Legend has it that Charles Napier, the Englishman whose forces won the Battle of Dubbo and, hence Sind, supposedly sent a one-word message about his victory: Peccavi—Latin for “I have sinned” (Sind!). That’s bosh. A young girl, Catherine Winkworth, made it up as a joke for her Latin class and sent it to Punch, which published it in the foreign affairs section. The message that never got its due was, however, from General Hoshu Sheedi, the defender, who said on March 24, 1843, before he perished in that battle: “Marvesoon par Sind na desoon.” But the ultimate blow to a homeland from which a large part of the population was ejected was by Cyril Radcliffe, an obscure civil servant in 1947. He knew nothing of Sind or for that matter about his subject, which W.H. Auden expresses so evocatively in his poem Partition:
“Having never set eyes on this land he was called to partition Between two peoples fanatically at odds,
With their different diets and incompatible gods…”
So, it came to pass that while many of the Sindhi Hindus (referred to as Sindhis for all practical purposes) were settled across the world with their memories, the rest came to India in 1947 leaving nearly everything behind, except their memories.
Saaz Aggarwal’s new compilation of Sindhi memorabilia Sindhi Tapestry is a collection of recollections, from across the globe; spoken by many voices from far and away, here and there, which reflect the voices of a people who belong to a state that isn’t there. She describes the book as “reflections on Sindhi identity: an anthology”. It’s not meant to be a page turner.
Read it backwards, skip some articles; go to an interesting byline—but it has substance. Subaltern history is like that. It is a potpourri of experiences, remembrances, bits of history, anthropological insights, a dash of fiction, narratives of self-discovery and some self-deprecating humour. As an editor and curator, Aggarwal has not interfered with the styles of her numerous contributors, so the narratives are in a refreshing as is where is condition. However, the peculiar styling of the Sindhi words is a distraction, with Arabic cursive flourishes that you can only follow, I suppose, if you know Sindhi.
After Partition, they weren’t exactly welcomed with open arms in India—Maya Khemlani David and Mathew Cook. In their article in Modern Asian Studies, they summed up other writers who observed Indians treating Sindhis as “a beggarly linguistic minority” and discriminated against them; how cultural practices such as eating meat and writing in Naskh, the Arabic writing system made the community “irksome” to India’s Hindus (many vegetarians who wrote in Devanagari…). The community felt this discrimination all the more poignantly since—unlike refugees from Punjab and Bengal—their homeland was entirely located in Pakistan.
The spread of Sindhis globally is not a recent phenomenon. According to Mark-Anthony Falzon, in his book Cosmopolitan Connections: The Sindhi Diaspora, “….one of the specificities of the Sindhi diaspora is the somewhat paradoxical fact that it is not Sind that constitutes the ultimate reference for Sindhi identity either literally or symbolically. Rather, this role is taken by Bombay”.
Then, in Sindhis of Calcutta, Sajni Kripalani Mukherji quotes the researcher Claude Markovits’s difficulty in substantiating some of his arguments regarding the Sindhis who are diasporic like the Jews, but who do not have the Jewish penchant for keeping records. Markovits published his book The Global World of Indian Merchants in 2000. Twenty years later, encouraged by writers and compilers, encouraged by readers and viewers, a lot more memories, memoirs, incidents, insights, academic treatises, fiction and literature, television and movies by Sindhis from across the globe are being recorded. This has resulted in a greater understanding of a ‘refugee’ community that is otherwise known for cash and flash or tight-fistedness or merely its pappad.
