SUBCONTINENTAL DRIFT
From the Bible to Homer's Odysseyto Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, the journey or quest has been a staple motif of Western literature. Mira Kamdar’s Motiba’s Tattoos (Public Affairs, pp. 283, $24), is a welcome--if unusual--addition that list.
Kamdar, born in the United States to an Indian father and a Danish-American mother, undertakes a journey into her family’s Indian past and into its rural, ethnic origins, which stand in stark contrast to the globalized, cosmopolitan lives most of her family members live today. Her goal is to learn more about her beloved grandmother, Motiba, with the intuitive understanding that her uneducated, non-English-speaking grandmother had much to teach her American granddaughter.
The result is a book that is a satisfying, if uneven, read. The first three chapters--which trace the family’s origins in a tiny Indian village located in Kathiawar; its spectacular rise and tragic fall in Rangoon, Burma; and its establishment of a beach head in America--are simply fascinating.
Combining facts, family legends, Hindu mythology and Indian history, Kamdar paints a picture of a rustic, agrarian Indian family at the turn of the 20th century, whose life is dominated by ritual, tradition and religion. As Kamdar puts it, it is a world of “the past that exists as ritual, belief, and symbol; the past that flows in the blood.”
Even more fascinating is the story of how the family built its fortune in British Rangoon and how it lost it, first during the World War II years and later, irrevocably, in post-independence Burma. According to the Kamdar family legend, Motiba’s 17-year-old uncle was riding in a bullock cart to a nearby town to drop off his mother’s silver ankle bracelets for repair. One of his fellow passengers was a man recently returned from Burma, who filled the youth’s head with the promise of a glittering city. Instead of returning home from his errand, the teenager instead headed to Rangoon to seek his fortune.
A few years later, the rest of the family followed. Like other Indian traders, they prospered but their very prosperity created resentment among the native Burmese population, which viewed the Indian mercantile class as brown-skinned representatives of British colonialism.
In harrowing detail, Kamdar writes about the Indian exodus out of Rangoon soon after the Japanese bombing of Rangoon in 1941. The lucky few, like Motiba and her children, left by ship and some took their amassed wealth with them.
Others, like Motiba’s father, waited too long and had to make the long trek to India by foot. Those who fell behind were left to die; parents abandoned children at the first signs of diarrhea for fear of contamination. Despite being products of a culture that reveres the elderly and the young, the walkers were reduced to throwing their sick children into rivers, to ensure a swift death. Out of the 450,000 men, women and children who made the journey, 50,000 to 100,000 did not survive.
After Rangoon, the family settled in Bombay, where Kamdar’s father learned about American ways from watching Hollywood movies. In 1949, he became one of the few Indians to study in America. The children of the Indian elite still mostly went to England, in those days.
Motiba's Tattoos loses its momentum when the focus shifts from Motiba to the author’s American childhood. Although it is interesting to witness an inter-racial family living suburban lives in 1950s America, Kamdar’s meditation on growing up biracial in that homogeneous time does not seem particularly unique or insightful.
Indeed, much of the chapter on America reads like a greatest hits catalog of the 1960s--the Kennedy assassination, the Cuban missile crisis, the Apollo landing on the moon (in which, Camdar’s father, an engineer, played a role). To an American reader, this chapter will feel familiar, despite the biracial narrator’s insider-outsider status. And after the mysterious, rich, unfamiliar locales of the previous chapters, it is hard to suppress a feeling of let-down.
Kamdar's constant reminders of the differences between her grandmother’s life and hers and her continual wonder at the Information Superhighway upon which so many members of her scattered family now meet, also wear thin after awhile. These passages simply do not have the power and uniqueness of those that deal with Motiba’s youth and marriage.
Motiba's Tattoos is ultimately the tale of two women, separated by personal history, geography and time. But they are bound by family ties and mutual affection and it is this bond that gives the book its power and its sweetness.
--Washington Post, Oct. 22, 2000
