When Partition gave Sindh intact to Pakistan, it was
believed that the non-Muslims would continue as a peaceful and prosperous
minority there as they had been for centuries. And when they found themselves
exiled, a large majority of Sindhi parents stopped speaking to their children
in their own language, wanting them to have a better chance in the new world by
mastering local languages wherever they settled. The government of the
newly-truncated India played its part in the annihilation of Sindhi, by not
listing it as an Indian language. The writers and intellectuals of the
community – a large number at the time – took the help of a young lawyer (later
the most famous lawyer in India, Ram Jethmalani) to contest the horrid
omission. In 1967, Sindhi was accepted in Schedule VIII of the Indian
Constitution as an Indian language. It is a consequence of those 20 lost years
that, today, only a handful who had the benefit of a ‘Sindhi-medium’ education,
still survive.
Life-support
Today, of course, the Indian government (and literature
festivals around India) uphold Sindhi wholeheartedly. The Department of HRD,
Government of India, even has a well-funded body called NCPSL, the National
Council for the Promotion of Sindhi Language. Sindhi is taught in a few schools
and colleges in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Rajasthan; Bombay University has a
full-fledged department of Sindhi which offers MA, MPhil, PhD. However, Dr
Baldev Matlani, former HOD, informed me that there has been a steady and
continuing decrease in numbers.
I also asked my dear friend Vimmi
Sadarangani, Professor of Sindhi at Tolani College of Arts & Science,
Gandhidham, an internationally renowned poet who writes in both Sindhi and
Hindi, a person of extraordinary creativity and incisively rational mind. She
spoke to me extensively about the state of Sindhi literature in India and here
is a little of what I gathered:
“Yes, there is a new generation
of writers in Sindhi. But nobody publishes Sindhi books, nobody buys, India has
no bookshops where you can buy Sindhi books. Writers print the books with their
own funds and distribute them to their friends. They read each other’s books.
And the pool of senior writers who write the forewords has now dwindled to just
3 or 4.”
Vimmi also reminded me that the Sahitya Akademi Yuva
Puruskar, instituted in 2011, had been received by young Sindhi writers only from
2015. And I told her about the Sahitya Akademi conference in March 2022, on
Sindhi writers who have contributed to the literature of languages other
than Sindhi, where I was invited to present a paper on the life and work of Dr
Murli Melwani, whose book of short stories Beyond the Rainbow, a
riveting collection set in the global Sindhworki diaspora, I had published.
At the end of our two-hour chat, we decided to get together
to identify Sindhi writing that we could work together to translate and
publish. And here I must reveal further droll (if poignant) information about the
state of Sindhi language and literature in India: 3 of us who have translated important works
from Sindhi into English – Anju Makhija, Menka Shivdasani and I – cannot read
or write the language. We can barely speak it, and did the translations working
with elderly writers who read and write Sindhi. Yes – the support from that
generation has been tremendous.
Devnagari vs “Perso-Arabic”
The painstaking – and painful – attempts to revive Sindhi in
India has taken many forms, and they have all been blighted by the battle of
the scripts. After Partition, some felt it would make it easier to pass on the
“mother tongue” in Devnagari. The Sindhi script was renamed the “Perso-Arabic”
script. Most students, and often for very good reasons and by well-meaning
teachers, are only taught the former. As a result, they are deprived of the
riches of Sindhi literature, since most of it is not transcribed in Devnagari. And
when prescribed texts are only available in Sindhi script, teachers
painstakingly transcribe it themselves for their students.
Wouldn’t be easier, I think to myself, to teach your
students the script? Little children learnt it in Sindh, how can it be
considered “difficult”? But I don’t ask because it’s a complex situation,
overshadowed by legacies of Partition which further fractured the scattered community, distancing young Sindhis even more from
their heritage of poetry and philosophy. Few even know that it exists.
Sindhi literature has a long history and
there were many masters of poetry and philosophy, the greatest known being the
17th century Shah Abdul Latif whose work permeated society. It was taught
in schools, and his thoughts and beliefs also pervaded the everyday language of
the masses through folk tales as well as pahakas – the kind of life sayings
that most languages have. Sindhi pahakas urge people to aspire to common sense,
respect for all religions, and essential goodness. I’m always fascinated when I
interview a young person who unknowingly reflects these attributes, untarnished
by Partition and the loss of the language.
From what I’ve understood through the
course of my interviews, Sindhi literature was of overarching importance to the
Hindus of Sindh, with their large population of writers, academics and
intellectuals. In the lead-up to Partition, many of them were freedom fighters
involved in writing, printing and distributing literature to create awareness
of the importance of freedom from British rule – this was propaganda against
the Crown and a serious view was taken of it. Many of them spent substantial
time in jail for these “seditious” activities. Sadly, when the goal of freedom
was achieved, they themselves lost their homeland for good.
Glory, but strewn with
mortification
I was delighted and
gratified when JLF invited me as a speaker for the 2023 festival. The
democratic space of JLF, its festive energy, earnest readers, well-loved
writers, colour, light, music, inventive displays, eager volunteers – a planet
of book-lovers – was always an unimaginably lovely time of year back when JLF
was new and I had the good fortune of writing a books column for Sunday
Mid-day. It was a place where you could be standing behind Alexander McCall
Smith in the lunch queue; even share a shuttle to your hotel with Hanif Qureshi!
One day at an overcrowded session, a member of the audience stood up and observed
indignantly that Madam Vasundhara Raje was standing. Festival director Sanjoy K
Roy politely suggested that he offer her his seat.
An opportunity to
be on the other side of the table there made me so very happy. But also sad to
have to convey, in my session, on “mother tongue” the story about how
Partition depleted Sindhi language and Sindhi culture. While Archana Mirajkar spoke
of the vibrancy of Marathi Literature and her solidly glorious discourses, Granthyatra,
all I could do was whine on and on about how no language can be expected to
survive among a people who never hear it spoken on the street.
My work is not IN
Sindhi. It's about heritage, storytelling, lost nuances, and conveys messages
from our shared ancestry to coming generations.
Sindhis form a global diaspora with a
large majority settled in Mumbai and its environs. There are small communities
settled in various parts of India – but also in and around many ports around
the world. These were trade outputs
which started coming up soon after the British illegally occupied Sindh in
1843. After Partition, the families were able to set up homes there and local
communities burgeoned. Another fascinating aspect of the Sindhis is their
tendency for multi-faith worship. In Sindh, religious ritual and religious
boundaries did not form tight defining borders for worship. And yet, when push
came to shove, they found themselves on the wrong side of the fence.
Invisible but all-pervasive
On 26 December 2022, The New Yorker carried a delightful, evocative essay, Seventy-Five Years After Indian Partition, Who Owns the Narrative. The word Sindh was not mentioned even once.
This is not unusual: Sindh is invariably absent
from Partition narratives; sometimes it earns a patronising mention. The
only 2 exceptions I know of that have embraced Sindh as part of mainstream
Partition are the 1947 Partition Archive and the Partition Museums in Amritsar
and Delhi. Very few independent researchers – notably Aanchal Malhotra, Rashi
Puri, Ishika Chatterjee – have pursued Sindhi interviews along with Punjabi
ones.
Why the largescale boycott?
Could it be because there was less violence in Sindh, could
it be that the absence of trains full of dead bodies, the absence of acts of barbarism
from the Sindhis themselves that disqualifies them?
Could it be that a province that was not partitioned cannot
consider itself a part of the Partition narrative despite the huge, complex and
fascinating repercussions Partition brought to it?
Could it be that a community that has no access to its
motherland has no right to its Partition identity even though Partition is what
now underlies the identity of every Sindhi?
It’s not because they were too few.
Though the actual numbers will never be known, it is believed that nearly a
million non-Muslims were displaced from Sindh; around 2.5 million from Bengal;
around 5 million from Punjab. The Sindhi story is huge. And it’s a truly
extraordinary one with a lot of adventure, a lot of diversity and some remarkable
features such as the extraordinary manner of dealing with refugee status –
quietly picking up the pieces, moving on, making it big. Could that even be
considered particularly relevant in today’s world?
At JLF too, there were Partition sessions – without a single
acknowledgement of Sindh. Until – suddenly and unexpectedly! – a mention arose.
It was by Sudha Murthy, introducing Chitra Banerji Divakaruni and Aanchal
Malhotra at the launch of the former’s book Independence. Voicing her
appreciation that they had both written on Partition, she pointed out that they
had only covered Bengal and Punjab and she now exhorted Chitra Banerji
Divakaruni to write her next book on Sindh.
Now is the time
Sudha Murthy spoke at the right moment, for we stand at the
beginning of a new era! Young people yearn to know more. Social media handles with
“I am proud to be a Sindhi” hashtags have huge and growing populations of
followers. There are easily-downloadable apps from which you can learn the
Sindhi alphabet. Sindhi singers, and more and more are emerging, are assured of
huge enthusiastic audiences. Creative output in Sindhi is nascent but with
technology supporting the growing interest, good things surely lie ahead. When
I started writing about the Sindhi diaspora 10 years ago, there were just 7 or 8
of us in the space. Today there are more than a 100 and the number is growing.
Loquations and dislocations
When I'm asked about my mother tongue, I generally end up
holding forth on the
marvellous story of Khushiram Kundnani, founding principal of
National College, Mumbai, who carried his college with him from Hyderabad
Sindh. That's where my parents met, brave pioneers of that fledgling
institution "love marriage" practiced by brave rebels. They did not know each other's languages,
Sindhi and Konkani, we lived in the Nilgiris where my third language at school
was Tamizh. When filling forms I despondently inscribe "English" in
the "mother tongue" field.
Some months ago I came across this quote by Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong'o
“If you know all the languages of
the world but not your mother tongue, that is enslavement. Knowing your mother
tongue and all other languages too is empowerment"
it made me ponder the brazenness with which I cope with my
disability. And it reminds me of the enormous number of times I’ve heard
people I’ve interviewed say
-
I wish I had learnt
the language when I had the chance!
-
If only I had made
the effort to speak to my children in Sindhi!
-
They used to speak Sindhi to each other, never to us.
When we heard them speaking Sindhi, we knew that they were saying something
they didn’t want us to understand!
My mother was 13 years old when Partition
took place. When I was born, 13 years later, she gave me the pen name she had
chosen for herself – but could never use because she had lost her language. Why
would any young person want to write in a language which nobody could be
bothered to read?
But I am grateful. It is a pen name that
gives me a distinctive by-line.
Saaz Aggarwal
"The idea of a
'mother tongue' is a modern idea, a philological invention of German
Romanticism, wedded to that movement's obsessions with unique linguistic roots
for every nation. 'Nation', too, is an invention of this period. In India, for
millennia, we have been multilingual subjects, our home languages one of
several at our disposal. The words matru-bhasha and madari-zubaan only come
into being after the encounter with colonialism and European philology. They
are calques, formed on the basis of the German Müttersprache."
- Ranjit Hoskote
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