Leaving India : My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents

by Hajratwala, Minal

• ISBN13: 9780547345413
• ISBN10: 0547345410
• Copyright: 2009-03-18
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Summary

An inspiring personal saga that explores the collisions of choice and history that led one unforgettable family to become immigrants In this groundbreaking work,Minal Hajratwala mixes history,memoir, and reportage to explore the questions facing not only her own Indian family but that of every immigrant: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 original flight from British-occupied India to Fiji, where he rose from tailor to department store mogul,Hajratwala follows her ancestors across the twentieth century to explain how they came to be spread across five continents and nine countries. As she delves into the relationship between personal choice and the great historical forces--British colonialism, apartheid,Gandhi's Salt March, and American immigration policy--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 offers a deeply intimate look at what it means to call more than one part of the world home. Leaving India should find its place alongside Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family and Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million.

Excerpts

For Ganda, eleven years old, it would have been easy enough to disappear into the ghetto. An uncle and cousins lived in the neighborhood, and they must have taken him in. They would have known that, sooner or later, he would need an official identity: he could be stopped on the street at any time and asked to show his documents; he could be arrested for breaking the 9 p.m. curfew or walking on a sidewalk reserved for whites; he could be deported.So his relatives — being, after all, wily Asiatics — hatched a scheme.In Johannesburg, cousin Chhiba reported to the police that his son had gone missing. He gave a description, a name. Perhaps he said that the boy might have run away, to Durban.Meanwhile, in Durban, Ganda filed for his identity papers. He had no birth certificate, but that was not unusual. He gave his "father’s" name, Chhiba of Johannesburg.As for his last name, the uncles and cousins used "Kapitan."Most rural Indians never use a surname until they encounter a Western authority, and so it was with Ganda’s predecessors, who had to invent one upon landing in South Africa. Kapitan is a unique choice among our people, and the stories of its origin vary widely. Three brothers jumped around like monkeys and were nicknamed "three monkeys," orkappi tran.Or, it comes from the first port where they landed in South Africa: Cape Town, pronounced according to the principles of Indian-English phonetics. Or, the first family member in South Africa came on a ship steered by a man calledel capitán,which the sojourner thought to be a fine surname and so adopted as his own.In any case, armed with these names, young Ganda submitted his papers and his references. Cross checking, the officials found the missing persons report. They verified his identity.

Ganda’s middle name, by tradition, should have been his father’s name, Dayaram. He would have become known as G. D. Kapitan; the Durban institution he founded would have been G. D. Kapitan & Son Vegetarian Restaurant. His father would have lived forever, almost, in that single initial recognizing his paternity. But now his name reflected his new "father." And somehow in the transcription process, Chhiba became Chhagan. He became Ganda Chhagan Kapitan, a self-made man — G.C., for short.