resigned his Captain’s commission in July 1782, Mahomet decided to follow him to Cork where the Bakers were known as pillars of the Protestant community. The Travels of Dean Mahomet (1794) is Dean’s representation of himself as an Indian immigrant in Ireland. Around 1808 he moved to London. From small town Cork, he now entered the imperial metropolis and lived close to Portman Square, one of the new centres of London high society, where he was employed by Scottish nobleman Basil Cochrane who in 1805 had returned from the East. The latter claimed to have learned sophisticated medical skills while in India and in early 1808 he set out to improve the wellbeing of Londoners by establishing a therapeutic vapour bath at his home. His book An Improvement on the Mode of Administering the Vapour Bath (1809) epitomized the self-promotional literature of that era. Dean Mahomet introduced the new technique of ‘shampooing’ for health. The phrase quickly entered medical jargon and numerous bathhouses included shampooing among their advertized therapies. Having received little encouragement from Cochrane for his new techniques, Dean resigned and decided upon a new venture: representing Indian cuisine to the English. Late 1809, Dean Mahomet opened his Hindostanee Coffee House, on the corner of George and Charles Street. His ambition was to serve ‘Indianized’ British food that would appeal to Indians and Brits alike. Wealthy Indians, however, would not come out to eat in the restaurant because they had chefs at home cooking more authentic food. Neither was Mahomet able to attract a loyal English base of customers. He was declared bankrupt in 1812. Having moved to Brighton, he once again found employment in a vapour bathhouse and set himself up as a ‘shampooing surgeon’. By December 1815 he had opened his own ‘Indian Vapour Baths and Shampooing Establishment’. In a local paper he described the treatment as the ‘Indian Medicated Vapour Bath (type of Turkish bath), a cure to many diseases and giving full relief when every thing fails’. In 1822, he published a book on Shampooing, or Benefits Resulting from the Use of the Indian Medicated Vapour Bath in which he argued that shampooing aidsed the cure of rheumatism, asthma, affection of the lungs, spinal complaints, sprained ankle, lameness from debility,