Prejudices can only be overcome when we understand realities and face the truth
By Saaz Aggarwal
On January 24, 2024, I spoke at the Willingdon Club, at the invitation of the club library. My friend Shahsultan happened to be in Bombay and she attended too, as my guest – she’s a member of the club but when she registered for the event, was informed that it was full and even the waiting list was full, which I found very flattering. Of course the club has many Sindhi members, but it was good to see that the audience had non-Sindhis too. One of them, a professor at a university in Canada, told me after the talk that I had missed speaking of an important point: the “bad name” that Sindhis have. He suggested that in future, if I did not want to talk about it, I include a disclaimer on the lines of “today I will not be speaking about the fact that Sindhis have a reputation for being crooks”.
His kind advice made me remember my primary motive in writing and speaking about Sindhis – the conviction that prejudices can only be overcome when we understand realities and face the truth. I believe that offering a body of true stories could work towards this.
Also read: Sindhis have strong feeling of belonging – Saaz Aggarwal
One of the lovely moments at the event yesterday was when I spoke of Harchandrai Vishindas and mentioned his work as a city father of his hometown, Karachi, and found that there were 4 members of the audience who were his grandchildren! I requested them to stand up so I could take this photo.
I usually don’t bother to speak about the prejudice against Sindhis, but many of the people I’ve interviewed do, and many ask me about it. When I invited a range of Sindhi academics, businesspeople, artists, professionals and others, truly wonderful people, to contribute to my book SINDHI TAPESTRY: AN ANTHOLOGY OF REFLECTIONS ON THE SINDHI IDENTITY, it was very surprising to find that 4 of their excellent essays mentioned “The Sindhi and the Snake”!
Also read: Haridwar – Records of Sindhi Pilgrims’ Travel and Worship
In October 2013, at the fag end of a book tour in the south of Spain, I spoke to a gathering of 80 Sindhis in Gibraltar, showing photos, sharing insights, and explaining why I’d called it SINDH: STORIES FROM A VANISHED HOMELAND. At the end of my talk, Suresh Nagrani stood up to share something.
“When I was young,” he started, “I thought all Indians were Sindhi.”
This was greeted with a ripple of laughter, but it was no less than a fact: the Indians native to Gibraltar are indeed Sindhis. Suresh Nagrani went on: “Then I went to ‘uni’ in England. There I met Indians who were not Sindhi, from different parts of India. That was surprising. Even more surprising was that one of them said to me, ‘Oh, so you are a Sindhi. Let me ask you a riddle. If you meet a Sindhi and a snake, which one should you kill? You should kill the Sindhi!’”
The audience broke into guffaws.
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Saaz Aggarwal is an independent researcher, writer and artist based in Pune, India. Her body of writing includes biographies, translations, critical reviews and humor columns. Her books are in university libraries around the world, and much of her research contribution in the field of Sindh studies is easily accessible online. Her 2012 Sindh: Stories from a Vanished Homeland is an acknowledged classic.
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