What makes one choose to shift homes? A quick internet search will suggest prospects for something better, greater, or more. The variables are several: education, career, lifestyle, air quality, safety, proximity to loved ones, money. It seems that any voluntary migration, from A to B, is performed with some form of gain in sight; one sets sail when the promise of a better land awaits. In Nusrat F Jafri’s debut book This Land We Call Home, a family belonging to an outcaste tribe – the Bhantus – shifts homes in the hope to shed their caste. For them, the gain in sight is not an upgrade, but the only chance at a life of respect.
A trial by fire
The book – which, among other things, is a historical portrait of Jafri’s maternal ancestry – begins with a fire. A fire that had eaten up her great-grandparents’ house in Alwar, Rajasthan in the year 1880. Hardayal and Kalyani Singh, members of the Bhantu tribe at the time, had turned criminals in the eyes of the law when the British enacted the Criminal Tribes Act in 1871. Despite the Bhantus tracing their lineage to Rajputs from the army of Rana Pratap, they were reduced to a nomadic community living on the fringes.
It was later learnt that the fire had been an assault by the upper-caste Hindus in response to the Bhantu community’s increasing self-sufficiency. Here, Jafri echoes words from missionary Phillip Godfrey’s book Outcastes’ Hope: “Hinduism is as much a social system as a religion, and that social system is built upon caste. Whatever weakens caste, weakens Hinduism.” In the aftermath of such tragedy, it was the Christian missionaries who came to the aid of Hardayal and Kalyani. In 1911, the two decided to surrender their idols and gods, leave their makeshift shelter in Alwar, and move to Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh.
In many ways, Jafri’s book is a corrective endeavour. To begin with, it is written partly in response to her “deep personal disappointment at the dearth of research and archival material available on Bhantus.” With this book, she sets out to rectify this historical omission and give us a vivid biography of the community. Then, predominantly, it is a corrective to the many narratives of suspicion that have surrounded the idea of religious conversion. Jafri maintains that “Christianity came with a promise of a casteless new identity” and “a shining educated life” ahead for her ancestors. The six daughters of Hardayal and Kalyani “gain[ed] tremendously from a modern education and healthcare system” designed and delivered by the missionaries.
Jafri presents a narrative of religious conversions that emphasises individual expression and not the promotion of any agenda. In the chapter “Physics of Love” which stands out as the most charming in the book, Jafri’s mother, Meera, falls in love with a Muslim man, Abid. The two had first met at a coaching institute, where Abid was a teacher of physics and Meera, his student. But they didn’t catch each other’s eye or register in each other’s hearts until a year later when both were pursuing careers in separate fields. Their paths kept crossing, and what started as chance encounters soon turned into Abid frequently visiting Meera’s home. What followed was an Urdu couplet discreetly placed within the pages of a book he gifted to Meera. And from the sound of the words, she knew right away that they were “a deeply romantic confession of love”.
When Meera’s favourite aunt, Hannah, the woman who mattered the most to her, heard about her Muslim suitor, she replied with a forceful slap across Meera’s face. Despite the threat of ostracisation from the rest of her family, Meera chose to marry Abid with the blessings of her mother. Soon after, Meera, eager to learn more about Islam, “embarked on her own spiritual path of self-discovery.” She “underwent a quiet conversion to Islam” in 1969, “a time when such conversions could be made without drawing too much attention or scrutiny.”
Lost in its own design
Jafri, an acclaimed cinematographer hailing from Lucknow, writes in lucid prose but with little stylistic abandon. She has a flair for passionate description and patches up history from memory (both hers and her mother’s) with such exacting detail, as though she were there to witness it all. But, besides a handful of dazzling paragraphs, Jafri’s writerly persona remains generally eclipsed by a solemnity typical of the reportage ilk.
It is only more unfortunate that, unlike the prose, Jafri’s project is rather muddled. Alongside a meticulous portrait of her maternal family’s migrations and religious conversions, the book is also a well-researched chronicle of nation-building from the late 1800s to the 2010s. While it is perfectly sensible to conceive a familial history within or against a larger socio-political history, Jafri’s execution is rather shaky. This is largely because she often uses devices like metaphors – a literal earthquake Meera experiences in Delhi suddenly becomes a figurative earthquake that “jolt[ed] the nation to its core” with Jawaharlal Nehru’s passing – and juxtapositions – as India and Pakistan fight the Bangladesh Liberation War, “a war between Prudence [Jafri’s grandmother] and her sisters” unfolds in their house – instead of underlining significant links between the two narratives operating on different scales. In other words, the book’s architectural intent becomes lost in its own design.
There is another burden that weighs heavily on the book: gratitude. The reader is frequently reminded that what they are reading is an expression of Jafri’s deep regard for all the difficult choices her family made. But, in addition to the many verbal articulations (“Thanks to the daughters of Hardayal Singh, education stands as my most cherished possession,” she tells us), the gratitude also manifests itself in the attempt to inscribe each of their names for posterity. As a result, “the story of a family” (that the book’s subtitle promises) takes the form of lengthy, insipid character sketches. For instance, the chapter titled “The Daughters of Hardayal Singh” presents the daughters to us like this: “Champa was pleasant-tempered, exuded confidence and was somewhat portly. When not donning her nurse’s uniform, she loved wearing saris. She worked at the Girdhaari Lal Maternal Hospital in Ajmeri Gate, Delhi.” And this: “Nora and Hannah were fiercely independent and uninhibited. Nora, petite, light-skinned with wavy hair that fell below her waist was described as ‘dove-like and gentle’ by my grandmother Prudence. She wore both Indian clothes and western wear with equal panache.”
At one point in the book, there is a striking shift in Jafri’s voice and addressal as she recounts the moment of Nora’s passing. In a ceremonious demeanour, naming her aunt in full for the first time, she goes, “The cause of death was determined to be poisoning. Nora Singh, who had been full of life and optimism, was only twenty-eight years old,” as if dictating to a mortuary scribe. The wish to quickly enshrine becomes known.
But, despite all the structural chaos, there is merit in reading This Land We Call Home as a rare account of change. The variables are several: home, faith, identity, government, nation. “I come to realise that in the India of today, I may be called upon to prove my ‘Indianness’ to a detached government official,” Jafri writes, “Carrying this amalgamation of cultural and religious heritage within my veins, I wouldn’t know where to start.”
This Land We Call Home: The Story of a Family, Caste, Conversions and Modern India, Nusrat F Jafri, Penguin India
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