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Nusrat F. Jafri's 'This Land We Call Home' defies every official definition of ‘Indiannness’
Summary
Nusrat F. Jafri's ‘This Land We Call Home’ is a memoir of a multi-religious family and its journey through 200 years of Indian history
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. For the author, the process that unfolds after each such change is as important to engage with as the act itself.“Conversions take time, even when freedom can be granted overnight", she notes. This idea of choice, especially as exercised by the women in her family, is a powerful theme she returns to throughout the book.
Among the most captivating passages are those detailing her grandmother’s siblings, the “daughters of Hardayal". Her grandmother Prudence was the youngest of the seven sisters to train as a nurse in Delhi’s St Stephen’s Medical College. Their time living in hostels, and earning their own living, gave these women a power and flair that was unusual for their time. They sent tins of high-quality ghee to their father, rode their bicycles to work and wore brocade blouses with their expensive saris, offset with jewellery that they bought for themselves, or gifted each other. In their overlapping lives, Jafri maps a nuanced depiction of sisterhood as well as rivalry. Prudence falls out with her siblings after eloping with John, who was initially her elder sister’s friend. While the rift heals over the years—partly because the marriage is marred by John’s alcoholism—it persists in cruel ways. For instance, Prudence is not told about Hardayal’s passing by her sisters, finding out only when she goes to visit him months after his death.
Jafri’s mother Meera’s love story follows, detailing her attachment to Abid, her young physics tutor. Abid shyly declares his affections through an Urdu couplet slipped into a gift—a second-hand copy of Maxim Gorky’s Mother. Their marriage is met with a blend of hostility and acceptance. While Prudence offers quiet support, Meera’s favourite aunt responds to her news by planting a stinging slap to her face.
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At times, the memoir is lyrical, blending the threads of these actions and their consequences with a poetic attention to detail. Jafri’s background as a cinematographer is borne out in her honing into images. For example, a moment when Abid runs into Prudence, his future mother-in-law, at a tea-stall, and cheekily asks her for a light. Or in her portrait of Hardayal’s love for his livestock, that he cares for despite his deteriorating health. Each afternoon he would take his “long hardcover register with the handwritten names of each goat" and call them for their feed. “(W)ith utmost adherence each goat would step forward on hearing its name to take its share of leaves from his hand."
These anecdotes appear alongside passages on India’s historical transformations and events—a structural choice that can make the book feel overburdened. Jafri’s voice, at its most powerful when describing her family and her own reflections on their lives, veers between the journalistic and the academic where she attempts to weave in multiple threads to her memoir. Passages on her aunt’s lives are interspersed with the history of places and institutions, and her research on the Bhantu tribe is presented along with insights from scholars. It is not unusual for memoirs to mine such material for background and insights. However, in Jafri’s case, it feels disconnected from the journey of the characters, failing to add to our understanding of their inner lives.
Similarly, her sense of respect and regard towards the stories of her forebears comes at the cost of narrative fidelity, making her sound stilted and repetitive in places. “Over the years, I have come to recognize that growing up in a multicultural household is indeed a privileged experience," she writes. A few pages later, she echoes, “I consider it nothing short of a privilege that during my upbringing, I was unaware of the fact that Muslims in India also follow a caste system influenced by Hindu society." At times I wished for the author to be more trusting of the stories she holds so dear, and to let them present their own nuances. As such, she feels compelled to spell out what they mean.
The book ends with Jafri’s own life, growing up with six siblings and facing jibes about stereotypical large Muslim families. She was deemed “not Muslim enough" by her paternal cousins and not “adequately Christian" by her maternal family. Eventually, she reconciled such labels by embracing the diversity that shaped her home. Her moving description of her father’s death encapsulates this acceptance. Since the day he passed away while preparing to offer his prayers, she writes, her mother completes them on his behalf. “There is no Islamic custom or tradition that dictates this daily ritual. This is pure devotion to fulfil his last intent, his last incomplete task. If this is not true love, then I’m uncertain about what love truly is."
Moments like this give This Land We Call Home its power, transforming it from mere tribute to the writer's family to an argument for valuing the multiplicity that shapes our lives. It makes the case for a society where private acts of love and liberty are cherished and offers a portrait of identity that is both deeply personal and resonantly universal.
Taran N. Khan is a non-fiction writer and the author of Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul.
