Women as an invisible constituency: a gendered reading of the life narratives of Nanji Kalidas Mehta and Muljibhai Madhvani

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper attempts a close reading of the life narratives of two select male Gujarati entrepreneurs – Nanji Kalidas Mehta and Muljibhai Madhvani. Their biographies offer a detailed account of voyages made by them to East Africa, their spirit of exploration and enterprise, and the formidable business empires that they painstakingly built in present-day Uganda. While the narratives offer a laudatory account of the commercial acumen of these business magnates of Indian origin, the life stories and the role of women of their families remain marginalised and untold. This paper argues that by limiting the description of the lived experiences of women to the confines of their domestic spaces, the two narratives under study fail to acknowledge the possible contribution of the Indian emigrant women, either direct or indirect, to the project of entrepreneurial expansion of the community of East African Asian traders, and thereby restricts the experiences of women in the East African Asian diaspora to the domestic realm alone.