Aditi Sharma chats with filmmaker and author Sadia Shepard who followed the story of her Indian Jewish grandmother who eloped with her Muslim grandfather, to document the Bene Israel, a shrinking community of Jews that believes it was shipwrecked in India 2,000 years ago
Aditi Sharma chats with filmmaker and author Sadia Shepard who followed the story of her Indian Jewish grandmother who eloped with her Muslim grandfather, to document the Bene Israel, a shrinking community of Jews that believes it was shipwrecked in India 2,000 years ago
Sadia Shepard gives credit to the watchman at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, for inspiring the title of her first book, The Girl From Foreign. It was the identity that the watchman gave Sadia, on her first day on campus, while she was here on a Fulbright scholarship to work on a documentary on the Bene Israeli community.
The Girl From Foreign is an autobiographical account that spans Sadia's journey from her home in Boston, Massachusetts, where she lived with her Christian father, Muslim mother and Jewish grandmother, to the Konkan belt of Maharashtra, where the Bene Israelis are believed to have first landed after fleeing persecution.
It is also, all the while about Sadia's self-discovery while she tries to make sense of her complex cultural legacy.u00a0
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The book is a result of a promise made to her maternal grandmother Rahat, nee Rachel Jacobs, who eloped with, married and moved to Pakistan with a Muslim businessman but never forgot her Bene Israeli roots. Though the book spawned out of Sadia's documentary on the Bene Israelis, it all began when the inquisitive 13 year-old stumbled on a velvet box that held a pin with the name "Rachel Jacobs". "Who is Rachel Jacobs?" Sadia asked her nana, to discover that she wasn't a Pakistani Muslim like her mother, but a Bene Israeli Jew from pre-partition India.
The subject of your book is fascinating. When did you decide that it needed a book of its own?
I arrived in Mumbai in 2001 to fulfill a promise I made to my maternal grandmother, my nani, that I would go back to discover my Indian and Pakistani roots. Then, I was here to work on a film on the Bene Israeli community, not to write a book. During the filming process, I started writing down my experiences in the city and with the community in notebooks, and by the time I got back to New York, I had a suitcase full of notebooks. So, I had the material for the book right there.
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How was it dealing with the autobiographical nature of the book, to reveal intimate details to the unknown reader?
(Laughs) Quite frankly I wasn't expecting so many people to be interested in my book. I thought people who know me would pick it up.
For an author who is multiply exiled, where do think you belong?
I wouldn't call myself an NRI because that's not who I am. But all through my growing years, I've been around a mother who was homesick for Pakistan and a grandmother who was homesick for Mumbai. So, even though I grew up in Boston, Mumbai and Pakistan became a part of my identity. Right now, I'd say Mumbai is my adopted second home.
Do you find audiences more inquisitive about your documentary on the Bene Israelis?
Yes, readers and audiences are asking more questions about the community after reading the book and watching the film. What they find most fascinating is that the Bene Israeli community in India amalgamated so well with the rest of society. They almost completely escaped anti-semitism. And that's essentially because India is less a country, and more a federation of micro cultures.
Excerpt from The Girl From Foreign
The stories my grandmother told me are outlines, marks in black ink on a page, the salient details. Everything Nana told me about her life was a remnant, a piece of a phrase. Whenever Nana told me stories I badgered her for details, as many as I could think to ask. I worried that some day, when I needed to tell these stories to explain who I am, I would wonder about the color of the dress she wore in a certain black and white photo and she would no longer be alive to tell me. The sum total of what I could imagine about India was contained in my grandmother's brown vinyl album, hundreds of tiny prints with scalloped edges. What comes in between these details is my own invention; it's the shape and shade that is the work of a grandchild to embroider. I've spent years trying to paint the colors in.
A Fulbright Scholarship allowed me to quit my job, put my belongings in storage, and buy a one-way ticket to India. Now that I'm here, the possibilities are dizzying. I look at the new stamp in my passport, trace the embossed letters with my fingertips, curious about what the next year will bring. In the upper left hand corner of my visa is an R, for Research. So much of what I want to know about my grandmother and my ancestors is a mystery, a well-guarded secret. I am here as an amateur detective on that most American of journeys: a search for the roots of my own particular tree. This is a reverse migration. I have returned to the land that nurtured my grandmother and my mother, to walk where they walked, to make my own map within their maps.
Order the film's DVD
In Search of the Bene Israel follows a group of 3,500 Jews in and around Mumbai who believe that they were shipwrecked in India 2,000 years ago and are in the process of a community-wide migration to Israel. The documentary tracks a Jewish Indian filmmaker working in Bollywood, a family who takes care of a rural synagogue, and a young couple on the eve of their marriage and departure for Israel.
To order the DVD, log onto www.neoflix.com/store/SQM66
Sadia'su00a0 documentaries have been shown at Sundance, IFP/West Los Angeles, Full Frame, New York Jewish
Film Festival, and on the Sundance Channel
The Girl from Foreign: A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Forgotten Histories and a Sense of Home, published by The Penguin Press is available at all major bookstores across the city.
For: Rs 450
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