Nusrat F. Jafri's 'This Land We Call Home' defies every official definition of ‘Indiannness’
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The work of memoir is to move from the personal to the particular, to make sense of anecdotes and experiences in a way that makes sense of the world.Nusrat Jafri’s This Land We Call Home attempts this not with her life alone but with the collective story of her family, going through transformations of faith, caste and class. In her telling, she takes in wide swathes of India’s history, from the late 1800s to 2019.
But where she achieves resonance is in moments of intimate observation. Love is at the heart of the book: the author’s love for the people we encounter, and the ‘land’ they create for her. The image comes up early in the writing, from the title onward, tying the stories together.
“I come to realize that in the India of today, I may be called upon to prove my ‘Indianness’ to a detached government official," she writes. “Carrying this amalgamation of cultural and religious heritage within my veins, I wouldn’t know where to start." The book unfolds chronologically, beginning with the story of her maternal great-grandparents, Hardayal and Kalyani Singh. The couple belongs to the Bhantu tribe, one of the 150 tribes notified by the colonial government as ‘criminal’.
Facing the aftermath of a fire that destroys their home and livestock in the Rajputana region, the couple convert to Methodism and move to the town of Bareilly. While their conversion opens new opportunities—most notably, education for their daughters—other caste-based divisions are left intact. Later, Jafri’s grandmother converts to Catholicism, and her mother to Islam.
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