Commerce as Romance
Nanji Kalidas Mehta's Dream Half-Expressed
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9250341 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Desai Desai (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 42 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 147 |
| Publication date | 2011-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Research in African Literatures (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044 |
| Publisher | Indiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2979/reseafrilite.42.3.147 |
| OpenAlex | W2948313085 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 7 |
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
Art · Art history · Biography · Communalism · Dream · Hinduism · Literature · Modernity · Mythology · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Romance · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious studies
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,22 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2018 (2) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |