About midway through her book The Other Mohan in Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire, Amrita Shah mentions litigation in South Africa in the last decade of the 1800s. A prominent Indian trader, Dada Abdullah, sued a former business partner. Although Abdullah had white lawyers handling his case, the records of the transactions were in Gujarati; a bilingual lawyer was needed. It was then that a young lawyer, newly returned to their common hometown of Porbandar in Gujarat after becoming a barrister in London, was recommended.
As Shah writes: ‘Dada Abdullah offered boarding, lodging and a one year contract at a fee of £105 with first-class return fare, to the boy whose name was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.’
Mohandas was the Gujarati in South Africa whom the world was yet to discover; but, at the same time, also in South Africa, was another Gujarati, with a similar name—Mohanlal Parmanandas Killavala. He’s the author’s great-grandfather and the subject of this fascinating book.
Shah begins the book with an introduction to Mohanlal and how she was inspired to unravel the mysteries surrounding the life of this ancestor of hers. From there, she goes back in time several centuries, from her hometown of Mumbai to the shores of Gujarat in mediaeval times.
Here, Shah imagines the coming of sailors or khalasis from the West, their settling down, and the subsequent establishment and burgeoning of trade along the Gujarat coast. The story goes on, now fictionalised, now hard fact, until the late 1800s, when Mohanlal, whose family long migrated from their ancestral Surat to Bombay, decided to head for greener pastures—across the Indian Ocean, to South Africa.
This could have been a straightforward account of a quest to understand the life and motivations of a somewhat hazy figure from the past—a figure, unlike Mohandas Gandhi, who was relatively obscure. Shah turns that quest into more.
She takes the reader along with her, tracing Mohanlal’s roots and his own travels as she journeys in his footsteps—from Bombay to Surat, South Africa, Mauritius, and more. As she visits archives, reads old documents, meets people, and asks questions, she shows us not just what these places are today but what they had been in Mohanlal’s time. She tries to make sense of Mohanlal’s travels and of his motivations, but at the same time, she also examines others around him.
