THE MAKING OF EXILE: SINDHI HINDUS AND THE PARTITION OF INDIA

by NANDITA BHAVNANI

  11.Motilal Jotwani, Sufis of Sindh, pp vii-ix.

  12.C. S. Lakshmi, Standing On Her Own Feet, p 16.

  13.Percy Ramchandani, interview, May 2012.

  14.Sobho Gianchandani, ibid, pp 35-37.

  15.Nooruddin Sarki, ‘Anpoori Atamkatha’, in Sattar Pirzada, ed, Aadarshi Insaan Nooruddin Sarki, pp 21-22.

  16.Sri Prakasa, Pakistan: Birth and Early Days, pp 67-68.

  17.The Times of India, Bombay, 10 January 1948.

  18.Ganda Singh, ibid, p 83.

  19.As quoted in G. D. Khosla, Stern Reckoning, pp 252-253.

  20.Gurbachan Singh Talib, Muslim League Attacks, as quoted in Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India, p 78.

  21.As quoted in The Times of India, Bombay, 11 January 1948.

  22.Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, ibid, pp 86-88.

  23.Free Press Journal, Bombay, 13 January 1948.

  24.See ‘Love is Stronger than Hate’ by Khushdeva Singh in Mushirul Hasan, ibid, pp 87-112, which gives a detailed account of the effect of the arrival of Hindu and Sikh refugees in Dharampur (near Simla) and the consequent harassment of, violence meted out to and the expulsion of Muslims in that area. Also see ‘Who Killed India?’ by Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, in Mushirul Hasan, ibid, p 248, in which he gives the ironic account of how Hindu and Sikh refugees from Montgomery (present-day Sahiwal) in West Punjab were resettled in Panipat as a result of which Muslims in Panipat were harassed and made to leave, some of them settling in Montgomery. Also see Divide and Quit, in which Penderel Moon describes the climate of revenge in Bahawalpur State.

  25.According to one account, Hindus owned just over 28,000 properties in Karachi. K. R. Sipe, ‘Karachi’s Refugee Crisis: The Political, Economic and Social Consequences of Partition-Related Migration’, unpublished PhD thesis, Duke University, 1976, as quoted in Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, ibid, p 120.

  26.As quoted in The Times of India, Bombay, 10 January 1948.

  27.Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit, p 190.

  CHAPTER 8

  Exodus

  They have departed now, heading eastwards

  Giving up their homes here, they will settle ahead.

  – Shah Abdul Latif Bhitai1

  The Last Straw

  The Karachi pogrom created panic among the Hindus who had continued to live in the city; news of this violence also sent shockwaves among Hindus all over Sindh. Lakhs of Hindus living in cities both near and far from Karachi – Thatta, Sukkur, Larkana – now decided they were no longer safe in Sindh or in Pakistan. For many Hindus, the agonising dilemma of whether to leave Sindh or not had been simmering for many months; it now boiled over after the Karachi pogrom.

  Through the months of 1947, a high degree of ambivalence had prevailed among the Sindhis, both Muslim and Hindu. The Sindhi Muslims who had for the past few months vacillated between supporting the local Hindus, their fellow Sindhis, on the one hand, and discriminating against them on the other hand, had become completely outnumbered and overshadowed by muhajirs and Punjabi Muslims, captains of the new nation-state. The Sindhi Hindus had also oscillated between their ethnic identity as Sindhis and their centuries-old bond with their home province, their investments in business and property in Sindh and the hollow reassurances of the Sindh government on the one hand, and their recent experience of being an oppressed minority on the other hand. Now, thanks to the stance among a section of the muhajirs that their rehabilitation in Pakistan was incompatible with the continued residence of Sindhi Hindus – and the resultant violence – the Sindhi Hindus realised that their physical safety was at stake. There was acute panic among Sindhi Hindus all over Sindh, even among those who had not witnessed any violence at all.

  Consider a survey conducted by the writer Subhadra Anand of a random sample of 100 Sindhi Hindus: 90 per cent said that the central government in Pakistan had given no assurance of safety to Hindus; 87 per cent said that Khuhro did not inspire any confidence among the people (presumably Hindus); 96 per cent of them said that Muslim immigrants from India created trouble for the Sindhi Hindus; and 89 per cent of them said that the Karachi riots were the last straw.2

  The Karachi violence had also given impetus to wild rumours, which spread heightened fear among the Hindus. According to one rumour:

  Every Hindu house is marked and the secret radio station functioning somewhere in Karachi is giving out bloodcurdling stories of the plight that is in store for those who do not leave. Secret plans are being forged to steal or stitch army uniforms so that the victims of mob fury may not be able to distinguish between the friend and the foe.3

  The flight of Sindhi Hindus from Pakistan to India was triggered off by panic caused by premeditated rioting against a backdrop of marginalisation and discrimination. Yet there was another factor which also played a significant role in the Hindu exodus from Sindh.

  Izzat

  Speaking of the Muslim minority in undivided India, Maulana Azad observed in 1940:

  Politically speaking, the word minority does not mean just a group that is so small in number and so lacking in other qualities that give strength, that it has no confidence in its own capacity to protect itself from the much larger group that surrounds it. It is not enough that the group should be relatively the smaller, but that it should be absolutely so small as to be incapable of protecting its interests. Thus this is not merely a question of numbers; other factors count also. If a country has two major groups numbering a million and two million respectively, it does not necessarily follow that because one is half of the other, therefore it must call itself politically a minority and consider itself weak.4

  Hindus in Sindh had been far from a weak and marginalised minority. If they had been influential and indispensable in the Kalhora and Talpur eras, their power had only amplified during the colonial regime. As described earlier, their rise in many spheres of public life in Sindh – in education, in the bureaucracy and the judiciary, and in business – had far outstripped that of the Muslims in Sindh. This had engendered a sense of superiority among the Hindus, which was further augmented by the urban-rural divide and the class divide. Consequently, the urban Hindu trader or government employee looked down upon the rural Muslim peasant. As Ghulam Hussein Hidayatullah, premier of Sindh several times over, and governor, said in a speech at the Sind Sub-Committee of the Round Table Conference in London in January 1931:

  […] our Hindu friends are not a meagre minority, they are more than 25% and they are a great economic fact in the life of every Sindhi, almost every Muhammadan is indebted to them. I am speaking with all responsibility when I say the first man who is consulted by a Muhammadan is a Hindu lawyer or a Hindu official. They are the brains, being highly educated. He may be in number 25%, but he holds 40% of the land in Sind and 30% is already mortgaged with him, so that we, the Muhammadans, have only 30%. So he is not a meagre minority, he is a very rich man, he is an economic factor.5

  Sindhi society was – and continues to be – essentially feudal in character, and its lifeblood was izzat, honour or social prestige. It was the rise of Hindu izzat in the colonial period which galled the Muslim elite in Sindh, especially since the Hindus often flaunted it fiercely. Consequently, communal hostility in the 1940s often referred to izzat and transformed into a battle for communal supremacy. The formation of Pakistan and the reconfiguration of social equations in Sindh, which took place in a matter of months, brought about a sharp loss in the izzat of the Sindhi Hindus. Not surprisingly, a frequent refrain among many Sindhi Hindus of that generation was: ‘We migrated to save our izzat.’

  Coupled with this was the bitter realisation that this lost izzat could never be regained by Hindus in Sindh in the foreseeable future. As Professor Ghanshyamdas Jethanand, the leader of the Congress in the Sindh Assembly, told his relatives: ‘We will be able to live here, but we will not be able to hold our heads high.’6

  It is no accident that a considerable number of the Sindhi Hindus
who stayed behind in Pakistan belonged to the lower middle or poor classes, and did not have the luxury of worrying over matters of izzat. Joya Chatterji also finds that, in East Pakistan,

  […] being wealthy and of high status was no longer sufficient guarantee that Hindus would be accorded the social deference which they had been accustomed to receiving from Muslims in the past, and for many bhadralok Hindus this change was so intolerable that they preferred to get out.7

  Chetan Mariwala, the D. J. Sind College professor, was on a bus coming home from college on 6 January, when he saw pillars of flame and smoke at the Akal Bhunga gurudwara. He managed to reach home safely, but later wrote of the impact of the Karachi pogrom:

  Not that many people had been killed, but the entire city had been completely looted. […] Enough! Now Sindh was no longer habitable for us. Death was better than spending the rest of our lives being dishonoured, but the Muslims had refused to unleash death on us. We had the hope that we would work hard and start life anew in Bharat. It was difficult to leave one’s country, but the violation of our izzat forced us to do so. The dark day [January 6] obliged us to do what we did not want to do. Strong roots were ripped apart in a mere day.8

  The Sindhi Hindus’ sense of identification with, and patriotism towards, India, their aversion to the idea of becoming citizens of Pakistan, the strong sense of discrimination that they faced as a minority and the ensuing loss of their izzat, and finally, the accelerated threat to life with the occurrence of planned pogroms: All these coalesced after January 1948 to cement the Sindhi Hindu exodus to India.

  The Role of the Sindhi Muslims

  In 1947, Kalyan Advani was a 36-year-old professor of Sindhi at the D. G. National College in Hyderabad (Sindh). Deeply influenced by his father, Bulchand Advani, who wrote Sufi poetry, he had a deep and abiding love for Sindhi Sufi poetry and music. In a nostalgic article, Kalyan Advani writes:

  Another pastime of mine was listening to music. Every Friday, I would listen to Sindhi kalaams [Sindhi songs] accompanied by the dilo and yaktaaro [Sindhi musical instruments], and it would leave me with a high for the whole week. This was during my college days, and after I graduated too, this continued for a while.

  I am such a fan of Sindhis surs [musical forms] that for years, I would listen to high-quality Sindhi kalaams broadcast by the Hyderabad Sindh radio [station] here [in India], and thus ruined my radio set. Before migrating, two surando [Sindhi violin] players would come to me every week in Hirabad. Both of them would uplift my soul [with their music] and bless me before leaving. When I bade farewell to them for the last time, tears came into my eyes. What they told me is inscribed in my heart even today. The older faqir pronounced, ‘Divan, you stay on and govern here. Where are you going? Who are you afraid of? Are you afraid of these poor people, who roam around with sugarcane sticks and radish leaves? Saiin! You continue your reign.’ He was referring to the poor refugees [the muhajirs]. Trying to explain the situation to him, I said, ‘It is difficult for anyone to stay anywhere without their kith and kin.’ The young surando player consequently blessed me many times over as he left, and said, ‘Yes, yes, sir! You Hindus are very dear to us, but may the Lord’s will be done. May you always be happy, may you always be prosperous!’ Even in my dreams, I will never forget the innocence and musical talent of these faqirs.9

  In January 1948, Kalyan Advani left Hyderabad, with his elderly parents, his wife and their two young daughters. His close friend, Dr Haji, came to see them off at the railway station. Dr Haji and he continued to stay in touch, writing letters to each other over the decades.

  There are numerous instances of Sindhi Hindus who were given protection by their Sindhi Muslim friends and neighbours, and numerous instances of the latter pleading with the former to not migrate. Many Sindhi Hindus and Sikhs report that their Muslim friends and neighbours not only asked them to stay in Sindh, but later came to see them off, at the docks or the railway station, and wept when they left.

  It is noteworthy that there is a widespread perception, among both Sindhi Hindus and Sindhi Muslims today, that the latter did not participate in the violence against the former. According to Subhadra Anand’s survey of 100 Sindhi Hindus, a solid 81 per cent clearly said that the Sindhi Muslims had not threatened them into leaving.10

  However, not all Muslims felt warmly towards Hindus. When Mohammed Ayub Khuhro became PWD minister in early 1946, he gave a speech in which he reportedly had said, almost prophetically:

  Let the Hindus of Sind leave Sind and go elsewhere. Let them go while the going is good and possible, else I warn them that a time is fast coming when in their flight from Sind, they may not be able to get a horse or an ass or a gari or any other means of transport.11

  It is difficult to ascertain the exact role that Sindhi Muslims played in the discrimination towards and violence against Sindhi Hindus during 1947-48.There was a clear perception among the Sindhi Muslims, that if the Sindhi Hindus were to migrate, the former would then be able to take over their landed property, businesses and assets, and would benefit economically. There had been some instances where haaris, anticipating the Muslim domination that Pakistan would bring, refused to cooperate with their Hindu landlords in harvesting standing crops, and in some cases, even appropriated the crops and the lands. There were also instances where Sindhi Muslims, having agreed to purchase property from Sindhi Hindus, refused subsequently to pay, in the knowledge that they would anyway be able to take possession once the Hindus migrated.

  Muhammad Usman Baloch, the noted trade union leader and political worker, was a 10-year-old boy in 1947. He lived in Lyari; his father was an overseer at Grax Salt Works at Mauripur. Baloch shares his Partition memories:

  One day my father came home and told my mother that some Muslims had stabbed a Hindu at the gates of Empress Market. He brought with him some eight to ten Hindus – they were workers at the salt works, and their women and children. I was surprised to see low caste poor Hindu workers – I had never seen such Hindus before. The Hindus who lived in Burns Road and Kharo Dar were bureaucrats and traders and businessmen. They were more middle class. They had a lot of misgivings about Muslims, they were not so reconciliatory. The Hindus who were agricultural, they were more reconciliatory. So these people, the poor Hindu workers, they were hiding in our house out of fear. A few days later, they left for India.

  We had relatives in Larkana and Dadu. They used to tell the Hindus, ‘Please stay on here.’ I used to feel that it was half-hearted. Sindhi Hindus and Sindhi Muslims had a gulf between them. Sindhi Muslims used to feel that they would get their mortgaged lands back from the Sindhi Hindus if they left.12

  It is also possible that in some cases, Sindhi Muslims may have been afraid of censure or reprisals from other Pakistani Muslims if they gave protection to Sindhi Hindus, and hence played a passive role in certain instances. In early January 1948, on the eve of the Karachi pogrom, one Sindhi Muslim commented:

  Sindhi Muslims are peace-loving people. They are anxious for Hindu-Muslim unity. They are hospitable and work with patience and deep thinking. The result has been that Sindhi Muslims have been accused as dishonourable, pro-Hindu and anti-Islamic. The Punjabis have begun to hate and abuse us. If Sindhi Muslims extend a helping hand to Hindus they face death.13

  Consequently, after the Karachi pogrom several Sindhi Muslims, who now felt outnumbered and overshadowed by the muhajirs, asked their Hindu friends to leave, since they no longer felt able to protect them.

  Perhaps the conflicting emotions and ambivalence that prevailed among many Sindhi Muslims – a degree of resentment towards the Sindhi Hindus, and the desire to benefit economically from their departure, coexisting with emotional attachment to them – are best exemplified in the memoir of the renowned Sindhi poet, Shaikh Mubarak Ali Ayaz, son of a Muslim father and a Hindu mother. He had some close Sindhi Hindu friends, especially among his classmates from the D. J. Sind College and fellow writers, such as Kirat Babani, Narayan ‘Shyam’ Nagwani and Arjan ‘S
had’ Mirchandani. Shaikh Ayaz recalls:

  My entire family belonged to the Muslim League, and they would call Mahatma Gandhi ‘Maha Tama-a Gandhi’ [‘Very Greedy Gandhi’]. My close relative, the late Wajid Ali Shaikh was the president of the Shikarpur Muslim League and the leader of the Mazjid Manzilgah movement. And if this movement had not started, then the late Allah Baksh Soomro would not have been assassinated, and if Allah Baksh Soomro had not been assassinated, then the Sindh Assembly would not have been able to pass the Pakistan resolution. That is why, after the founding of Pakistan, the Shaikhs of Shikarpur dominated the city, and considered themselves above the law. […]

  In those days I had come to Shikarpur to prepare for my final LLB examination… In Karachi, in a gymnasium next to the Metharam Hostel, I used to do all kinds of exercises, and entering the sea off the steps at the Native Jetty, I would swim, summer or winter. […] All this exercise had made my body as supple as a wet stick of willow, so I could squeeze through skylights and enter rooms.

  With the migration of 1947, thousands of Shikarpuri Hindus had left their belongings behind, locked their houses and gone to Hindustan in the hope that the riots would stop soon, peace would return in a short while, and they would return home. Thanks to the migration, entire neighbourhoods had been vacated. […]

  After the migration of Hindus, two or three of my relatives set out at night to steal; they broke the locks on Hindu houses and took away their belongings. Once, when they discussed their thefts, I said to them, ‘You are educated people! What if you get arrested tomorrow?’

  One of them replied, ‘The question of our being arrested does not even arise. First, at night, all the streets are completely deserted, there is absolute silence. And second, we put a soaking wet cloth around the lock and then hammer it with an axe, so when the lock breaks, it does not make a sound; as a result, we quietly bring things home.’

  I thought for a while, and then told them, ‘Tonight, I will also come along with you.’