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Journalism of Courage
History is noisy, filled with proclamations, battles, manifestos and monuments. It is shaped as much by what survives as by what slips away. The 20th century gave us Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, inscribed in stone, sermon and syllabus. But in Amrita Shah’s The Other Mohan in Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire, another Mohan emerges: Mohanlal Parmanandas Killavala, her great-grandfather, whose life endures only in shards, letters and silences. Through him, she seeks the texture of the past, complex and obscure.
By April 1907, if not before, the two Mohans had met. Gandhi’s Indian Opinion briefly mentions Mohanlal, a Gujarati trader entangled in the networks of Bombay, Port Louis and Durban. Elsewhere, a letter surfaces, unacknowledged. An astonished Shah embarks on a journey to reconstruct a life that was already half-lore. And in that journey, we are constantly reminded that these are not traces of legend but the substance of life, and hence partial and evasive. Where Gandhi towers as an architect of a people’s moral imagination, Mohanlal appears only in glimpses, slipping between ports, carrying commerce and kinship across the Indian Ocean. Yet Shah does not recast him as a hero. The other Mohan is no counter-Mahatma. His life, accomplished though it was, drifts towards oblivion. What returns to the family is silence. The man who traversed seas leaves scarcely a ripple.
Shah also uses Mohanlal’s life to emphasise on the role the Indian Ocean played, both in the history of her family and of the subcontinent. For her family, the ocean is the huge canvas on which Mohanlal pieced together his life. To the subcontinent, it is a vast, liquid archive. It carried indentured labourers, traders, exiles, constantly retracing a world where migration was routine; a world where the Empire’s reach extended as much in cargo and contracts as in armies.
Shah’s book is an act of pursuit. She writes against the indifference of both the Empire and her family memory. Mohanlal himself leaves no memoirs of South Africa, no intimate reflections of exile and enterprise. Even his surname is contingent, a bureaucratic convenience: the Sankalias of Surat became Killavalas when an East India Company job at the fort required a new register. Even names, under imperialism, become negotiations with power.
At the centre of this fractured lineage stands another figure, doubly at risk of erasure: Foolkore, Mohanlal’s Mauritian wife. Her life dissolves before it gathers shape, leaving no trace in memory, no echo in family lore. History grants her barely more than a name, yet Shah insists on holding her in view.
To name Foolkore is to pierce the silence that history spreads over such women, insisting that even a shadowed presence unsettles the grand narrative. Foolkore is not simply a shadow; she is an emblem of the silences that governed the Empire itself.
The form of Shah’s narrative mirrors its subject. It is tentative, digressive, unwilling to smooth over gaps with easy invention. At moments, it reads less like biography than a meditation on method: how does one write a life out of fragments? How to grant dignity to a figure the archive itself disavows? To some, these digressions may appear indulgent. Yet they are integral. They remind us that the archive is not neutral ground. It is structured by power, political in both what it preserves and what it omits. The Other Mohan is not seamless. Its force lies in its refusal to pretend at wholeness. Shah’s prose acknowledges the incompleteness, the provisionality of what she can recover. The result is an account of memory itself, riven with gaps, haunted by ghosts.
In retrieving Mohanlal, Shah retrieves more than a man. She retrieves a sensibility that history belongs not only to saints and heroes but to the countless who slip past the spotlight. She grants Mohanlal a strange afterlife, far from the permanence of monuments. She offers him a subtler endurance of being remembered, read and thought about once again.
This is why Shah’s work matters. It is more than genealogy. It is a reckoning with the inheritances of silence. What does it mean to descend from unrecorded lives? What weight does one carry when the archives refuse to speak? These are not the dilemmas of one family alone, but of the Indian subcontinent, where migrations and marginal histories are constantly at risk of being forgotten.
