The East Indian by Brinda Charry

Thursday, July 27, 2023--San Antonio

The East Indian by Brinda Charry is a novel about the first man from East India to arrive in Colonial America--at Jamestown, VA, in the 1600s.  It is not a long novel, only about 270-280 pages.  It is fiction, but the author built the story from researching multiple references of East Indians in Colonial America along with references about life in Colonial America before the slave trade started (due to the number of people coming from England being too small to meet the demands of the land owners and because slaves were harder workers than white men and were owned for the rest of their lives which made having them so much better for the landowners than having to give up the rights to indentured men and women after 7 years).  Life seems to always, no matter when in time, be about men with money trying to take advantage of men without money.  The book made me think of the factory workers of the late 1800s/early 1900s,  sharecroppers of the mid-1900s (whose lives were much like those of the the indentured men in the 1600s in this novel--designed to keep them down and bound), as well as the workers today for companies such as Starbucks, Amazon, cleaning service contractors, airport wheelchair and luggage handlers, etc., who are expected to do demanding jobs at wages that are not enough to support life.  (I've recently been explaining slow service in luggage getting to carousels at our airport this way:  When you only pay a person $11-13 per hour and expect them to handle luggage outdoors in 104 degrees every day in a state that just passed legislation that employers are not required to give water breaks, is it any wonder that they might just not show up?)  Anyway, this novel starts in India and follows the life of an East Indian male who doesn't know his father and whose mother is a "kept woman" by English colonial occupiers.  His life is ruled by circumstances.  He finds himself shipped to England.  Then he is kidnapped and put on a ship to America where he is the first East Indian to arrive there.  He is regularly misidentified as a Moor, a Turk, a Mohammedan, etc., and called such--too black to be white and not black enough to be an African.  He sold into indentured service where life is miserable.  The book continues to follow his story through various changes in life.  It's an interesting book which the BBC called one of the 16 best of the first half of 2023.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.