This book is an account of four generations of the author's family, East African Indians who later moved to the UK, and after that to cities all over the world. It is a cross between a family history and a meditation on a variety of social and political issues -- the author is a lecturer in sociology at the UK's University of Warwick.
In a sense, the personal pain and the historical awareness make unusual companions. Nevertheless, the mix is informative -- color photos of the author's family jostling side by side with thoughts about colonialism, post-colonialism, and the hideous plight of widows in traditional Indian culture.
There are today large numbers of Britons of Indian descent who came to the country via the British colonies in East Africa, notably Uganda and Kenya. Essentially they went there from India in the early decades of the 20th century to improve their economic situation, formed a middle class between the colonizing British and the colonized Africans, and were later driven out of their adopted home by the newly emergent African regimes. Many found sanctuary in the UK.
Most originated from the Gujarat area of western India. Parita Mukta's grandfather went to Kenya from the princely region of Kathiawar in 1923, returning to marry the author's grandmother (who he had never seen, nor she him) when he had established his business five years later. She eventually joined him in Nairobi and bore nine children.
The family described so lovingly in this book were never particularly wealthy. The author's grandfather, though at one point a veritable Kenyan grandee, had later sunk, for reasons that to this day remain unclear, to the rank of an insurance clerk. Her grandmother came from a family that had lived by running a small hotel catering to railway workers. On first arrival in the UK in the 1960s, in London's Wembley district, her mother had worked in an electronics factory manufacturing light bulbs. In fact it was the author herself, by gaining a PhD, who turned out to be the family's potential high-flier.
Because Parita Mukta was born in Kenya and largely brought up in the UK, she has had to research the Indian part of the story, and she describes how she spent the best part of the years 1984 to 1989 in India doing just that. But the result is remarkably balanced, and throws light on social conditions in all three countries with equal perceptiveness.
She writes of the devastation of traditional pastoral communities by the forced introduction of cash crops (cotton in Gujarat, coffee in Kenya), and the disruptive, and periodically famine-producing, effects these had. She writes about indentured labor (a "second slavery"), and about the three-tier apartheid in British-run East Africa.
The treatment of widows is one of her most passionate concerns. By her account, suttee was only the worst of it. The common experience of widows was for bands of men posing as the late husband's "creditors" to arrive at the house and strip it of all its belongings. This and the enforced shaving of a bald patch (tonsure) ensured that widows almost never remarried, though Parita Mukta has some interesting material on movements in 19th century India to resist these traditions, and to reinterpret the Hindu scriptural sources that supposedly justified them.
Two of her uncles moved to Tyneside in the northeast of England (nowadays labeled by the tourism-promoting authorities as "Catherine Cookson Country"), and the life there is also evoked. One of Cookson's novels concerned with race relations in the 1930s is also assessed, less than favorably. Race relations could turn ugly, and the Tyneside riots of the summer of 1991 are mentioned.
Multiculturalism is the implicit theme of this book, though in fact it isn't much discussed as such. The author, when she isn't writing about her family past and present, has more to say about famine and world hunger. But the descriptions of her life, and the lives of some of her family members, display in recognizable form the multicultural theme over and over again. The author's daughter Sonpari, now 13, is lovingly described, as is her native English-born partner's father John.
This is a story of migration with a happy ending. But it is a moving rather than a happy book. The author's mind is constantly aware of the wider scene, the world's disaster locations in particular. Towards the end she refers to Sebastiano Salgado's Migrations: Humanity in Transition (Amazonas Images, Paris; 2000), a photographic record of dislocation, hunger, child soldiers, and child mutilation caused by landmines.
"We are left with a view of the contemporary world," Mukta writes, "in which people walk across the earth under a sky darkened by the memory of war and displacement: there are transit camps, camps for displaced peoples, refugee camps, prison camps. Only trees, the earth, tents, railway wagons and makeshift shelters provide a home. This is not a metaphor for our time: this is our time."
This book does the immense service of giving a close-up portrait of migration over four generations, and then setting this against an international backdrop. When people forced to move find a new home, and security, things blossom -- children's lives, family relationships, friendships. But the fact that there are millions more who haven't found this happy ending to their stories is never forgotten.
Refugees and emigrants are, after all, close cousins, and a caution in the new environment, a tendency to cling to old habits, and a parallel desire, often passionate, to be full and undisputed members of the newly adopted society, all characterize this book's tone. As a result it is cautious, and even tentative, at the same time that it is loving and full of praise for human solidarity and warmth.
At one point the author refers to sitting with a graduate student she is supervising and discussing world hunger. The academic milieu, she remarks, tends to introduce a false objectivity that is akin to coldness. It is just such a coldness that Parita Mukta avoids so successfully in this book.
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