‘The Bengali’ Review: New Orleans Author Searches for Her Indian Grandfather’s Past in Travelogue Doc
th century.Author and New Orleans native Fatima Shaik is the granddaughter of an immigrant Bengali merchant named Shaik Mohamed Musa who, as was not uncommon when Indian men uprooted to segregated America, married a local African-American woman and blended into a welcoming Black community. Fatima never knew her grandfather — he died in 1919 before he could see his three children grow up — but she also grew up with little sense of her Indian heritage outside a treasured hookah of his that was lost in the Katrina flooding.Katrina’s devastation, which took loved ones of Fatima’s, spurred her to better understand a piece of her family tree that felt like an unfilled space, and in the documentary “The Bengali,” from Kolkata-born filmmaker Kavery Kaul, we’re with Fatima as she travels for the very first time to India to trace her grandfather’s existence, and hopefully to meet new relatives.