Motiba's Tattoos: A Granddaughter's Journey Into Her Indian Family's Past [Hardcover]

Mira Kamdar (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 5, 2000

The story of the Indian Diaspora--the great migration of Indians from their homeland to the New World--through one woman's memories of her remarkable family. . Delving back into the world into which her grandmother was born in a tiny village in Kathiawar, India, Mira Kamdar begins a wondrous journey into the past. She follows her family as it emigrates from the feudal, rural India of 1900 to the bustling streets of Rangoon in the 1920s and 1930s. After a harrowing flight out of war-torn Burma, the family returns to their profitable businesses, only to be stripped of everything and expelled by the Burmese dictatorship in the early 1960s. The family begins a new life in Bombay. It is there that they are first introduced to America. Hollywood captures the imagination of Kamdar's father, who, at the age of nineteen, is packed off to make the family's fortune in the United States. We witness his travails as one of the first Indian immigrants to the US in the 1950's and see how his children and grandchildren grapple with a multi-ethnic identity in post-modern America. Kamdar retraces pivotal historical moments-Satyagraha and India's independence movement, World War II, the "brain drain" years of a triumphant American military-industrial complex-but never strays from the intimate experiences of her own family. With rich, vivid details of her relatives' many fascinating lives, she recreates the moods and atmospheres of lost times and places and explores the borderless world of Indian-Americans today.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Tracing her family's odyssey from her grandmother's 1908 birth in rural India through her own 1960s childhood in the boomtowns of the American West Coast, Mira Kamdar paints a poignant but anti-nostalgic portrait. It's true, she notes, that Motiba (Hindi for "Grandmother") spoke, moved, and lived with a calm assurance that came from her roots in an ancient culture inaccessible to her cosmopolitan, mixed-ethnicity descendants. But she had also been pulled out of school at age 12, as was customary to preserve a girl's virtue, and was fiercely proud that her granddaughters had access to the education forbidden to her. Kamdar, whose prose is as subtle as her perceptions, captures the timeless appeal of village life when describing a visit to her grandmother's birthplace, but she also vividly evokes the vibrant sophistication of Rangoon, where her family made its fortune, as well as the colonial and racial tensions that forced most Indians out of Burma after World War II. Her father came to study in America and stayed to marry the red-haired daughter of Danish American farmers. Motiba's far-flung descendants remain close, even if they now keep in touch by e-mail as much as through the lengthy visits traditional among Indian relatives. In a moving final passage, Kamdar deems this new global community consistent with her grandmother's Jain belief that "we are all sojourners... adopting endless, myriad identities." --Wendy Smith

From Library Journal

In this story of her grandmother's life, Kamdar (senior fellow, World Policy Inst., New School) brilliantly captures the experiences of the Indian diaspora in the 20th century. Motiba, Kamdar's paternal grandmother, was born in a village in Kathiawar, in western India, in 1908. During the Twenties and Thirties, Motiba's family sought their fortune in Burma. The bombing of Rangoon by the Japanese during World War II and later General Ne Win's nationalist policies forced the family, along with the rest of the Indian community, to flee to India. In the Sixties, Motiba's son emigrated to the United States as a student and eventually married a Danish American. This account of Motiba's odyssey through the 20th century is effectively blended with the wider context of world events, Motiba's Jain religion and culture, Asian Indian immigration to the United States, and the author's own experience of growing up in two cultures. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.DRavi Shenoy, Naperville P.L., IL
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs; 1 edition (September 5, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1891620584
• ISBN-13: 978-1891620584
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,973,165 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book for young people in search of identity, December 11, 2000

By 

Jay Sheth (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Motiba's Tattoos: A Granddaughter's Journey Into Her Indian Family's Past (Hardcover)

Mira Kamdar's family biography is the heart-warming and lovingly told tale of multiple generations of the Kamdar-Khara families. Beginning in the early twentieth century, in the small Kathiawar village of Gokhlana, we follow the lives and loves of this extended Jain family to the close of the twentieth century. Along the way we are allowed to share in the Kamdar-Khara families `adventures' and `mishaps', as a story that begins in the simple Gujarati villages of Kathiawar takes us on an enchanting journey through Rangoon and Bombay, ending in the vast suburban metropolises of the United States of America.

At the heart of the story lies Motiba, grandmother of the author, a simple lady steeped in the fine traditions of Kathiawari-Jain culture, and witness to all the dramas that have shaped the lives of her large extended family through the twentieth century. Mira Kamdar beautifully brings to life Motiba's world as a young Jain girl growing up in the deeply traditional Jain villages of Kathiawar. Through Mira's retelling of the anecdotes of older family members, especially Motiba, we learn about the lives of Jain women in the early part of the century: How they lived, their position in society, the role of religion in the Jain village and the impact of the British and Mahatma Gandhi upon this pre-modern world.

As the century moves on, the action switches to the British imperial possession of Burma and the cities of Akyub and Rangoon where many members of the Kamdar-Khara families, like other Indians, travelled in search of business opportunities and the hope for a more prosperous existence. Perhaps because the story of the Indian Diasporas in Burma is not as well known and documented as other Indian Diasporas experiences, the story of the Jain community in Burma is one of the most fascinating parts of the entire narrative. Here we discover how young Jain settlers in Burma built businesses and created new lives for themselves and their families and then saw it all swept away after the Japanese invasion during the Second World War and the consequent ethnic conflicts that gripped post-independence Burma. The poignancy of this section of the story is only heightened by Mira's interviews with the remnants of the once strong Indian community in Rangoon.

But wherever Mira Kamdar's story takes us, and it proceeds to take us to Bombay, Oregon and Los Angeles, a number of overarching themes dominate the book. Firstly, how the descendants of turn-of-the-century Kathiawari-Jain families attempted to preserve and adapt their Jain identity in a modern and, more importantly, non-Jain world. We are witness to the struggles of Motiba's eldest son, Prabhakar or `Pete' as he is known in America, as he attempts to cope with life after emigrating to America and how both he and his family cope with his marriage to a white American girl from Oregon and the status of Prabhakar's children's as perceived half-castes. Secondly, we see how the impersonal forces of history interact with people's personal choices to shape their lives as well as the lives of the generations to follow. Whether it be the ravages of the Second World War, the Cold war or the Indian independence struggle the fate of this Jain family has been touched by external events. But Mira never lets the `external' dominate her narrative; instead she weaves the major events of the century into the fabric of her story whilst preserving the primacy of her chronicle as a family biography.

The people and lives that Mira Kamdar has so affectionately described are not the lives of Maharajas, celebrated Indian independence fighters or Indian industrial magnates: There are no Nehrus, Tatas or Tagores amongst the Kamdar-Khara clan. But this, paradoxically, is the source of the very richness and beauty of Mira Kamdar's story. Mira Kamdar is telling the story of one Jain-Kathiawar family and how it has navigated the twentieth century. But this family is similar to hundreds and thousands of other Jain families who began the century in the pre-modern villages of Gujarat and who ended the century in the cosmopolitan cities of New York, Chicago, Toronto, London and Singapore. And this takes us to the heart of this book: How we, the younger generation of Jains, have a tendency to look at our silver-haired parents and grandparents and dismiss, or at the least never enquire, into their lives and experiences. We lose so much that sits just in front of us if we forget that our older relatives have lived fascinating lives, very different from our own, and have often made extraordinarily brave and difficult decisions to leave their homeland in search of a new future of which we are the ultimate beneficiaries. This then is the true joy of Mira Kamdar's book, reminding us all that within our own families are those who have lived through a history very different to our own and that we have much to discover by sitting down and learning from them and drawing upon their rich experiences and wisdom.

Jay Sheth

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Preserving and Redefining Culture + a Good Story!!, February 12, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Motiba's Tattoos: A Granddaughter's Journey Into Her Indian Family's Past (Hardcover)

Mira Kamdar writes about her Motiba because she was the last bastion of their family left in India. As long as Motiba was alive and living in India, India was "home". Now that she is gone, the Kamdars are forced to re-center their emotional homeland. This book was the authors attempt to maintain knowledge about her family history while simultaneouly redefining the meaning of being South Asian in the U.S.

This story is a good one for the larger South Asian immigrant community and for other ethnic groups that have immigrated in the U.S. in the last 20-30 years. Since Ms. Kamdar's father came here in the late 1940's, he was a very early Indian emigrant, but now a majority of the family is in the U.S. This will also happen to other immigrant families and it requires a redefinition by all generations of what their culture is. The positive light that Ms. Kamdar sheds on the emerging South Asian-American youth "movement" and on the younger members of her own family is refreshing given the negative image common in the South Asian-American community about Westernizing influences - that has given us the term ABCDs and such.

The difference between the current movement of people and ideas and previous emigrations of Indians abroad is well demonstrated by the Kamdar family. The Kamdars lived in Burma for a long time, but their spiritual and cultural center was always Gujarat. America has become a place which influences global culture and integrates the culture and ideas of its immigrants.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the beauty of a multi-cultural family, September 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Motiba's Tattoos: A Granddaughter's Journey Into Her Indian Family's Past (Hardcover)

Anyone who has grown up with parents of two different nationalities -- which includes a great number of people in our country -- will appreciate this story. MOTIBA'S TATTOOS beautifully and lyrically tells of one family's journey to America and illustrates the challenges and blessings that are faced in multi-cultural families. The most beautiful part of this book is when Motiba writes of her parents philosophy of their marriage: that their union and the children that they produce are their contribution to world peace and understanding. This book is for everyone--Indian or not--who has relatives who left their home to start anew and faced the challenges of being "American," remembering their roots, and instilling in their children the same appreciation for their own history.