A Place Within: Rediscovering India
by M.G. Vassanji
Toronto: Doubleday, 2008, ISBN 9780385661782, 423 pp., $21 paper.

The famous phrase, "You can't go home again," is never truer than when referring to people whose ancestors have settled in another place and who return to the ancestral homeland seeking their roots. In M.G. Vassanji's case, the process of immigration beginning with his grandparents, who first left India for Africa, was further compounded by his immigration to Canada.

M.G. Vassanji won the inaugural Giller Prize for The Book of Secrets, the Commonwealth Prize for The Gunny Sack and captured the coveted Giller again for The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. He has written four other acclaimed novels and two collections of short stories. A Place Within, a departure from both these forms, is a fine assimilation of travel, history, spiritual quest and a search for home.

Like Vassanji, I, too have made the trek back to India, to the land of my ancestors, three generations removed from India, and so the book held special meaning for me. It enabled me to recapture, if only vicariously, the joys of this land, on the one hand fascinating and beautiful, on the other, difficult and frustrating to the Westerner used to efficiency and organization in public spheres. Over the vast land, from the crowded cities to the idyllic villages on the coast of Kerala, from the towering Himalayas through the dusty plains, from the mosques, temples, churches, forts and ruins, still hangs the gruelling poverty, in spite of the recent gains the country has made.

The book's first chapters on Delhi, that historic, conquered, ravaged city, an open temptation over the centuries to marauding armies from the north and west, finally the seat of government of the British Raj, are exciting and fascinating. Some famous names in history emerge: Tamburlaine (Timor), Babur, Genghis Khan, Akbar, Shah Johan. Old Delhi, an entirely different city from New Delhi, the city the British created in 1912, is brilliantly described in a chapter entitled "City of the poets: Old Delhi."

The chapters on Shimla, formerly called Smile, contrast sharply with accounts of travel in the crowded cities of the plains. The hill town of Shimla was where Nehru, Gandhi other Indian leaders and the British Viceroy met to finalize plans for Indian Independence. The former Vice-Regal residence, now The Indian Institute of Advanced Study, is where the author spent some months writing this book. He was housed in the Postmaster's Flat, a poorly heated, inadequately outfitted building. Shimla in the western Himalayas was once the summer capital of the British Raj, where its breathtaking scenery and cool mountain temperatures provided a welcome break from the summer heat of the plains. In two chapters in the book, the writer searches for the ancestral past, in Amritsar, the home of his wife's grandparents, and later for his own family's village in Gujarat. He ties in these visits with the relevant history, which, as in so many parts of India, is bathed in blood.

One of the themes Vassanji returns to time and again in this book is that of the ever-present Hindu-Moslem tension and rioting. He sees how the past is still affecting India today. The Moslem invaders systematically destroyed Hindu Temples and imposed their faith and language on the populace, and so many centuries later, this has not been forgotten. Vassanji, however, shrinks from the many bloodbaths and riots he witnessed while in India. He resists the terms Hindu and Moslem. This is not a recently acquired Western ideology. The Koja community, into which he was born, was a blend of Hinduism and Islam.

Meticulously researched, written with sensitivity and empathy, A Place Within pulses with the long history of the sub-continent, while painting a picture of contemporary life.

Madeline Coopsammy is a Winnipeg poet and fiction writer.

Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.

Back to Reviews Index