Amrita SHAH

In the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, two million indentured labourers followed by traders, teachers, priests and clerks went from India to British colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. White settlers, alarmed by the proliferation and commercial success of Indians attempted to curb their advance through discriminatory legislation. In Southern Africa, the phenomenon led to a confrontation between Indians, headed by a young, migrant lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi and the British colonial authorities, a harbinger to the great freedom struggle in India.

Amrita Shah employs a personal mode of entry into this historic episode: her ancestor who went from India to Southern Africa as a lawyer’s clerk and was briefly swept up in the Gandhi-led campaign. Building upon archival material from Mauritius, South Africa, India and the UK, she recreates his journey from India in the backdrop of similar journeys and his efforts at making a home in a foreign land amidst the networks and community spaces created by his pioneering countrymen. By entering a well-known episode through the persona of a minor character, she provides a wider framing of the confrontation and sheds light on a migrant community marked by struggle against an oppressive regime but also by enterprise and opportunism.

Amrita Shah is a leading journalist and non-fiction writer in India. After graduating in English Literature from Elphinstone College, Mumbai in 1983 she wrote for various Indian and international publications including the American Time magazine and was best known for her pioneering investigative series of articles on the Mumbai underworld. She went on to edit the monthly features magazine, Debonair and launched the Indian edition of Elle as Editor in 1996. She wrote a fortnightly column on socio-political trends for the national daily, The Indian Express and was its Contributing Editor from 1999 to 2009.

She has written three books. Hype, Hypocrisy & Television in India revised and republished as Telly-Guillotined: How Television Changed India (Sage-Yoda, 2019) describes the sweeping transformation wrought by the world’s greatest media explosion. Vikram Sarabhai-A Life is a biography of a multi-faceted builder of institutions in modern India and the founder of its space programme. Ahmedabad: A City in the World (Bloomsbury, 2015) looks at India’s future through the framework of an ancient and rapidly modernizing city; it was on the short-list for the Raymond-Crossword Book Award, 2016 and won the 2017 Tejeshwar Singh Memorial Award for Excellence in Writing on the Urban from Sage.

SHAH, Amrita. Telly-Guillotined: How Television Changed India, Sage-Yoda, 2019.

SHAH, Amrita. Ahmedabad—A City in the World, Bloomsbury UK, 2015.

SHAH, Amrita. "An Ethnography of an Indian City: Ahmedabad", in The New Companion to the City, Gary Bridge & Sophie Watson, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011.

SHAH, Amrita. Vikram Sarabhai –A Life, Penguin-Viking, 2007.

SHAH, Amrita. Balancing India’s Human Resources, Report for The Economist Intelligence Unit, 1995.