Mohan’s fascinating narrative begins with indentured labour from Bihar in the 1860s in the cargo holds of ships looping all the way from Calcutta via the African Cape to the West Indies. There was, we learn early in the novel, a place at the back of these ships where women were sequestered.
It is the life-voyages of these women, recounted by the 110-year-old Deeda and diligently tape-recorded by the young linguist studying Trinidad Bhojpuri, that shape this book, intertwining sinuously with her own first-person account.
It may, in this sense, be a stretch to call this work a novel. Rather, in trendy postcolonialese, it is what’s known as "auto-ethnography", a hybrid genre where the author’s fictionalised biography intimately mirrors the story of her community. In Jahajin, Mohan has produced an example of this genre with the compelling ring of truth,not only because her linguist’s hand transcribes with finesse the cadencesof Bhojpuri folk tales, of local creole, and even, in passing, a Scots accent,but because when some stories run their course, it’s not only the tellerwho is freed.
