On a quest to understand why her great-grandfather, 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. Part travelogue, part memoir, part family history and imbued with rigorous scholarship, The Other Mohan is an original pathbreaking work. A feature by columnist Riccha Grrover
Extensively researched in India, South Africa, Mauritius and Britain, this book is a riveting account travels from the medieval port of Surat, where the British East India Company established its foothold 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.
The author shared “I was curious about why he had gone on that journey. It turned out that this trip of my great-grandfather’s was a significant one for my family, as it was during this journey that he met my great-grandmother. We don’t know much about her—who she was, her name, or her ethnicity. All we know is that they had a child together, my grandmother. My great-grandmother passed away young, and the family never learned much about her. In many ways, I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that journey.”
This book presents new revelations about the celebrated pass burning incident in Gandhi’s South African Satyagraha at the beginning of the 20th century. The emblematic protest against racial prejudice, famously depicted in Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, shows Indians burning their identity documents in Johannesburg in August 1908. In an effort to restrict Asian entry, British authorities passed the infamous Black Law requiring all Indians to register themselves with fingerprints, like criminals. In her book, The Other Mohan, Amrita Shah narrates the story of her great-grandfather Mohanlal, an aspiring interpreter who participated in the protest, prompting a re-evaluation of this historic event by looking deeper into the circumstances that gave rise to the Black Law. In doing so, the book departs from the traditional narrative of Gandhi’s resistance and highlightsinstead, a story of opportunism and enterprise in the Indian Ocean diaspora.
“Part of what inspired me to write this book was a story I heard as a child about an ancestor of mine who sailed from Bombay to South Africa on a steamer. It was fascinating and exciting to learn about someone in my family who traveled so far when very few people ventured overseas. Even more intriguing was that very few Hindus took the risk of crossing the “kaala paani,” as it meant facing potential ostracism and breaking social taboos. Hindus were generally not supposed to travel beyond the seas. This story captivated me, and as an author, anything that sparks such fascination naturally creates a sense of wonder, this initially compelled me to explore it further, was an interesting trigger for me to write this book.” Said Amrita.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amrita Shah is a former editor of Elle and Debonair, an ex-contributing editor with the Indian Express, and has worked for the US-based Time-Life News Service. She has been a fellow of the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Indian Institute of Science, the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study and the Research Institute Advanced De Nantes. She is the author of the award-winning Ahmedabad: A City in the World (2015), Vikram Sarabhai: A Life (2007) and Telly-Guillotined: How Television Changed India (2019). She is based in Mumbai.
HarperCollins is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, having begun publishing in India in 1992. HarperCollins India publishes some of the finest writers from the Indian Subcontinent and around the world, publishing approximately 200 new books every year, with a print and digital catalogue of more than 2,000 titles across 10 imprints. Its authors have won almost every major literary award including the Man Booker Prize, JCB Prize, DSC Prize, New India Foundation Award, Atta Galatta
Prize, Shakti Bhatt Prize, Gourmand Cookbook Award, Publishing Next Award, Tata Literature
Live! Award, Gaja Capital Business Book Prize, BICW Award, Sushila Devi Award, Sahitya
Akademi Award and Crossword Book Award. HarperCollins India also represents some of the
finest publishers in the world including Harvard University Press, Gallup Press, Oneworld, Bonnier Zaffre, Usborne, Dover and Lonely Planet. HarperCollins India has won the Publisher of the Year Award four times at Tata Literature Live! in 2022, 2021, 2018 and 2016, and at Publishing Next in 2021 & 2015. HarperCollins India is a subsidiary of HarperCollins Publishers.
