An excerpt from Losing Home Finding Home in Scroll on Nov 10, 2022

How did the Partition affect the people of Sindh? Using true stories, a new book finds out

The Sindhworkis

Boolchand Mohinani left home when he was seventeen years old, to work in a store in Ceylon. After three years, he joined his father in the family business in the Dutch East Indies.

Many things have changed in the world. Ceylon is now Sri Lanka, the Dutch East Indies is now Indonesia. But ambitious young men were leaving Sindh to trade in other countries ever since 1850, more than seventy years before Boolchand set out to seek his fortune. They sailed from Karachi, carrying trunks filled with beautiful handicrafts made in Sindh, and got off at ports to sell them. After all the goods were sold, they went back home and brought more. In time, they set up stores of their own, and moved on to new ports to expand their businesses. Soon there were many Sindhi stores in ports around the world! The young men who ran them lived above their stores, and sometimes even had to do their own housework, or cook for their bosses. When a ship’s horn sounded, whatever time of day or night, they quickly ran down to the dock to call customers to come and buy. Because they had started by selling ‘Sindhwork’, they became known as ‘Sindhworkis’.

The Sindhworkis led a hard life, and they could only visit their families every two or three years. The ship journeys were long and difficult. During the Second World War, the ship routes were closed and some men were separated from their families for all the years of the war.

By this time, Boolchand had his own store. He and his wife Muli and their three children lived in an apartment above the store. Three more children were born to them during the war years.

Isolated in Indonesia by the war, Muli missed Sindh and her parents very much. When the war ended, they decided that she and the children would go and live in Hyderabad, as most Sindhworki families did. Boolchand would continue his business in Indonesia and visit his family every few years.

A life of luxury 

Muli had grown up in Hyderabad. Her father, Khiomall, was a Sindhworki too. He had lived in Durban, South Africa, his entire working life. He visited his family in Hyderabad for two or three months every few years. Sometimes, when he left to go back, he would take his wife Pappur and the younger children along with him in the steamer ship on the twenty-day journey to Durban. After some weeks or months, he would send them back.

The drawing room of Muli’s childhood home. On the right you can see Ramchand, Boolchand’s brother, and their stepmother who have come to ‘see’ Muli and plan the wedding. Muli is in the centre with her parents Khiomall and Pappur on either side. Pappur’s brother Bullo’s is on the left with his children Gul, Rukmani and Gope. The goblets have a gold coin for the honoured guests to take home! This lifelike and accurate illustration is by Subhodeep Mukherjee

In Hyderabad, Pappur lived like a queen. When people visited on formal occasions, they would be served wine with a gold guinea at the bottom of the glass, a stylish gift from their hosts! They owned horse carriages made of pure silver.

When Muli married Boolchand, she went to live with him in Indonesia. Life was quite different from what she was used to! But she soon made friends with her neighbours and learnt how to cook delicious Indonesian food, which her children would always love even when they went to live in other countries. They spoke Sindhi to their parents, but Indonesian to each other and their friends.

Tulsi was born soon after they returned to live in Hyderabad, in July 1946. Just as the children started going to school and getting used to their new lives, Partition took place. As trouble broke out on the streets, there was no choice but to leave Sindh.

They got in the train, not knowing where they were going

Quite a different situation from the one in which she grew up, Muli is seen here with her family. Another fleeing family occupies the berth above. Illustration by Subhodeep Mukherjee.

By the time Partition took place, Muli’s father, Khiomall, had died.

Muli had to flee, taking care of her children and her mother, Pappur, as well as her younger sister Sati, who had two babies of her own. Luckily Muli’s son Jiwatram and daughter Mohini were older, and they could help her. It was very difficult and frightening but Muli was a brave lady, and so were the other women who had to leave Sindh with their children and family elders. They did not know where they were going or what would happen to them.

Muli and her family travelled in a very crowded train [S2] with a few clothes and eatables they had packed, and crossed the new border. They arrived in Ajmer and were taken to a camp and given a room in a row of rooms, each occupied by many people. The toilets were in outhouses and people had to stand in line and wait their turn.

After two weeks they left Ajmer and took a train to Delhi, where they had to wait on the railway platform for a long time. The trains and railway platforms were full of people like them, who had left their homes and were looking for a safe place to settle. They talked to each other, asking where they had come from and where they were going, trying to find out where they could live and what they could do to earn money.

Muli and her family boarded the train to Patna, where her cousin lived. Boolchand sent money to the family in Patna. It took nearly a year before he was able to make arrangements for them to return to Indonesia, and they were finally reunited.

 

Losing Home, Finding Home

Saaz Aggarwal

Illustrations by Subhodeep Mukherjee

black-and-white fountain

hardcover, 112 pages

for readers of all ages

Rs750

---

First appeared here on Nov 10, 2022

Losing Home Q&A in Indian Express Pune

Sindhi voice is unlikely to carry much weight in public life: Saaz Aggarwal

Saaz Aggarwal talks about her book 'Losing Home, Finding Home', a culmination of 10 years of her research into the Sindhi diaspora.

Written by Parthasarathi Biswas

Writer Saaz Aggarwal created ripples with her book Sindh: Stories from a Vanished Homeland, which talked about the plight and fate of Sindhi refugees who came to India post Independence. Ten years down the line, she revisits the topic in a different format in her new book Losing Home, Finding Home. Aggarwal speaks to The Indian Express about how her new book treats the issue and why she felt the need to revisit the topic.

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

Kindness in the time of Partition in USAWA LITERARY REVIEW

Kindness in the time of Partition

by Saaz Aggarwal

It is common knowledge that the 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent was a time of extreme violence between the Hindus and Muslims. In Punjab, men even killed their own daughters and wives, believing that they were protecting them from a fate worse than death. Every family experienced loss of life and limb, rape, abduction, separation and various forms of trauma.

Even as desperation and inflamed emotions led to a maniacal frenzy of vicious destruction, other, softer, human emotions continued to manifest, all along the new border as well as the areas in which riots and conflict prevailed.

In my ten years of interviewing Sindhi Partition survivors, one of the things that has struck me most is the many examples of kindness and affection between the communities. The Sindh story is different for many reasons, most significant of which is that Sindh was never partitioned. Sindh also saw less violence. A turning point took place on 6 January 1948, when a pogrom was conducted. Of the many who were saved by members of the other community who went out of their way to help and protect them, at risk to their own lives, here are a few.

Kartar’s story:

I was born in 1934, in the village Taib in Larkano district, a small village belonging to the Jaisinghani families. We were zamindars. The Bhutto family’s lands adjoined our village and we had frequent disputes over water, which was sometimes scarce, but there was friendship and congeniality between us too. The houses were made of brick – there was no concept of cement or concrete in those days. We were well off, had a horse-driven cart with seats for four, and a motorcycle, and employed a number of farmers who lived on the land and tilled it. The house was large and our rooms were upstairs. Downstairs was the autaak, a big room where the menfolk gathered. Their food was served to them there. In Taib, we ate our meals sitting on cots. Women sat separately in their section of the house. We had kitchen, bathroom, and toilets inside the house. During the hot weather, we slept in the angan, the courtyard.

My father Jessaram Jaisinghani studied in Shikarpur and then worked as a teacher in Dharamsabha High School. My mother and we children were taken to live with him in Shikarpur when I was six years old. I had my primary education in Shikarpur.

We spent our holidays in Karachi and on 14 August 1947 when Pakistan was born, that is where we were. We had been thinking about migrating to India but were still there on the fateful day of 6 January 1948.

That morning, my elder brother Nand was to take our chachi to the city. Our neighbours on the ground floor were Muslims who had migrated from Bihar a few months earlier. They must have known something was going to happen, because they rushed to Nand and begged him not to leave the house that day. They invited us to come and hide in their house where they would protect us from harm. We were grateful, but what could we do? How could we go and stay with people we hardly knew, who were of the other community?

These Muhajirs – as the migrants to Pakistan during Partition are known as – understood our dilemma. They came to our house, hung curtains on the windows and hoisted the Muslim League flag in the balcony. They assured us that if a mob came they would point to the balcony and say that no Hindu lived in the house. The mob came twice, but our kind neighbours saved us.

That day I saw terrible things that I will never forget. People were being butchered in the streets. The Muhajirs told everyone who came that there were only Muslims in the building and nobody disturbed us.

We left Karachi for good, sailing to Okha port in Saurashtra. From Viramgam, we got into the Bombay train. But it was 30 January 1948, the day Gandhi was assassinated. Our train was terminated at Ahmedabad station and everything was at a standstill. We stayed for one week on Platform Number One. There were curfews. After some days, we moved to a sesame oil mill which had been converted into a camp for refugees.

My father rented a house on the outskirts of Ahmedabad and joined Mahatma Gandhi High School as a teacher. We had to walk twelve miles every day to the school. It was a hard time but we never felt a sense of poverty since we were always aware that we belonged to a noble, zamindar family. As the years went by, our lives improved. My father became the widely-respected principal of the school. I became an engineer and worked in the corporate world. None of us ever forgot the Muhajirs who saved us on that terrible day.

Triveni’s story:

Before marriage, my mother was Saraswati Ramchand Malkani. The family lived in Malkani Ghitti, Hyderabad, Sindh. They were landlords, wealthy for seven generations, owners of bunnyoon and buildings. In c1941 they moved to live in Karachi, in Malkani Mansion on Bunder Road, opposite a Muslim cemetery.

Saraswati was the youngest of three sisters. Her father, Ramchand, had died when she was just forty days old. The head of the family was his brother Dr Sahijram. My mama Gurbaksh went to London to study and became a barrister, and the other mama Ajit Singh was given charge of the family lands, a holding of more than 3000 acres.

When Partition came, Malkani Mansion was attacked by a mob. They ransacked the doctor’s clinic on the ground floor. As they climbed to the next floor, loot maar kayoon – they pillaged the houses on the first floor, then attacked the second floor.

On the third floor they met a Muslim who stopped them, saying that there were no Hindus on the fourth floor. When they refused to believe him, he swore on the holy Quran, insisting that there were no Hindus upstairs. It was this false promise, made on the Holy Quran, that saved my mother and her family. If it hadn’t been for that Muslim, I would not be here today.

Motilal’s poem

The experience of the 6 January 1948 Karachi pogrom is also beautifully depicted in this poem by Motilal Jotwani, a child when the incident took place. His father was a teacher in Karachi and they rented two rooms in a building belonging to a devout Muslim. He was huddled that day along with other members of the family in a small storeroom of the house, old enough to imagine the consequences although his younger brother and sister were not. Allahdino – which means ‘given by god’ – let the rioters take what they wanted, and then spent the rest of the day singing songs of Kabir with the author’s father.

Cities Ran Amuck

by Motilal Jotwani

Streets roared: “Allah-o-Akbar!”

“Har har Mahadev!”

In Karachi, on 6 January 1948,

huddled in a store room,

we waited with bated breath.

The world, it seemed,

would come to a sudden end.

“Hand over the kafirs in your house,”

the rioters demanded.

God’s good man, God himself,

Allhadino lied to them:

“The people you are looking for

sailed to Bombay yesterday.”

Allahdino was an ordinary man,

Sindhi and Sanskrit dino in his Muslim name.

Allahdino lied once again:

“The poor creatures migrated to India,

leaving behind their precious belongings.

Do you want those instead?”

And we waited with bated breath …

The number of individual positive acts between members of the two communities during Partition far outnumbers the violence. While the repercussions of the latter were inestimably higher, inestimably more damaging – the support and kindness received from members of the other community must be memorialized too.

A visit to a Hindu village in present-day Pakistan

I spent a week in Sindh with my family when my first book on Sindh was launched at the Karachi Literature Festival in February 2013. On our last day we were driven into rural Sindh on a special visit to the Hemrajani family in the hamlet of Tando Ahmed Khan, close to the well-known Thano Bula Khan in Jamshoro District, an area that continues to have a large population of Hindus.

A village dargah which commemorates the ruler Raja Vikramajeet who abdicated his throne for the life of a monk displays of symbols of Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism, typical of the age-old syncretic religion of Sindh.

At Tando Ahmed Khan, we enjoyed devotional music and Sindhi hospitality at a Hindu temple, received blessings from a 100-year-old ‘Mata’, ate a meal in the Hemrajani home that tasted like my grandmother had cooked it – and drove away laden with presents, including ‘kharchi’ – a tradition of gifts of money – for my children.

Although situated off the Karachi-Hyderabad superhighway and just under two hours from each of these cities, Thano Ahmed Khan has remained remote and a small rural world unto itself. To us it provided the extraordinary experience of stepping back in time to the world of my ancestors.

What makes it a fascinating study to all, however, is that during Partition when the Hindus were leaving Sindh to settle in other parts of India and the world, not a single family left Thano Ahmed Khan. They continue to live and work here, following age-old lifestyles and traditions. They have prospered and live in peace and plenty. The Hemrajani family has lands in the village where onion forms the major crop. They also have cotton ginning factories and mills near Hyderabad, as well as agricultural lands, including banana and guava orchards, there. The brothers and their grown-up children travel to manage these businesses but the ancestral village is their home and they live their in a joint family.

Says Bhagwandas Hemrajani, the second of six brothers:

We have never had any problem. We continue to celebrate their festival days and family events and live happily and with brotherhood.

Part of the reason is because in this area we have had very good landlords and leaders. At the time of Partition, it was the presence of the local chieftain Malik Sekander Khan, that gave us the reassurance that we needed to remain in our homes. When he passed away in 1985, his son Malik Asad Sekander Khan took over and he is extremely cooperative, attending all our functions and giving us every support.

Allah tala hamari madad karta hai. Bahut khushi hoti hai aur sukoon hai.

Thano Bula Khan also has a dargah which commemorates the ruler Raja Vikramajeet who abdicated his throne for the life of a monk. This shrine displays of symbols of not just Hinduism but also Islam and Sikhism, typical of the age-old syncretic religion of Sindh. This, combined with good-quality local governance created a wall of kindness that protected the people and kept them safe.

 

The parting present

In this picture, taken in the home of Dr Gul Metlo in London in April 2017, you can see Mir Hassan Malkani and his wife Farzana with the rug Moolo gave his grandfather Ali Gohar Malkani, with the name Valeccha Kodumal woven in.

Another touching example of peace, affection and kindness is of Mir Hassan Malkani and the rug entrusted to him by his mother Izzat Khatun.

Mir Hassan’s grandfather, Ali Gohar Malkani of village Malkani near Sehwan, had any number of Hindu friends, but none as dear as Moolo. His being Hindu had never been of consequence – until Partition.

Before Moolo and his family left Sindh for good he came to bid Ali Gohar farewell. Ali Gohar was distraught and begged his friend not to leave but there was nothing anyone could do. Moolo pressed Ali Gohar to use the things from his home that he could not carry – kitchen utensils, rugs and knick-knacks. There was a beautiful metal tray engraved with designs and fitted with gold handles. When special guests visited, the children would be told, “Moolay varo tray khani acho – bring the Moolo tray”.

One of the rugs had been woven with Moolo’s father’s name: Valeccha Kodumal. Ali Gohar preserved it lovingly, hoping that a day would come when he would be able to return the heirloom to his friend. Right until the war of 1965, Ali Gohar and Moolo exchanged letters. Later that year, Ali Gohar died. The letters stopped.

Ali Gohar’s daughter, Izzat Khatun, treasured the rug and when the time came, entrusted it to her son Mir Hassan Mir Hassan grew up in Sindh. He became a doctor and settled in London. His practice on Harley Street established him as London’s foremost hair-transplant specialist. The rug is safe with him as he continues trying to find the family of his grandfather’s dearest friend so that he can return it and tell them how much the friendship meant to his family and how much they mourned its loss.

Credits

Kartar’s story is excerpted from Sindh: Stories from a Vanished Homeland by Saaz Aggarwal black-and-white fountain 2012

Triveni’s story is excerpted from The Amils of Sindh by Saaz Aggarwal black-and-white fountain 2019

Cities Ran Amuck translated by Anju Makhija and Menka Shivdasani in Freedom and Fissures: An anthology of Sindhi Partition Poetry (Sahitya Akademi 1998)

A visit to a Hindu village is excerpted from Look back in nostalgia, Mid-day, 11 April 2013

The parting present is excerpted from Losing Home by Saaz Aggarwal black-and-white fountain 2022

About the author

Saaz Aggarwal has a Master’s degree in Mathematics, but over the years established herself as a writer and artist. Her body of work includes biographies, translations, critical reviews and humour columns, as well as themed painting collections and mixed-media installations. Her books on Sindh are in university libraries around the world, and much of her research contribution in the field of Sindh studies is easily accessible online, for example in the links sindhstories, sindhworkis, talks, and free downloads.

First published https://usawa.in/issue-8/non-fiction-8/kindness-in-the-time-of-partition on October 29, 2022

About REFUGEES IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY by Sunayna Pal

Refugees in Their Own Country distills the immense trauma of Partition into seventy-five short, illustrated verses — one for each year since 1947. What makes the collection remarkable is the distance of its author from the event itself. Writing as a third-generation descendant of refugees, Sunayna Pal inhabits the inherited pain of displacement with startling immediacy.

The poems are compact, pared-down, and visual — each a snapshot of memory and loss. Using simple English, they reach readers of all ages while evoking powerful emotional and historical layers. Pal writes of ordinary objects — sand, bricks, doors, toys, papads — yet through them captures a civilization’s unmaking. Her voice is not that of witness but of listener, piecing together fragments from grandparents and survivors, and transforming them into accessible, moving verse.

There is deep empathy in these pages, but also clarity. The poet does not dramatize suffering; she humanizes it. By naming the unspoken and evoking the silenced, Refugees in Their Own Country becomes both memorial and mirror — a gentle yet piercing reminder that the story of Sindh, and of Partition’s refugees, remains incomplete until it is truly heard.

Review of Maverick Effect by Harish Mehta in Hindustan Times

A book that weaves together the personal journey of one of India’s earliest tech entrepreneurs with his role in founding and growing NASSCOM

Not that long ago, we lived in an India where businesses could not run if they followed the rules. Traditional firms were large and family-run, perceived as greedy, self-serving, intent on gaining profits and evading taxes. Corruption was so ingrained that when politicians worked with businesses, they could only do so secretly.

And we were a population that waited patiently for telephone lines, gas connections and scooters for years at a time – offering them as tempting dowry components, greasing palms to get ahead in the queue, believing that things were never going to change because this was our karma.

When did the page turn? When did we start to value professionalism and aspire to prosperity with a more relaxed confidence? And who or what pressed the button?

While there is a tacit understanding that the global IT opportunities were responsible for the social and economic changes of the last few decades, the transformative role played by NASSCOM has never been properly acknowledged and this book attempts to do so.

It is a book that weaves together Harish Mehta’s personal journey, his life as one of India’s earliest tech entrepreneurs, and his role in founding and growing NASSCOM. And it has received lavish endorsements from the senior leadership of the corporate world and Indian bureaucracy.

The Maverick Effect walks us through that soon-to-be-forgotten terrain, a time when INDIAN EXPRESS carried a headline about ‘Softwear’. A time when a customs officer asked for samples of what was being exported, Harish Mehta handed him a floppy disk, and the officer thrust a stapler pin through the disk to attach it to a form, blithely uncaring that he had ruined it. And once, when a senior bureaucrat was told that the software business’s potential could be $1 billion, his guffawed retort was, “Young man, do you know how many zeroes are in one billion?”

Bureaucracy was that nasty barrier which forced young entrepreneurs into paperwork battles in government offices, draining away energy that should have been reserved for innovation. However, this book showcases the many officials who helped achieve their goals, year after year, without a single incident of bribery. It is equally subjective in documenting the resistance to NASSCOM’s efforts by MAIT, another more traditional industry body.

When NASSCOM was established, its aim was government-industry collaborations that would fuel intelligent economic strategy and give the Indian IT capability access to world markets. Perhaps what made it unappealing to powerful lobbyists was that these efforts were never restricted to favoured members but on benefits for the entire industry. There were bureaucrats who welcomed this new approach of a level playing field and an ‘India first’ strategy. Even the dissenters soon saw that when the pie increases in size, each slice is going to be larger too.

The new culture that developed inadvertently drew from the non-hierarchical US business environment and its related efficiency, the Jain teachings Harish Mehta was brought up with, and partly the influence of the European Union where competing entities collaborate for the greater good. A cohesive team came together with no personal agenda and a ‘growth mindset’; with no room for elderly statesmen or a laddering system. What a welcome wind of change!

It was a time of transition when it suddenly felt like the future had arrived – data transfer that once took days got done in hours! But it was still an India where a telecom minister might inquire, “Yeh bandwidth kya cheez hai”. The dawning of India as a ‘technology destination’ took place in this flurry of opportunity, confusion, continuous activity, and persistent effort from NASSCOM.

This book also examines larger issues, condensed in time by the extra-swift passage of this significant historical era. Why were software services and outsourcing essential to incubate an ecosystem and build a critical mass before moving to IP-driven output? Would MNCs entering India be the ruin of us, or help us move to a higher and more stable ground? Were the Indian engineers working in the US, struggling to cope with an unfamiliar climate, the lack of domestic help and vegetarian food, the fire-alarms that rang out when they tried to cook – really stealing jobs or simply enhancing the efficiency of the US business environment?

One of the most dramatic events this book describes is the 2009 scandal when the gentle and endearing Ramalinga Raju, founder of Satyam Computer Services, then India’s fourth-largest IT company, stood up and publicly confessed to a massive accounting fraud. NASSCOM immediately rallied round to protect Brand India (which it had struggled to establish), ensuring that Satyam would continue to deliver its client commitments, and forbidding competitors from poaching.

There is also an in-depth profile of Dewang Mehta, for a long time the face of NASSCOM but with the kind of personality which made him unpopular among some. The author’s paean to Dewang’s commitment to growing the Indian economy through IT, and Dewang’s fundamental patriotism and love for India, is moving indeed.

This, book written by an engineer-entrepreneur, conveys emotion with skill. Its nuances and creative metaphors reflect the author’s exposure to poetry from a young age.

first appeared here on Aug 25, 2022

Written for wire.in for Independence Day 2022

For Sindhis, Partition Meant Loss of a Homeland, of a Culture and a Language

Saaz Aggarwal

19/Aug/2022

5 min read

The community however turned hardship into success and thrived by assimilating into the host society.

Image courtesy Murli Melwani (left). taken in the family store after a fire in the neighbourhood caused calamity. His father Herkishendas Sobrajmal Melwani is seen on the right.

As the country waves flags and celebrates the 75th anniversary of India’s independence, it is also time to take stock. What did India’s founders and citizens dream of, how has India fared, what have been our challenges and successes?

Sometime in mid-2012, I asked Niranjan Gidwani to tell me his family’s Partition story.

Till then, I’d only known Niranjan as my husband’s friend, a good guy, and never thought about him as a Sindhi or anything like that. But I’d just started working on a book about Sindhis and it was amazing how all kinds of unexpected sources were popping up. Niranjan told me some interesting things, including how his grandfather, a fairly well-off and influential person in Sindh, went missing in the turmoil before Partition. His younger son was general manager of the Great Indian Peninsular Railways, and arranged for a private bogey for the family to move their things as they left Sindh. However, the labour bringing their furniture and personal belongings never reached the station. Later, his grandfather's body was found cut up in pieces in a sack, under a railway bridge. “Till today,” Niranjan said, “no one really talks about this.”

This was the first example I’d heard of barbaric atrocity coming out of Sindh, and over ten years and many interviews, it is still one of very few. Even with no one really talking about such things, the extent of violence in Sindh is of a completely different scale to what happened in Punjab where there was no family without its own horror story. This is one of the big differences between what happened in Sindh and what happened in Punjab, and it’s the main reason why people who left Sindh always considered themselves the lucky ones and did not feel they had a story to tell.

What somehow slipped out of this broad context was that while Punjab and Bengal were split in two, Sindh was given intact to Pakistan. And when the minority community Sindhis were forced out by ominous threats and pointed discrimination, they had to start afresh in unfamiliar places among unfamiliar people, where the food, clothes, habits were different from what they were accustomed to – and the language was written in the opposite direction.

Many Sindhis settled in centres of employment and trade – Bombay, nearby Pune, Delhi, and places easily accessed from the border including Ahmedabad and Ajmer. Aruna Jethwani, 13 when Partition took place, remembers that neighbours in Ahmedabad and Nadiad were good and helpful. However, before renting an apartment, her father had to sign a declaration that no meat would be cooked or eaten on the premises. Reaching out to touch laundry flapping on a line one day, she knew what it meant to be an inauspicious omen when a woman screamed, “Nirvasi chho – you are homeless!”

The taint of disdain was felt all over.

In Gibraltar in October 2013, Suresh Nagrani stood up to speak after my talk. “When I was young,” he started, “I thought all Indians were Sindhi.” Everybody laughed. The thing is, though, the Indians native to Gibraltar are indeed all Sindhi. They form part of the trade diaspora that originated in the 1850s, soon established itself in ports around the world, and was documented as recently as 1999 by Claude Markovits. Suresh went on to describe the jolt he got at university in England where he met Indians from different parts of India – and one of them said to him, “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?”

Perhaps the prejudice Sindhis faced began after Partition when many of the homeless ones took to trading at low margins, creating resentment among established traders. Perhaps this was reinforced by negative characters in Hindi films who had Sindhi names and said nasty, exploitative things in Sindhi accents – even until the 1990s.

Beneath that public perception lies a gentler reality. Reyhaan Datta who grew up in Calcutta remembers a Sindhi sari seller from whom her mother bought beautiful saris – a softspoken person whom her mother would offer tea. One day he told them that it would be his last visit. He had been a skin specialist and had left Sindh with his wife and mother with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Selling saris from door to door and living simply, he had now saved enough to buy a practice with a leading Calcutta skin specialist.

It is stories of this type that pervade every family that left Sindh.

From the ‘refugee camps’ in which the new Government of India accommodated the masses displaced by Partition came many schools, colleges, other institutions that continue to serve the community. Being homeless, the Sindhis built homes for themselves; in time, they would change the skyline of these cities. Scattered over the globe with a few pockets of some density, the Sindhis rebuilt their lives of comfort and dignity by integrating into the communities where they settled. For a community that lost all their material possessions, they were able to regain a remarkable degree of prosperity in time. And, just as this heterogenous community had behaved as one when leaving their ancestral homeland without looking back – most families spontaneously stopped talking to their children in their mother tongue.

The languages we grow up with, the words and expressions used around us, influence our thoughts and behaviour. And the Sindhi of 1947 was a language packed thick with phrases and concepts from the region’s philosopher poets of the previous few hundred years.

Herkishendas Melwani left Sindh in 1939 to work in the global retail chain of Lalchand Dhalamal, was never able to return when exiled by Partition, and settled in Shillong. Anglicized due to his social station and education, Herkishendas valued his Sindhiness and quoted and lived by his Sindhi pahakas (sayings). One day a fire on GS Road burnt down six shops and he too suffered great losses. When asked, “Saba mey bhali – there is good in everything – really?” He replied, “Yes, now even more than before. “Hikri lati sau pati – when one door closes, another 100 open.” His son, Murli Melwani (PhD in English Literature and a professor at Sankerdeb College until he too fell prey to political forces and left his hometown Shillong, becoming a businessman in Taiwan and later the USA, acknowledged recently by Sahitya Akademi as a Sindhi writer who contributes to languages other than Sindhi) wrote about his father’s classic Sindhi response here: systematically restoring and recouping, adjusting losses against goodwill, ensuring that credit lines remained open.

The Sindhi pahakas – shaped by and reinforcing the multi-faith harmony of the land – defined the mindset of a people who chose to accept their fate, protect their womenfolk, adapt to lives in other places. They continue to pervade the Sindhi identity. Somewhat. Because there is no place the community has access to where their language is spoken on the streets. Sindhi is a language that you only hear in the homes of relatives, it’s the language of intimacy, 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.

First appeared here on 19 Aug 2022

Foreword to REFUGEES IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY by Sunayna Pal

Foreword 

The extent of pain and trauma that took place during Partition – the massacres, destruction of families, material loss, displacement of communities and other ordeals – covered such a wide spectrum that it took decades for the subject to even be approached. The process of unravelling and trying to make sense of what happened continues, but the far-reaching consequences may never be fully comprehended. With the silence of decades, our understanding will always be based on conjecture or extrapolation.

It took fifty years for Urvashi Butalia to begin the process of documenting the experiences women had during Partition. An entire half of the displaced, denuded and dismembered population had such a dramatically different story than what had been previously recorded!  The fact that it had been completely ignored for fifty years carries its own message.

Ten years later, when Nandita Bhavnani started exploring the Sindh story – so very different from what had happened in Punjab or Bengal – it was still seen as inconsequential.

Unlike Punjab and Bengal, Sindh was never partitioned. Hindus were a comfortable minority, well integrated in the province for centuries. It was believed that this would continue after Partition. However, 1947 onwards, they faced continuous threats, communal violence and discrimination. As time passed, the situation deteriorated and the naively anticipated ‘normal’ became a chimera.

Here was a population that had not seen dead bodies on the streets. Not too many heaps of them, that is. There were neither drama nor loud retellings. All they wanted was to resume their lives of comfort and dignity. And so they worked hard, used their enterprise and their historical advantages – and quietly integrated.

At first, what was lost was seen as merely material. What was not seen was that, along with the material loss – hugely significant material loss – so much else was also lost. Relationships. A way of life. Familiarity and connection with the land. Families once tightly connected were abruptly scattered. Elders died of broken hearts. The trauma which enveloped the community would continue to manifest in different ways for generations to come. Parents stopped speaking to their children in their mother tongue. Old customs gave way to new ones. The violent severing caused huge chunks of history to vanish, especially recent history. To resurrect it would be a long and perilous task.

The eruptions of Partition caused sparks to fly and scatter. Amidst the agony and trauma, amazingly, instances of beauty arose too. There were the personal sacrifices made to protect members of the other community. There were the sagas of the heroic rebuilding of lives. There were the remarkable, indomitable, institutions that arose from the refugee camps. Many Sindhi writers produced outstanding works of Partition-related literature and some of it has been translated into English by writers like Rita Kothari, Anju Makhija and Menka Shivdasani.

The case of Sunayna Pal and her delightful Partition Poetry is unique.

First, she herself is from a generation quite far removed from Partition. Even her parents were born in the 1950s. She grew up in a Sindhi family, but not immersed in a Sindhi community. Like very many Sindhis of her generation raised in urban, cosmopolitan India, Sunayna’s representation of her ethnic identity remained nebulous and sometimes defensive. “I have played a game all my life,” she says. “When anyone asks me where I am from, I reply, ‘guess’.” The answers come, naming states of India, south, east, north. “Further north,” she encourages the smiling questioner to go on. By the time they conclude that she is Sindhi, the connection to Pakistan, she observes ruefully, has caused the smile to disappear.

Second, the influences upon her were limited. Partition was never the focus of specific conversations around her as she grew up. She did not have continued or intense interactions with her grandparents. All she knew was that they had escaped from Sindh across the new border, and found solace in refugee camps set up by the new government of the newly-independent and newly-severed nation. When an English teacher – Sunayna was her favourite – mentioned her admiration for the Sindhis who had lost everything to Partition but worked hard and established themselves, she rushed home to excitedly share this lovely affirmative observation. Her mother agreed, but in a noncommittal way.

Sunayna’s father’s eldest brother took care of Sunayna and her sister when their parents were away at work. Ram Chacha was their link to the old country, and his reminisces appear to have awakened a latent poetic talent. When Sunayna’s mother complained of dust in their Mumbai home, Ram Chacha spoke wistfully of the abundance of sand in his home in Sindh. When she applied henna on her hands, he described how women in Sindh plucked henna and rubbed the crushed leaves on their hands. Thirteen years old when he left his home in Nasarpur for a new home in a new India, he told Sunayna that he had sat in the ship, petrified that the building on water would sink. And he occasionally told her of his deep desire to visit his home in Sindh. As Sunayna grew up, she began to feel like going there too. Interviews with other Sindhi grandmothers and grandfathers gave Sunayna glimpses into life in Sindh during Partition. Somehow the fragmented impressions came together to create in her a visceral reaction which filled her with the passion to describe the wonders of Sindh to the world.

Third, Sunayna does not have a strong literary background. She loves to read but doesn’t read much. Her writing uses American spellings and her structures are grounded in Indian English. Her verses make an impact even though she is yet to master the range of short poetic forms. “They came to me,” she says of them; they could be considered ‘ayat’ – inspired verses (as were those of Shah Abdul Latif). Each captures, in a few well-chosen words, core, iconic issues of the experience of Partition. Coming from a third-generation survivor, a young mother who lives in the US with her scientist non-Sindhi husband and their two little sons, Sunayna’s verses are uncannily close to the bone. 75 verses, on the 75th anniversary of Partition, they form a primer for anyone, across generations, interested in an encounter with syncretic human cultural experience.

 

Saaz Aggarwal
July 2022

The Pain of Partition, as Seen in the Literature of Many Languages

Novels, stories, poetry – there were many ways that authors expressed what they saw during that harrowing time and after: a contribution to a piece in wire.in about Partition literature.

Sindhi 

Pakhiara Valarakhan Vichriyaa (Birds Separated From Their Flock) by Gobind Malhi

This 1953 book written by Gobind Malhi fresh from his own Partition experience, has hero Sanwal refusing to leave Sindh even when all his family and friends do. The book describes the situation of Partition vividly, and through Sanwal’s dogged determination not to succumb to a political categorisation of religion, the author conveys the Sindhi Sufi ethos which puts humanity above all. Translated into English as The Anguish of Separation by Sindhishaan and published by Shobha Chandnani in 2014.

Yerwada jailajyu kahaaniyoon by Rita Shahani

Written in 1999, Shahani drew on the bedtime stories her husband Vishnu would tell their children about his life as a freedom fighter. This book uses different voices with different perspectives to present an all-round view of the Indian freedom struggle, the RSS, the bitterness at the loss of Sindh – on 15 August 1947, Vishnu ripped up the flag in anguish – and some changes that took place after Independence. Translated into English as Tales from Yerwada Jail by Saaz Aggarwal with the author in 2014.

One of the most prolific, original and vibrant Sindhi writers of recent times, a feminist role model, was Popati Hiranandani. Her autobiography and selected stories, The Pages of My Life, was translated from Sindhi by Jyoti Panjwani in 2010. Popati writes about her life in Hyderabad as a young girl, and her mother’s struggles to take care of the family after her father died. She describes the escape from violence and the traumatic resettlement, followed by her life as a writer in independent India. The stories are a fictionalised extension of the autobiography and their main themes are gender, Partition and social injustice.

Sindhi novels about Partition are few, but there was a huge outpouring of short stories and poetry in the anguished aftermath of separation, loss and struggle. Unbordered Memories, a collection of short stories, was translated by Rita Kothari in 2009. Freedom and Fissures, an anthology of Sindhi Partition poetry was translated by Anju Makhija and Menka Shivdasani with the poet Arjan ‘Shad’ Mirchandani in 1998.

Hem’s father is the mukhi of Tharushah. Away at Shantiniketan when Partition takes place, he becomes a successful and well-paid journalist in independent India. However, the feeling of being lost and not fitting in persists. This book is about his anguish, his conviction that he needs Sindh as much as Sindh needs him. He wanders through Kachchh, crosses the salt desert towards the border, and is never seen again. Tarandara Badal (clouds transgress borders) was written in the late 1990s by Krishin Khatwani, himself a student at Shantiniketan when Partition took place

Contributions by Kuldeep Kumar, Sakoon Singh, Mahtab Alam, Sanjay Sipahimalani, Shikha Mukherjee and Saaz Aggarwal.

First appeared in wire.in on 14 August 2022

You can read the rest of the article on this link