Leaving India

Book excerpt: 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).