My Genealogy

There is documentation, somewhere, of paternal marriages in my mother's family for more than a dozen generations. (Basically, there's a book for documenting Brahmin weddings.) However, my mother's paternal grandfather began our family tradition of being very strongly against the caste system, so there haven't really been any records since then and I've never seen the ones that exist. The fable/legend/myth is that the records go all the way back through the entire age of the maharajahs, cover the rule of the moghuls, and basically document all the way back to the first aryan folks making their way over from the Caucasus.

I'm, uh, kinda skeptical of that.

That same great-grandfather was on the salt march with Gandhi, and was a lawyer after Indian independence. His son, my mother's dad, was also a lawyer and is one of my heroes because he was very funny and smart and I'm told I look just like him. I don't know very much about my mother's mother's family; Indian families are generally pretty lousy at keeping track of that stuff.

My dad's family is a little harder to track. My dad's father was adopted under some kind of sketchy circumstances (possibly kidnapped from his birth parents) so we don't really know where that goes. His adoptive father, my paternal great-grandfather, was the village tax collector and a witch doctor. By the time my dad was born, they were focusing more on farming, the family still did some tax collecting (I'm not sure how they hung onto that role after Independence, but I guess some political roles were maintained after the British left.) and were also farmers.

My dad's parents were "married" when he was 8 and she was about 9. They didn't live together then, but their families arranged for them to be wed, and I think they actually started living together as husband and wife when they were about 15/16 or so. They eventually had 14 children, 10 of whom survived to adulthood, 9 of whom are still alive. My dad's #3. all of his siblings have pretty big families, so I have about 100 cousins on that side.

On my mom's side, there were 4 siblings, 3 of whom survive. I have 3 cousins there. So that tells you a little bit about the difference in Indian famlies between poor, religiously-conservative, drama-filled farmer's kids (my dad) and wealthy, city-living, extremely liberal, socially-active lawyer's kids (my mom). People don't really think that a single caste in the Indian caste system can vary that much, but there you have it.

And that's pretty much all I know about where I came from.