Book Review | Life of Mahatma contemporary, pieced together
The book is about Shah’s great-grandfather who, at one point in his life, travelled to South Africa and stayed there for several years, acquiring a mysterious second wife and creating the daughter who would become the author’s grandmother
For those of us who have never had to leave their homeland to seek better opportunities elsewhere, stories of emigration can be most fascinating. What courage it must take to move to another country to find work, putting up with hardships and very likely prejudice, simply so the family back home can live better! I find the concept of this both intriguing and humbling.
This is why the second I heard of Amrita Shah’s book, The Other Mohan in Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire, I wanted to read it. The book is about Shah’s great-grandfather who, at one point in his life, travelled to South Africa and stayed there for several years, acquiring a mysterious second wife and creating the daughter who would become the author’s grandmother. Oddly, given the pride with which most of us pass on tales of adventurous ancestors across generations, the story of Mohanlal Killavala’s South African sojourn was seldom mentioned among Shah’s family. But the few words she heard about it, plus a travel grant, were enough for her to set off on a journey that would take her all the way to the tip of Africa and to Mauritius on a quest to find her ancestors.
With little to begin with except a message from a fellow researcher about Mohanlal Killavala’s association with the better-known Mohanlal of South Africa — Mohanlal Karamchand Gandhi a.k.a. Mahatma Gandhi — Shah decided first to follow Gandhi’s footsteps in the hope that one Mohanlal would lead to the other. The idea worked. Shah’s own Mohanlal, she learned, worked as an interpreter in Gujarati and Hindustani at a solicitor’s firm, and was actively involved in Gandhi’s Satyagraha in South Africa.
But the Gandhi lead only took Shah up to a point. After that, she was on her own. And so it was that, while trawling through file after file in archives after archives, she came upon a document that provided a revelation she was so unprepared for that she almost had a fit.
Was Mohanlal Killavala what he had first appeared to be — an interpreter and a Satyagrahi? Or was his presence in South Africa more sinister?
Even at the end of the book, the mystery remains unsolved. But while this could be frustrating, the story of Shah’s journey, beginning with the shores of Gujarat, via which many Indians travelled the world, to the British Empire in the Indian Ocean, which few of us know about, to the beginning of apartheid, and personally and physically in South Africa, Mauritius, Surat and Mumbai, is a very delectable one. Read it nice and slow.
The Other Mohan in Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire
By Amrita Shah
HarperCollins India
pp. 400; Rs 699