A Passage To India

Sadia Shepard pieces together the exotic story of her grandmother’s Jewish roots in the Bene Israel community.

Shepard’s memoir unfolds with cinematic pacing, fitting for a documentary filmmaker.

by Sandee Brawarsky
Jewish Week Book Critic

Sadia Shepard grew up in a white clapboard house outside of Boston with three parents — her Pakistani Muslim mother, her Midwestern Protestant father, and her Nana, her mother’s mother, who came from Pakistan to help raise Shepard and her younger brother.

Shepard knew that her much-beloved Nana, a widow named Rahat Siddiqi, had been the third wife of her husband, and raised her children alongside those of his other wives. And she knew that her grandmother was born in India and left Bombay for Karachi during the Partition of India in 1947. But it was only when she was 13, and ruffling through the drawers of her grandmother’s bureau, that she came across a pin with the name Rachel Jacobs inscribed on

it, and learned that Rahat had been born Rachel, that her grandmother had been part of the Bene Israel community before marrying her Muslim husband. Shepard knew enough about Jewish law to understand that she and her mother would be considered Jews.

“The Girl from Foreign: A Search for Shipwrecked Ancestors, Forgotten Histories, and a Sense of Hope” (Penguin Press) is Shepard’s memoir of piecing together her family’s tales. She has prime material for a great memoir — exotic background, colorful characters, complex relationships and a generational tradition of storytelling — and she unfolds her story in graceful prose, with cinematic pacing and abundant love.
In 2001, 15 months after Nana’s death, Shepard traveled to India on a Fulbright Scholarship to research and make a documentary film about the Bene Israel community. She was fulfilling a promise made to her grandmother near the end of her life that she would go to India and learn about her history, embarking on, she writes, that “most American of journeys: a search for the roots of my own particular tree.”

She made return trips, and altogether spent two years in India. In an interview with The Jewish Week in a Manhattan café, while taking a break from editing her documentary, she admits that it will take a lifetime to fully interpret what she has seen. The film, “In Search of the Bene Israel,” has its premiere at the San Francisco Film Festival later this month.
The book title refers to how Shepard was known by her Indian classmates, guards at the film school, local merchants and her neighbors, as though Foreign were a state or destination.

Upon arriving in Bombay, she finds the large white house by the ocean that her grandfather built for her grandmother, and that she often spoke about. This was the home where Nana lived independently, with the sound of the waves crashing and gardens alongside, before she moved to Karachi, joining the other wives and children. The grandson of the new owner takes Shepard around.

Her grandmother married secretly at age 16 to a family friend 10 years her senior, who did business with her father. For a decade, while she was living away from home as a nurse, she kept her marriage secret from her family. Her father died without knowing that his daughter was married to his Muslim friend. Her mother found out about the marriage when she became pregnant with her first child.

After her marriage, Shepard’s grandmother lived as a practicing Muslim, raising her children as Muslims, as she had promised her husband. Many years later when she is open with her granddaughter about her Jewish background, she becomes curious to explore Judaism, even joining Hadassah. Toward the end of her life, Nana worried about her decision to marry outside of her faith and wondered if she could die a Jew. Her husband had promised her a Jewish funeral. When Shepard asks her if she considers herself a Jew or a Muslim, she says that one is the religion of her forefathers, the other the religion of her children, and then repeats the understanding of the Shepard home, that “all paths lead to God.”

Shepard’s grandmother told her that their ancestors left Israel on a ship and were shipwrecked in India, south of Bombay along the Konkan Coast where they settled. Although they were cut off from the rest of the Jewish world for centuries, they observed Jewish law regarding the Sabbath, kashrut, circumcision and the prohibition against intermarriage. By the late 19th century, most of the Bene Israel moved to Bombay from small villages. At its height the community numbered more than 30,000 in pre-partition India. After 1947, members of the community began moving to Israel, and today, according to Shepard, the community in India numbers about 3,500, while in Israel there are more than 90,000 Bene Israel.

Shepard begins her project while based at a film institute in Pune, home to the largest Bene Israel community outside of Bombay. She tries to meet members of the community, including a relative, and finds that her first photographs are very stiff. In a dream, her grandmother encourages her to move to Bombay, and there she volunteers at ORT, a Jewish vocational school, as a way to integrate herself into the community.
Her first project is to direct a play about the history of the Bene Israel, which the teenagers touring Israel will present as a way of explaining themselves. She makes friends among the shy girls who can barely say their lines out loud, the more confident young men, and members of the staff who invite her to their homes to celebrate Shabbat and to community weddings. In Bombay, and in her travels to towns along the Coast, her photos become filled with life and depth. She learns that the dishes her grandmother served at home, that she used to think of as Pakistani food, like fish curry with coconut milk, were traditional recipes from the Bene Israel.

The memoir is full of lovely moments, like when the village women insist that she must wear a sari for Simchat Torah celebrations, and work to fit the tall Shepard into one of their garments. In her travels, she finds the village of her grandmother’s family, and meets the caretakers of several synagogues where few Jews remain. She enjoys the process of writing, as she’s able to capture many small moments that would have been impossible with a camera.

For the Days of Awe next month, Shepard hopes to return to Bombay. About her own religious identity, she says that she’s still working on it.

“I think about the choices my grandmother made. As I begin my own path, I think about the kind of home I will make. I was raised with tremendous respect and admiration for what came before, and I’ve had the luxury of being able to explore some of those traditions,” she says, adding that she’s deeply interested in religion as an expression of culture.

“I arrived in India on Sept. 8, 2001, and saw the world fundamentally changed from a different perspective from the one that I’m used to,” she says. “I have come to believe that in order to get beyond the idea of a clash of civilizations between East and West we must recognize that no religion — whether it be Judaism, Christianity or Islam — is a monolith. I hope that more people come forward to give voice to stories of plural and hyphenated identities, ones that encourage us to reconsider our assumptions about faith, culture, and the diversity of religious practices.”

Shepard’s memoir brings to mind last summer’s award-winning memoir, “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit,” by Lucette Lagnado, another deeply felt, poetic work about a family’s exile. In fact, Shepard’s grandfather, a man of great charm and success with three wives, would wear white sharkskin suits around Karachi.

Readers may see their own grandmothers in Nana, women of uncommon strength, wisdom and kindness who transplanted their lives and dedicated themselves to children and grandchildren. In Pakistan, Nana was very unusual for her time in encouraging her daughter to study abroad in America at age 16, and again for university, understanding that she’d have more opportunities as a woman in America.

Sadia Shepard will speak on Wednesday, Aug. 20, in the third event of a series, Jewish Week Literary Summer, along with Ariel Sabar, author of “My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for his Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq,” at 7 p.m. at Congregation Rodeph Sholom, 7 W. 83rd St., Manhattan, followed by a reception and book signing. The event is free but reservations are suggested: events@jewishweek.org.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization