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 20^th 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.

For the serious reader, this novel is an excellent gateway into a more detailed investigation of not only the Sikh experience in the Americas but of all immigration to the West Coast.