A tale of two Mohans: Missed opportunities in a meandering narrative

The back cover of The Other Mohan in Britain's Indian Ocean Empire calls it part travelogue, part family history, and scholarly. This reviewer disagrees

The Other Mohan in Britain’s Indian Ocean Empire

Author: Amrita Shah

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: xxiv+412

Price: Rs 699

  This is a difficult work to describe, leave alone classify. Take the title.  It suggests that the author’s great-grandfather (the titular character) had possibly a consequence comparable to that of the Mohan, Mahatma Gandhi, as far as the British Empire was concerned. It doesn’t take the reader long to discover the presumptuousness of it, since Mohanlal Killawala was nothing of that ilk; he was a mere blip in the Empire in the Indian Ocean and does not merit even a footnote.

 

For the record, the said