This Land We Call Home’ is Nusrat F Jafri’s ode to India and the complex permutations and shared heritage that defines India.

A memoir, the book chronicles her personal story and the history of four generations of her family as India moved from British Raj to a nation of multitudes it is today. Released in April 2024, it explores this complex trajectory of family history through the lenses of caste, conversion, and the formation of modern India.

Jafri’s book, her first, is also one of the only non-fiction books that delves into the life of what were colloquially referred to as criminal tribes of India (now called denotified tribes in official parlance)—the people who are assumed to be criminals or habitual offenders.

They were situated outside the Hindu caste system and thus were considered by upper castes as impure. Once a tribe became ‘notified’ as a criminal, all its male members were required to register with the local magistrate—the onus was on them to prove to the state that they were not criminals. In 1959, India changed these laws to bring the Habitual Offenders Act, but far from easing their lives, new laws such as this only furthered the stigma for the people who come from these marginalised tribes.

Jafri’s maternal grandparents were from one such tribe in Rajasthan, the Bhantus. After facing persecution there, they came to Uttar Pradesh and became Christians, leaving behind a religious system that kept them bound in chains of caste. Two generations later, Nusrat’s mother, Meera, met Abid Ali Jafri, through a physics tuition class and fell in love. Even though her devout Christian family was mostly against it, she decided to marry with a man who was a Shia Muslim. Jafri herself is married to Sumit Roy, a Bombay-based screenwriter, a Bengali Hindu. The couple have named their son, Dylan Jafri Roy, because both of them are fans of Bob Dylan.




Sources - https://article-14.com/post/-conversion-was-my-great-grandfather-s-act-of-defiance-nothing-short-of-a-rebirth--66bef38ceba94