Personal diaries and the weaving of a heritage

A view of Eldoret Town on March 24, 2016. On the main road that cuts through Eldoret, opposite Ken-Knit (Kenya) Limited, there is a factory called Rupa. Further down that road there is a school called Gulab Lochab Academy. PHOTO| FILE| NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • Few people can write history with a diction that is accessible to a 15-year-old and pleasurable for the adult reader.
  • Ranju is one of them. She has flavoured the routine entries in Kaka’s diaries with a lingering romantic poetry that paints poignant pictures of the Timbadi and Kitale landscapes and asks gentle questions about 12-year-old Gujarati brides.
  • Ranju digs beyond Kaka’s diaries. There is a wealth of sociological detail in her description of Gujarati wedding ceremonies. She narrates Jain mythology, Hindu festivals and legends, folksongs and folktales.

In Kitale, there was once a street called Zaverchand Mulji Shah. On the main road that cuts through Eldoret, opposite Ken-Knit (Kenya) Limited, there is a factory called Rupa. Further down that road there is a school called Gulab Lochab Academy. Here now, in Threads of a Legacy (2016), is the story behind those names.

It is the story of a husband and wife — Zaverchand and Rupa — who made a life in Kenya. They laid the foundation upon which their children (Gulab, Babu, Bachu, Batuk, Amu) and their grandchildren (Satish, Raj, Ajay, Tinu, Neel, Ravi) painstakingly spun a thriving industrial yarn of sweaters and blankets that is worthy of study, particularly since most of the textile industries from that era collapsed — Kicomi, Rivatex, Raymonds’, Mountex and others.

This is not one of those intimate stories concerned with the micro-politics of domestic cruelty and private triumphs in the way that Radhika Lee discloses her personal journey in Rainbows in My Clouds (2015). Ranju Shah’s Threads of a Legacy is a family memoir that spans four generations. It paints the intricacies of migration, the sacrifices that each generation makes for the sake of the next one and the liminal spaces that Kenyans of Indian descent have learnt to negotiate as part of their multiple identities and their contested belonging.

Ranju’s concern with the legacy of her father-in-law, Zaverchand, lifts the veil on the socio-cultural invisibility of a community. It marks the big turning points in the community’s evolution in the same way that the portraits of dynasties in Pally Dhillon’s Kijabe: An African Historical Saga (2000) and Pheroze Nowrojee’s A Kenyan Journey (2015) add to our knowledge of the history of Indians in Kenya.

A key element in the telling of these family memoirs of Dhillon, Nowrojee and Ranju is the value of personal diaries. Ranju goes back to the journals kept by her father-in-law, Zaverchand, the Gada family patriarch. Zaverchand — popularly known as Kaka — left India in 1927. He was not one of the 31,983 indentured Indian men that the British Empire “imported” into Kenya to build the Uganda Railway and to run the trains. He was one of the ground-breaking dukawallahs who set up shops along the advancing path of the railway, opening the East African countryside to the material things of modernity — sugar, calico cloth, tin sufurias, curry powder and bicycles.

Born on December 27, 1902, in the village of Timbadi, Gujarat, Kaka forged a pioneering spirit at an early age. When farming proved hazardous, he left Timbadi to seek opportunities in the nascent sugar-importation trade at the port of Salaya. This business was not easy. The British levied heavy taxes on imports. Kaka spotted another opportunity in the sale of garlic which he packaged for export. Disaster struck when a vessel carrying one of his consignments capsized in a storm, wiping out his profit, capital and dignity. Deeply in debt and determined to find a way to pay off his creditors, Kaka bid a quick farewell to his wife, Rupa “in the dark hours of the night … rode all the way to Porbander on horseback … (and) embarked on the next available ship to Mombasa”.

Few people can write history with a diction that is accessible to a 15-year-old and pleasurable for the adult reader. Ranju is one of them. She has flavoured the routine entries in Kaka’s diaries with a lingering romantic poetry that paints poignant pictures of the Timbadi and Kitale landscapes and asks gentle questions about 12-year-old Gujarati brides. Ranju digs beyond Kaka’s diaries. There is a wealth of sociological detail in her description of Gujarati wedding ceremonies. She narrates Jain mythology, Hindu festivals and legends, folksongs and folktales.

NOSTALGIC TEXTURE

The nostalgic texture of Ranju’s writing is given further depth by the memories of the family members she interviewed. She moves beyond nostalgia as she weaves cultural histories with studious detail. Take for example her description of chaupat, a traditional board game. Documenting social past-times of this kind — complete with a photograph of the chaupat cloth board — is an act of validation and cultural retrieval.

Ranju looks back on the good old days with admiration for the spirit of communal care and “joint family”. But there is a haunting anxiety in Ranju’s tale, as if she fears that the cast of Gada grandchildren — seen and unseen — will miss out on ancestral values. She wrote this book to secure the knowledge from their roots because “we cannot let the experiences of an epic journey slip by simply as faded memories”.

It is very easy for a family history to descend into a chronicle of who married who, when. Ranju tries to escape that trap. Beyond the story of self-sacrificing elders that she is determined to give their progeny, there is a story of visionary thrift and commerce. It is neither linear nor predictable; it lies between the lines of this space-clearing book which invites further inquiry. I am sure that the business schools at our universities teach courses on trading cultures, family enterprise and succession planning. Threads of a Legacy is a book they will want to get hold of, to further those lessons.

Ranju provides us with an opportunity to reflect on the impact of policy. The Trade Licensing Act of 1967 was meant to encourage Africans to venture into retail business. The truth is that it ostracised Kenyan Indians and temporarily stunted the growth of many centres in rural areas since, at the time, Africans lacked the skills and capital to take over retail business from the dukawallahs. Tax revenue in many towns declined significantly. Ranju argues that Kitale was so badly affected by the exit of Indian traders that the town council “passed a unanimous resolution asking the commerce minister to exempt the town from the Trade Licensing Act”.

Like Sana Ayar, author of Indians inKenya: The Politics of Diaspora (2015), Ranju notes the uncertainty and dispersal created by this policy. To compound the problem, there was fear that amendments to Britain’s Commonwealth Immigration Act would bar the entry of Indians. These anxieties grew into an exodus. Ayar avows that 33,000 Indians emigrated from Kenya within six months. Ranju details the weekly departures on chartered flights as “numbness descended on the Asian community”. Those who remained gradually moved from retail to manufacturing, finance, tourism and construction, reclaiming “the trading sector with more sophisticated activities”.

Students of social history will find value in Ranju’s portrayals of Kitale and Eldoret which are accompanied by some priceless photographs, never mind the poor camera resolution of our yesteryears. Overall, this is a beautiful hardback book – small, light, easy to carry. The understated cover design carries layers of meaning. The photographs interspersed within the story illustrate the chapters usefully. The font is easy on the eye and the glossary is a valuable inclusion.

Still, this book could have benefitted from additional editing to synchronise the tenses in some instances; to iron out syntax; to weed out some repetition and to match the formal names used in the family tree with the affectionate nicknames that Ranju uses in the body of the story, most of the time. You won’t find Bachu in the family tree if you don’t remember that his formal name was Keshavlal.

Ranju, whose full name is Ranjan, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1966 from the University of Bombay. Thereafter, she studied the teaching of French at the University of Sorbonne, taught English and Physical Geography and has remained committed to the propagation of knowledge in a variety of ways.

In 2011, Ranju wrote Kaal Khand (A Unit of Time), the story of her maiden family. In 1986, she was part of the Hindu Council’s women’s wing which lobbied to have the national Religious Studies syllabus broadened beyond Christianity and Islamic studies. They succeeded and in 1990, they published  a secondary school textbook on Hindu Religious Studies. Threads of a Legacy will be launched in Nairobi on Sunday and is available at Text Book Centre.

 

Dr. Nyairo is a Cultural Analyst. [email protected]