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Biography

Mala Kishoendajal (1959, Paramaribo) emigrated in 1968 with her parents to the Netherlands. She came from a Suriname where Hindustani, among which her grandparents, still carried all traces of India, their homeland, in their –rural– style of life. Mala Kishoendajal as a three year old toddler in Suriname. She arrived in the Netherlands where colourds were to be counted on the fingers of one hand. She saw how her three "home'lands India, Suriname and the Netherlands, first gradually and then in merciless speed, changed. She tried to give the confusion that this caused, a place in her (Dutch) autobiographical works: Dame Blanche (2001) and the key novel The Figurehead (2002, The Knipscheer Publishers).

The third, semi-historical novel, entitled The Anonymous Adventurers (Dutch language, expected 2012), dates back to the period when the first Indian indentured labourers officially travelled from India to Suriname in 1873. With the intention to write a historical novel, she went through the names of the passengers on the ship Lalla Rookh. ‘To my great surprise, among the first batch of ‘kantraki’s’ I found my own great-grandparents, the grandparents of my father's mother’, named: Peeaaree Heerun and Masapeb Mohesh. Their granddaughter, my grandmother, married Kishundyal Daroga, the -adopted-son of Kishundyal Sukhur. My namesake was to leave a peculiar CV behind for his progeny. Not long after his arrival in Suriname he was sentenced for six years for manslaughter. His hard labour was performed in the area where the Irish plantation manager James Mavor was slaughtered by enraged Javanese and Indian workers. That happened in the year that my great-grandfather would be released.