Filter Coffee #101

On Finding Your Roots

Hello, my dear readers, I’m indeed touched by your fond enquiries as to when I would resume brewing your morning cuppa. On Sunday the 5th June I posted the ‘Filter Coffee Break’ and I received an overwhelming request to resume the Sunday post. So, here it is the 101st post of FC after a 4-week break so kindly permitted by my dear friend Abbas and others.

I’m posting this from Atlanta, GA having arrived here last week to behold my newborn granddaughter.

I have been told by many other grandparents that if you want to enjoy irresponsible parenthood, be a grandparent. I think it is true, considering the way my first granddaughter has me wrapped around her little finger and continues to do so. The second granddaughter will do the same and make me go dizzy, with my world revolving around her and her cousin. I am sure many of my readers have experienced this kind of carefree grandparenthood. 

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Picture on the Wall

Have you noticed? It is no longer a done thing to hang pictures of our ancestors in the drawing room. For that matter, you don’t see any family pictures in most houses. They are found elsewhere in the house if considered worthy of display. The drawing room might have pictures on the wall, but usually they either they are some paintings of a lesser known artist, prints of a well known painter of the bygone era, or, in some affluent homes, an original work of a celebrated painter.

Well, I am not here to advocate what constitutes the right kind of display of family pictures. My intention is to point to the disconnect that perpetuates between the younger generations and their ancestors. We do not take much interest in familiarising our youngsters with the men and women in a family group photograph, particularly if those in the picture have gone to meet their maker.

I believe that children of today need to know their ancestry and their ethnic background. They need to know the struggles the ancestors went through and their achievements alike.

They need to know which ancestor was a torch-bearer and which one was the black sheep.

Grandparents can be a good influence on the grandkids, at least until they become teenagers. While in most modern families one finds parents conversing in English, in families where the grandparents speak the mother tongue, chances are that the grandkids will learn to speak that language. Grandma tales are a source of not just language, but are also about our epics and morals. 

What if the grandparents are not in the hall but are on the wall? Will the grandkids be told about them, their life, the trials and tribulations which may, perhaps, bring about emotional connection? Well this could depend on the status, position and fame they may have enjoyed.

If either of the grandparents were celebrities in their own right, or were holding some high office which fetched them awards and fame, chances are that they will be introduced to the kids of successive generations with a sense of pride. Ancestry becomes a matter of celebration. Ancestry holds nuclear families together. As the saying goes “Like the branches on a tree we all grow in different directions and yet our roots remain the same.”

I have tried to dig deep into my ancestry, but I hit a dead end when it came to the ancestry of my parents. Apparently, my father was orphaned very early in his life. Some mention is made of his parents’ names, but without a face to put them on. My mother’s parents too are just names. I have been told where they came from, but I never had the satisfaction of visiting those small towns and trying to trace their roots. To that extent, I feel that my family tree is not firmly rooted, but a floating tree* with all the known branches of the family. The branches spread far and wide, but the reality is that the roots are shrouded in mystery.

Roots by Alex Haley, published in 1976, is a narrative about seven generations of his family. Being an African-American, he claimed to have traced his family history back through seven generations to Kunta Kinte, a Mandinka warrior who was enslaved in 1767. This novel became an Emmy award-winning TV series. Roots was classified as ‘faction’ considering that it combined truth and fiction, though Haley claimed to have based it on his own research.

Whatever views the sceptics may have, Roots does inspire people to embark on tracing their own ancestry. There have been many instances of young people from England travelling to India to trace the life history and locate the graves of their ancestors who served for the British in India and died. They considered their roots to be in India.

Similar is the case with many families, particularly Sindhis and Sikhs, whose roots are in 

Pakistan, and also Parsis whose roots are in Iran. When you hear them saying ‘Our family is originally from…’ you know that they are wistfully relating to their roots in an alien soil.

Going back to one’s roots could also mean to revisit one’s past. If the ancestor had covered himself in glory, the descendent has a greater initiative to track that line of ancestry, ensuring that besides tracing the roots, they would bask in the reflected glory of the ancestors and give the family tree a semblance of respectability. On the contrary, if the descendent discovers that the ancestor was notorious, it is possible that it may result in dissociation.

There are times when the ancestor may have acted (or not acted) wisely, depending on the perception of the descendent. In my own family, our togetherness and a sense of bonding is attributed to the fact that my father donated his only house to charity, leaving nothing on the table for us siblings to squabble about and alienate each other. I have heard of stories in which the descendents have rued the stupidity of their parents or grandparents for not having availed a benefit or acquired a property at a throwaway price without realising that what we consider today to be a ‘throwaway price’ was indeed a costly proposition in those days.

Sometimes what the grandfather did can astound the grandson. Here’s a reported case of a grandson inheriting 20,000 shares of MRF Ltd which his grandfather bought in 1990 for a price which could be less than the share price of Rs.11 per share in 1993. It is reported that in 2020 the price per share was in the vicinity of Rs.70K !! An inheritance of a staggering 140 Crores.

Tracing the roots of the family is a matter of earnest pursuit among some people who feel that their existence is like a canoe bobbing in the water. They look to anchor it by undertaking an arduous task of travelling far and wide to locate their ancestors, where they lived and where they were buried. The search may involve going through decades old municipal records. Today, you have many websites that help you search for your ancestors and create a family tree. 

Digging up dirt is part of dirty politics. Mark Twain’s quote makes this amply clear. He said:

“Why waste money looking into your family tree? Just go into politics and your opponents will do it for you.”

*If you wish to see a floating tree, please visit: https://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article250195470.html