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ABSTRACT
This article is a study of the autobiography of Nanji Kalidas Mehta (1887-1969), a Gujarati entrepreneur who arrived in East Africa as a young boy and retired in his old age as the founder of a major multinational conglomerate, the Mehta Group of Companies. I locate in his autobiography one of the mythological charters of the Indian presence in Africa-that of commerce as romance. My reading highlights Mehta's self-fashioning not only as a man of commerce, but also as a man of literature, an avid traveler, an engaged nationalist, a devout Hindu, and a committed philanthropist. In tracing some of these priorities of his life, I seek to ask what they also say about his attitudes towards African modernity, religious tolerance, spaces of domesticity, and the role of women in society. A closer look at lives such as those of Mehta's, I suggest, may allow for a more nuanced understanding of the larger Indian Ocean provenance of commercial modernity in East Africa than that rendered by traditional accounts that focus solely on British colonial enterprise.
Born in 1888 in the village of Gorana, Gujarat, Nanji Kalidas Mehta was raised in a family that ran a grocery shop, engaged in money-lending, and bought, ginned, and sold cotton in the nearby town of Porbander (Mehta 6). Schooled until the age of eleven, completing the fourth form education that was the highest available to him in the village, Nanji apprenticed in his father's shop-measuring cloth, weighing articles for sale, and delivering them to customers. Mehta's uncle Gokaldas had already established himself as a trader in Zanzibar, and having returned to India after his five-year sojourn had later sailed to Madagascar, first to work under a Bohra trader and then to start his own business. Having taken his sons with him to Madagascar, Gokaldas later summoned Mehta's elder brother Gorkhandas and some of the other cousins in the household (17). Impatient with being left behind, "something invincible in me heard the call of the sea and I was mentally ready to go abroad," writes Mehta, marking the onset of a long-lasting love of the sea and travel as a whole: "The sea had a great hold upon my imagination and I watched it with peculiar emotion that...