Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women’s Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope

An invaluable cultural document shaped from a personal exploration, through the lives of four generations of Baghdadi Jewish women, of a social and cultural history of Baghdadi Jews in Calcutta, India. The author discovers, through the lives of her foremothers, how, despite being widely dispersed across Asia, they ‘dwelled in travelling’, creating a moving geography of Baghdadi Jewish culture. We see how they negotiate multiple identities, including that of emergent Indian nationalism, and how they perceive and shape their Jewishness and their gender in response to changing cultural and political contexts. This book also traces the trajectory of a Jewish presence in one of the most hospitable cities of the diaspora. These rich family portraits convey a sense of the singular roles women played in building and sustaining a complex diaspora in what Silliman calls ‘Jewish Asia’ over the past 150 years. Her sketches of the everyday lives of her foremothers—from the social and political relationships they forged to the food they ate and the clothes they wore—bring to life a community and a culture, even as they disclose the unexpected and subtle complexities of the colonial encounter as experienced by Jewish women.