In her new book, Amrita Shah sets on a quest to understand why her great-grandfather, Mohanlal, set sail for South Africa from pre-independent India. She 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 occurred. Mohanlal’s co-travellers included traders, indentured workers, interpreters, soldiers, slaves, prostitutes, lascars and smugglers.
Thoroughly researched and inviting, the book captures the clashes between the needs of white settlers and the aspirations of Indian migrants in South Africa, which saw the emergence of Gandhi’s Satyagraha campaign, which attracted many, including Mohanlal. This confrontation, though, was only a strand in the as-yet untold story of enterprise and opportunity practised by ordinary migrants like Mohanlal.
The book is a riveting account of the life and times of ordinary migrants like Mohanlal and his contemporaries and takes the reader on a journey through India, South Africa, Mauritius and Britain. This part-travelogue, part-family history, part-memoir is truly pathbreaking as it chronicles the travels from the mediaeval port of Surat, where the British East India Company established its footholds in the Indian subcontinent, to the 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 and their stories.
Published by HarperCollins India, ‘The Other Mohan in Britain’s India Ocean Empire’ will be released on 15 November on SoftCover, ThePrint’s online platform for launching non-fiction books.
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 currently based in Mumbai.
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