Book Review: A Place Within - By MG Vassanji

An emigrant’s journey through history
Subhashree Desikan
First Published : 14 Jun 2009 10:26:00 AM IST
Last Updated : 14 Jun 2009 12:16:14 PM IST

MG Vassanji, author of A Place Within: Rediscovering India, comes from East Africa and now lives in Toronto with his family. He was born in the port city of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania. His grandparents had emigrated to East Africa and settled there. When the countries in the region obtained independence from the British in the early 1960s, he recalls, in his wonderfully clear introduction, that it seemed very natural for him to seek an identity that was closely tied to the British and colonial traditions and myth. The contradictions this evoked were stirred by his reading of Jawaharlal Nehru’s autobiography and his Discovery of India. He realised that he had his own discovery to make. This book is born from that stirring.
A Place Within is not one book, but several, interwoven in the hope of producing a tapestry of abstractions of India. It takes several forms at once — a travelogue describing the landscape of modern India; an emigrant’s quest to follow his own roots and to locate the origins of his family’s tradition of legend and symbol; an unearthing of the layers of history shrouding some famous cities of India such as Shimla, Delhi, Baroda, Ahmedabad and much more.
Buried deep within this tapestry is the story of the syncretic tradition of the Khojas — a sect initiated by “a line of pirs, whose ancestry was Persian Ismaili, but who, except for the first one or two, were all born in India”. With these lines and a brief introduction to the most prominent of these saints — Sadardeen, also known as Guru Sahdev and Sarguru — Vassanji narrates the story of Imamshah, a descendant in the tradition of Guru Sahdev, and the life of the Ismaili sect of Muslims. With this understanding, it becomes easier to understand what follows, the story of this fusion of Islam and brahminism as it had taken place in Ahmedabad. His earlier references to Ahmedabad reflect the reader’s own horrified wonder at how this fusing has actually given way to the presently seen excesses of intolerance and even genocide.
In retrospect, this book should not be called a “tapestry of abstractions”. It is, in fact, a composite of two stories, or even several as more readings may reveal, one consisting of the author’s search for his homeland and the second telling the reader of the understanding he has gained about the workings of time over history as applied to Ahmedabad.
Certainly it is a brilliant book in many respects, not least of which is in its exposition of the nonlinear and tiresome work involved in research. The effort made by the author to compile and assimilate the information it contains is apparent in every chapter. It offers valuable insight to research scholars in any discipline as to how the truth one is looking for can get distorted and covered up so badly that it would take patient and persistent toil to make the crucial contact. Yet the whole thing is too much of a challenge to take through to the finish, unless one has some business with the book. In fact, one cannot help wondering whether this book would get buried in the nanodynamics of modern popular reading, just like the subject it deals with! This is a phenomenon to worry about, and just as missions are launched to save beaches and the ecosystem, it would not be amiss or too late either to start a campaign to save endangered voices such as this. A few months ago, I was impressed by an article in The Guardian of UK, which spoke about the danger of the publishing boom to the value that used to be added by expert editors in the past. Certainly the campaign to save endangered voices is one that should be pioneered by expert and committed editors