Unbordered Memories

by Rita Kothari

  The guilt in Ayaz’s voice, the fact that when opportunity presented itself, Sindhi Muslims pilfered things from the homes of Hindus is one of the cornerstones of Sindhi Muslims’ memories of that period. Some justify it by recounting how Hindu traders would charge usurious rates of interest, and their falling out was entirely because of economic disparity. The conversation between Kamil and members of the older generation in Shoukat Hussain Shoro’s ‘Death of Fear’ captures the divergent historiographies of this period.

  Ambiguity of Citizenship

  Compared to Sindhi Muslims, the Sindhi Hindus have had a more awkward, but non-confrontational relationship with the nation state. It is useful to relate here a short but symbolically significant episode that took place in India. In the year 2005, a petition was filed in the Supreme Court to remove the word ‘Sindh’ from India’s national anthem because the region of Sindh is no more in India. The Supreme Court dismissed the petition summarily, and the media ceased to take interest in it. The matter was forgotten by all as an isolated and absurd example of how the Indian judiciary was made to waste time. The implications of this however were hotly resented by a handful of Sindhi intellectuals and activists. What the Sindhis mourn most even today is the loss of homeland. The petitioner seeking the removal of Sindh from the Indian national anthem was making even the memory of a lost homeland illegitimate. Worse yet, he sought to erase the historical roots of the Sindhis. On the other hand, Ali Baba, a Muslim writer from across the border, sensitively captures the alienation of the Sindhi Hindu in a story called ‘Dharti Dhikaana’. The son born in post-Partition India teases his mother, who is nostalgic about Sindh, by saying:

  ‘Amma, you always call the sea of Karachi, Sindhu Sagar, but there is no such sea in history or geography. The sea of Karachi is called the Arabian Sea.’

  ‘Wah! Why the Arabian Sea? The sea became Arabian after the Arabs conquered it, do you think it was called Arabian Sea at the times of King Dahir?’

  ‘But Aai, Sindh is under Muslim domination even now. They consider themselves descendants of the Arabs. There is only one unit in Pakistan these days. The world atlas shows no country by the name of Sindh. You keep giving yourself false assurances, Sindh does not exist anywhere.’

  His mother was suddenly stung, as if by a scorpion. She looked at him wounded, and stricken, ‘Ram, I don’t understand what you people are taught in universities and colleges. Your knowledge is so limited. Listen, even now I have a vivid memory of how when I was a child, and a student studying Sindhi in class four, your late grandfather had taken me to the Lakhidhar pilgrimage fair. I had written my name with a nail on a slab of Bhago Thodo—Savitri Hingorani, Standard Four, Sindhi. It’s been so many years since then. I can say with certainty that the cruel flow of time must have wiped my name off the mountain. But how does that matter?’

  ‘Amma, forgive me, I didn’t know that it would hurt you so much. How do I know what a nation is? I am untouched by that experience.’

  What is ‘nation’ for the Indian Sindhis? For the globally diasporic Sindhi community spread across three continents of the world doing business, the nation is a notional place, an idea with no physical contours. For those who live in India, Sindh has ceased to be a nation, because they can’t visit it, and can’t afford to talk about it since it belongs to what the rest of India considers an ‘enemy state’. This has made Sindh inaccessible in both memory and reality. It also perhaps explains the silence Sindhis maintained about their past, the stories that were never transmitted, the wounds that were never shared. It is only in the literary space of stories that nostalgia for the lost nation finds articulation. The first generation writers who tell the stories included in this volume re-enact Sindh as a pure and pristine nation, an ideal haven that they (the Hindu Sindhis of India) may not be able to visit, but which remains enshrined in memory as a pre-lapsarian heaven. The idea of Sindh is often engendered, best exemplified in Sundri Uttamchandani’s ‘Bhoori’. The central character, Bhoori, is Sindh (endearingly called Sindhri) whom the Sindhi Hindus managed to rescue and bring with them, locked securely in their hearts. The fact that Bhoori lost her lustre, but not her virtue, when thrown into poverty and helplessness has symbolic significance for the Sindhis. It implies that a self-respecting entrepreneurial community turned itself from sharnarthi (refugees) to purusharthi (hardworking people) without compromising their women’s dignity. Interestingly, Sindh is a woman in the conception of Sindhi Muslim writers also, but the historiographical emphasis is different. In the Sindhi Muslim’s right to self-determination, the Sindh nation is defined by the river Indus, by Mohenjodaro and by the Sufis. The Sindhi Hindus use the same tropes to emphasize an Aryan continuity. However, the nation remains elusive for both, constructed, fantasized and shared only in literary space and, now, cyberspace.

  Unbordered Memory

  The discussion on Amar Jaleel at the beginning of this essay set the tone for an unbordered memory of Partition. It also set the tone for an imaginative and empathetic entry that Sindhis on both sides of the border very often make into each other’s world. If Partition changed the lives of Sindhi Hindus who felt insecure and unwanted, it also changed things for Sindhi Muslims. After 1947, both religious communities in different ways faced challenges, from within and without, to their language, state and identity. I have discussed elsewhere that the Sindhi Muslim leaders supported the movement for Pakistan hoping to acquire economic advantages that they had lost to the Hindus. However, the Islamic state of Pakistan was new for them, and it was not easy getting used to the Urdu, the mosques, the new avatars of domination. In the story, ‘The Oxen’, Muhammad Daud Baloch asks a hard-hitting question: If beasts need to be in their language zone, how are humans beings to function without one? The question applied as much to the imposition of Urdu on Sindhi Muslims in Pakistan, as to the Sindhi Hindus in post-Partition India. It is true that the Sindhi Hindus paid a heavier price by leaving their lands, homes, shops and all cultural referents behind in Sindh. At the same time, Partition also caused irrevocable changes in the lives of Sindhi Muslims who willy-nilly found themselves second-class citizens in the new Islamic state of Pakistan. The ramifications of that moment continue to be felt even today by Sindhis living in both nations.

  The shared space of the Sindhis (Hindus and Muslims) in this book is an extension of a composite ‘Sindhiness’ in the literary community of Sindhi writers across borders who continue to read and interact with each other. The formation of nation states seized upon this composite zone, concretized in Jaleel’s nostalgia for the festival of Holi that was also ‘holy’ for being syncretic. Many stories in this volume testify to an empathetic entry made by Sindhi Muslims into the world of Hindus, and the Indian Sindhis’ solidarity with the turbulence experienced by a Pakistani Sindhi. It is hoped that this small gesture of documenting simultaneous experiences from both sides of the border would dispel the synonymy between nations and religions, and bring the discussion on Partition into the ambit of South Asia at large.

  References

  Bhalla, Alok. 2007. Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

  Karandikar, S.L. Refugee Files. National State Archives. New Delhi

  Kothari, Rita. 2007. The Burden of Refuge: Sindhi Hindus of Gujarat. New Delhi: Orient Longman.

  Kothari, Rita. 8–21 July 2006. RSS in Sindh. Economic and Political Weekly, 3007–13.

  Kripalani, J.B. 2004. My Times. New Delhi: Rupa.

  1To understand why the Sindhi experience of Partition was different, and what made it relatively less violent, we need to see interconnections between Sindh’s geography as a frontier region, its cultural isolation, its amalgamation of religions and the economic interdependence between Hindus and Muslims (Kothari, 2007).

  2The Province of Sindh (now a state in Pakistan) is bordered on the east by the Thar desert of India and in the west by the mountains of Baluchistan; it boasts of the port city of Karachi as well as the remains of the Indus
Valley civilization. Its history is chequered and is best known by the brief message ‘PECCAVI’ sent by its British conqueror Charles Napier to his superiors in the Bombay Presidency. Tracing its origin to the Indus Valley settlements of Mohen-jo-daro (itself a Sindhi word meaning the ‘gate/hillock of the dead’), Sindh was part of various Hindu kingdoms up to 712 AD when Mohammed bin Kasim conquered it and established Muslim rule. Various Muslim dynasties ruled over Sindh undisturbed until 1843 when the British decided that its strategic importance necessitated its conquest. The colonial policies of land and education tipped the economic and social balance. The Hindu minority of Sindh which had always been rich but unobtrusive, now cornered powerful positions in the nineteenth century, evoking a strong feeling among Sindhi Muslim leaders that they had not received their just desserts.

  3Gradually these images of a vilified Muslim became generalized, at least in the minds of post-Partition generations.

  6 January 1948

  THAKUR CHAWLA

  Karachi city. Near the press building of the daily Hindu (now Hindustan) was a prominent circular structure and across that was the area called Gaadikhaato. At the outskirts of Gaadikhaato, stood a pale green, five-storey building called Thakur Nivas (now Maahrukh Manzil).

  Thakur Nivas belonged to us. We had an office on the first floor and our home on the third. The remaining three floors were rented out. We were in the business of finance. Over a period of time, Baba had meticulously squirreled away money and had the building constructed. He made allowances for the ups and downs of business and assumed that at least the rent would take care of his children’s expenses. But God had something else in mind. The year 1947 changed history. The country was divided into two, followed by brutal riots everywhere. In the interiors of Sindh, zamindari was dying out, and it seemed almost certain that people would have to leave behind wells and buildings, gardens and parks, and homes put together over years.

  Our house was so tall that you could see it for miles around. It was in the village of Ranipur, which you had to pass through to visit the dargah of Sachal. My baba had been the mukhi of Ranipur for years, so people migrating from Ranipur and its surrounding villages, who needed to stop by in Karachi to board ships, used our home in Karachi as a temporary refuge. They would wait for their tickets, and sometimes this could take four or five months. Out of the five rooms on our office floor, we had reserved four for guests, and these were constantly packed with the belongings of people migrating from Sindh. Every piece of luggage had a name written on it.

  On the morning of 6 January 1948, at about noon, there was a sudden furore on the street where we lived. Shrieks and shouts came forth from neighbouring homes. I must have been fifteen or sixteen years old then. When I came out into the balcony, what I witnessed was daylight robbery. Two trucks stood nearby. About a hundred non-Sindhi Muslims, that is, Mohajirs, were filling up the trucks with pickings from a building only a block away from ours, where Dr Premchand used to live. It was horrifyingly evident from the way they spoke and acted that these were Muslims who had migrated from UP or Bihar and they intended to kill us and rob us. I ran downstairs. Oblivious to the mayhem, our watchman, who hailed from Allahabad, was busy cooking dal in his alcove under the stairs. I yelled at him and made him lock up the iron gates. I explained the situation to him and quickly sent the women and children to the top floor of our house.

  Ten or fifteen minutes later, a bunch of Mohajirs stood outside our building, violently shaking the iron bars of the gate, and shouting ‘Allah ho Akbar’. About seven or eight of us stood in the balcony randomly throwing things at them to prevent them from entering the building. The Sindhi Muslims living in the government-owned quarters across our building merely watched.

  Within no time, we ran out of dispensable objects, such as pieces of wood, which we had been using to throw at the hooligans, who now began to bang and thump the wooden doors on the ground floor vigorously. As a result, the latch of one of the doors came unfastened, giving them access to the rest of the building. I wanted to call up the police but the the telephone wires had been cut. Companions who I had thought would support me in resisting the attacks had fled, taking refuge in their own houses. As for the guests, whose belongings had lain safely in our office, they had rushed to the terrace with their wives and children.

  When the crowd started pounding our door, there were only three of us left in the office—my cousin Hardasmal, the watchman and me. Hardasmal was ready to leave the following day, that is, 7 January, with his eight bags and gunny sacks full of utensils. He now watched with growing terror as the latch came undone slowly but surely and he suddenly collapsed in a heap. The watchman threw away his lathi and hid himself in the bathroom.

  I took up the lathi but didn’t have the chance to use it. Hefty looking Mohajirs descended on us with knives and staffs. Some hit us with sticks, and some with blows. One of them grazed my nose with a knife, and another one grazed my back. My clothes were soaked with blood. ‘Police! Police! Bachao, bachao!’ I shrieked but to no avail. The rooms were deserted, bereft of belongings, including bags which contained trousseaus for daughters. Some of the bags had contained everything needed for a new life in India. In one fell stroke, the aspirations and hopes of all the guests were buried. They had been turned paupers.

  Two hours later, the police had arrived. The injured were taken to hospitals. The following day, the daily newspaper Sindh Observer had covered the incident and also printed the names of those who had died. The list included my name because there was little hope of my survival. Luckily for me, a nurse who used to live in the neighbourhood, had seen me in hospital and she took painstaking efforts to help me recover. With timely medical attention medicine and under her care, I managed to return home within a fortnight. By then, everything had changed.

  Every single relative and neighbour of mine had left for India. Willy-nilly, I too began to think of leaving Karachi. I had written off the possibility of selling my immovable property—the house, the land, and in the village, houses, wells and otaks. As for the building in Karachi, which could have been sold for one and a half lakh rupees before the riots, it was now reduced to exactly half its price. I finally found a buyer for sixty-eight thousand. At that point in time, the government had promulgated a fresh rule prohibiting any distress sale of property after the riots. In order to prove that the transaction preceded the riots of 6 January, I needed a certificate from the collector.

  My friend, who was a lawyer, helped me approach the collector. The collector, a Sindhi Muslim, said to me, ‘Vaanya, for once you are at my mercy. I will charge you a thousand rupees to issue a certificate.’

  This is how I sold my building in Karachi, abandoned everything else, and migrated.

  When I Experienced the Simultaneity of Life and Death …

  POPATI HIRANANDANI

  We have with us neither death nor life. We lack completely in autonomy.

  —Lachhman ‘Komal’

  The radio announced that the nation was divided. Newspapers mentioned that the entire province of Sindh had gone to Pakistan. Refugees had begun to come into Sindh. The next day we heard that five thousand Muslims had come to Hyderabad. Some had been put up in the Muslim hostel, while some others lived in the neighbourhood of the Salatis. The Muslim hostel was on the street to our right. The atmosphere was vitiated by fear and misgiving, and terror gripped our hearts. As if this was not enough, some young Muslim men got out of the hostel and began to shout, ‘Hand over the beauties of the beautiful Hyderabad to us.’ Our heart beats raced. Young women in every house were being warned. The moment a Muslim enters your house, you must shove your fingers in the nearest electric socket, turn the switch on and bring an end to your life. Small packets of poison were also being given to them.

  At six in the evening, I heard somebody’s voice on the loudspeaker. To catch the words, I walked to the head of the lane where I lived. An announcement blared from a row of police jeeps. ‘No riots will take place. The police are ale
rt. Military forces are also present.’ Wherever the police jeeps passed, doors and windows closed one by one. People felt a sense of imminent danger. A hush fell over the streets.

  I entered my home and switched on the radio. But Amma did not let me. ‘Don’t, the rascals will think we are having a good time listening to music.’ Usually, the light above the main door of the house would be turned on at 7 p.m. and it would remain on until the late hours of the night. The main door would be left open almost till midnight. But on that day, even the lights in the courtyard and the verandah were switched off. The door was fastened with three kinds of latches.

  With the exception of my brother Hashu, everyone was inside the house. Young men were busy equipping themselves for possible skirmishes with the incoming refugees. They were forming small defence teams and training themselves to safeguard lives and homes. Hashu was the leader of one such team. He would arrive late at night and unload lathis from his bicycle, which he would then slide under my stringed cot in the verandah because my cot was covered with a sheet. Some of the lathis were pierced on one end with pins, while some others had glass splinters on them. At least fifty lathis were buried in a secret corner of the terrace so that the women of the house could have easy access to them and fight from the rooftops.

  It was 9 p.m., but no sign of Hashu. The doors of the house facing ours were shut fast. It was all quiet and deserted around us in Hyderabad, a city otherwise bustling and active late into the night. Even at one in the morning, you could hear gramophones playing, Kya kaaran hai ab rone ka … kya kaaran … (Why the tears now …) or hear loud cries of ‘Eh, kaara! Give me ice for fifty paisa,’ as a hot and thirsty customer called out to the ice-candy man. You could see young men hanging outside shops and laying wagers over who could eat the most bananas. Grandmothers would be busy telling stories about how ‘Kuno abducted the virgin’ and tongawallahs would sing legendary songs like ‘Umar took Marui away, took her away …’ A demon had visited those streets that night.