Leaving India
My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The PEN Award–winning chronicle of the Indian diaspora told through the stories of the author’s own family.
In this “rich, entertaining and illuminating story,” Minal Hajratwala mixes history, memoir, and reportage to explore the collisions of choice and history that led her family to emigrate from India (San Francisco Chronicle). “Meticulously researched and evocatively written” (The Washington Post), Leaving India looks for answers to the eternal questions that faced not only Hajratwala’s own Indian family but all immigrants, everywhere: Where did we come from? Why did we leave? What did we give up and gain in the process?
Beginning with her great-grandfather Motiram’s original flight from British-occupied India to Fiji, where he rose from tailor to department store mogul, Hajratwala follows her ancestors across the twentieth-century to explain how they came to be spread across five continents and nine countries. As she delves into the relationship between personal choice and the great historical forces—British colonialism, apartheid, Gandhi’s salt march, and American immigration policy—that helped shape her family’s experiences, Hajratwala brings to light for the very first time the story of the Indian diaspora.
A luminous narrative from “a fine daughter of the continent, bringing insight, intelligence and compassion to the lives and sojourns of her far-flung kin,” Leaving India offers a deeply intimate look at what it means to call more than one part of the world home (Alice Walker).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two journalists reflect.Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five ContinentsMinal Hajratwala. Houghton, $26 (352p) 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.
