Indian writer and journalist Amrita Shah discusses her latest book "The Other Mohan in  Britain's Indian Ocean Empire" with Mayank Chhaya | SAM Conversation - video Dailymotion

South Asia Monitor

Indian writer and journalist Amrita Shah discusses her latest book "The Other Mohan in  Britain's Indian Ocean Empire" with Mayank Chhaya | SAM Conversation

Transcript

00:00Reading the well-known writer and journalist Amrita Shah's latest book is a highly kinetic

00:23experience. The book titled The Adhamohan in Britain's Indian Ocean Empire, A Personal Journey

00:30into History, has a great deal of rapid movements of Indians and Europeans, of goods and services,

00:37of ideas and counter-ideas. As the book's blurb describes it, it is about the movements of traders,

00:45indentured workers, interpreters, soldiers, slaves, prostitutes, lushkers and smugglers.

00:51A clash between the needs of white settlers and the aspirations of Indian migrants in South Africa

00:58saw the emergence of Gandhi's Sityagara campaign. It is a book, bookended by two Mohans. One was of

01:06course Mohandas Gandhi and the other Mohanlal Killawala. It is Mohanlal Killawala, whose life

01:14in South Africa, contemporaneously with Gandhi in the early 1900s, that Amrita uses as the central

01:21focus to tell a much larger story because he happens to be her great-grandfather from her

01:28mother's side. Killawala, who sailed to South Africa in search of professional opportunities

01:34as an interpreter, ended up being someone not just with a first-hand view of the nascent days of Gandhi's

01:41Satyagraha, but even a participant in it, who inevitably met him. It is an extraordinarily

01:48researched book which has the distinction of being superbly written, that took Amrita 10 years.

01:55She spoke to MCR from Mumbai.

01:58Welcome to Mayank Shire Reports. Amrita, it's an absolute pleasure to see you.

02:03It's lovely to see you, Mayank, after all this time.

02:05It's been a very long time, yes. And my compliments on a dauntingly detailed but also superbly written

02:13book.

02:14Thank you so much.

02:16You know, that's a tough balance to strike, something which is this detailed and something

02:22which is this readable. How did you manage to do that? In the sense, because obviously there's

02:29so much research has gone into it. I've read most of it. It's 432 pages.

02:37I apologize.

02:42Yeah.

02:44Yeah, you know, I mean, it is, you're right. It is, the more detail you have, makes for good writing, in one sense,

02:54because you have a lot of material with which to build atmosphere and, you know, kind of create the setting

03:03and things like that. But it's also difficult because what happened was that I, I set out not knowing,

03:12you know, what I was going to find. It was really a sort of jaunt, you can say, you know, just a kind of,

03:19I was just taking a chance. And I, I didn't know what I was going to do with it, you know.

03:26And then I found, I found so much in the archives. And then I found so much more. And in fact, the more I found,

03:36I began to get seriously worried because my, my aim was to write a kind of literary book,

03:45not a deeply scholarly book, you know, that was not my intention. I, I set out to find solve this little

03:54family mystery, you know, that what was my great grandfather doing on this journey and who my great

04:01grandmother was, it was a, you know, sort of personal quest. And I thought it might even be a novel, you

04:06know, once I get going. And, and in fact, the more material I found, the more scared I got, because,

04:15because the danger was that it would become a very niche kind of book that would, you know, would have,

04:23because there was a, what I was finding out is very sort of original material. These original findings

04:30that had not been, I mean, not been talked about, or except very, very, very kind of limited way by a

04:41couple of scholars in South Africa. And, and what I was finding was actually a link to the Gandhi story

04:46between the Gandhi story and their findings. And so it was very new. And I said, how am I going to

04:52explain this? Who's going to be interested? Who's going to be following me here, except very,

04:58you know, scholars of this era or British empire to be a very limited book. And I'm not an academic.

05:06So this was not my aim. But so, which is why I actually took a really long time for me to write

05:14this book, because I was determined to, to fuse the two, to, to keep it, keep its historical value,

05:24and its literary value. And for that, I think what took a long time was that I had to live the detail.

05:34I mean, I had to enter that space, that time, understand, because there were lots of names of

05:43people who I'm quoting, I'm not quoting, but I'm, I'm kind of, that world is made up of all these

05:50many people and these many communities. And I didn't want to give information. I wanted to narrate

05:59it as if one was actually bringing a, you know, making that space come to life. You know, this,

06:08this idea of these pioneering migrants, people who went to, went outside India at that early time,

06:16uh, and what their lives were and how they built, built a new life in this, you know, this new space

06:22and the complexity of that life. You know, we, we tend to think we only know of Gandhi going abroad in,

06:28in this period. I mean, you know, we talk about the diaspora a bit, but, uh, and so, uh, my story was

06:35much larger. It was about an ordinary migrant. And as I said, I wanted to, um, I thought it was a very,

06:42uh, how, how to say kind of the, uh, it was, I was so interested in it, you know, um, it interested

06:51me so much to know how they, they set up home, how they, how they made their lives, uh, who was what

06:59and, you know, who was related to what. And, and so it took me quite a long time. It took me, the whole

07:05book took 10 years to write and the research really, I was, I struck very lucky, very early.

07:11Um, so I think that was, you know, the kind of, I was very lucky that that happened so easily.

07:19Um, but making sense of it, tying it up with the background, um, and, and as I said, inhabiting

07:27that space so that I'm not giving you chunks of information, but I'm actually telling a story.

07:32Um, I had to kind of live with that material, um, you know, kind of read it over and over and

07:41over again, try and understand it in new and different ways. That took a long time. And I

07:46think time was the way I sort of solved that. You know, I'm so glad you mentioned two things

07:53that you were perhaps prompted to, to take sort of a literary approach like a novel early on,

07:59given the kind of information you had. Um, that was my very next question. You have this imaginary

08:06khalasi bit in, in your book. You talk about a seafarer or a khalasi.

08:12Yes. Yeah. The khalasi. Yeah.

08:15When I was reading it, it, it, it read to me like a sort of a cross between

08:21Joseph, uh, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and, surprisingly, Gunwantra Acharya's Darya Laal. I

08:29don't know if you've read it. No, I haven't. Okay.

08:31Oh, perhaps my favorite Gujarati novel. It, it talks about precisely the slave trade,

08:37Gujarati parodies in Africa. It's a fantastic book. Give me the name again.

08:41Darya Laal. Darya Laal. No, I have not read it. I must. You must get your hands off. To me,

08:50it's the best Gujarati novel of its kind. So anyway, so when I read it, I'm swinging between

08:55the two. And I said, why doesn't Amrita continue writing that part? Forget Mohandal for a while.

09:00You know, there are some, what happened was, you know, many unexpected things happened when I,

09:15you know, as I said, I started out with this idea that I had this great grandfather who went on a,

09:20an unexplained journey. Uh, and it always fascinated me from the time I was a child. I was fascinated by

09:27the idea that I had an ancestor who was adventurous. I, I liked that. Uh, and this mystery

09:35of my great grandmother, you know, um, so, so when I set out, right, that was what prompted me.

09:42I did not expect many things that happened to happen. One of which was that, um, so my great

09:49grandfather came, the family came from Surat, uh, this part of the family. Uh, and I did not actually

09:56even know that. I had never even been to Surat. That gone past, you know, I passed through it

10:01very often. Um, and I think I might have gone on a journalistic trip, uh, for a day or something,

10:06but I don't remember actually, um, experiencing Surat. And so when I started reading up about it and

10:14the fact, you know, I knew it was a port, but how important a port, uh, its place on the ocean trade.

10:23And then the Indian ocean itself, the history of the ocean, uh, you know, I did not expect that to

10:29become part of, of my, uh, uh, sort of the atmosphere of this book at all. And, um, and so

10:36I kind of went on this sort of trip on the ocean, uh, which is what you refer to, you know, the Khalasi

10:43and finding this character, um, of the seafarer who comes from, you know, the Arabian coast, uh, to,

10:51and settles down on the Western coast, uh, uh, in India, in Gujarat. Um, but you know, I,

10:58there are so many good books written on the Indian ocean. Um, scholars who write about the Indian

11:04ocean kind of, uh, I think respond to the romance of the ocean. And so I, I think that, uh, you know,

11:12there's no, there's no way I could do undertake that job, which has already been, you know, done by,

11:19by scholars like Michael Pearson and, uh, you know, various others who, whose books are so evocative.

11:26So, you know, I think I, I must not take credit entirely for, for the Khalasi's, uh, you know,

11:33the character. No, but I'm talking purely in terms of the writing part of it. It's, uh, yeah,

11:40but, uh, you know, it also seems to me that, uh, on, on this quest of yours for your maternal grandfather,

11:47uh, Mohanlal Kilawala, uh, you ended up quickly exploring, uh, much broader history, say, of

11:55colonization quickly versions of slavery and indentured labor and so on. Uh, was that tough

12:04in the sense for you to bring it down from a bigger backdrop to a single individual and his wife?

12:10How was that, uh, as a challenge as a writer? The thing is, I, you see, I had this, uh, interest in,

12:20as I said, this ancestral history. Um, but I also, I think that that, as I said, from childhood,

12:29I had this, and I had this idea that someday maybe, uh, you know, and then one becomes a researcher

12:34and realizes that you can actually, uh, there are ways of, um, investigating this, you know, come to

12:41kind of, because I met with academics and I started understanding that there are archives and things like

12:47that, which you can explore because as a journalist, you know, one is not, I at least wasn't that

12:51familiar with, uh, the world of, uh, you know, historians. Um, so, uh, uh, but I think when I started

13:01researching this, um, when I was much older, uh, obviously this was around the early 2000s that I

13:07started thinking about it because I think, I think it was because I was already doing some reading on

13:12Gandhi and suddenly South Africa became more real to me, you know, that I, I started seeing it,

13:19what it would have been at that time, how large the community might have been. I started getting

13:24a sense, a realistic sense. It wasn't just, I had this great grandfather who went, uh, you know,

13:30it wasn't, uh, and so I think somewhere there was an idea that my story was not of interest only to me

13:39because after all, I mean, you know, we all have ancestors and we all have stories in our families

13:45and, uh, it can be interesting, but it is not always interesting to a wider audience. Uh, and I'm

13:54not saying I set out. I just felt like that it was worth exploring to kind of satisfy my curiosity, of

14:03course, and my families, but also because I felt that it tied up with something larger. I don't know.

14:09I had a certain instinct about it that there was a larger story here, that it was not, um, just the

14:18story. And I, I do think though that individual stories are very interesting to tell on their own.

14:23I'm not saying that they can't be told, uh, but here I felt, you know, because of the Gandhi connection,

14:29um, I mean, in the sense that I, you know, that there was an idea because the, the timing was the

14:35same. The similarities between the two men, uh, both were, you know, in Gandhi, we always think

14:42of dressed in a loincloth and, uh, very simple and, you know, um, and a sort of ascetic life.

14:48And

Indian writer and journalist Amrita Shah discusses her latest book "The Other Mohan in Britain's Indian Ocean Empire" with Mayank Chhaya | SAM Conversation

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