Novels set around the Jewish Bene Israel community in India are as rare as hen’s teeth, but Sheela Rohekar’s 2013 Hindi novel, Miss Samuel: A Jewish-Indian Saga, translated this year into English by Madhu Singh, must be one-of-a-kind. Rohekar is perhaps the only Jewish author in India who writes in Hindi. Her novel reads as two stories in one: the fictional saga of six generations of a Bene Israel family from Amdavad, the Gujarati name for Ahmedabad, and a more general history of the Bene Israel, the earliest group of Jews to settle in India some 2000 years ago, thought (by some) to be a lost tribe of Israel.
Hindi
When Mark Twain interviewed the leader of the Mormon Church, Brigham Young, in 1861, he found the religious patriarch mightily preoccupied with the problems of equal treatment for his 56 wives. Young told Twain of gifting a handkerchief or a fan to one woman; before long, all the other wives clamored for similar attentions. Polygamy’s downside provides the starting point for the epic poem, The Theft of a Tree, composed in classical Telegu by Nandi Timmana for Krishnadeveraya, ruler of the 16th century, south Indian, Vijayanagara empire. Surely the maharaja, with three documented consorts, could relate to the problem described by Brigham Young. And surely, he would have been enchanted by the poetic treatment accorded to it by his court poet.
In 1980, a year after Mridula Garg’s Hindi-language novel Chittacobra was published, two policemen appeared at her door at night to arrest her under sections 292, 293, and 294 of the Indian Penal Code, commonly referred to as the Act of Obscenity. The case was built around a scene of just two pages that described Manu, the novel’s protagonist, having sex with her husband Mahesh, whom she no longer loves.
On a trip many years ago to New Delhi, I was struck by an official memorial to Subhas Chandra Bose, the wartime leader of the Indian National Army, the Japan-affiliated force of Indians who fought against the British during the Second World War. India, of course, has a more complex view of the fight against Japan than other countries involved in the War—with these soldiers being contentious, debated and, at times, celebrated.
In these ten stories, selected by translator Kavita Bhanot, Anjali Kajal examines the lives of women across two generations of, mainly, mothers and daughters, set in current-era Northern India. No one who has lived in the region will be surprised at the unfortunate incidents portrayed in these stories: harassment of females by men on the streets, in homes and in workplaces is “normal” and overlooked. Her stories, told in an unembellished style, and largely kept in the original cadence by the translator, are hard-hitting because they reflect daily real-life incidents and trends.
We are often told that the trend toward globalization is unstoppable, but then some event occurs—whether it is the war in Ukraine or Brexit—that reminds us of the power of nationalism; the emotional attachment that citizens have to their land and people. That power, that emotional attachment, jumps off every page of The War Diary of Asha-san, written by a young Indian nationalist in the midst of the Second World War.
Satya Vyas’s 2015 bestselling campus novel Banaras Talkies—telling the stories of three undergraduate friends who have just started law school—has recently been translated into English by Himadri Agarwal and is full of humor, wit, and undergraduate antics.