Prejudices can only be overcome when we understand realities and face the truth

Talk given at the Willingdon Club in January 2025

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.

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”!

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.

First appeared in Sindh Courier on 25 January 2024