Podcast: In Amrita Shah's book about the voyages of one family, a tale of migrating Indians

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02-05-2025

Across the Indian Ocean are traces of a million voyages. Starting at the dawn of civilisation, traders in Mesopotamia and India began navigating its coasts. Empires transported commodities, slaves, and – during the British Empire – indentured servants. And, at the height of Pax Britannica, a certain Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi launched his political career with a fateful voyage to South Africa.
In The Other Mohan in Britain's Indian Ocean Empire, Amrita Shah investigates the voyages of one of Gandhi's contemporaries: her great-grandfather, Mohanlal Killavala. In this episode of Past Imperfect, Shah explains how Indian Ocean travels left an indelible mark not only on her family, but also upon so many broader aspects of India and the Indian diaspora. She presents us with an account of the diaspora which is sometimes surprising, and sometimes unsettling.
Shah began her research many years ago with a handful of family stories. Her great-grandfather, an educated and Anglicised Gujarati from Bombay, had migrated to South Africa. Here, he joined Gandhi's satyagraha activities before returning to Bombay and living out the rest of his life in India. But Shah knew that there were layers of this story that remained unexplored.
Killavala left Bombay after marrying a Gujarati woman – yet he married again on his travels, and this union led to the birth of Shah's grandmother in South Africa. Who was Killavala's second wife? Where did they meet? How did all of this change her family's story?
Looking for answers, Shah plumbs Gujarat's centuries-long association with the sea. The Killavala family settled in Surat while it was the dazzling epicenter of Mughal oceanic commerce, a place where merchants from across Europe, the Middle East, and East Africa mingled, haggled, and became extraordinarily rich. Appropriately enough, the Killavalas lived in the Surat precinct of Nanavat, which means 'dealing with money'.
Surat's fortunes declined sharply as the Mughal Empire disintegrated. The Killavalas joined thousands of other Gujaratis in migrating to a new hub of global trade: Bombay. Bombay's imperial connections facilitated even lengthier migrations of Gujaratis to unfamiliar places like Mauritius, Durban, and Cape Town. As an educated man fond of wearing western suits and eating English porridge, Mohanlal Killavala stood apart from most of these migrants, who were escaping desperate poverty. So why did he go?
Shah looks for answers in archives in Mauritius and across South Africa but encounters new questions. Learning that her great-grandmother was from Mauritius, she wonders whether she might have been Creole, of part-African descent. Many Gujarati merchants on the island married Creole women, and some of them even took these wives back to Gujarat.
Another lingering question involves Killavala's participation in Gandhi's satyagraha against the 1906 Registration Act, where the government of Transvaal, in an attempt to stymie Indian immigration, forced all Indian settlers to carry identity passes. By this time, Killavala seemed to have established himself as a respectable member of the Indian community in Natal. He worked for a white lawyer, served as an interpreter of Indian languages at the courts, and had a wife and young daughter in tow. What convinced him to travel to another territory and court arrest?
An archival find in Pretoria adds a new twist.
Here, Shah discovers that Killavala might have been a 'permit agent,' someone involved in both legal and illegal immigration networks between India and South Africa. Then, like now, illegal immigration was a hot-button political issue, adding fuel to the fire of white antipathy towards Indian settlers.
For Shah, the archival find provides possible answers to so many of her questions. Perhaps Killavala set out for South Africa through a professional network for facilitating illegal immigration. And perhaps he joined Gandhi's satyagraha for the purpose of acquiring passes – valuable sheets of paper that could smooth the way for new migrants.
Shah never finds definitive answers. But along the way, she paints a vivid portrait of a diaspora, demonstrating how travel abroad both reinforced prejudices and weakened racial boundaries. Traveling through contemporary Mauritius and South Africa, she encounters so many reminders of India – and some now slightly less faint traces of her own ancestors.
Dinyar Patel is an assistant professor of history at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Researchin Mumbai. His award-winning biography of Dadabhai Naoroji, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, was published by Harvard University Press in May 2020.