Jain Spirit 2003 06 No 15

Author(s): Jain Spirit UK
Publisher: UK Young Jains

Page 39

THE GREAT MIGRATION BEGINS
way up the side. She wore heavy chains of gold around her neck, multiple bangles of gold and coloured glass on each arm, heavy sculpted silver kaambis around her ankles, and silver rings on several toes. On the left side of her nose, she wore a nose ring. A married woman should be so ornamented. To be bereft of any of these ornaments was akin to being naked-or poor - in any case, not attired in a manner consistent with one's station in life.
Jakalben's kaambis needed to be repaired, so she sent her seventeen-year-old son, Motiba's uncle Premchand, to Amreli (the nearest town), to have them fixed by a jeweller known to the family. Premchandbhai left by bullock cart, hitching a ride with someone going into town. He was to deliver the broken kaambis, stay the night at a relative's house, and return with the repaired kaambis the next day. Not a difficult mission for a seventeen-year-old. But Premchandbhai didn't return the next day. In fact, it would be over a year before they heard from him again, and several years after that before he returned to Gokhlana.
On the way to Amreli, Premchandbhai Khara made an encounter of the sort that one is likely to make when travelling alone for the first time. He met a man who had recently returned from Burma. During the hours they travelled together, bouncing along the dirt track behind a team of plodding bullocks, this stranger told Premchandbhai the most amazing things. Burma was a land of unimaginable opportunity, a place of easy living where great riches were just waiting to be made. Young Premchandbhai drunk all this in: the exoticism, the temptation of wealth, the boundless opportunity. By the time they reached Amreli, he made a shocking and fateful decision. He would sell his mother's kaambis. So what if Jakalben had to walk about with naked ankles like the poorest of beggar women, this was the chance of a lifetime. He would sell the kaambis and use the money to get himself to Burma.
Premchandbhai had never been on a train before in his life. He had as yet had no contact with the world outside his village, a world of empire crisscrossed and connected by the steel rails of the British Indian Railway. But fearless in the way only a teenager can be, he sold Jakalben's kaambis and bought a train ticket for Calcutta, the nearest to Burma the railway could take him. When Premchandbhai Khara stepped onto the train, he stepped into the world of nineteenth-century British imperial India. It was a fateful step, one that would eventually take him and his entire family into the twentieth century and the wide world.
To young Premchandbhai, a village boy wholly innocent of the modern age, the three days between Amreli and Calcutta went by in a flash. Giddy with the sheer gumption of his grand adventure, he felt as if he was whizzing across the vast Indian subcontinent. One day he was sitting on a bullock cart on a dirt path in Gokhlana. A mere seventy-two hours later, he was standing on the banks of the mighty Houghly in the British imperial capital of Calcutta. There, with the last of his money, he bought a one-way, steerage-class ticket for steamship passage to Akyab, on the Arakan coast of Burma.
When he reached Akyab, he hadn't a single rupee left to his
name. He headed for the local Jain boarding house, where he was granted free room and board until such time as he could find a job and get himself on his feet. By the time Premchandbhai arrived in Akyab in 1900, Indians had been pouring into Burma in search of economic opportunity for fifty years. Each community - the Chettiar moneylenders from South India, the Gujarati traders, the Bengalis - took care of its own. At the Jain boarding house, Premchandbhai found home-style vegetarian cooking and people who spoke his language, who shared his religious beliefs, and who were full of advice on starting a new life in Burma.
Within a few days, he found a job. It was a modest one. He was to help out in the shop of a fellow Kathiawari who sold kitchen utensils imported from India. The shopkeeper was a Muslim and therefore a non-vegetarian, SO Premchandbhai continued on at the Jain boarding house. Then, within the year, the shopkeeper died. This was a tragedy for his wife and children, but a stroke of good fortune for Premchandbhai. The Muslim merchant's wife had never been involved in the business and since she respected the requirements of purda, couldn't consider taking up work that would expose her to the public gaze. She begged Premchandbhai to take over the shop. He accepted. For the first time since leaving Gokhlana, he wrote home, informing his family - to everyone's astonishment that he was alive and well and in possession of a profitable business in Burma. Couldn't they send over his brother Muljibhai? He could use the help, and there was money to be made. They sent Muljibhai, Motiba's father, my great-grandfather.
I heard this fantastic story of her family's start on the road to riches directly from Motiba. Khara family members have confirmed it, though there are some who are vague about the details or even totally unaware of how the dots between Gokhlana and Burma were ever connected. In any case, a different truth, if there is one, has long vanished. All that remains is memory, myth, and legend. And even if another, truer story could be discovered, it is by telling its very own rag-to-riches tale that the Khara family created an identity and gave the inchoate flow of its members collective experience meaning and history. After all, the Rajput kings boast of a genealogy tracing their origin to the sun. If kings can be spawned by the sun, then merchants can be enriched by daring young men taking the bit of history in their teeth. Whether or not it is true, Motiba's version of the Khara family's ascent to riches is a great story.
Mira Kamdar is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute. The above is extracted from her book Motiba's Tattoos available from amazon.com
June - August 2003 • Jain Spirit
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Jain Education Interational 2010_03