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| Saaz and Susheel on one of their many zoom discussions during the course of preparing the book for publication in Jan 2025 |
Susheel
Gajwani’s book, Sunrise Over Valiwade, opens with the milk queue in a
refugee camp. Mothers and grandmothers have brought their little ones – a ragged,
squalling lot, some naked – and are waiting in line as milk is doled out from a
large, dirty, aluminium vessel. A man in a khaki uniform is pouring milk into dented
and tarnished tumblers with mechanical precision, filling each glass swiftly
and purposefully. The children grab their glasses and empty them hungrily.
Another man stands beside them, snatching the empty glasses back and rinsing
them in a bucket of water. Hundreds of glasses are ‘washed’ in the same bucket.
Susheel is waiting his turn.
What happens
next you must read for yourself in the book, all I can reveal for now is that
the words and the descriptions bring alive much more than the wretched, forlorn
existence, the grime, the pushing and shoving, the language barrier, the
unfamiliar geography, the helpless dependence on others’ goodwill and charity. Susheel’s
dismay, his attachment to his grandmother, the way she responds – especially
the way she responds, an iconic manifestation of the Sindhi identity – made me
want to cry and ended up making me laugh. The first story in the manuscript
Susheel sent me some months ago, it filled me with delight, and energized me to
put everything aside and start preparing it for publication.
Kolhapur’s Gandhinagar Camp for
Sindhi Partition refugees is largely unknown except to those associated with it.
The most commonly referred list of Sindhi refugee camps in India at the end of
1948 is from Dr. UT Thakur’s 1959 book Sindhi Culture (Sindhi Academy,
New Delhi):
1. Ajmer Merwara at Deoli 10,200
2. Bombay 2,16,500
3. Baroda 10,700
4. Bikaner State 8,900
5. Jaipur State 33,200
6. Jodhpur State 11,800
7. Madhya Bharat 3,400
8. Former Rajasthan 15,800
9. Saurashtra Union 45,500
10. Vindhya Pradesh 15,400
11. Madhya Pradesh 81,400
Total 4,52,800
The Gandhinagar Camp is absent
in this and other research about Sindhi refugees, as are many other locations
of the scattered population. In time, it would grow – as did the other camps –
into a community of solid citizens who contributed substantially to the economy
of the region. And this is where Susheel Gajwani was born, in the barrack his
family had been allotted, delivered by a daee from another refugee
family.
Growing up in the camp, hearing
the sounds of his mother tongue – and even the melodies of Master Chandur and
other Sindhi singers – spoken around him was one thing; integrating into the
wider world outside was another. This book covers interesting aspects of both.
Susheel’s family came from
Shahdadkot in Sindh and, growing up, he heard the elders reminisce with
nostalgia of the places they had left behind. I peered into maps of Sindh to
locate the towns and villages Susheel named and found them all – except Korayoon.
I asked around with no success and, finally, requested Nasir Aijaz. The award-winning
Pakistan media personality and founder and director of the redoubtable Sindh
Courier https://sindhcourier.com/ could
find no trace of it.
“Seriously, Susheel? Korayoon?”
I asked.
“Yes, Korayoon,” he replied
firmly.
“Qambrani?”
“No.”
“Karira?”
“No!”
“Chakiyani?”
“Of course not, Saaz! Korayoon –
that’s the name they spoke about. Often. Korayoon.”
Nasir reported back that village
Korayoon was not even on the survey list of the Revenue Department. Perhaps, he
said, the name had been changed. Yes – perhaps it had. Because, when the
non-Muslims left Sindh, much changed. A new population arrived, making things difficult
for those left behind, regardless of their religion. Sindhi culture was mocked,
Sindhi people were colonized, their efforts derided. Across the border,
Hassomal had turned into Haresh; Sati into Sita. Kripps was emerging from
Kripalani. How could we know what names were being changed in Sindh?
As adults, Susheel and his
brother Shashi became professionally associated with different formats of mass
media. Discussing their childhood in a refugee community, the trauma of their people,
and the courageous way in which it had been faced, they began asking round and
reading up, and something they had always known came into focus. Their childhood
home had in fact been built for Polish refugees of the Second World War, on
land given by the Maharaja of Kolhapur, one of the Indian princes who followed
the lead of the Maharaja of Nawanagar, in arranging for shelter to the Polish
women and children who had lost their families to the war.
Susheel’s family had arrived in
Valivade completely devastated. Wrenched from lives of comfort, they were
thrown into wretched living conditions, and forced to live on charity. But the
Polish refugees had arrived in Valivade a decade before them, after even more
intense ordeals in slave gulags.
In the 1990s, Susheel and Shashi
made an effort to find local people from nearby villages who had been
associated with Valivade camp, and came across Dadoba Lokhande, who introduced
them to Maruti Dashrath Bhosale, Shiva Gawli, Bandu Hari Awale and others who
had worked with the Polish refugees. They shared their memories, and these form
a charming adjunct to this Sindhi story. Barbara Charuba kindly gave permission
to use her photos; more can be seen on https://www.polishexilesofww2.org/valivade-camp-india-part-4
Occasionally, dates came into
question. When exactly did the Gajwani family leave Sindh, when did they arrive
in the Bombay docks, when were they herded into trains that took them to
Valivade?
Clarifying dates is always a
challenge while tracing the history of families from a beleaguered community
whose focus was on surviving and moving on. Over hundreds of interviews, I’ve
met people who did not want actual years to be known, sometimes for legal
reasons, sometimes social appearances. Fudging years was an easy way out. Most
commonly, as with Susheel’s family, overwhelmed by the demands of survival and
daily existence, people simply did not kept track. We turned to archival accounts.
After the 6 January 1948 pogrom
in Karachi, the Bombay docks became overrun with refugees who had fled their
ancestral homeland and wished to live close to Bombay where they could earn for
themselves rather than in faraway Ulhasnagar on government doles. According to
a news report on 28 February 1948, more than 5000 were squatting on the
quaysides of No 18 and No 19, Alexandra Dock. Crime was escalating, and the sanitation
situation put the entire city’s health at risk. On 4 March 1948, the
Directorate of Evacuation was preparing to receive 5000 refugees per day. There
were 12,000 awaiting dispersal, and on an average about 2000 were being removed
daily. Do the figures quoted really add up? Either way, oral history interviews
confirm that mass accommodation was being identified in other parts of India,
and the railways were arranging refugee-special trains to Aswali (Deolali), Avadi
(Chennai) and other places. It was a news report which indicated the month and
year in which Susheel’s family – his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and
the extended families – arrived at Valivade.
Very soon after Sunrise over
Valivade went online a few days ago, I received an email forward, strongly
opinionated and responding with authority to the excerpt on https://blackandwhitefountain.com/sunrise-over-valivade/#.
It lamented the incident as questionable and reflecting the writer’s urge for
self-aggrandisement. The Sindhis, the email went on, were greatly appreciated
by other communities, and India as a whole! Not only that, but Sindh
stands at the very centre of the Indian national anthem and even forms the stem
of the word India and Hindu! The writer of the email himself, an important
person, specified that, as a Sindhi, he had received nothing but affection and
respect across the state even though he is not fluent in Marathi.
I will admit that I rolled my
eyes a bit but phoned Susheel at once to check, “Was that the only time anyone
hit you?”
He replied indignantly, “It was
not. I was beaten up many times when I was in college!”
“Ok – were you the only Sindhi
who faced that treatment, Susheel?”
“No, no, no, there were others
who did.”
“Ok – did all the Sindhi
youngsters get beaten up?”
“Of course not, Saaz! Most of
them tried to stay out of trouble. But there were some of us who stood up for
ourselves.”
This episode made me ponder (yet
again) how very little I know about this fascinating community despite all the
years of listening, thinking and trying to understand. Yes – by and large they
wanted to be low key and just get on with the job – but does that mean we should
pretend that people who are poised to bite back when provoked do not exist?
That we can’t make space for that mantra of our times, ‘diversity’?
It took me back to the time when
Susheel, 5 or so years old, stood clutching his beloved Amma’s loose-flowing
pajama as they waited in line. The spectre of this hungry child, craving for
milk, the ultimate luxury, haunted me right through the process of working with
him on the book. How had he survived? What traces of those years remained
within?
First appeared in https://scroll.in/article/1078447/a-publisher-recounts-her-experience-of-working-on-a-memoir-about-the-sindhi-refugee-camp-in-valivade on 4 February 2025
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