The Girl From Foreign:
A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors,
Forgotten Histories and a Sense of Home
By Sadia Shepard
Penguin Books
Pages: 364, Price: Rs 450.
The literature of diaspora has caught the imagination of literature lovers all over the world. And why not? An empathy with the ‘rootlessness’ of the ‘diasporic’ protagonist often becomes the inspiration to undertake a personal voyage of self-discovery.
Sadia Shepard’s ‘The Girl From Foreign’ with its long appendage ‘A search for shipwrecked ancestors, Forgotten Histories and a Sense of Home’ appears to be an attempt at a fiction of diaspora. Yet it would be unfair to place this book in such a cliched groove. Sadia’s search for her Bene Israel roots in Bombay has none of the disoriented emptiness of a ‘diasporic’ protagonist .Sadia’s journey is, in fact, a voyage of joyous discovery as she moves from one synagogue to another on the Konkan coast or interacts with the Indian Jewish community and joins them in the Jewish festivals of ‘Sukkot’ and ‘Simchar Torah’. Sadia undertakes the journey at the behest of ‘Nana’, her grandmother who was born Rachel Jacobs, a Jew in Mumbai and who later married a Muslim and shifted to Pakistan after the partition. Her Nana’s directive ‘Go To India, study your ancestors’ takes Sadia on an untrodden path to India where armed with a camera and a pen she enthusiastically etches the Bene Israel community on the pages of her book. The life of the Indian Jews is sketched for the readers through small vignettes of the Waskars of Revdanda, the Chordekars of Chorde and Mr Ellis of Alibag. The author’s journey to her Jewish roots is however overlaid with the pain of losing her beloved grandmother. The book also talks about the regret and pain of a grandmother who even after several decades of leaving Bombay clings to the refrain ‘I should’nt have left’.
The name of the book suggests a serious historical sojourn into the life of ancestors but as the reader moves through the pages of the book it becomes clear that despite the scholarly title, the focus is on the present day joys and sorrows of the community of Bene Israel in India. The history of the Jews can be extracted through snippets of conversation. The arrival of the Jews to India is summed up in a few lines_“A very long time ago, your ancestors left Israel in a ship and they were shipwrecked in India.”
Interestingly, Sadia’s story moves back and forth between her childhood with Nana and her present day search for her Jewish roots . It also recounts how she was brought up by three parents- a Christian father, a Muslim mother and a Jewish grandmother. And yet there is no angst generated by religious conflict. Sadia absorbs in her persona the qualities of all religions. The simplicity of acceptance of three religions is unique to her narrative. At the end of it all ‘Rachel Jacobs’ merges with ‘Rahat Ali’ and Sadia becomes in turn Christian, Jewish and Muslim. The book with its smattering of history and the simplicity of its narrative is a story well told. An interesting and enjoyable read.
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