India’s encounter with western modernity: Review of The Other Mohan in Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire

Amrita Shah’s book, The Other Mohan in Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire, is a deeply researched historical work on the Indian diaspora in Britain’s Indian Ocean world. Shah’s book focuses on South Africa where Gandhi honed his novel nonviolent protest against the racially discriminatory practices of the colonial administration. Intertwined with the fascinating historical background is a compelling account of Shah’s search to make sense of her great grandfather, Mohanlal Killavala’s unexplained travels to South Africa via Mauritius, from Bombay, and her attempt to discover the identity of the woman he met on the way, who gave birth to the child who would become her grandmother. Shah’s quest becomes a travelogue linking past and present.

Excerpts from an interview:

Your book views the British Empire as a huge space, enabling a massive movement of people across the world.

The second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an era of extreme global mobility as Europeans and Asians migrated to the new colonies. Indians had always travelled across the Indian Ocean for trade but under modern colonialism new forms of migration emerged. Over a million Indians mainly from eastern India went overseas as indentured workers. Gujaratis followed them as suppliers of wholesale goods. Indians also went as blue-collar workers and professionals -- teachers, interpreters and the odd lawyer, like Gandhi. Amitav Ghosh and V.S. Naipaul have set fiction against this backdrop, but the phenomenon is rich in factual accounts that are not widely known.

Amrita Shah | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

You tell the story of your great grandfather and the unnamed woman he met on his travels. Why did you choose to intertwine the historical with the personal?

I started out wanting to know more about my great grandfather’s journey and to discover who my great grandmother was. But it soon dawned on me that the story I was researching said a lot about India’s encounter with western modernity: the privileging of English, the breaking of taboos such as the ban on Hindus travelling overseas, technology – the steamer, the telegraph, and the erasure of old signifiers like caste and language in the settling of new societies. And then I found a connection between my great grandfather Mohanlal and Gandhi which provided an entry point into a historical event -- Gandhi’s campaign in 1906-1909 against the infamous ‘Black Law’ which required Indians to register themselves with fingerprints. It also led me to archival findings which gave me a completely new perspective on this celebrated confrontation.

Did Mohanlal join the Satyagraha campaign in South Africa? What was his relationship with Gandhi?

Mohanlal was part of a group of English-literate professionals who travelled to Transvaal from Natal in August 1908 to collect passes from Indians for burning in a mass protest against the Black Law. Mohanlal was jailed for refusing to register under the law. He knew Gandhi socially and interacted with him and other members of the professional Indian elite which included teachers, lawyers, and interpreters in Durban.

Mohanlal’s story does not follow the familiar trajectory of a Gandhi acolyte.

No. And the surprising revelations that I came across in the South African archives regarding Mohanlal’s activities and the celebrated pass-burning incident suggest that tracking ordinary people can sometimes yield completely new insights into events about which we assume everything is known.

You describe Hindus and Muslims coexisting peacefully both on the Indian coast and in South Africa.

Trade makes for collaboration between different sets of people as does the need to survive in an alien environment. That said, kinship ties also play a very important role in both activities and many tightly-knit units exist within this assemblage.

Your search for your great grandmother hints at the plight of women in this era.

Her anonymity was symbolic of the times. Travel documents listed married women under their husbands’ names and archival records are mostly about men. Migration presented mixed possibilities for women – making them vulnerable to exploitation but also offering an escape from stifling social mores in India.

Uday Balakrishnan teaches public policy and contemporary history at IISc-Bengaluru