‘… had gone to South Africa from India over a hundred years ago.’
IMAGE: Mahatma Gandhi, centre, when he was practising as an attorney in South Africa. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images/Rediff Archives
The Other Mohan is the journey of an Indian across Africa and Mauritius during the Raj.
Mohan’s great grand daughter author Amrita Shah painstakingly and with single minded focus traces her ancestor’s journey and in the process writes a history of the Indian Diaspora at that time.
He was there at the same time Mahatma Gandhi was there. They did interact once and he even participated in one of the Mahatma’s protests.
“By following my ancestor, an ordinary person rather than an extraordinary leader, I find a less familiar story, one of enterprise, opportunism and a love of adventure,” Amrita Shah tells Rediff.com‘s A Ganesh Nadar.
We know where Mohan began his journey but we don’t know what happened in the end.
I don’t think you have understood this genre of storytelling. This is a book of creative non-fiction which is using different approaches.
It is like you are reading a novel but everything is factual. If I am writing about the weather I am not imagining it, I have looked it up.
It is an episode that happened in my family’s past and I was exploring it and as I was exploring it I realised that it was India’s encounter with modernity in many ways.
The colonial education system where my great grandfather was educated and he became an English speaking Westernised individual like Mahatma Gandhi was.
Their knowledge expanded their horizon and they travelled abroad. As I was exploring I came to realise that this told a much larger story about our people there.
It’s about people at that time. It is a moment in history and you are meant to enter it and go along with it.
The British left in 1947 but their influence continues to this day. It is not a conventional book. After you read it, it is meant to linger in your mind. I am trying to do something offbeat.
I am trying to find out something about an ordinary man who left India more than a hundred years ago.
It is not easy to do but I did find it after a lot of effort. It is a challenge which I have mentioned in the book. I have written it like a story and not history or a travelogue.
Your book combines personal history with a larger history of the Indian Ocean. Was this intentional?
I started out just trying to solve a puzzle, to understand why my great grandfather Mohanlal had gone to South Africa from India over a hundred years ago.
I had no idea how far I would get because I was trying to track an ordinary undistinguished individual and I did not know what kind of data would be available.
So, it was a challenge as a researcher, which is why the book is written like a thriller, with each discovery taking the narrative further.
But I was always aware of the larger implications of my personal story. Mohanlal’s ancestors came from Surat, a vibrant medieval port city.
They were vanias/banias, an entrepreneurial class that had traded for centuries on the Indian Ocean.
Mohanlal was born in Bombay, a city built by the British and left at a time when very few people, particularly Hindus, travelled overseas. And he went to Mauritius and South Africa because the need for indentured workers there had created thriving Indian communities.
I was interested in understanding the impact of colonialism on ordinary lives so my personal history had to be entwined with its context.
IMAGE: Amrita Shah.
Photograph: Pat King
Gandhi is also in the story which is confusing.
At the time my great grandfather Mohanlal travelled to South Africa Gandhi was leading his Satyagraha campaign against the colonial administration.
My great grandfather even participated in a small way. Gandhi is such a towering figure and his biography is so well-known that it is likely that anyone looking at the timing and location would think they were going to read a familiar story about a struggle against racial discrimination.
By following my ancestor, an ordinary person rather than an extraordinary leader, I find a less familiar story, one of enterprise, opportunism and a love of adventure.
Which is why the book is called The Other Mohan.
Photograph: Kind courtesy Yann/Wikimedia commons
The style of your book is unconventional. How would you describe it?
The book belongs to the genre of literary non-fiction which means it is not literal as much of Indian non-fiction tends to be.
It is in part a memoir, travelogue, personal history and history. By combining these approaches and moving between the past and present I am also exploring the lingering effects of colonisation.
That said, it is a rigorously researched work as you can see from the references.
Everything from the room, to the passage to the weather is described in great detail.
Creative or literary non-fiction works differently from conventional non-fiction which is all about conveying information.
I aim to take my reader to a place and make them see things in a way they might not have done earlier.
So, for instance, when I describe how I imagined my great grandfather standing on a ship like Napoleon or Nelson and the reality of it which would have been that he was on a crowded deck spilling over with tiffin boxes and bedrolls I am also conveying how influenced we are by colonial literature and art and the way it glamourised its personalities.
Actually, the best history books also use colour and detail, and draw from a wide range of sources to tell a story.
Your story is also about an unknown woman who Mohanlal met, who gave birth to your grandmother. Why was she a mystery?
She, my great grandmother, died very young, at sea. My grandmother was brought up by her stepmother and had a happy life with her half siblings. And she never talked about her mother.
She told me about her father, going away on a steamer as a young man, which is what set me on this journey. But she said nothing else, nothing about why he went.
I could find no information even from other family members. It was one of those stories that so many families have in their past which nobody ever talks about and which remain a mystery — till someone like me decides to unravel it.
I found my great grandmother’s anonymity and her story very telling of the plight of women migrants and my search for her also became a means for me to explore the various kinds of people and communities that went overseas.
The experience of migration, even for the poorest, meant a cutting off of traditional bonds and the forging of new ones.
People of various castes and regions were mixed together and had to form new communities.
Indentured labourers used the term ‘jahaazi bhai‘ for the brotherly ties forged on the boat that took them overseas.
So, the story of my great grandparents, was also an effect of colonisation and the consequent patterns of migration.
My villagers went and set up businesses in Sri Lanka when the British ruled both countries. They faced no obstacles. You have written about the restrictions faced by Indians in Africa, why was it different from Lanka?
European settlers found the climate in South Africa suitable unlike India and Sri Lanka. They settled there in large numbers and wanted to keep other races subservient.
In Sri Lanka it suited the British to encourage Tamilians to move there so they were involved in social engineering there.
Do you expect your book to be used as a text book for Indian history in Africa and Mauritius?
One cannot say how a book will be perceived. It is a history of the Diaspora in the Western Indian ocean which I have based both on archival research and many excellent works by local scholars.
I also see it as a book on India’s experience with modernity which literary scholars might read with interest. But I did not set out to write a text book. It is a book to be read by people who like to read a well-written story that also makes them think about the world.
Feature Presentation: Rajesh Alva/Rediff
