As is the case with many communities, Sindhi Hindus too feel the need for a community history.
By Nandita Bhavnani
[When India was partitioned in 1947, the province of Sindh went in its entirety to the newly-formed state of Pakistan. The bulk of the Hindus (and Sikhs) of Sindh migrated to India in the months that followed. Given that there was no part of Sindh in India, and given the harsh visa regime shared by the two countries, Sindhi Hindus have had little or no contact with their original homeland for the last seven decades. Some among the generations of Sindhi Hindus that migrated to India (and subsequently formed the diaspora) have shared their recollections with their children and grandchildren. There has been a corresponding move among a section of Sindhi Hindus to distance themselves from memories of a culture shared with Muslims, and a history that was largely dominated by Muslims. Yet, as is the case with many communities, Sindhi Hindus too feel the need for a community history. Consequently, when Sindhis recall Sindh, they often refer to a ‘sanitized’ Sindh, which they have supposedly ‘inherited’]
Exceptions
It should be pointed out that, over the decades, there have been exceptions to this ‘selective’ remembering of Sindh. After 1947, there was an entire generation of Sindhi Hindu writers in India that wrote extensively about their Partition and post-Partition experiences. Of a literary bent of mind, they were also better informed about Sindhi history. Further, these writers maintained contact with their counterparts and friends in Sindh, and hosted Sindhi Muslim writers and friends who visited them in India. Several of them made journeys back to Sindh, to attend literary conferences, but also to meet their friends and revisit their old homes and hometowns; they published their travelogues subsequently, and almost uniformly had high praise and warmth for their Sindhi Muslim friends.
Moreover, in the two decades spanning the turn of the 21st century (i.e. the 1990s and the 2000s), there were various magazines and journals published, most of which were in English but specifically for a Sindhi readership (given that the Sindhi community had moved away from the Sindhi language and towards English). These include Sindh Sujaag (“Awakened Sindh,” in Sindhi) and Sindh Rises (in English), both published by the late Sindhi writer, Kirat Babani (1922-2015), which specifically dealt with various issues faced by Sindhis in Sindh. Other English language magazines, such as Aseen Sindhi (“We the Sindhis”), Sindhi International, and Sahyog Times, covered a wide range of subjects such as Sindhi personalities and issues relating to Sindhis in India as well as the historical aspects of various towns and regions of Sindh, apart from various Sindhi legends.
Overall, it appears that a greater interest in Sindhi history, particularly with respect to the eleven centuries of Muslim rule, or actual friendships with Sindhi Muslims, was largely confined to the small community of writers among the Sindhi Hindus.
III. POSSIBLE CONTRIBUTORY FACTORS
There were various significant factors that distanced Sindhi Hindus from their history. From interviews with a few of the generation of Sindhi Hindus who were children at the time of Partition, the picture that emerges is that most Sindhi Hindus were not aware of their provincial history in great detail, especially beyond the regimes of the Kalhoras (1737-1783) and the Talpurs (1783-1843). Similarly they were not aware of, or had not visited historical landmarks in Sindh. This was an era of highly undeveloped tourism, in Sindh as well as in other parts of India, when travel was mostly limited to pilgrimages, work-related travel or visits to relatives. It appears that in the pre-Partition period, Sindhi Hindu children were actively kept away by their families from visiting Muslim tombs, mausoleums and mosques, although they may have visited Sufi dargahs, which historically have been more welcoming to, and tolerant of, Hindus. Fear of religious conversion was likely a prime cause, as well as an avoidance of sites relating to death.
As a result, it appears that most Sindhi Hindus remained unaware of the richness of the Muslim medieval architecture —tombs and mausoleums, graveyards and mosques— found in Sindh. These architectural sites could have functioned as a means of accessing Sindhi history, and their beauty could have functioned as a gateway to an appreciation of the civilization or historical era that produced that particular monument, and ultimately to a sense of pride in being Sindhi, but sadly, visits to such sites were actively discouraged among Sindhi Hindus.
While some Sindhi Hindus had interactions with, and friends among, Muslims in schools, colleges, offices and neighborhoods in Sindh, other Sindhi Hindus (especially those from the upper-middle class) recall that their only interaction with Sindhi Muslims was limited to those from the lower-middle class e.g. washer-men, butchers, etc. Further, during the first half of the 20th century, Hindu right-wing organizations had put down roots, and acquired a significant presence in Sindh.
After Partition, Sindhi Hindus distanced themselves to an even greater degree from Sindhi Muslims. This happened for several reasons. Firstly, the subsequent migration from Sindh of a large number of Sindhi Hindus to India (and later to various countries across the globe) resulted in the simple fact of the physical separation from Sindh and Sindhi Muslims, in an era of highly limited communications.
This was further cemented by the stringency of the mutual visa regime that subsequently evolved between India and Pakistan, ensuring that Sindhi Hindus would find it difficult if not impossible to visit/revisit Sindh, unless they had relatives living across the border.
Secondly, like other Partition refugees, many Sindhi Hindus chose to blame the trauma of Partition on the ‘other’ community. As mentioned earlier, it could also have been a coping mechanism to deal with the Partition trauma. Consequently, there was little desire on the part of several Sindhi Hindus to revisit their old homes, which were now occupied by Muslim strangers.
Further, over the many centuries of living under Muslim rule and in a Muslim-majority country, and in the absence of any state patronage for Hinduism, the Hinduism as practiced in Sindh was distant from Sanskritic Hinduism in several respects. Sindhi Hindus ate meat and did not practice caste-based untouchability; they sometimes believed in Muslim pirs and visited dargahs; many Hindu school children learnt Persian and/or Arabic even till 1947, and wrote Sindhi in the Perso-Arabic script, which had Muslim connotations. Sindhi Hindu women wore their traditional dress of suthan-cholo, a tunic worn over trousers, and not the sari or bindi. These various factors served to create the image of the Sindhi Hindu as a ‘quasi-Muslim’ in the eyes of other Hindus in India, which was especially ironic, considering that the Sindhi Hindus had fled Sindh on the basis of their religion.
As a result, in an effort to adapt to local societies and to gain some degree of acceptance, Sindhi Hindus began to jettison these aspects of their culture, and also began to turning to the Hindu right to a greater degree, embracing Sanskritic customs and rituals. Hence the “Aryanizing” of Moenjodaro, and even the name “Mohan jo daro” interpreted as the ‘Mound of Krishna’. All these developments further cemented the turning away from Sindh, now perceived as a “Muslim” country, which had no place for Sindhi Hindus, and from where they had been literally ejected. (This was later exacerbated by the Indo-Pak wars of 1965 and 1971, and the Kargil conflict of 1999, which turned Pakistan into an “enemy country” for many Hindus in India)
There was a concomitant turning away from Sindhi language, culture and identity, which were perceived as belonging to the ‘past’. However, this occurred in varying degrees. It appears to have occurred more in the younger generation that migrated, i.e. those who were teenagers or children in 1947. Older Sindhi Hindus had a deeper and more rooted sense of their ethnic identity. Similarly, upper-class Sindhi Hindus were more likely to turn away from the Sindhi language towards English and a more Westernized lifestyle.
RAMIFICATIONS
As mentioned earlier, Congress leaders had also encouraged this philosophy of downplaying Sindhi ethnicity. As a result, both Sindhi language and identity underwent a decline. In the initial years after Partition, several Sindhi-medium schools had been founded in India; similarly, the new generation of Sindhi writers (who had undergone the trauma of Partition) published numerous books, newspapers and magazines. After several decades of downplaying Sindhi ethnicity, the bulk of these Sindhi medium schools have shut down, as have many Sindhi language newspapers and magazines. Younger generations of Sindhis have also distanced themselves from their ethnic identity over the decades.
However, ethnic identity in a multi-ethnic society like India is also reinforced from the outside. Much as they may want, Sindhi Hindus cannot wish away their ethnic identity and become Nehru’s idealized ‘Indians’. Hence the writer Popati Hiranandani’s observation: “I am also a refugee; I want to assimilate but the local population always reminds me that I am a refugee” (personal interview, November 1997).
As is the case with many communities, at times Sindhi Hindus too feel the need for a community history. The current trajectory of their political affiliations, however, has been moving more and more towards the Hindu right. As a result, when they search for a sense of community history, they largely reject the eleven centuries of Muslim rule in Sindh, and instead turn towards the single, most significant non-Muslim element of Sindhi history: Moenjodaro. This element has further been transmuted into an “Aryan bastion” or a “fountainhead of Hinduism” to give it far greater value, especially when judged by the yardsticks of right-wing Hinduism. In a concomitant vein, Muslims are depicted mainly as “oppressors”.
And thus Sindhi history is ‘rewritten’.
These trends dovetail with larger, more widespread trends towards right-wing Hinduism among Hindus in India today (and indeed, trends towards more hardened right-wing positions across the world). In other parts of India, there have been similar urges to ‘rewrite’ Indian history in a more saffronized vein, as for example, when textbooks in Rajasthan were amended in 2017 to state that Rana Pratap, and not Akbar, won the battle of Haldighati of 1576.
EPILOGUE
However, technological innovations have revolutionized communications in an unprecedented way. Today, any person with access to the internet can create and upload a message or video which has the potential for “going viral” in a matter of minutes, that too on an international level. Consequently, Sindhis in India can connect with far greater ease with other Sindhis —Hindu or Muslim— in Pakistan, or elsewhere in the world. Over recent years, this has resulted in the wide dissemination (given the borderless nature of the internet) of messages, videos, etc. which promote Sindhi language and identity among Sindhi Hindus. It is interesting to note that several of these videos —songs, skits and comic sketches— are created, or co-created by young Sindhis, in their twenties or even their teens. Further, email and WhatsApp groups have sprung up, which connect Sindhis in both India and Pakistan to return to the song “Jiye munhinji Sindh” that started this essay, it remains a highly popular vehicle for promoting Sindhi identity. In recent years, there have been multiple renditions of this song posted on the internet, including pop and remix versions (which are likely to appeal to younger generations of Sindhis), and also videos of Sindhis dancing to this song; these videos have been viewed literally thousands of times. (Juriani 2012; Pahlajani and Udasi 2017) These videos also include one (with slightly modified lyrics), actually created by a Sindhi Muslim in Pakistan, which depicts Hindu-Muslim communal harmony among Sindhis. The song’s multiple incarnations over the years are a testament to its enduring popularity. However, this also means that the selective ‘remembering’ of Sindh that it embodies continues to be perpetuated.
Clearly, the internet has provided Sindhis across the globe (and indeed all people) with innovative ways and means of recreating and disseminating new expressions of their identity, and sometimes even ‘rewriting’ their history. The story of this song continues, as does the parallel story of Sindhi ethnic identity. (Concludes)
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A research paper ‘Remembering Sindh, Reconstructing Sindh’ – The Politics of Memory among Sindhi Hindus in India’ written by the author in 2017.
Nandita Bhavnani, an independent scholar, who was raised as a typical south Mumbai elitist kid and couldn’t read, write or fluently speak in her mother tongue, became a Sindhi historian by choice. She learnt the Persian script and worked with social anthropologist Ashis Nandy for research on “Partition Psychosis”. She has travelled many times to Pakistan to explore Sindhi culture there and her research from both sides of the border has been documented in books and articles.
