The Other Mohan In Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire: A Personal Journey into History
By Amrita Shah
HarperCollins, 320 pages, Rs 699.00

When Mahatma Gandhi first went to South Africa in 1893, there already was an influential and burgeoning population of Indians. Colonisers were bosses and original inhabitants mostly kept to themselves, but it was the Indian community that played the key role in the development and progress of South Africa. They were merchants and traders, lawyers and clerks, waiters and cooks. There were labourers too, working under time-bound agreements (and hence the term “Girmitiyas”).

While M.K. Gandhi left South Africa in 1915, but the community – Gujaratis and Tamils, Muslims and Parsis, and more – continued to thrive and shape the nation and the region in the early decades of the twentieth century. The immigrant Indians have been part of the history of modern South Africa, but their story has rarely been told for a wider audience.

That is what Amrita Shah, journalist and scholar, offers in her new work. ‘The Other Mohan’ is about her great-grandfather, Mohanlal Paramandas Killavala. Enuga Reddy, a former diplomat and scholar, told Shah about the other Mohan’s participation in a 1908 agitation in South Africa. She started her investigations to learn more about his career there, family history merges with a larger history. Self-exploration uncovers forgotten parts of our collective memory.

On a quest to understand why Mohanlal set sail for South Africa from pre-independent India, Amrita Shah takes the reader into an era of unprecedented global mobility. At the turn of the twentieth century, as millions of Europeans travelled to overseas colonies, new forms of migration from Asia also took place. Mohanlal’s co-travellers included traders, indentured workers, interpreters, soldiers, slaves, prostitutes, lascars and smugglers. A clash between the needs of white settlers and the aspirations of Indian migrants in South Africa saw the emergence of Gandhi’s Satyagraha campaign, which attracted many, including Mohanlal. The confrontation, though, was only a strand in the as yet untold story of enterprise and opportunity practiced by ordinary migrants like Mohanlal.

Extensively researched in India, South Africa, Mauritius and Britain, this riveting account travels from the medieval port of Surat, where the British East India Company established its footholds in the Indian subcontinent, to nascent colonial cities such as Bombay, Port Louis and Durban, delving into the history of the Indian diaspora in the western Indian Ocean to discover modern India’s many ancestors.

Part travelogue, part memoir, part family history and imbued with rigorous scholarship, ‘The Other Mohan’ is a riveting work. It opens new paths for the writing of personal histories that throw light on larger questions.