Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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

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.

I was intrigued by the topical title of the book, Leaving India, a copy of which I picked up while traveling to Bangalore recently. The book, while readable did not exactly "keep me up late into the night" as Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's blurb on the jacket promises. It is a mix of academic and theoretical observations peppered with stories and anecdotes. I finished reading it on the 14-plus hour plane ride back to San Francisco.

Minal Hajratwala has done a great job of traveling, interviewing and capturing the immigration saga of her extended family spanning over a century. The book is primarily about migrants of the Gujarati Khatri community that the author belongs to. By selecting her extended family for her research, Hajratwala has been able to focus on an otherwise eclectic topic of immigration.
She draws from her personal experiences, a childhood in New Zealand and Michigan. There is a tinge of bitterness about her childhood, partly attributable to her experiences in racially charged Michigan of the seventies.

One of the most interesting passages is when Hajratwala examines the question "Where are you from?" (P 339). "I am thinking of all the times I have faced this question - dozens? Hundreds? - and how, even now, I feel I must defend or explain my answer . . . but none of these would give a clue to either ethnicity or character"

Reason for rating the book a three-star (not 4 or 5 star)?
In a book about the diaspora and leaving India, Hajratwala's detailed description of her coming out is a bit jarring. I guess the author is using the book as a platform to "announce" her lesbian/bisexual orientation to her extended Khatri clan, details that most non- Khatri readers can live without.

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 ancestor. Later chapters discuss the experiences of her generation and I found these less interesting, perhaps because I have lived them.

The author does a great job in weaving history into her family's story. She offers historical summaries of how the Indian diaspora was treated in Fiji, South Africa, America, and a few other places. There's a fair bit of information and analysis on the immigration laws and issues that led to South Asians immigrating to the U.S. As a history buff, I found these little interludes fascinating.

Her family's story (including her ancestors) is a microcosmic view of what many Indian merchant families experienced in the last 100 years or so. Since I come from one of those far-flung merchant families, I found these stories enjoyable and enlightening since they gave me a little window into some of the motives behind my own family's emigrations.

Sometimes the writing is a bit academic and the sentences get a little bogged down (but I suppose the same could be said of this review). Good writing is hard and I admire her dogged pursuit of these stories, and the risk and research she undertook to write this book.

If you are a student of diaspora, South Asians, or history, you will enjoy this book.

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 industry, immigration and a lot more. Hajratwala mined and organized her family's history in the context of history and politics of several countries, gradually narrowing her focus to her personal coming-out story, which while minor to the overall work, took courage for her to include. Her use of the term diaspora for Indian immigrants makes perfect sense. Her writing style is highly accessible and poetic, while at the same time, a significant academic contribution to South Asian, women's and queer studies. I expect to read this book again and to encourage my children-diaspora by international adoption--to read it when they are old enough.

If you sit there reading the title, you may think that this is another one of those biographies, here focusing on several generations of one Indian family. Thinking that this is the case will limit your ability to appreciate Leaving India.

Leaving India is more like the story of the entire Indian diaspora. Minal Hajratwala uses her family more as an example to tell the story of colonial and post-Colonial Indians as they made their way through the Empire, from indentured servitude in Fiji and South Africa (and other places) to the modern era where families struggle to rise against the tides of poverty and prejudice in their chosen countries.

Along the way we learn a great deal about India, Indian culture and the diaspora. The history Hajratwala weaves is fascinating, and her own personal story is a strong metaphor for other Indian-fill-in-country-here.

Anyone who is interested in modern Indian culture outside of Bollywood, or the history of the diaspora would be remiss to not read this book. It's extremely well-written and fascinating.

The story of the family in this book spans from India to Fiji eventually to Canada and the United States. Minal Hajraatwala is a writer who was born in the United States and raised in New Zealand before returning. Her family began emigrating from India by traveling to Fiji and other places in the British Empire. As circumstances and lives changed in each country and Indians were in turn welcomed and rejected, the family traveled from place to place generally ending up in the United States and Canada. I read this book easily in one day because it was so absorbing. I work with students learning English and have a student who is Gujarati and whose mother came from Fiji. I plan to share this book with the mother. It's great.

"Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents" is an account by San Jose journalist Minal Hajratwala of her family's behavior in the great Indian diaspora of the late 19th, early 20th centuries: a time when the crowded millions of that vast country were hungry and underemployed at home, but initially generally at least welcomed -- sometimes more than welcomed, actually desired -- elsewhere in the great British empire, of which India was, of course, the jewel in the crown. The author, who has evidently done a great deal of research, worldwide, sketches out the experiences of her family in Fiji, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, eventually Canada and the United States. In some of these places, the initial welcome cooled, as the locals realized just how economically competitive the Indian immigrants could be, such as Fiji; other places, such as South Africa and Australia, did not, initially, much welcome non-white immigration themselves, though it was empire policy to encourage it. And other places, such as Kenya, under its crazed dictator Idi Amin,were later famously to expel all their Indian residents, even those born there: they had simply taken control of too much of that country's economic life.

The author also touches on the great twentieth century story of Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian who, after some time in unwelcoming South Africa, began to strategize what would prove to be the winning campaign for India's freedom from its colonial status. One of perhaps her uncles, Ranchhod, was initially involved with this, particularly Gandhi's great salt initiative, before being sent to join his brothers in the family enterprises in Fiji. She also discusses the famous "brain drain;" the phenomenon much resented in the developing world through much of the twentieth century. That is, their brightest young people were sent to the western world to study, perhaps at their countries' expense, and then, their educations completed, chose to stay in the better-paying western world, rather than return to their homelands, where they were greatly needed.

Unfortunately, while I found this material interesting, I found the presentation heavy going. Particularly the first hundred pages were difficult, as the author outlines the comings and goings of various distant relatives. The names are self-evidently foreign and difficult; the families are large, so the degrees of relation are difficult; and these people left no first-person testimonies, so the narrative is very much a recital of bare bones facts. Not until Gandhi, and her uncle or whatever, Ranchhod, do we get any flesh on the bones; and things don't really liven up until we reach her parents and North America: Canada and the United States, when we perhaps get more information about the author's sexual orientation than we needed or wanted.

Perhaps Hajratwala bit off more than she could chew, in her inexperience as an author. Perhaps she should have begun the narrative with her parents, or, at any rate, gone back no further than Gandhi's time. My own feeling is that the author might best have transmitted this material in fiction: that would have given her more freedom to liven things up. At any rate, interesting material, very difficult presentation.

I almost put this book down after the first fifty pages. My complaint was that it is not quite biography, not quite literature and not quite history. Three things kept me reading. I wanted to find out how the author got to San Francisco, I wanted to learn more about the caste system and I got intrigued about the Indian Diaspora. Some of stories are very good but using a family history as a vehicle for telling about this amazing Diaspora is constraining. This is one of the best book I have ever read about migration from India or anywhere. I learned how and why Indians got to Fiji, East Africa and the USA. And how they ended up owning so many motels. Leaving India begins to fill an important gap. It is the first book I have found about modern India and its people yet about the caste system it is mostly silent. Probably in the same way that Americans were silent about segregation in the 1950's and Australians were about the treatment of Aborigines in the 1970's. This is a good book about a new topic.