PRNewswire
New Delhi [India], October 1: The book presents new revelations about the celebrated pass burning incident in Gandhi's South African Satyagraha at the beginning of the 20th century.
The emblematic protest against racial prejudice, famously depicted in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, shows Indians burning their identity documents in Johannesburg in August 1908. In an effort to restrict Asian entry, British authorities passed the infamous Black Law, requiring all Indians to register themselves with fingerprints, like criminals.
In her book, The Other Mohan, Amrita Shah narrates the story of her great-grandfather Mohanlal, an aspiring interpreter who participated in the protest, prompting a re-evaluation of this historic event by looking deeper into the circumstances that gave rise to the Black Law.
In doing so, the book departs from the traditional narrative of Gandhi's resistance and highlights, instead, a story of opportunism and enterprise in the Indian Ocean diaspora.
ABOUT THE BOOK
On a quest to understand why her great-grandfather, Mohanlal, set sail for South Africa from pre-independent India, Amrita Shah takes the reader into an era of unprecedented global mobility. At the turn of the twentieth century, as millions of Europeans travelled to overseas colonies, new forms of migration from Asia also took place. Mohanlal's co-travellers included traders, indentured workers, interpreters, soldiers, slaves, prostitutes, lascars and smugglers. A clash between the needs of white settlers and the aspirations of Indian migrants in South Africa saw the emergence of Gandhi's Satyagraha campaign, which attracted many, including Mohanlal. The confrontation, though, was only a strand in the as yet untold story of enterprise and opportunity practiced by ordinary migrants like Mohanlal.
Extensively researched in India, South Africa, Mauritius and Britain, this riveting account travels from the medieval port of Surat, where the British East India Company established its foothold in the Indian subcontinent, to nascent colonial cities, such as Bombay, Port Louis and Durban, delving into the history of the Indian diaspora in the western Indian Ocean, to discover modern India's many ancestors.
Part travelogue, part memoir, part family history and imbued with rigorous scholarship, The Other Mohan is an original path-breaking work.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amrita Shah is a former editor of Elle and Debonair, an ex-contributing editor with the Indian Express, and has worked for the US-based Time-Life News Service. She has been a fellow of the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Indian Institute of Science, the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study and the Research Institute Advanced De Nantes. She is the author of the award-winning Ahmedabad: A City in the World (2015), Vikram Sarabhai: A Life (2007) and Telly-Guillotined: How Television Changed India (2019). She is based in Mumbai.
ABOUT HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS INDIA
HarperCollins India publishes some of the finest writers from the Indian Subcontinent and around the world, publishing approximately 200 new books every year, with a print and digital catalogue of more than 3,000 titles across 10 imprints. Its authors have won almost every major literary award including the Man Booker Prize, JCB Prize, DSC Prize, The Erasmus Prize, New India Foundation Award, Atta Galatta Prize, Shakti Bhatt Prize, Gourmand Cookbook Award, Publishing Next Award, Tata Literature Live! Award, Gaja Capital Business Book Prize, BICW Award, Sushila Devi Award, Sahitya Akademi Award, and Crossword Book Award. HarperCollins India also represents some of the finest publishers in the world including Harvard University Press, Gallup Press, Oneworld, Bonnier Zaffre, Usborne, Dover, Nosy Crow, and Quarto. HarperCollins India is India's most awarded publisher seven Publisher of the Year Awards (2015, 2016, 2018, two in 2021, 2022, and 2024). HarperCollins India is a subsidiary of HarperCollins Publishers.
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