulary (the East India Company, bankrupt and shampooing).

Materials & prerequisites

The folder holds the audio, the slideshow and the script; there is no lesson plan. The pupil pack and the teacher pack (answers highlighted) are one A4 page each, with the text, three pictures (a portrait of Sake Dean Mahomed from about 1810, a print of his baths in Brighton in 1826, the green plaque in George Street), the key words and the 10 questions; a pupil sheet and a teacher sheet with the answer key come with them. The text ends with an open question, not one of the 10 app questions, that works as a class discussion prompt (Why do you think his restaurant closed after only two years?). Learners should know the past simple of common verbs and be able to read years. The script explains its new words as it goes (the East India Company, hookah, bankrupt, shampooing).

Curriculum alignment

Tagged c4-travel-and-migration ("Voyages et migrations") and c4-encountering-others ("Rencontre avec l'autre"), Cycle 4 (3e): the episode follows a man who travelled from India to Ireland and Britain, and the meeting of two cultures through food. It fits the 3e textbook unit "India: a feast of food". The episode targets CEFR level B1-.