Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents [Hardcover]

This is a review of the Advanced Reading Copy (ARC).

I know very little about India so I was anxious to read about an Indian's family history. This book did not disappoint. I file this book with the many other multicultural readings I have done in the past year. One learns about Hindu culture and is exposed to racial discrimination done to and from the Indians across the globe.

This memoir is a wonderful literary work of the Indian diaspora, of which I knew so little about before embarking on this wonderful memoir.

The chapter begins with Minal's great-grandfather Motiram who sailed to Fiji as a coolie (indentured servant) to work as a weaver and died as a business owner there, a victim of the global influenza epidemic of 1918.

Further chapters then, logically continue the family tree: how other relatives ended up in South Africa, Los Angles, Chicago and Michigan and San Francisco where the contemporary history ends with her generation fighting cultural tensions between Old and New World.

Minal conducted an incredible amount of history for this book and weaves it well between family members. Some passages are sprinkled with speculations based on historical events of the time. All of her history, however, starts with old family legends and lore that she researched further for this book.

As for the ARC I have some recommendations: place a larger map of India at the front of the book, showing India's provinces. It helps to know that Minal's family started in the western Indian province of Gujarat, which borders Pakistan. (The much smaller global map in the back of the book does not clearly show this). Also, have family photos scattered across the book rather than in the front. For instance, it would have been more intimate to have a photograph of Motiram at the front of chapter one, a photograph of Maaji, Motiram's stay-in-India wife, at the start of chapter two and so forth.

Despite these recommendations, I would recommend this book for those who enjoy personal and historical memoirs, books on Asian Cultures or books about multicultural relations. The final print of this book should be a winner.

Minal Hajratwala set out to write a book about her family in one year. Seven years and many international miles later, she completed the task. Piecing together her memories and scattered partial records including horoscopes, postcards and photographs, and visiting across the globe with as many of her family members as she could, Hajratwala became an explorer, mapping both the outer and inner lives of a huge clan and, with them, her own.

Through the vast scope of this book and its particularities, we learn that Indians wherever they find themselves generally work hard. Leaving a harsh life of poverty in Gujerat, Hajratwala's grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles did not shrink from doing menial work that would have been considered undignified back home. They did not let anything stand in the way of their determination of furthering the aims of the extended family, even if it meant never seeing the family again --- husband leaving wife, children leaving parents. The author herself was an immigrant by age five, going with her family from New Zealand, which she thought of as home, to migrate to the U.S. to live among relatives she had never met before. She has close family in South Africa, Hong Kong and Canada.

One of the reasons for such far-flung upheavals was the British Empire and its ceaseless need for laborers to expand new colonial opportunities. Indian labor was shipped at a per head price to Fiji, to Africa, to anywhere it was required to keep the Empire humming. Once there, a laborer became attached to the new environment and, like Hajratwala's family, set up not one shop but many, built homes, developed neighborhoods and left a permanent mark on large communities. One of her relatives started as a tailor in Fiji and wound up owning one of the largest department stores in the South Pacific. Another, orphaned and sent to Durban when still a child, started with a tiny food stand and eventually established a centrally located restaurant and became known as the inventor of a "national" food delicacy. Hajratwala learned that the restaurant had been used as a meeting place by Nelson Mandela in his early activist days. Hajratwala's grandfather marched with Gandhi during the famous salt boycott, going to prison for his principles. As she retells these family legends, she reveals a sweeping historical panorama, a view of the Indian diaspora rarely seen in so many facets.

Hajratwala focuses closely on the lives of her ancestors but more so on the lives of people she has had a chance to visit and follow personally, such as her cousin Mala and Mala's husband Madhukant, a Fijian couple who applied to emigrate to the U.S. by lottery and won two of the small number of places sought after by thousands of Asians. Once there, they lived a hand-to-mouth existence, both holding down as many as three jobs at a time. Both won employee awards at the fast food joints and parking garages where they found employment. They even tried motel work, one career that has been opened up to Asians largely through the machinations of people from Gujerat. In less than 50 years, a few southern Asian families have parlayed a willingness to do every task associated with motel management and a strong family support system into a remarkable monopoly of motel ownership across America. As Mala penetrated ever deeper into the American scene, she stopped wearing saris and willingly donned the scratchy uniforms required by her jobs at McDonald's and in a hospital. She considers her life in the complicated culture of America "freedom" compared to her youth spent in a traditional setting, under the thrall of a tyrannical mother-in-law.

The author also learned about freedom in America. From asserting her independence as a college student by traveling far from her Michigan home to Stanford University, to dabbling in the heady vapors of feminism, to the conviction that she is a lesbian, she made departures from her heritage, even refusing marriage, a shock to her tradition-minded parents. But each "departure" was a journey to somewhere else, in that way asserting her inner bond with the diaspora.

"Every migrant," Hajratwala writes, "constructs, or spends her life seeking, a new definition of home." She has found her home on what she calls her "queer planet" --- but she has the comfort that she is never far from her family and her heritage. As she has followed it, it follows her, all over the world.

--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott

I've waited far too long to post this, perhaps because I had another identity crisis when I sat down to write it. I've written a few "reviews" of writing projects on this blog, all of which have been positive. And I realize that when you are writing 100% positive reviews, you are not so much a reviewer or a critic and more of a promoter.

And when I read back through previous Amazon reviews, I see that I am no critic. That's probably because when I love a book enough to write about it, I am not critical. I am in love. I loved Drew Banks's first two novel's and MJ Hahn's amazing podcast. I wrote about them and called what I wrote reviews.

But they are not reviews; they are love letters! The Sexy Grammarian is not a critic. She is a teacher. And a lover.

So, I now sit with pen in hand (yes, I do draft most of my blog posts in ink) to write a well-deserved love letter to the incredible and beautiful book, Leaving India by Minal Hajratwala.

Every family should have a Minal, a member who records the family story with involved passion that can only come from the inside of a family but also sits back and observes, to give us a journalistic, even critical view. She tells the story of her extended family and its scattering of people and how that fits into the greater diaspora from India to all over the world.

Minal's writing lilts and then reports, questions and then critiques. She is a historian, a romance writer, a gossip, an academic, and a researcher, all at once. Perhaps that's why her book has been nominated for both a Lambda Literary Award and a California Book Award.

At one point there were four copies of this book on my shelf:
o one for my cousin, a writer who has plans to write about our family
o one for my mother, who loves to study our family's geneology
o one for my wife, who kept stealing my own copy before I'd finished it
o my own treasured copy, purchased from and signed by the author--her inscription encouraged my own writing.

But it's the copy on my shelf reserved for my mother that worried me. Before I picked up my copy of Leaving India, I heard that there was some controversy about the "sexy chapter," that critics had complained that Minal snuck some lesbian sex into the pages of her otherwise serious, journalistic endeavor.

In spite of my disgust with a literary world that thinks sexy = not serious, I worried about my mother reading the chapter about Minal, the sexy chapter. "Here is a book about family history, Mom. Oh and watch out for the lesbian sex toward the end." But when I read it I knew this story would not be new to Mom. This chapter of lesbian love, laid out like a collection of tiny, precious poems, tells the tale of heartbroken parents with papers in their hands--papers that told them, your daughter has become something you fear.

And that story would not isolate my mother but bond her even more deeply to the whole picture of this amazing book. She's been through that, even if she hasn't been exposed to this particular picture of diaspora, of family, and of change.

Incidentally, I post this love letter to Leaving India just as Minal prepares to help launch Indivisible, the first anthology of South Asian American poetry. You can catch her tomorrow night, reading poetry from the book at The Green Arcade, 1680 Market Street @Gough, San Francisco. (415) 431-6800.

This review has been cross-posted to my blog and GoodReads.