Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #613033 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780618251292
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Hajratwala, a journalist at the San Jose Mercury News, tells of the Indian diaspora experience through a part-personal, part-reported story of her extended family. Hailing from the small northwest Indian region of Gujarat, her family's ancient origins begin with the myth of a race of warriors and kings. Their migration begins in the wake of the famine of 1899, when Hajratwala's great-grandfather Motiram left to learn the tailor's craft in Fiji, leaving his wife and children behind. In the same, tireless spirit echoed in generations to come, Motiram founded a family business in his new home, then built it with the support of relatives who followed to join him. His shop eventually became one of the largest department stores in the South Pacific isles. Other family branches developed in South Africa; the U.S., where Hajratwala's parents immigrated as part of India's earliest wave of brain drain; and other locales, totaling nine countries in five continents. Throughout sojourns across cultures and across time, the family endures—and succeeds—in spite of discrimination and bigotry. Told with the probing detail of a reporter, the fluid voice of a poet and the inspired vision of a young woman who walks in many worlds, Hajratwala's story offers an engaging account of what may be one of the fastest-growing diasporas in the world. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by REVIEW BY SADIA SHEPARD

As he fought for India's independence from the British in the 1930s and '40s, Mahatma Gandhi relied on the strength of his country's villages. His hope was that they might become self-sustaining: 700,000 tiny, independent republics. One wonders what he would think of the unprecedented late 20th-century dispersal of Indians to every corner of the globe and their rapid rise in the places they landed.

In Leaving India, Minal Hajratwala deftly explores this diaspora through the story of her family, whose members left their ancestral villages to seek opportunity in places as varied as Fiji, South Africa, Australia, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong and the United States.

Hajratwala's goal is to tease out where personal motives for migration intersect with the forces of politics and economics, to "find the meeting place where character intersects with history." Her family is descended from the Solanki dynasty of warrior-kings who reigned over Western India until they were vanquished in 1242. According to family legend, a benevolent goddess advised her clan, the Khatris, to lay down their arms and become weavers. And so they passed "quiet lives" in five villages in the Gujarat region, waiting "out the centuries until the next great scattering . . . by forces nearly as mysterious as gods and demons."

One of those forces was the British Empire. In the late 19th century, demand from British textile mills created a cotton boom in rural India. But as farmers switched from grain to cotton, the countryside became vulnerable to famine, particularly in drought years. It was a time, Hajratwala writes, when young men from all over India boarded ships "to seek their fortunes, or at least a respite from chronic poverty." Among them was her great-grandfather, Motiram, who sailed in 1909 for the Fiji Islands, where the British had put Indian laborers to work on sugar plantations. Motiram was luckier, or more enterprising, than most; within a couple of years in the South Pacific, he opened a tailor shop that grew into a department store and a retail empire.

At about the same time, Hajratwala's great-great uncle Ganda was running a vegetarian restaurant in Durban, South Africa. For the immigrant, as we learn repeatedly in "Leaving India," necessity is truly the mother of invention: When Indian restaurateurs were barred from seating black Africans, Ganda and others began serving curries in hollowed-out loaves of bread for carry-out, inventing the beloved dish known as "bunny chow."

Through the stories of her parents, Bhupendra and Bhanu, Hajratwala also traces the laws and policies that shaped the Indian encounter with the United States from 1917, when the U.S. government barred South Asian immigrants as undesirables, to the present. A turning point came in the mid-1960s, when the United States began to admit significant numbers of Asian immigrants; the author recounts how her father walked into the U.S. Embassy in Suva, the Fijian capital, in 1963 and was soon on his way to the University of Colorado at Boulder to study manufacturing.

Leaving India is meticulously researched and evocatively written. Hajratwala spent seven years traveling the world and interviewed more than 75 relatives. But it can be difficult to keep this large and far-flung family straight, and it seems at times that Hajratwala is more interested in (or better able to reconstruct) the historical forces that shaped her relatives' lives than in their individual characters.

This flaw disappears as we get closer to the present. Her portrait of her parents is full of telling anecdotes. We learn, for example, that her mother used earnings from her first job as a physiotherapist to prepare a trunk of saris for her bridal trousseau, while her father read Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" and talked his way into graduate school at the University of Iowa. During her parents' first trip across the country, two nights and three days aboard a train, Bhanu could find nothing vegetarian to eat; at a brief stop in Cheyenne, Wyo., she rushed off the train to buy potato chips and was nauseated by the high altitude, which she had never experienced before.

For the most part, Hajratwala removes herself from her narrative, "to be transparent, not to overwhelm the stories of others with my own." But at the end she offers a searingly honest chapter about her "border crossings," her journey from trying to meet parental expectations to living in San Francisco as a lesbian. She remembers growing up in Michigan, wary of getting too close to her mother's cooking for fear of smelling like curry in school, and the first blush of acceptance she found in college as a poet and campus activist. She describes the warmth she found among her relatives in India as well as their resentment of her good fortune in America. "Leaving India" is a story of migration, but it is also, as Hajratwala reminds us, about "the ones we leave behind."


Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About the Author

Customer Reviews

A loving family memoir
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.

Leaving India? Not really. Actually her grand-parents leaving India and Africa.
I just got through this book after three attempts. The writing style is more akin to someone cataloging office furniture rather than a person's experiences leaving India. Which brings me to my main lament. I ordered this on the belief that I will be reading about a person's experience of leaving India and settling abroad. I personally left India in 1970 and I was curious to read about the author's experience. Well was I disappointed!

The main theme is about the author's family's history of leaving India early in the twentieth century and settling in Africa and then moving elsewhere. The author herself never was in India to begin with. Also the bit about her lesbian thing seemed too much like the "woe is me" syndrome.

All in all a disappointing book that I regret ordering and worse spending time reading the thing. The fault is entirely mine though because I ASSUMED that the title implied the author's experiences in leaving India and starting a new life in the United States. What was that old limerick about "don't assume lest you make a a-- of you and me"? Well it did make one of me.

My personal opinion is that the book is a little dry
I was hoping for more of a personalized story about the family members who actually left India. Instead I found this to be a presentation of facts; more of an outline of someone's personal genealogy research. However, to give the author credit, she does offer some good information about the Hindu culture. When I selected this item from the Amazon Vine listing for review it was classified as a biography. I was expecting something a little bit different, and this may be leading me to offer a mediocre review.

Read some of the other reviews out there on this book. It has many glowing reviews, and they may give you the viewpoint that you're hoping for.