Leaving India

In this groundbreaking work,Minal Hajratwala mixeshistory,memoir, and reportage to explore the questionsfacing not only her own Indian family but that of everyimmigrant:Where did we come from?Why did we leave?What did we give up and gain in the process?Beginning with her great-grandfather Motiram's originalflight from British-occupied India to Fiji, where he rose from tailor to department store mogul,Hajratwala follows herancestors across the twentieth century to explain how theycame to be spread across five continents and nine countries.As she delves into the relationship between personal choiceand the great historical forces-British colonialism,apartheid,Gandhi's Salt March, and American immigrationpolicy-that helped to shape her family's experiences,Hajratwala brings to light for the very first time the story of the Indian diaspora.This luminous narrative by a child of immigrants offersa deeply intimate look at what it means to call more thanone part of the world home. Leaving India should find itsplace alongside Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Familyand Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost: A Search for Six of SixMillion.

"The Lake of Nails is where your history begins," Bimal Barot tells us.Dust filters through the half-light of afternoon. I am slightly nauseous, two days of traveler's sickness and a winding journey through convoluted alleyways--not to mention several countries, by now--having taken their toll. After interviewing relatives at half a dozen stops on my 40,000-mile plus air ticket, piecing together the story of our family's migrations, I have come to India: to find whatever fragments remain here, to trace the shape of our past and learn how it shadows or illuminates our present.Written records about private lives, though, are sparse. In English they come only from encounters with the colonial bureaucracy, usually at or after the moment of emigration. Before that, any information is kept in Gujarati, the language of our region, and in the Indian manner--which is to say haphazardly. Historical property records are inaccessible, but a date engraved on a house tells when it was built. Birth certificates may not exist, but an old lady's memory links a child's birth with a wedding with an eclipse of the moon.But there is one objective Gujarati source, a collection of books filled with personal data. In the time before widespread literacy, one caste had access to the written word. Others, if they could afford it, paid these learned men to keep track of--or spruce up, if need be--their personal histories.And so I find myself sitting, with my parents, in the home of our clan's genealogist.In a way it is astonishing that we have arrived here at all, on the strength of a name and a vague address given to me in Fiji weeks earlier by a distant uncle, who last used the information several decades ago:Behind the Temple of JusticeVadodaraGujaratINDIA

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Excerpted from Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents by Minal Hajratwala
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