Jews becoming subjects of interest in Indian fiction

By Dr. Navras Jaat Aafreedi

Navras Aafreedi
Navras Aafreedi

GREATER NOIDA, India — 2013 was an exciting year for Indian Jewish literature: two works of fiction were published, one in Hindi, the other in English. Sheela Rohekar’s Miss Samuel: Ek Yahudi Gatha (Miss Samuel: A Jewish Saga) is one of only two Hindi novels depicting Indian Jewish life, and the first Hindi novel in 52 years to explore the Bene Israel community, the largest Jewish group in India. Jael Silliman’s The Man with Many Hats, on the other hand, is the first novel by a member of the Baghdadi community, the latest Jewish settlers in India, and one of the only two novels to depict Baghdadi Jewish life there.

Considering the numerical insignificance of Jews in India (5000 out of 1.3 billion), the community has left its cultural mark on Indian society.

Bahais Joseph Talkar’s Marathi novel Gul and Sanobar (1867) is considered the first published work of literature by a Bene Israel Jew. It was soon followed by M D Talkar’s Bagh-o-Bahar. But the best known Jewish writer from India has been Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004), who wrote poetry and plays and is acknowledged as the father of modern English poetry in India. The first Indian Jew to publish a novel in English depicting the Bene Israel community was Esther David, whose The Walled City was published in 1997. Since then she has emerged as the most published Indian Jewish novelist in English, with a number of novels to her credit. Another Bene Israel author, Sophie Judah, is known for her collection of English short stories, Dropped from Heaven (2007).

Through Miss Samuel’s protagonist, Miss Seema Samuel, Rohekar looks back at the Bene Israel Jews’ existence in India. According to tradition, a ship-wreck two millennia ago brought the community to the west coast of India (official documents mentioning their existence, however, date only from the 17th century).

Jael Silliman’s The Man…, on the other hand,focuses on the Baghdadi Jewish community, and is set in post-Independence Calcutta. Baghdadis started settling in India from the 1780s onwards. Despite the fact that these Jews came from across the Middle East, colloquially they came to be known as Baghdadis.

Rohekar and Silliman transport the reader into the heart of the Indian Jewish dilemmas of homeland and belonging, and evoke the everyday condition of these communities. Despite feeling connected to India, many Jews simultaneously felt a sense of trepidation and alienation. These novels help bring nuance to this sense of Jewish difference in Indian society – it is possibly the careful and unhurried portraits of these communities that are their greatest strength.

The only Hindi novel on the Bene Israel other than Rohekar’s Miss Samuel is Meera Mahadeva’s Apna Ghar (1961), published in English in 1971 with the title Shulamith. Unlike Apna Ghar, Miss Samuel deals with the ostensible absence of anti-Semitism in India.

Indian Jewish literature deserves more attention, and this could be done by introducing it into Indian academia within the larger framework of Indo-Judaic Studies.

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Dr. Navras Jaat Aafreedi is an Indo-Judaic Studies Scholar and Muslim-Jewish Relations Activist, employed as an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities & Social Sciences, Gautam Buddha University, Greater NOIDA, India. He Can be reached at: aafreedi@gmail.com. .. This article abridges a longer article by Aafreedi that was  published by Himal Southasian.