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BOOKS
Grandma's
Tales
A family's
history and its insights into the lives of the Gujarati Diaspora
By
Arthur J. Pais
MOTIBA'S
TATTOOS
By MIRA
KAMDAR
Price: $ 24
Pages: 320 |
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For
young Mira, grandmother Motiba's tattoos represented one of the biggest
mysteries of childhood. No one bothered to explain to Mira how Motiba
came to acquire the intricate patterns, why she wore them or what they
stood for. "Certainly, I never dared to ask," recalls Mira Kamdar,
43, now a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York.
Kamdar came
to know of a few legends behind the tattoos years later. One of her aunts
suggested that Motiba got herself tattooed at a religious festival by
an itinerant artist. When Motiba died six years ago, she took along with
her a whole world. And Kamdar was left with hundreds of unanswered questions.
"I wanted to know what life was like at the beginning of the century,"
she says. "About how and why the family migrated from India to Burma,
and then to America."
Kamdar also
wanted to know what it means to uproot oneself from one culture and start
a new life elsewhere. When she began to trace her roots, she came across
stories which were so colourful and illuminating that her friends urged
her to use them in a book. Motiba's Tattoos was written over a
period of four years. Now it's making its way across bookshops in the
US supported by heavy endorsements from Abraham Verghese, author of The
Tennis Partner, among others. Describing the book as "colourful,
poignant, humourous and beautifully told", Verghese says, "I
came to a clearer understanding of the Indian Diaspora and the political
forces at work at the beginning of the 20th century."
"My
story of immigration resonates with the stories of millions of immigrants
across countries and racial divides," says Kamdar. "Motiba's
tale is one of abandoning a life firmly anchored in traditions and rituals
for the tantalising prospects of urban existence. And yet, she never lost
sight of her community's religious and cultural mores."
One of the
many notable vignettes scattered throughout the book is based in Motiba's
ancestral home in Gujarat. Kamdar remembers how her 18-month-old sister
Devyani accidentally spilt a couple of quarts of dhokla batter. There
was no quick way to whip up a substitute. Motiba darted over to the site
of the accident, "scooped up the spilled batter with her bare hands,
put as much of it as possible back into the bowl, and said, 'What the
men don't know won't hurt them'."
Kamdar's
peripatetic journey begins in Motiba's birthplace, the tiny village of
Gokhlana in Gujarat's Kathiawar district. From Gokhlana, she follows her
family as it emigrates from the feudal India of 1900 to the bustling streets
of Rangoon. The family joins the affluent Gujarati merchant community
in Burma, and quickly prospers. But their idyll is shattered when they
are expelled from the country by the Burmese dictatorship in the early
1960s. They start afresh in Bombay. Here, lured by Hollywood's fantastic
portrayal of post-war American life, Kamdar's 19-year-old father sets
off for the US with dreams of a better life. Motiba followed her son soon
after.
What does
the future hold for Motiba's descendants in America? "We will redefine,
as each new group of immigrants has done since the country's founding
two centuries ago, what it means to 'become an American'," observes
Kamdar. "It may mean putting down roots in the US, but it also means
stretching out branches across national boundaries." Going by her
success story they have succeeded admirably in the task.
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The
Government should encash at least a part of its stake in LIC and GIC before
its too late, suggests INDIA TODAY associate Editor V. Shankar Aiyar
in 
