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The Other Mohan In Britain's Indian Ocean Empire: A Personal Journey into History
On a quest to understand why her great-grandfather, Mohanlal, set sail for South Africa from pre-Independent India, Amrita Shah's wonderfully engaging book sets on record for the first time a sweeping social and business history of the Indian diaspora in the Indian ocean, drawing out an incredible story spanning centuries of migrations and peopled by slaves, political prisoners, sex workers, lascars, smugglers, indentured workers, traders and interpreters.
Drawing on an extensive range of sources interwoven with her own first-hand research in India, South Africa, Mauritius and Britain, in The Other Mohan in Britain's Indian Ocean Empire, Shah covers a wide gamut, including in its sweep, the Indian Ocean, the medieval port of Surat where Europeans set up their earliest trading companies in India, the evolution of colonial Bombay and Indian migrant communities in the Indian Ocean littoral.
By foregrounding the story of her great-grandfather and of the opportunistic drive that led thousands of Indians to seek their fortunes across an ocean, Shah also offers a supplementary history to explain many aspects of India's present.
Drawing on an extensive range of sources interwoven with her own first-hand research in India, South Africa, Mauritius and Britain, in The Other Mohan in Britain's Indian Ocean Empire, Shah covers a wide gamut, including in its sweep, the Indian Ocean, the medieval port of Surat where Europeans set up their earliest trading companies in India, the evolution of colonial Bombay and Indian migrant communities in the Indian Ocean littoral.
By foregrounding the story of her great-grandfather and of the opportunistic drive that led thousands of Indians to seek their fortunes across an ocean, Shah also offers a supplementary history to explain many aspects of India's present.
475 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 11, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 6, 2025
About midway through her book The Other Mohan in Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire, Amrita Shah mentions a litigation in South Africa in the last decade of the 1800s. A prominent Indian trader, Dada Abdullah, sued a former business partner. Although Abdullah had white lawyers handling his case, the records of the transactions were all in Gujarati; a bilingual lawyer was needed. It was then that a young lawyer, newly returned to their common hometown of Porbandar in Gujarat after becoming a barrister in London, was recommended. As Shah writes:
‘Dada Abdullah offered a year’s contract at a fee of £105 with first-class return fare, board and lodging to the boy whose name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.’
Mohandas was the Gujarati in South Africa whom the world was to come to know; but, at the same time, also in South Africa, and also a Gujarati, was another Mohan. Mohanlal Parmanandas Killavala, the author’s great-grandfather, who is the subject of this fascinating book that is biography, but not quite; travelogue, but not just; and so much more than just a peek at a history few people can even guess at.
Shah begins the book with an introduction to Mohanlal and how she was inspired to unravel the mysteries surrounding the life of this ancestor of hers. From there, she goes back in time several centuries, from her hometown of Mumbai to the shores of Gujarat in medieval times. Here, Shah imagines the coming of sailors or khalasis from the west; their settling down, and the subsequent establishment and burgeoning of trade all along the Gujarat coast. The story goes on, now fictionalized, now hard fact, until the late 1800s, when Mohanlal Killavala, his family long migrated from their ancestral Surat to Bombay, decided to head for greener pastures—across the Indian Ocean, to South Africa.
This could have been a straightforward account of a quest to understand the life and motivations of a somewhat hazy figure from the past: a figure, unlike Mohandas Gandhi, who was relatively obscure. What Shah does here, however, is to turn that quest into more. She takes the reader along with her, tracing Mohanlal’s roots and his own travels, as she journeys in his footsteps—from Bombay to Surat, to South Africa, Mauritius, and more. As she visits archives, reads old documents, meets people, asks questions, she shows us not just what these places are today, but what they had been in Mohanlal’s time. She tries to make sense of Mohanlal’s travels and of his motivations, but at the same time, she also examines others around him. She gives us a glimpse of history being made.
For instance, in an especially engrossing section of the book, Shah travels to Mauritius to unearth a piece of Mohanlal’s history connected to that island nation. In the process, she explains the history of Mauritius, and especially of the Indians who settled there. She layers this with her own impressions of travelling in Mauritius now, of interacting with—perhaps—the descendants of the very people her great-grandfather might once have known.
Across South Africa, too, Shah builds on extensive research and on her own family’s memories (or possible theories, where memories were never passed on) to weave a story. She builds up an image of Indian immigrants, both the indentured labourers who were brought to work in the mines and elsewhere, as well as the ‘passenger Indians’, educated, urban, urbane men who could hold their own against the European colonists, and who chose to do so.
Shah manages to blend several elements and styles of writing with seeming ease. There’s an extremely interesting thread here of macro-level history: of politics, colonialism, racism, socio-economics, ideas of culture and identity. How these have intertwined, how they have developed, whether (briefly) in Gujarat, or (in more detail) in Mauritius and South Africa. That is juxtaposed with the story, carefully dredged up, sometimes with the help of sheer serendipity, of a young man and his family in a faraway land, over a century ago, the piecing together of Mohanlal’s life sometimes reading like a gripping detective story. The private and the public intersect, as does East and West, India and Britain, one Mohan and the other.
The Other Mohan begins with a little uncertainty, a tendency towards verbosity and too-high flights of fancy in imagining Gujarat several centuries back. But Shah hits her stride quickly after that relatively shaky start, and the skilful way she combines fact and fancy, past and present, herself and Mohanlal, Mohanlal and Mohandas, is excellent.
(From my review for The New Indian Express: https://www.newindianexpress.com/life...)
‘Dada Abdullah offered a year’s contract at a fee of £105 with first-class return fare, board and lodging to the boy whose name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.’
Mohandas was the Gujarati in South Africa whom the world was to come to know; but, at the same time, also in South Africa, and also a Gujarati, was another Mohan. Mohanlal Parmanandas Killavala, the author’s great-grandfather, who is the subject of this fascinating book that is biography, but not quite; travelogue, but not just; and so much more than just a peek at a history few people can even guess at.
Shah begins the book with an introduction to Mohanlal and how she was inspired to unravel the mysteries surrounding the life of this ancestor of hers. From there, she goes back in time several centuries, from her hometown of Mumbai to the shores of Gujarat in medieval times. Here, Shah imagines the coming of sailors or khalasis from the west; their settling down, and the subsequent establishment and burgeoning of trade all along the Gujarat coast. The story goes on, now fictionalized, now hard fact, until the late 1800s, when Mohanlal Killavala, his family long migrated from their ancestral Surat to Bombay, decided to head for greener pastures—across the Indian Ocean, to South Africa.
This could have been a straightforward account of a quest to understand the life and motivations of a somewhat hazy figure from the past: a figure, unlike Mohandas Gandhi, who was relatively obscure. What Shah does here, however, is to turn that quest into more. She takes the reader along with her, tracing Mohanlal’s roots and his own travels, as she journeys in his footsteps—from Bombay to Surat, to South Africa, Mauritius, and more. As she visits archives, reads old documents, meets people, asks questions, she shows us not just what these places are today, but what they had been in Mohanlal’s time. She tries to make sense of Mohanlal’s travels and of his motivations, but at the same time, she also examines others around him. She gives us a glimpse of history being made.
For instance, in an especially engrossing section of the book, Shah travels to Mauritius to unearth a piece of Mohanlal’s history connected to that island nation. In the process, she explains the history of Mauritius, and especially of the Indians who settled there. She layers this with her own impressions of travelling in Mauritius now, of interacting with—perhaps—the descendants of the very people her great-grandfather might once have known.
Across South Africa, too, Shah builds on extensive research and on her own family’s memories (or possible theories, where memories were never passed on) to weave a story. She builds up an image of Indian immigrants, both the indentured labourers who were brought to work in the mines and elsewhere, as well as the ‘passenger Indians’, educated, urban, urbane men who could hold their own against the European colonists, and who chose to do so.
Shah manages to blend several elements and styles of writing with seeming ease. There’s an extremely interesting thread here of macro-level history: of politics, colonialism, racism, socio-economics, ideas of culture and identity. How these have intertwined, how they have developed, whether (briefly) in Gujarat, or (in more detail) in Mauritius and South Africa. That is juxtaposed with the story, carefully dredged up, sometimes with the help of sheer serendipity, of a young man and his family in a faraway land, over a century ago, the piecing together of Mohanlal’s life sometimes reading like a gripping detective story. The private and the public intersect, as does East and West, India and Britain, one Mohan and the other.
The Other Mohan begins with a little uncertainty, a tendency towards verbosity and too-high flights of fancy in imagining Gujarat several centuries back. But Shah hits her stride quickly after that relatively shaky start, and the skilful way she combines fact and fancy, past and present, herself and Mohanlal, Mohanlal and Mohandas, is excellent.
(From my review for The New Indian Express: https://www.newindianexpress.com/life...)
January 2, 2025
Amrita Shah was always curious to know more about her maternal great grandfather, Mohanlal Killavala, a well educated man from a reasonably prosperous family who at the turn of the 20th century left the comfort of Bombay to travel to South Africa.
“The Other Mohan in Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire” is a book that cannot be fitted into a convenient genre- it part travelogue, part memoir, part family history, part historical recreation. It traces the history of families settled in small towns along the coast of Gujarat from the Medieval age- of how the families contributed to the rise of Surat as the most prominent maritime trading city in India, of the exodus to Bombay when the land of seven archipelagos started developing into a metropolis, of how they contributed to making Bombay a city that almost rivalled London on which it was modelled. Mohanlal was born in this city, and from the few clues available to her, the author attempts to retrace his journey to South Africa.
This is a fascinating book, and the notes and references will certainly send the reader down other rabbit holes. The author also has a very engaging style and almost effortlessly brings the people and places to life. While the title may suggest it is the story of one man, it is actually the story of the people who were part of an immigration wave that is not spoken of much. Anybody who is curious about our history would love this book.
I received a review copy and my unbiased review is here: https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2024/12/...
“The Other Mohan in Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire” is a book that cannot be fitted into a convenient genre- it part travelogue, part memoir, part family history, part historical recreation. It traces the history of families settled in small towns along the coast of Gujarat from the Medieval age- of how the families contributed to the rise of Surat as the most prominent maritime trading city in India, of the exodus to Bombay when the land of seven archipelagos started developing into a metropolis, of how they contributed to making Bombay a city that almost rivalled London on which it was modelled. Mohanlal was born in this city, and from the few clues available to her, the author attempts to retrace his journey to South Africa.
This is a fascinating book, and the notes and references will certainly send the reader down other rabbit holes. The author also has a very engaging style and almost effortlessly brings the people and places to life. While the title may suggest it is the story of one man, it is actually the story of the people who were part of an immigration wave that is not spoken of much. Anybody who is curious about our history would love this book.
I received a review copy and my unbiased review is here: https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2024/12/...
January 12, 2025
Two stars because girl get an editor
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews