With a claim on Calcutta as an activist, writer, painter, and preserver of Jewish culture, author Jael Silliman is a Bengali at heart. Born and brought up in the city and away for a few decades pursuing her studies and career, her trajectory brought her right back to Calcutta. Silliman lives with her mother Flower, 94, but divides her time with her four-year-old grandson, Vivaan, who lives in Goa.
Silliman was a tenured professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Iowa and a program officer at the Ford Foundation in New York. She has written extensively about the minority communities of Calcutta, especially the Jewish community.
The title of her latest book, Shalome Rides a Royal Elephant — The Story of the First Jews of Calcutta, spells out loud and clear what it is about. Shalome Ha Cohen was the first Jewish businessman and settler in Calcutta who arrived from Syria in 1792. That is where the story takes off from.
Silliman writes both fiction, non-fiction and articles for dailies and magazines. Her books on Calcutta include Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women’s Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope, The Man with Many Hats, The Teak Almirah, Where Gods Reside: The Sacred Places of Kolkata, and Adda! The College Street Coffee House.
She has dedicated Shalome... to her grandson Vivaan since he loves animals. Silliman talks to t2 about her work. Excerpts.
Your historical novel, Shalome Rides a Royal Elephant — The Story of the First Jews of Calcutta, the story of the first Jewish settlers in Calcutta, from the very first page is a persuasive and beautiful narrative that is a fable, a melange of personal history with national history, and a biography that is inimitable in style and content. Can you speak about how you conceptualised and curated this story?
I had always known about my ancestor’s diary that was written in Judaeo Arabic and had been summarised in texts about the Calcutta Jewish community. I had never seen the diary but a few years ago, my brother trying to track it down saw a version in microfiche. Rereading the summary, I thought it would make a wonderful tale and decided to write it for children as it would allow me to play imaginatively with the narrative while keeping the history in place.
In your assessment, why do you think it would appeal to both children and adults? Did you consciously have to think of the monkey Chanchal as a narrator? Why a monkey? And how is your monkey able to communicate with/ without language?
I always wrote it with an audience of children and adults in my mind. The tale of Shalome, the first Jewish settler in Calcutta who came from Syria in 1792, is a wonderfully colourful one which is, at once, rich in history. By having the tale told by a monkey I thought I could capture the imagination of children without taking away from the historical record. When I started to write it I used humour to keep the interest of adult readers and thus make the story multi-layered.
Lewis Carroll’s white rabbit in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Vikram Chandra’s monkey in Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Rushdie with parrots in Victory City... any inspirations?
I can’t say I deliberately looked at these books in the development of Chanchal’s character. By the end of writing the story, to my surprise, Chanchal came to have a personality of his own and was as important as Shalome in this telling.
Tell us about the research you conducted to retrace the footsteps of your first ancestor in Calcutta; 1792 was a long long time ago. Did you find any other documents or material objects that have been passed down?
I am trained in history and development studies and was a professor of Women’s Studies. Over the last decade, on my return to Calcutta, I have taken a deep dive into Calcutta’s Jewish history and this historical record is detailed in my non-fiction books, Jewish Portraits, and Indian Frames: Women’s Narratives From a Diaspora of Hope. I did not have to do any new research in telling this tale, but I did have to do some research on Calcutta’s early history to make sure that the setting of the tale was accurate.
You have written two earlier novels. What was the reason you felt you had to write this book?
The Man with Many Hats and The Teak Almirah are both novels that draw on my experience of growing up Jewish in Calcutta and speak to the unravelling of my community’s two-century history in the city. I was fascinated with Shalome’s diary and thought I could bring it to life and do so in a very colourful way. Like my other books, it is deeply personal but is different as it is a story about the formation of the community.
The story of Shalome is mostly about male rulers, dominating and masculinist. That is quite a strong thread through the story. Is the Jewish community still a patriarchal one in the diaspora and in Israel? Or different?
This story does focus on the trajectory of Shalome arriving as a trader to seek commercial opportunities in a new land. In most communities, because of the structures of patriarchy and masculine privilege, men are most free to chart new territories for trade and expansion but knew when it comes to building community this is a far more complex narrative. Women always play key roles in developing family and community, and are the bearers of tradition. I have explored the critical roles women play in community formation and as carriers of memory especially in Jewish Portraits that traces the story of the community through four generations of women in my family. This book, Shalome..., represents another dimension, a counterpoint to my other writings on the community.
What were the most surprising elements that emerged as you began to write the story?
As the story is based on the diary of Shalome, the surprise for me is how, by using Chanchal to narrate the tale, I could conjure a magical world where animals can emerge as significant characters that enrich the story immensely.
Tell us about growing up with your mother, one of the best teachers of home science, whose qualities influenced you. Where do you feel you belong? You were a professor in the US, then returned to Calcutta. How do you feel being here in India now with your grandson in Goa and 94-year-old mother in Calcutta?
Mine was a fun-filled and colourful childhood. I was the middle child in a family of five. Both my parents seemed larger than life, and our home was filled with friends and relatives. Though I left home at 16, I always longed to be back in Calcutta, which remained “home” for me. After spending 30 years abroad I returned to a Calcutta that I felt an essential part of me never left. Returning in 2009 was seamless and I have come to know a Calcutta that is so much richer than the one I knew as a child. Learning more about my community, my interest in issues of heritage, have made me appreciate Calcutta even more. I love my life here.
The friends you made here for life, your marriage, then you chose to be a single woman. Tell us about your life.
I have been single since 2003 and have enjoyed living life on my own terms.
I am very close to both my daughters, and my grandson who is now four years old and to whom the book is dedicated, is the love of my life. My mother has lived with me for more than three decades and is now 94. I am still blessed with many friends. So, while I am single I am embedded in family without the responsibilities and the inevitable compromises of married life.
Why is this book, Shalome..., important to you, to the Jewish diaspora and homeland?
I think that the Jewish story is still largely seen as a European Jewish story. The story of the Jews who did live for thousands of years in the Middle East is much less known. The story of what I call Jewish Asia is a fascinating one that I have explored and shared in my writing. The story of Shalome is an important one and I am glad to tell it in an imaginative and fun tale.
At a very contested and embattled time with the bombing of Gaza by Israel, how do you see the timing for the release of this book?
As a Jew with deep roots in the Middle East, as a feminist, a human rights advocate and as a mother and grandmother, I am deeply saddened by the events unfolding in Israel and Gaza. Shalome, the protagonist of my narrative, was an Arab Jew who was deeply comfortable with and assimilated in Arab culture. His diary was written in Judaeo Arabic. Jews have lived in the Middle East for thousands of years. I have to believe that we can continue to live together in peace with dignity and security for both Jews and Palestinians. It will be difficult to build a lasting peace, but I believe that a two-state solution will be negotiated. This is the only way for both Jews and Palestinians to thrive living in peace, security and with dignity.
The illustrations are all by you. Please tell us about that process.
My initial plan was to have the very famous artist, Siona Benjamin, a Bene Israeli who lives in New York and has illustrated other children’s books, to be the illustrator for this book. Though we tried to find a publisher for this endeavour, we were not successful. Since I have been painting these last six years, I went out on a limb and decided to do the illustrations. I hope the readers will appreciate the 16 full-size illustrations I painted for the book.
Julie Banerjee Mehta is the author of Dance of Life, and co-author of the bestselling biography Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen. She has a PhD in English and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, where she taught World Literature and Postcolonial Literature for many years. She currently lives in Calcutta and teaches Masters English at Loreto College
