'The Other Mohan' by Amrita Shah: A Tale of History and Memory 

Amrita Shah sets out to get a record of her maternal great grandfather, Mohanlal Parmanandas Killavala바카라�s, time in South Africa, where he participated in Gandhi바카라�s Transvaal Satyagraha in 1908. His name is mentioned in the Gandhi-run Indian Opinion in 1907 as member of a committee with two other Gujaratis. Gandhi must have had a nodding acquaintance, or perhaps not even that. Some years later, after the two returned to India, Mohanlal writes to Gandhi in 1913, expressing a desire to go back to South Africa.

But there was no reply from Gandhi. Armed with these bare details, Shah delves into the archives in Surat, to trace the ancestors of Mohanlal, but with much success, and in Mumbai/Bombay, where Mohanlal바카라�s family had moved in early 19th century from Surat, in Port Louis, Mauritius where Mohanlal stopped over and in South Africa where he stayed for about three years.

He was from a well-off middle class business family. He belonged to the Vaniya/Bania community, and they were accountants and trade agents as in the case of many in the community in Surat. Mohanlal had passed his London Matriculation exam, showing that he was proficient in the use of English. This is reflected in the letters he writes to British colonial officials in South Africa, asserting his right to move in any part of the British Empire even as restrictions were growing about immigrants from India.바카라�

Apart from the fact that she is intrigued by Mohanlal바카라�s story because there are no details except faint hints of family lore. More fascinating was that of Shah바카라�s maternal grandmother, the woman Mohanlal married in Mauritius on his way to South Africa though he had left behind his wife in Bombay/Mumbai when he left the country at the age of 24, and when he returned home he brought back his Mauritian wife and the daughter born to them. The daughter is the grandmother of Shah. It is a strange story shrouded in silence.

She, her name is Foolkore, left Bombay on a ship to Mauritius, leaving her daughter behind, and she died before she reached home. Mohanlal became a successful businessman in Bombay but he has not left any memoir of his stay abroad. It is indeed strange that an educated man should remain silent about his travels. Perhaps it is not strange either because thousands of Indians, many of them educated, have left behind no accounts of their travails and triumphs, of their joys and sorrows abroad.바카라�바카라�

Shah is forced to reconstruct their story through her empathetic imagination. She writes about Mohanlal바카라�s arrival in Durban: 바카라�The callow Gujarati boy had acquired a worldly air, a preening touch of cosmopolitanism that might have made him look away from the deck, from the faces of his co-passengers바카라�Next to him, Foolkore studied the dirty deck floor 바카라� or so I expect from a teenage girl바카라� a married woman of her time, who would not raise her gaze like a man. Perhaps there were tears in her eyes, recalling the parents, playmates and pets she had left behind.

Not long ago she was a kid, playing on the sand, or scrambling up a hill, and now she was pregnant and on board a ship heading into the horizon.바카라� It reads like an excerpt from a Joseph Conrad story. But she packs a whole of history and politics around the little known lives of Mohanlal and Foolkore, rustling up facts from the archives and evoking a picture of places where they lived as they were in the past and when she went looking for their traces.바카라�