My Family and Other Saints

by Kirin Narayan

In 1969, young Kirin Narayan’s older brother, Rahoul, announced that he was quitting school and leaving home to seek enlightenment with a guru. From boyhood, his restless creativity had continually surprised his family, but his departure shook up everyone— especially Kirin, who adored her high-spirited, charismatic brother.

A touching, funny, and always affectionate memoir, My Family and Other Saints traces the reverberations of Rahoul's spiritual journey through the entire family. As their beachside Bombay home becomes a crossroads for Westerners seeking Eastern enlightenment, Kirin’s sari-wearing American mother wholeheartedly embraces ashrams and gurus, adopting her son’s spiritual quest as her own. Her Indian father, however, coins the term “urug”—guru spelled backward—to mock these seekers, while young Kirin, surrounded by radiant holy men, parents drifting apart, and a motley of young, often eccentric Westerners, is left to find her own answers. Deftly recreating the turbulent emotional world of her bicultural adolescence, but overlaying it with the hard-won understanding of adulthood, Narayan presents a large, rambunctious cast of quirky characters. Throughout, she brings to life not just a family but also a time when just about everyone, it seemed, was consumed by some sort of spiritual quest.

Genres: Religion, India, Memoir

236 pages, Hardcover

First published November 30, 2007

About the author

Kirin Narayan was born in India to an American mother and Indian father, and moved to the United States to attend college. As a graduate student, she studied cultural anthropology and folklore at the University of California—Berkeley, writing a dissertation on storytelling as a form of religious teaching through an ethnography of a Hindu holy man in Western India who often communicated teachings through vivid folk narratives. The book that resulted, Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching (1989), won the first Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing from the American Anthropological Association and was co-winner of the Elsie Clews Prize for Folklore from the American Folklore Society. She then wrote a novel, Love, Stars and All That (1994) that was included in the Barnes and Nobles Discover Great New Writers program. In the course of researching women’s oral traditions in Kangra, Northwest Himalayas, she collaborated with Urmila Devi Sood to bring together a book of tales in the local dialect with discussions of their meaning and ethnographic context in Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon: Himalayan Foothill Folktales (1997). An interest in family stories and diasporic experience inspired her to write My Family and Other Saints<?i> (2007), a memoir about spiritual quests. Her most recent book is Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov (2012).

Kirin Narayan has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the School of American Research, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research in the Humanities, and the University of Wisconsin Graduate School. She received a Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Wisconsin in 2011. Since 2001, she has served as an editor for the Series in Contemporary Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania Press. She currently serves on the Committee of Selection for the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

(from https://researchers.anu.edu.au/resear...)

Reviews

[Iva · Rating 4 out of 5]

When the l6-year-old son and brother of a liberal urban family in Bombay becomes enamored of gurus and holy men, the family responds in various ways. The sari-wearing American-born mother, who loves all things Indian, embraces her son’s quest. The Indian father does not trust anything that comes attached to religion or mysticism. Throughout, the house is continuously bursting with visiting Westerners seeking enlightenment. The memoir, written through the younger sister’s eyes, is informed by her professional anthropologist’s view: she brings the food, clothing, and colors of the unique period in the late l960s to life. She is to be commended for her ability to re-create the era and populate it with a host of colorful characters: visitors, locals, the holy, and, of course, relatives, both American and Indian. They are supported by wonderful photos and her wry observations. A revealing, honest, humorous, and loving portrayal of unique times makes this a splendid read.

[Karlan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author is the youngest of a large family born to an American mother and an Indian father living in India. She announces that she wanted to create something amusing as Gerald Durrell did in MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS, but it's not funny. The many hippy visitors whom her mother welcomed, the swamis whom they knew, and the difficulty caused by an alcoholic father are interesting. The beginning is paced slowly, and the conclusion zips by with no details. The book needs a good rewriting to achieve any balance.

[Maura Finkelstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

See! Anthropologists CAN write interesting engaging witty books that appeal to more than three people!

[Maya · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author starts the book by describing how she worked through the process of writing this book with family members, and after finishing it I can see why. Narayan talks about how the title came from Gerald Durrell's famous My Family and Other Animals, a favorite book of her childhood as it was of mine. The beauty in Durrell's book, however, comes from his incredible ability to mine his memories for humor, in addition to incredibly vivid nature writing.
By contrast, Narayan manages to simultaneously recapture her childhood emotions and reactions to difficult situations while interpreting them through her adult understanding in a way that is both unsentimental and compassionate.

[Helen Mccarthy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is an autobiographical account of the authors life from the time she was about age 10 and for the next 10 or so years. Her mother is a very bohemian woman who married an Indian man and they have made their home in India. Some of the family becomes very attached to a local guru. The telling of the various family experience are some what self indulgent. One of the problems with the book is that there is really no tension in the stories or direction to the family history. It probably would have been interesting to know how/why the mother was so bohemian and why she was so drawn to Hindu explanations of the world. I have sort of had my fill of New Age seekers so I was somewhat impatient with some sections of the story.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Growing up in India with an American mother and Indian father in the 60's gave a young girl a window on the world that few have seen. The large family was filled with seekers, trying to find their way to life's meaning. A truly unconventional childhood that was so visual, I had to put the book down to take it all in.

[Susan Dermond · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book fascinated me because I loved the subject: India meets the U.S. the author, daughter of an American mother and Indian dad, grew up in Bombay in the sixties and seventies at the beginning of the western craze for yoga, Indian philosophy, and gurus.

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this memoir of a family--Indian father, U.S. mother--& its members' spiritual quests & encounters with fellow seekers and gurus. Wish I had time to write a full, thoughtful review . . . it's a wonderfully vivid, poignant story.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this to be well written and compelling memoir. I have very little background with Indian religions, but Narayan narrates it in such a way that I felt I learned a lot without it feeling didactic.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes, it's another Indian book but actually an autobiography of a hippy family in India, half American and half Indian, and the search for enlightenment. Beautifully written, funny and touching

[Halldóra Jóhanna]

Beautiful memoir.

[Anali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinarily beautiful. Raw. Restless. Never ending. Beautiful.