‘The Melbourne Hindus … take a keen interest in politics, especially in the restrictive acts which aim at a White Australia.’
The shops of 1890s Melbourne’s so-called ‘slum’ streets were more than just places for trade. At 161 Exhibition Street, between the so-called ‘mixed raced’ streets of Lonsdale and Little Lonsdale, was a pawn shop run by an India–born merchant, Khooda Bux. The court records reveal this was the regular haunt of Indian, Syrian and Jewish men, who used the shop as a polyglot meeting place to trade, share information and conduct political meetings.
While Khooda Bux was busy supporting the livelihoods of merchants and hawkers, two blocks north a Bangalore-trained masseur, Teepoo Hall, was busy healing the tense, diseased and partially paralysed bodies of white Melburnians in his rooms on Collins Street.
This photo shows Teepoo Hall training white doctors in ‘the art of massage’ in the Melbourne Hospital in 1905. Through his English skills, massage business, and work in the Melbourne and Austin Hospital, Teepoo Hall earned the respect and support of surgeons, politicians and even Lord Hopetoun, Australia’s first Governor General.
After the White Australia Policy came into effect, Hall would use his respected status as a masseur to find ways to negotiate the forces of legalized white supremacism. Teepoo Hall also worked closely with Khooda as a political ally, and the two pooled their linguistic skills. Listen to more about Hall here : https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/shootingthepast/all-hands-on-deck/8838380
In March 1903, the Sydney Sunday Times reported that ‘Indians [have] Organised’. ‘Mr. Khoda Buksh, a well-to-do Melbourne merchant’ has ‘become the President of the British Indian Association of Australia … but ‘being a poor English scholar it has been arranged the vice-president, Mr. Teepoo Hall, will undertake the ... practical control of affairs.’ This was a new branch of the 50 year strong British Indian Association.
Khooda Bux and Teepoo Hall also organized medical philanthropy, which helped to win white sympathy for Indian rights; what Mei Fen Kuo has called from her study of contemporary Chinese philanthropy as ‘leading by giving’.