GREATER NOIDA, INDIA — The release of the only work of fiction by a member of Kolkata’s Baghdadi Jewish community on June 19, 2013, was momentous. Kolkata’s Jewish community was the last to arrive in India and the first to depart, but the Baghdadis made substantial contributions to the city’s cultural and commercial life during their time there.
As “definitions of who is and who is not an Indian are becoming increasingly politicized, place identities are being essentialized, and secular forces are increasingly challenged,” Jael Silliman’s novel The Man with Many Hats becomes even more important. Minority narratives, such as this one, play an important role in this political climate. While working as a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Iowa, Silliman wrote in her book Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women’s Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope (2001) that “they resist efforts to communalize India’s past and present and contrast sharply with contemporary histories in India today that are being rewritten to serve communal politics.”
Jael researched the history of three generations of her Jewish female ancestors in Calcutta in her nonfiction book Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames. In fiction, The Man with Many Hats tackles comparable territory, primarily through the perspective of Rachel, the heroine. As Shashi Tharoor points out in his foreword to the work, the novel provides an in-depth look into Jewish and Bengali rituals, a tactile tour of Calcutta in all its splendor, and an evocation of what can be called “cross-cultural encounters” in non-fiction.
Source: https://www.sdjewishworld.com/2013/08/16/baghdadi-jew-from-kolkata-india-publishes-first-novel/
