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

Minal Hajratwala (Author)
3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)

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Book Description

March 18, 2009
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.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Hajratwala, a journalist at the San Jose Mercury News, tells of the Indian diaspora experience through a part-personal, part-reported story of her extended family. Hailing from the small northwest Indian region of Gujarat, her family's ancient origins begin with the myth of a race of warriors and kings. Their migration begins in the wake of the famine of 1899, when Hajratwala's great-grandfather Motiram left to learn the tailor's craft in Fiji, leaving his wife and children behind. In the same, tireless spirit echoed in generations to come, Motiram founded a family business in his new home, then built it with the support of relatives who followed to join him. His shop eventually became one of the largest department stores in the South Pacific isles. Other family branches developed in South Africa; the U.S., where Hajratwala's parents immigrated as part of India's earliest wave of brain drain; and other locales, totaling nine countries in five continents. Throughout sojourns across cultures and across time, the family endures—and succeeds—in spite of discrimination and bigotry. Told with the probing detail of a reporter, the fluid voice of a poet and the inspired vision of a young woman who walks in many worlds, Hajratwala's story offers an engaging account of what may be one of the fastest-growing diasporas in the world. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"In LEAVING INDIA, Minal Hajratwala deftly explores [the India] diaspora... LEAVING INDIA is meticulously researched and evocatively written."--Washington Post

"LEAVING INDIA is a rich, entertaining and illuminating story." --San Francisco Chronicle

"I love Minal Hajratwala's book LEAVING INDIA. It is what I imagine India itself to be like: incomparable, sprawling, rich, surprising, very old and wise and forever capable of re-creating itself, no matter where pieces of it lands. Minal Hajratwala is a fine daughter of the continent, bringing insight, intelligence and compassion to the lives and sojourns of her far-flung kin. For those of us who have needed to understand the presence of so many Indians in our various lands, this book is a wonderful primer." –Alice Walker

"Minal Hajratwala's LEAVING INDIA is a fascinating history that kept me up late into the night--and I suspect it will do the same for most readers. Filled with amazing and compelling family stories, it will strike a chord in anyone whose people have come from elsewhere--and today, in America, that's most of us! I am filled with admiration at Minal's honesty and the careful beauty of her language. I learned so much, through the story of this one family, about the tragedies and triumphs of the Indian diaspora."--Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, author of The Palace of Illusions


Product Details

  • Hardcover: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; First Edition edition (March 18, 2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0618251294
  • ISBN-13: 978-0618251292
  • Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #247,101 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

On twitter: @minalh
Minal Hajratwala is the author of the award-winning Leaving India: My Family's Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), which has been called "incomparable" by Alice Walker and "searingly honest" by the Washington Post. She spent seven years researching and writing the book, traveling the world to interview more than seventy-five members of her extended family. She is also a poet, performer, and queer activist based in San Francisco, where she was born before being whisked off to be raised in New Zealand and suburban Michigan. As a journalist, she worked at the San Jose Mercury News for eight years and was awarded a National Arts Journalism Program fellowship at Columbia University. She is a graduate of Stanford University. For an extended biography, please see http://www.minalhajratwala.com/bio

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
A loving family memoir February 24, 2009
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)
This is a review of the Advanced Reading Copy (ARC).

I know very little about India so I was anxious to read about an Indian's family history. This book did not disappoint. I file this book with the many other multicultural readings I have done in the past year. One learns about Hindu culture and is exposed to racial discrimination done to and from the Indians across the globe.

This memoir is a wonderful literary work of the Indian diaspora, of which I knew so little about before embarking on this wonderful memoir.

The chapter begins with Minal's great-grandfather Motiram who sailed to Fiji as a coolie (indentured servant) to work as a weaver and died as a business owner there, a victim of the global influenza epidemic of 1918.

Further chapters then, logically continue the family tree: how other relatives ended up in South Africa, Los Angles, Chicago and Michigan and San Francisco where the contemporary history ends with her generation fighting cultural tensions between Old and New World.

Minal conducted an incredible amount of history for this book and weaves it well between family members. Some passages are sprinkled with speculations based on historical events of the time. All of her history, however, starts with old family legends and lore that she researched further for this book.

As for the ARC I have some recommendations: place a larger map of India at the front of the book, showing India's provinces. It helps to know that Minal's family started in the western Indian province of Gujarat, which borders Pakistan. (The much smaller global map in the back of the book does not clearly show this). Also, have family photos scattered across the book rather than in the front. For instance, it would have been more intimate to have a photograph of Motiram at the front of chapter one, a photograph of Maaji, Motiram's stay-in-India wife, at the start of chapter two and so forth.

Despite these recommendations, I would recommend this book for those who enjoy personal and historical memoirs, books on Asian Cultures or books about multicultural relations. The final print of this book should be a winner.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Minal Hajratwala set out to write a book about her family in one year. Seven years and many international miles later, she completed the task. Piecing together her memories and scattered partial records including horoscopes, postcards and photographs, and visiting across the globe with as many of her family members as she could, Hajratwala became an explorer, mapping both the outer and inner lives of a huge clan and, with them, her own.

Through the vast scope of this book and its particularities, we learn that Indians wherever they find themselves generally work hard. Leaving a harsh life of poverty in Gujerat, Hajratwala's grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles did not shrink from doing menial work that would have been considered undignified back home. They did not let anything stand in the way of their determination of furthering the aims of the extended family, even if it meant never seeing the family again --- husband leaving wife, children leaving parents. The author herself was an immigrant by age five, going with her family from New Zealand, which she thought of as home, to migrate to the U.S. to live among relatives she had never met before. She has close family in South Africa, Hong Kong and Canada.

One of the reasons for such far-flung upheavals was the British Empire and its ceaseless need for laborers to expand new colonial opportunities. Indian labor was shipped at a per head price to Fiji, to Africa, to anywhere it was required to keep the Empire humming. Once there, a laborer became attached to the new environment and, like Hajratwala's family, set up not one shop but many, built homes, developed neighborhoods and left a permanent mark on large communities. One of her relatives started as a tailor in Fiji and wound up owning one of the largest department stores in the South Pacific. Another, orphaned and sent to Durban when still a child, started with a tiny food stand and eventually established a centrally located restaurant and became known as the inventor of a "national" food delicacy. Hajratwala learned that the restaurant had been used as a meeting place by Nelson Mandela in his early activist days. Hajratwala's grandfather marched with Gandhi during the famous salt boycott, going to prison for his principles. As she retells these family legends, she reveals a sweeping historical panorama, a view of the Indian diaspora rarely seen in so many facets.

Hajratwala focuses closely on the lives of her ancestors but more so on the lives of people she has had a chance to visit and follow personally, such as her cousin Mala and Mala's husband Madhukant, a Fijian couple who applied to emigrate to the U.S. by lottery and won two of the small number of places sought after by thousands of Asians. Once there, they lived a hand-to-mouth existence, both holding down as many as three jobs at a time. Both won employee awards at the fast food joints and parking garages where they found employment. They even tried motel work, one career that has been opened up to Asians largely through the machinations of people from Gujerat. In less than 50 years, a few southern Asian families have parlayed a willingness to do every task associated with motel management and a strong family support system into a remarkable monopoly of motel ownership across America. As Mala penetrated ever deeper into the American scene, she stopped wearing saris and willingly donned the scratchy uniforms required by her jobs at McDonald's and in a hospital. She considers her life in the complicated culture of America "freedom" compared to her youth spent in a traditional setting, under the thrall of a tyrannical mother-in-law.

The author also learned about freedom in America. From asserting her independence as a college student by traveling far from her Michigan home to Stanford University, to dabbling in the heady vapors of feminism, to the conviction that she is a lesbian, she made departures from her heritage, even refusing marriage, a shock to her tradition-minded parents. But each "departure" was a journey to somewhere else, in that way asserting her inner bond with the diaspora.

"Every migrant," Hajratwala writes, "constructs, or spends her life seeking, a new definition of home." She has found her home on what she calls her "queer planet" --- but she has the comfort that she is never far from her family and her heritage. As she has followed it, it follows her, all over the world.

--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Seriously Sexy April 21, 2010
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I've waited far too long to post this, perhaps because I had another identity crisis when I sat down to write it. I've written a few "reviews" of writing projects on this blog, all of which have been positive. And I realize that when you are writing 100% positive reviews, you are not so much a reviewer or a critic and more of a promoter.

And when I read back through previous Amazon reviews, I see that I am no critic. That's probably because when I love a book enough to write about it, I am not critical. I am in love. I loved Drew Banks's first two novel's and MJ Hahn's amazing podcast. I wrote about them and called what I wrote reviews.

But they are not reviews; they are love letters! The Sexy Grammarian is not a critic. She is a teacher. And a lover.

So, I now sit with pen in hand (yes, I do draft most of my blog posts in ink) to write a well-deserved love letter to the incredible and beautiful book, Leaving India by Minal Hajratwala.

Every family should have a Minal, a member who records the family story with involved passion that can only come from the inside of a family but also sits back and observes, to give us a journalistic, even critical view. She tells the story of her extended family and its scattering of people and how that fits into the greater diaspora from India to all over the world.

Minal's writing lilts and then reports, questions and then critiques. She is a historian, a romance writer, a gossip, an academic, and a researcher, all at once. Perhaps that's why her book has been nominated for both a Lambda Literary Award and a California Book Award.

At one point there were four copies of this book on my shelf:
o one for my cousin, a writer who has plans to write about our family
o one for my mother, who loves to study our family's geneology
o one for my wife, who kept stealing my own copy before I'd finished it
o my own treasured copy, purchased from and signed by the author--her inscription encouraged my own writing.

But it's the copy on my shelf reserved for my mother that worried me. Before I picked up my copy of Leaving India, I heard that there was some controversy about the "sexy chapter," that critics had complained that Minal snuck some lesbian sex into the pages of her otherwise serious, journalistic endeavor.

In spite of my disgust with a literary world that thinks sexy = not serious, I worried about my mother reading the chapter about Minal, the sexy chapter. "Here is a book about family history, Mom. Oh and watch out for the lesbian sex toward the end." But when I read it I knew this story would not be new to Mom. This chapter of lesbian love, laid out like a collection of tiny, precious poems, tells the tale of heartbroken parents with papers in their hands--papers that told them, your daughter has become something you fear.

And that story would not isolate my mother but bond her even more deeply to the whole picture of this amazing book. She's been through that, even if she hasn't been exposed to this particular picture of diaspora, of family, and of change.

Incidentally, I post this love letter to Leaving India just as Minal prepares to help launch Indivisible, the first anthology of South Asian American poetry. You can catch her tomorrow night, reading poetry from the book at The Green Arcade, 1680 Market Street @Gough, San Francisco. (415) 431-6800.

This review has been cross-posted to my blog and GoodReads.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
And so?
The people in this story are not the neighbors you would want to come to your neighborhood. I found them and the book tedious. So they left, so what.
Published 12 days ago by P. Dreyfus
Family memoir
This was my book club selection this month and while I found some of the writing quite poetic, I would not have finished the book if not for my book club commitment. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Jambo
Where are you from? India?
I was intrigued by the topical title of the book, Leaving India, a copy of which I picked up while traveling to Bangalore recently. Read more
Published 23 months ago by Mohan Babu
Great Combo of Family Memoir and Diaspora History
This book is a combination of family memoir and history. The author traces her ancestors' emigrations from India to various continents -- each chapter is devoted to a different... Read more
Published on March 26, 2010 by MoneyMagnet2004
Interesting book; narrates the experience of the author trying to find...
The author a first generation Indian American, has travelled extensively around the world to find her roots. Her family seems to be quite a globe trotting immigrant one. Read more
Published on January 21, 2010 by Gene Cloner
Well researched?
I am not very far in to this book and am enjoying it but question whether or not the historical facts were well researched. Read more
Published on December 23, 2009 by Caryn Lawson
Leaving India? Not really. Actually her grand-parents leaving India...
I just got through this book after three attempts. The writing style is more akin to someone cataloging office furniture rather than a person's experiences leaving India. Read more
Published on August 31, 2009 by Kersi Von Zerububbel
Good Read - Very Detailed
There are two big books in this one book - one a very personal story of the author that she talks about in Chapter 8 and the other chapters that deal with the movement on her... Read more
Published on August 28, 2009 by adamGhalib
Lacks the compelling narrative nesessary to keep the reader's...
Let me start by saying that Leaving Indian is an interesting read, and an eye-opening look into the history of Indian immigration. Read more
Published on July 23, 2009 by Poe the Ghost
Political and Personal
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I learned things I never knew about Bunny Chow (a south African curry that was created because of apartheid), Ghandi, the Gujarati motel and service... Read more
Published on July 12, 2009 by Susan Gambill-Read
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Inside This Book (learn more)
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
bunny chow, tailoring shop
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
South Africa, United States, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Grey Street, San Francisco, British Empire, Third World, South Asian, New York, Uncle Magan, Motiram Narsey, Iowa City, Los Angeles, New Jersey, South Pacific, Uncle Ratilal, World War, Sri Lanka, Fiji Islands, United Nations, Hazrat Trading, Son Vegetarian Restaurant, Little India, Des Moines
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