1) Tell us about this book.
How different is it from Sindh: Stories from a Vanished homeland? Why
did you feel the need to revisit the topic in this fashion?
I wrote SINDH: STORIES FROM
A VANISHED HOMELAND ten years ago. At that time, I knew nothing about Sindh or
the Sindhi diaspora. My mother was Sindhi, this much I knew. But nobody in the
family ever talked about what life had been like in Sindh, or any other aspect
of their Sindhiness. Even the language was restricted to those who had left
Sindh – everyone else heard it spoken around them, but it was never spoken TO us.
Yes, the food in my grandparents’ home was Sindhi food – but in our home, we
ate food from all over and Sindhi dishes only occasionally. In fact, my mother
would have to threaten violence before I could be convinced that
saeebhaji-khichdi – a traditional Sindhi meal comprising dal, rice and a basket
of vegetables – was good for health!
Well – over these years I
have read a lot, and interviewed around 300 elderly people who shared their
memories with me. I’m much more familiar with the subject than I was when I
wrote the first book, more comfortable with my thoughts and feelings about it.
Why I chose this format,
with so many high-quality images, is the knowledge that reading habits are
transforming – as they have always done over the centuries – and a visual
aspect is essential to communication with coming generations. I was very
fortunate to find a senior artist, Subhodeep Mukherjee, who has created
detailed and historically authentic illustrations to accompany each story.
Also, the text is very simple to read. And it tells pretty much the whole
story, with all the messages that I want to pass on!
2) Historical research
about exodus of Sindh is far and few between. I think yours would be the first
such book which looked into this incident of Indian partitions. Why have the
community and historians been lukewarm in research the human and historical
angle of this?
The Sindh Partition story
paled into insignificance for various reasons, most crucial of which is that
Sindh was never partitioned. It was given intact to Pakistan.
Sindh also faced far less
violence than Punjab, where almost every single family experienced barbaric
atrocity. The widespread exodus from Sindh took place some months after
Partition, when Sindh was occupied by large numbers of Partition-affected
refugees from other parts of the newly-divided India. This
may be the main reason why people who left Sindh considered themselves the
lucky ones and did not feel they had a story to tell. In any case – nobody was
listening, nobody wanted to know, nobody cared.
The Sindhis addressed their
trauma with stoic acceptance. They were role-model ‘refugees’ who started from
scratch. They found opportunities to earn their living by filling gaps and
providing necessities, and became useful citizens, contributing to the
communities they settled in. They integrated seamlessly into these communities,
adapting to new ways of living. These attributes – shown by an overwhelming
majority of the community – made them invisible.
While things have now changed
and there is a lot of interest in Sindhis, both from within the community as
well as from others who have begun to notice this tremendous phenomenon with
new respect, the Sindhi voice is unlikely to carry much weight in public life
for the simple reason that they are too few in number to form a significant vote
bank.
3) What were the main
sources of information for this book? How difficult or easy was for you to pen
this? Can you share some incidents or excerpts which touched you more as a
human than say an author?
This book is the
culmination of my 10 years of research into the Sindhi diaspora and I’ve tried
to include in it all that I’ve learnt, in particular all the messages I want to
pass on to future generations! This includes social, historical and
anthropological aspects of Sindhis as a community, and various aspects of the
Sindhi identity.
One of my biggest insights
in this journey has been the way the language was lost. Parents stopped
speaking to their children in their mother tongue, perhaps knowing that to have
a better chance in the world, they needed to be expert in local languages. I
realise now that most of us were never spoken to in Sindhi, never expected to
reply in Sindhi. However, there is a poignancy in the fact that Sindhi is a language that you only hear in the homes of relatives.
It is the language of intimacy, the language of the lost country. It is the
language you hear your grandparents speak to each other and to those of their
children who knew Sindh – never to you. Because you had never known Sindh, and
it would be impossible to explain anything as important, as essential, and as
complicated as that.
4) How personal is this
book? Is it just a relook at the exodus, or is it a personal journey about
losing and finding home?
The book is a collection of
personal accounts. It attempts to convey all that Sindh was to the Hindus who
lost their homeland, the journeys they undertook when they lost it, the heroic
rebuilding of their lives, the way they adapted, they way they ignored the
prejudice and stereotypes they faced, the way they contributed.
As a writer and oral
historian, I specialise in working with people to write their memoirs. It was
this that led me to write my first book on Sindh. For LOSING HOME FINDING HOME,
I had planned to write each story in the voice of its central character.
However, as I wrote, my mother’s thoughts and ideas began to enter each
narrative. I lost my mother nearly 8 years ago – and here she was, piping up insistently
and inserting her opinions, much as she had always done!
I soon decided to let her
tell the story, and the book is written in her voice. I’m really glad this
happened, because I found myself writing things that would not have occurred to
me without her inputs, essential aspects of the losing and the finding. It’s
extraordinary how parents leave traces of themselves inside one, long after
they are gone.
So yes – the book is
intensely personal. But at the same time, it is also as mainstream and
comprehensive as anything can be.
First appeared here on 7 Nov 2022
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