A tale of two Mohans: Missed opportunities in a meandering narrative

The back cover of The Other Mohan in Britain's Indian Ocean Empire calls it part travelogue, part family history, and scholarly. This reviewer disagrees

The Other Mohan in Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire

Author: Amrita Shah

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: xxiv+412

Price: Rs 699

  This is a difficult work to describe, leave alone classify. Take the title.  It suggests that the author’s great-grandfather (the titular character) had possibly a consequence comparable to that of the Mohan, Mahatma Gandhi, as far as the British Empire was concerned. It doesn’t take the reader long to discover the presumptuousness of it, since Mohanlal Killawala was nothing of that ilk; he was a mere blip in the Empire in the Indian Ocean and does not merit even a footnote.

 

For the record, the said gentleman, born into a Mumbai vania family on the fringes of business (being mostly clerks and bookkeepers) originally from Surat, was bitten with wanderlust and sailed first to Mauritius at the start of the 20th century, got married there to a young girl possibly of Indian and Creole origin, moved to Durban in Natal (the Union of South Africa was yet to be formed).  He tried for a court interpreter’s job, among other things and somehow managed to get it, after some failed attempts.  He clerked with some White solicitors’ firms, tried to move to Transvaal, was a fringe participant in one of Gandhi’s anti-permit satyagrahas, may have undergone a brief imprisonment, before coming back to India in the 1910s. He wanted to go to South Africa again and even sought advice and help from Gandhi who had earlier returned home for good.

 

With all due respect for the author’s affection for her ancestor, the above does not quite sound inspirational, not even interesting, for a narration.  Somewhere in her prolonged search for her roots, even she might have become aware of this. That is why Mohanlal makes so few appearances in her tale. He actually disappears for long stretches, which is when she fills up the space with the real Mohan. She browses through the South African records of Gandhi, visits the many locales associated with him and talks to some who may have handed down memories to share.

 

Unfortunately for the author, this is a well-travelled road.  Gandhi’s African sojourn is among the most thoroughly researched subjects, with numerous noteworthy writings. Ramachandra Guha’s magisterial Gandhi before India is easily the best among these. Amrita Shah makes a single passing reference to it, regarding an inconsequential detail about Gandhi’s Johannesburg home being the only Indian-owned one in a White neighbourhood. The poverty of the author’s research is brought out by the fact that she has to resort to quoting widely known tributes by Albert Einstein (“Generations to come will scarcely believe…”) and Nelson Mandela (“You gave us Gandhi, we gave you the Mahatma”) early on.  Surely she should have been aware that these quotes are so frequently repeated as to have almost become cliches.

 

What we get in super abundance from Ms Shah are descriptions —of people, places and events that mostly have not even the remotest connection to the subject at hand: The woes of a Mauritius inn-keeper, the tendency of an Indian-origin records clerk guiding the author to break into Amitabh Bachchan film songs (duly translated into English by the author no less), ancient mariners of Gujarat and their mental states, modern day teachers of English literature at Mumbai’s Elphinstone College, along with what they wore, what the landscape was like, what was offered to eat and so on.  It happens through the entire length of the book.  A single grit of sand in one’s footwear makes walking painful. Ms Shah’s hapless reader has to trudge through 400 pages of her prose with shoes full of sharp pebbles.

 

Her writing is eclectic.  She refers to Indian goods and commodities by their Indian names and explains them in English as well, but not always.  She sticks to mostly colonial names and spellings.  So her calling the Saurashtra peninsula Kathiawar is consistent but incongruous in the present context.  Worse, she refers to it as “one of the Indian …princely states” when in fact, it was a collection of scores of states, some scarcely larger than a few villages each.  They were not all bound together by any lasting connection other than a shared geography.  Junagadh famously wanted to join Pakistan, with its destiny guided by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s father as its last dewan.  Ms Shah’s numerous mentions of Kathiawar somehow miss this salient detail.  She translates agraha as determined opposition, whereas it is actually a determined insistence.  That makes satyagraha a determined insistence on truth, a movement suffused with positive intent, and not mere resistance.

 

The back cover of the book calls it “part travelogue, part family history and imbued with rigorous scholarship.”  This reviewer must disagree with all of this.  Travelogues are wordscapes of places, but despite the author’s strenuous efforts at descriptions real and imagined, we get no sense of any space and time. We get bits and pieces of family lore, but not history, and describing and quoting from a huge body of historic annals does not make scholarship. It requires analysis, sadly lacking here. What the author offers instead are idiosyncratic, self-indulgent, meanderings into history.

 

PS: This reviewer must strongly condemn the placing of notes elsewhere to be accessed by scanning a QR code. That effectively denies the opportunity of referring to them while reading the book.