What is the link between your great-grandfather, lost great-grandmother, and the global politics of Britain’s Indian Ocean empire? A lot, it turns out, if you are Amrita Shah. Family histories are rarely bereft of political baggage, and less so when movement is mapped through global changes. Stories in my family often begin with the Partition of 1947, unravelling politics not just as a project of the elites but as a part of my own identity, even if those who directly experienced the event are long gone.
In this form of storytelling, especially of historical events, archives often come alive – revealing much through quotidian frames of the same story. How did people live through these events? What happened to the low-level officials? Questions that get lost in the papers and letters of great men, find new life in old marriage certificates and complaint letters for lost baggage.
Uncovering the secrets of the Empire
It is this and more that The Other Mohan attempts to work through. Amrita Shah, a historian and writer based in Mumbai, attempts to chronicle the life of her great grandfather MP Killavalla, accidentally unravelling not just important family history but also a larger and more important story of the movement of migrants as the British expanded their Indian Ocean empire. What begins as a small throwaway remark about her great-grandfather’s involvement with Gandhi and his work in South Africa soon marks a longer archival study of the shift in migrant populations as people grappled with the growing strength of the colonial empire in the late 1800s and the early 1900s.
Shah weaves a gripping tale of not just the Empire, but of lives that have remained untold – shrouded in the great stories of yesteryears, buried in historical records that often will not speak unless spoken to.
In 1908, as the Anglo-Boer war wore down, a new racist law was introduced in Transvaal, a region in South Africa. Heavily populated by Indians, the new law introduced methods of surveillance to police the presence of immigrants in the region. Upset by this, a young lawyer, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, led a non-violent protest against the government, petitioning for the removal of racist policies against Indians.
Gandhi had also been at the receiving end of these policies, having been removed from a train compartment reserved for Whites Only even though he had a valid ticket. This spurred a complicated set of political moves, with Gandhi demanding and asking for more rights for Indians while making a categorical claim that Indians were superior to the other coloured populations. Gandhi’s history with the region gave him the start he needed to become a revolutionary in India, where he replicated the same strategies and is often credited for taking India to its freedom without violence – a fact that India has lauded over other more bloody revolutions in the post-colonial world.
But the book is not about Gandhi, and, as Shah points out in the title, it is about her great grandfather Mohan Killavalla, the other Mohan in the struggle in South Africa. Killavalla was not at the frontline, and nor was he politically salient in the same way as Gandhi. But his story is reflective of other movements – of migrant populations and their struggles, of the bureaucratic mundanities that plagued the people at the time, and also of how personal history can often mirror the political. As the white colonial empire expanded, so did migrant populations that saw opportunities elsewhere. In Mauritius, South Africa and India. Such is the tale that Shah takes you through in this book. Her journey of uncovering old records is a testament to how archival work can reflect the realities of a time that is hard to access. In this book she moves across countries, sitting in dark archives and trying to imagine them into teleological narratives.
The missing great-grandmother
Shah has a unique way of approaching the archives. One of the more interesting threads she holds on to through the book is the (reconstructed) life of her great-grandmother Foolkore. Her relative absence even from her family history led Shah into several dead-end rabbit holes, and eventually she indicates an absence in the archives that has been relatively understudied. The documentation, and perhaps over-documentation of men, made it easier for her to construct the journey of her great-grandfather as he moved from country to country, but Foolkore was nowhere and everywhere all at once.
Shah looked for her in marriage certificates, and in instances of offloading at borders (where officers often recorded the number of people accompanying the main traveller). But Foolkore did not seem to exist in these documents. As she walks through these physical spaces, Shah imagines herself there – and palpably rebuilds the archives for herself and Foolkore, exploring the markets that Foolkore might have walked to, the daily life she must have experienced, and so on.
This exercise of translation and interpretation speaks to larger gender roles too at the time, a thread that Shah picks up on but leaves quickly for larger questions of politics. In other instances, she uses a mix of imagination and archival material – opening up a new way of thinking about history and historical texts. How do you create and signify movement in texts that otherwise seek to establish themselves as records of a single instance? The author uses the tools of fiction to emphasise the relative stasis of non-fiction.
In Constituting the Archive, Stuart Hall writes: “Archives are not inert historical collections. They always stand in an active, dialogic, relation to the questions which the present puts to the past; and the present always puts its questions differently from one generation to another.” The archive is no longer talking to you, but you are talking back to the archive, a tool that Shah employs well to paint livelier pictures, making you dive not just into the history of the time but also imagine yourself as a participant.
Shah’s work also embarks on an ambitious journey of mapping the diaspora, a community that has historically been hard to study and even harder to nail down. With no singular identity, not even an enclosed geographical area, these are slippery groups – created by the sheer force of increased globalisation and nostalgic relationships with imagined homelands. Gandhi’s satyagraha in South Africa and the presence of a politically salient Indian identity in the Indian Ocean are all indicators of how complicated diaspora identities are. The writer makes these questions implicit in the text.
At a time when popular historians have been under fire, and debates on how WhatsApp has ruined scholarship on history have become everyday discussions on X, Shah’s work stands on its own. It is pertinent and creative, not only providing important historical context but also making it incredibly readable at the same time.
The Other Mohan in Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire: A Personal Journey into History, Amrita Shah, HarperCollins India.
