Against every official definition of 'Indianness'

This Land We Call Home: The Story of a Family, Caste, Conversions and Modern India: By Nusrat F. Jafri, Penguin Random House India, 220 pages, ₹699.

- Taran N. Khan

The work of memoir is to move from the personal to the particular, to make sense of anecdotes and experiences in a way that appeals to the world. Nusrat F. 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. She takes in swathes of India's history, from the late 1800s to 2019. 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. "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". After a fire destroys their home and livestock in the Rajputana region, the couple convert to Methodism and move to Bareilly. While their conversion opens 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.