Remembering ‘Got Japan’: This book dissects upper-caste life in Himalayan towns in colonised India

In 1906, a young Brahmin named Bholadutt Pande decided to travel to Japan and the United States to seek better educational opportunities than were available to him in British India. He was the first from his community of elite Almora Brahmins to make a journey crossing the seas, at least in recent memory. His return to Almora in 1910 sparked a huge controversy. Overseas travel was regarded as taboo for caste-Hindus. It was impossible, some Hindus argued, to sustain the required levels of ritual purity – an essential component of caste – through a long sea voyage and an extended sojourn abroad. So Bholadutt’s return polarised the community.

Several families in Almora bore the brunt of the controversy created by Pande’s travel overseas. With such virulence did the debate on his return escalate that it created a huge schism among clans. The divisions were pretty serious – inter-family and even intra-family. Daughters could not meet mothers on account of their opposing views of the affair, fathers refused to eat with their sons, uncles ostracised nephews, brothers refused to talk to brothers – all on account of a difference of opinion on what Bholadutt Pande’s status should be. I rely primarily on a...

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