THE UNBEATEN MIND by B.J. Kunthara
Reviewed by Jayasri Majumdar Hart, Producer-director
ROOTS IN THE SAND (2000), a documentary on the immigrants from Punjab who
helped develop Southern California’s Imperial Valley in the early 1900s.
The history of Asian Indians in North America has in recent
years been researched and recorded, but there has been very little effort to
present the entire history of one Indian community, or to present that history
in a form that makes for easy reading. Author B. J. Kunthara fills both those
voids for the Sikh community in his novel The Unbeaten Mind.
The story of the immigrants from the northern state of Punjab
in what was then British India, begins in Canada in the first decade of the 20th
century. The key events are faithfully recorded in terms of the challenges and
triumphs of the immigrants—mostly single men looking for work. Employment
opportunities lead some of them down the west coast into USA—first to
Washington and Oregon and finally into California. The decades of land
acquisition and family formation efforts are also described, including some
details of the first Canadian and American born children.
The author uses the first-person narrative quite effectively.
A successful second generation Sikh-American, married to an American of
Italian-Irish heritage, is the protagonist who travels to India and is inspired
by what he discovers there to go in search of details of his grandfather’s life
in the west. Most readers in the Indian immigrant community will identify with
the third generation immigrant returning to his roots after being raised by
parents who leaned toward assimilation.
