On Wednesday 11 April 2018, the journalist and author Amrita Shah led a seminar at JIAS titled ‘A personal journey into history’. This was the fifth in the 2018 JIAS Writing Fellows Seminar Series.

Background

‘As a child growing up in India, I was fascinated by the knowledge that my great-grandfather had travelled to South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century. Why had he gone there? Who was the woman he met along the way, who gave birth to my grandmother? And did he know Gandhi? My search for answers to these questions have led me to archives across South Africa, Mauritius, the United Kingdom and India, and revealed to me an alternative view of the past.’