Rich tale marred by writerly distance

My Family's Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents

nolead begins By Minal Hajratwala

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

352 pp. $26

nolead ends nolead begins

Reviewed by Helen Epstein

The mere facts are astonishing: 25 million people living in 100 countries now constitute the Indian diaspora. Starting in 1834, when slavery was abolished in the British Empire, Indians were recruited as "coolie" labor and transported by ship to the tea, rubber and sugar plantations of Fiji, Trinidad, Kenya, South Africa, Guyana, Suriname, Mauritius and Malaysia. In each of these destinations, supplemented by "free" Indian immigrants, they established new communities, some members of which "remigrated" as local economic and political conditions and international immigration policies changed.

The story that Minal Hajratwala's ambitious family and social history sets out to tell is how a segment of the descendants of these immigrants from 19th- and 20th-century India, together with new immigrants, have become the highest-income minority group in the United States.

This is an important and fascinating story: There are now three million souls of Indian extraction living here. If you live in a large metropolitan area as I do, you probably know an Indian engineer or physician, computer programmer, restaurateur, or owner of a motel or gas station. Certainly you are aware of the gifted offspring of this immigration: comic Russell Peters, TV commentator Sanjay Gupta, musician Norah Jones, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.

The Indian diaspora has, over the last three decades, produced a wealth of extraordinary writers - V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, Vikram Seth, Anita Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, to name just a few - who have fictionalized parts of this international saga.

In Leaving India: My Family's Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents, Hajratwala has chosen in some ways a more daunting task: to document her family's globe-crossing trajectories as nonfiction.

The book opens with a genealogical consult that situates her family in mythical and geographical terms. Descended from the Solanki dynasty, the family belongs to the kshatriya, the warrior-kings who are lower than priests, Hajratwala notes, but higher than merchants in a caste hierarchy that continues to be acknowledged. Their "clan" or branch is solanki, and their origins are in five villages in the state of Gujarat. Alas, the meaning and significance of these facts to the author, like so many other facts in the book, are neither made clear to the reader nor integrated into the narrative.

In 1909, Hajratwala's great-grandfather Motiram was among those who set off, at his own expense, to Fiji for reasons unknown. "Written records about private lives are sparse," she notes. "In English they come only from encounters with the colonial bureaucracy. . . . before that, any information is kept in Gujarati, the language of our region, and in the Indian manner - which is to say haphazardly."

With few documents to work with, the author sets off to retrace her family trajectory, relying on interviews with "nearly one hundred" family members and a great deal of library research. The result is an uneven and unwieldy patchwork of travelogue, reportage and memoir, with many sketches of family members in various cultural settings but little sense of place. How is it possible, I wondered at the end of this book, that I have no recollection at all of Fiji or Fijians?

Hajratwala's portrait of her parents, their arranged marriage, and their professional travails is more vivid. Her father, Bhupendra, was a brilliant, ambitious young man, so arrogant that a well-meaning cousin gave him Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to study. Her mother, Bhanu, was studious, artistic and well-mannered. I would have liked to read more about how they composed a life together, rather than another of the author's lengthy speculations: "If America could have acquired only my parents' brains, transplanted them like kidneys into jobless or skill-less Iowans and Michiganders, surely it would have: a white physical therapist, a white scientist, without problems of assimilation or language or race. But our brains are hard-wired to our bodies and minds, and when my parents - and others of their generation, educated professionals with much-needed skills - came to the United States, they brought with them their whole history, the history of their skin."

Windy passages like these pervade the book, making it seem longer than it is. Finally, we reach 1971, the year of the author's birth. Family and community history morphs into a coming-of-age memoir. Minal spends seven years of her childhood in New Zealand, where her father has taken a teaching job; the next 10 in Canton, Mich., where she faced the usual terrors of middle school, exacerbated by cultural loneliness. "For the most part, while Cubans congregated in Miami and Vietnamese created Little Saigons," she writes, " . . . the post-1965 Indians with their professional educations ended up all over the country, often in the white suburbs. Isolation was built into our patterns of immigration and assimilation as surely as hair follicles in our brown skin."

By the time Minal comes out as a lesbian to her parents, during a visit home from Stanford University, my interest in her story had been subsumed by my exasperation with her method. Rather than drawing us into her family's experience, the author distances us from it. Rather than illuminating the particularities of Indian attitudes toward homosexuality, she chooses to leave them unexplored. Leaving India is a rich subject. I wish Minal Hajratwala had better realized its potential.