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

by NANDITA BHAVNANI

  The amazing thing is that those clans which had no custom of dowry in Sindh before Partition have also fallen prey to this disease. The problem has truly increased. […] Another outcome of this foul custom is that many girls of a marriageable age have been kept away from marriage.13

  Dr Choithram Gidwani died of lung cancer in Bombay on 13 September 1957. Choosing to devote his life to political and social work, he had not married, and had no children. Working tirelessly for the rights and the welfare of Sindhi refugees, he did not buy or rent a home of his own after migrating to India. According to his nephew, Bhagwan Gidwani, the worldly possessions that he left behind were Rs 80 and a broken watch.14

  If wives, daughters and daughters-in-law faced difficulties in the process of rehabilitation, what about those women who did not have their immediate family to rely on? Maya Shivdasani’s maternal aunt, Dadi Hari, a child widow, lived at her parents’ home but spent a lot of time in the Nari Shala, a home for widows in Hyderabad (Sindh). As a result, Maya and her family were very close to Dadi Bhoji, the woman who founded and managed the Nari Shala. Here Maya Shivdasani recalls how she helped the Nari Shala women after they migrated from Hyderabad:

  One day in 1947 Baba-Ami [my parents] phoned me from Hyderabad (Pakistan). They said that they had sent a small parcel for me through Dadi Bhoji who had left for Bombay. Lachu [my husband] and I went to the station and Dadi Bhoji handed over the parcel to us. When Lachu asked her, ‘Dadi, where are you staying… can I drop you somewhere?’ She looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘Lachu, God has sent you to collect your parcel and also to collect me!’ We found ourselves taking Dadi and her group of 20 from the Nari Shala to Bansilal Villa.

  We put them up in our drawing room. It was not easy but it was not difficult, either. Breakfast was tea and a small loli [Sindhi pancake], dinner and lunch was dal-sabzi and either rice or chappati. The women were not demanding at all. They did all their own work – washing and cleaning – but every morning they had a loud bhajan session which Lachu found a little noisy and ‘besura’ [off-key]. The women were all trying to locate relatives who would take them in and this took nearly six months.

  Dadi Bhoji was a child widow and her father, Bulchand Advani, was one of the founder members of the Nari Shala in Hyderabad. Dadi was a very dynamic and determined woman. She had so many ideas on how to expand the Shala and make the women self supporting. At the Shala widows spent their time reading the Guru Granth Sahib and doing social work. They were also taught a vocation – stitching, cooking, embroidery and Gurmukhi. We used to give them a lot of orders and so did many other families.

  […] When Partition came [Bhagwansing Advani, who constructed the buildings, Shyam Niwas and Nanik Niwas] gave a ground floor flat in Nanik Niwas to Dadi Bhoji for the Nari Shala. Chaturi Malani volunteered to help Dadi in setting it up and settle the women. The Shala soon became very popular in Bombay for markas, bhogs, weddings, etc. Even in Bombay the Shala women continued to wear the traditional paro-chadar… grey paro with black churidar and grey chadar. They all had very short cropped hair, like nuns.15

  As Maya Shivdasani’s narrative indicates, there were a small number of Sindhi women who were not attached to larger families at the time of Partition: It is not clear whether all of them were widows, or whether some women had been cast out by their husbands and/or their natal families. Apart from the women of the Nari Shala from Hyderabad, there were other similarly ‘unattached’ women who migrated from Sindh, and several of them also had children to look after. Among the various camps set up for Sindhi Hindu refugees in Bombay city was also the Nari Seva Sadan, a camp at Kurla, which housed nearly 1,000 women and over 700 children in an atmosphere of ‘strict discipline’ in early 1951.16

  Several other Nari Shalas also sprang up in Kalyan camp and other places, housing single women who pursued tailoring and embroidery to earn a living.17

  Partition Marriages

  Partition created an additional crisis for parents of teenage children, both girls and boys. As many put it, ‘Who knew what would happen in Hindustan, after we were scattered? Then what would happen to our children? It was better to marry them off in Sindh itself.’ A fear of disintegration of the community in India – which appears inflated in retrospect – led to the phenomenon of Partition marriages: a spate of hastily arranged marriages between 1947 and 1948 among Sindhi Hindus, often between very young teenagers. While it was common in that era for young girls to be married off at a young age, say 16 or 17, Partition brought about weddings of girls who were younger, sometimes barely 10-years-old. This phenomenon was also far more common in villages rather than cities.

  A second motivation for these marriages was the protection – in a very limited sense – of the unmarried daughter of the family, the nyaahni. There had been enough accounts (further inflated by rumours) of rapes and abductions taking place in other parts of North India. A hastily arranged marriage on the eve of migration could not in itself prevent the occurrence of rape or abduction if that were to happen but, as the thinking went, at least the girl would be married already. It would have been extremely difficult to arrange the marriage of an unmarried girl who was known to have been raped.

  Devi Moolchandani lives in Adipur (a suburb of Gandhidam) in the Sindhu Varsha Colony, a low-income housing colony, the construction of which was sponsored by Sindhi philanthropists. She recalls her marriage at an extremely young age, and the years of resettlement:

  My parents lived in Nasirabad. They were poor; they rolled bidis. My mother had seven daughters, like I do. When I was very little, my father passed away.

  We were a family of a few brothers and sisters. My [other older] sisters had got married earlier. Only three of us [sisters] were left.

  We kept hearing that there would be riots, trouble. People were migrating, everyone was getting scattered. What would happen?

  In a time of such fear, one of my sisters and I were hurriedly married off in our childhoods. I was about 11 when I got married. 11 or 12. My sister too, she was about 13 or 14. We were married to two brothers.

  That left just one sister. She was the youngest of us all. She also got married at the same time as us, but to a much older husband. She was about 10-years-old, her husband was about 20. Our youngest sister got left behind in Pakistan after her marriage. We hear she is still living there. But where do we go looking for her? We still don’t know her exact whereabouts.

  We left Pakistan after having been married for a year, just when the troubles began. Muslims moved into our town. There were fights everywhere, and the Muslims were killing everyone. We were scared, and complained to the police. The police in turn said, ‘Why don’t you leave? You’ll get killed. Get out, get out.’

  I remember: We were cooking rice. But we just left the food – the pot of rice, the rotis, everything – and ran. We only took the clothes we were wearing. Nothing else.

  Then the police escorted us – my mother-in-law, my father-in-law, my niraans [husband’s sisters]. We left by train and came to Karachi, where we ate a meal, then boarded a ship. We reached Bombay. In Bombay, we had no place to stay. So we lived for a couple of days in a dharamshala.

  My niraan from Larkana was in India. She was living in Bantva, in Junagadh. She and her family were concerned for us. Her husband came to collect us from Bombay. He brought us to Bantva.

  We arrived in Bantva in just the clothes that we were wearing. My niraan’s daughters-in-law were there, and they gave us some of their clothes. They gave us their suits, we wore them. In my niraan’s house, my niraan’s immediate family lived upstairs, and they gave us one of the rooms downstairs. Somehow we managed to live.

  In Bantva, there were houses belonging to Muslims, which had been locked up. Several Sindhis just went and occupied these houses. Someone broke open the lock of one of the Memon homes and took it over.

  The intruders would say: ‘If this is aggressive, so be it. We are poor people, where do we go?’

  We were simple, we woul
dn’t take the houses.

  ‘Go and take the houses,’ other Sindhis would say.

  We’d respond, ‘No, sir. We don’t want another person’s home.’

  The Muslims weren’t there. They had locked up their homes and gone away. But their possessions were still lying inside their homes. How could we go and take over another person’s possessions?

  My father had died there in Pakistan itself. My mother had been living in Karachi, along with two of my brothers. She had married both her sons off. I had met them in Karachi, before we boarded the ship. Then we were scattered in different directions. I never saw my mother or my brothers again.

  There was a man from our neighbourhood in Nasirabad; he was known to my husband’s family. When my other niraan had gone to Amravati, she saw him there and recognised him. He told her about my family. Then she told me that my family was living in Amravati.

  However, there was no way of going there. After all, we had no money. Besides, I was young.

  Somehow, with some luck, I managed to reach Amravati with my niraan. I learnt that both my brothers had died. Only my bhajais [brothers’ wives] were living. One had had four girls and a son. She recognised me. She was my older brother’s wife. The other bhajai, she told me, had a son, and after my brother’s demise, had remarried.

  My father and mother had died, my brothers had died. And I got to meet only one bhajai. I never met anyone else.

  In Bantva, I slogged for 20 years, working in people’s houses to make ends meet. Washing dishes, sweeping and swabbing floors. What did we get? Barely Rs 25. We have really seen poverty.

  Thankfully, my mother-in-law looked after me like a daughter; she gave me a lot of love. My sister and I got married at the same time, but she has passed away. Both my husband and his brother have also passed away. Now I alone am left. They have all gone to God. That’s where I have to go too.18

  In 1947, Ishwari Khanchandani was a young girl of 13, living in Badin in Southern Sindh. She recalls that she seldom ventured out of the house: It was not customary for girls to roam around in public. She remembers communal violence in Badin, and listening to the sounds of fighting in the lanes outside her house. Her family sat terrified inside their house, expecting to be killed at any time. Stories of rapes and abductions elsewhere in the subcontinent had already reached their ears. Ultimately, the family decided to migrate. Around this time, they received a visitor who brought with him a marriage proposal for Ishwari. The intended groom was the visitor’s unmarried brother-in-law, a man of 40. After one full month, he was able to convince Ishwari’s father to agree to the marriage. Ishwari’s maternal aunt was against the match. She protested to Ishwari’s father, ‘Your daughter is far too young! Let her grow up, let her eat here however long she is destined. She is a nyaahni.’ But the father refused to go back on his word. Ishwari recalls, ‘Throughout, I remember being very scared. My friends and I had never seen men. I was from the village. I didn’t know what my in-laws were like, how I should behave with them, how I should respond to my husband.’

  After the wedding, Ishwari went to Tando Muhammad Khan, where she and her husband stayed for two nights. On the third day they left by train for Marwar Junction. Here, they stayed at the tented transit camp near the station, with separate areas for men and women. Ishwari’s in-laws were a big family, with her husband’s sisters, their families, her husband’s brothers and their wives. From Marwar Junction, the family went to Mandsaur in present-day Madhya Pradesh, then to Bantva, and later to Patan. Everywhere, Ishwari and her husband lived together with his sisters and their families. Eight months into the marriage, Ishwari went to live with her parents, who had resettled in Ujjain. She says, ‘I wasn’t “mature” at that point. After seven months of living with my parents, I went to Bantva. And a year later, I “grew up”.’

  Ishwari was extremely unhappy in her marriage. She explains:

  I was newly married, I couldn’t protest in front of my sisters-in-law. My husband used to do whatever his sisters told him. I was truly stuck. What could I do? My husband was so much older; if I disobeyed him, I would be abused. In any case, my husband used to beat me at his sisters’ bidding. Since I was young and naïve, I could not do anything about it. Now I have become a clever talker. But what’s the use of it now? In those days, I did not know what to say, I’d say nothing, so I would get beaten up.

  I did not complain to my father for getting me married at a young age to an unsuitable groom. I couldn’t, for I was consumed by sharam, modesty. But in my heart of hearts, I used to blame my father for being unfeeling, for attaching me to this old man. Being married to such an old man meant that I never sat face-to-face on the bed with him. I couldn’t say a word to him. In any case, what can one say to an older man? My life went down the drain.19

  Over the years, Ishwari Khanchandani worked as a maid in several houses. She had two sons who settled in Patan, but she could not live with them; she did not get along with one daughter-in-law and the other son was too poor to support her. In Adipur, she lived in a home for destitute Sindhi women.

  By definition, most of these marriages were arranged in extreme haste. Damayanti Sainani, who survived the Quetta violence and came to Larkana, was married off within one day of her parents receiving a ‘good proposal’ for her.20 Navalrai Bachani and his brother were married off to two sisters. But the wedding ceremony was conducted in such a hurry that the brother’s photograph was used in his stead, since he had already migrated to India.21

  Many of these girls who were married off in haste were deeply affected. Apart from the distress of Partition, common to the rest of their community, these young girls also faced a sudden uprooting from their family. They had to experience the ordeal of the journey and the process of resettlement with their marital family, who were in all probability complete strangers. Added to this was the girl’s loss of contact with her natal family; often contact was re-established much later, after one or both families were resettled in India. In a few cases, as Devi Moolchandani’s instance shows, contact was either established too late or not at all. In some cases, young girls like Ishwari Khanchandani felt compelled to spend the rest of their lives in extremely unhappy marriages. In contrast, the teenage boys who were married off at this time did not experience the additional trauma of being uprooted from their families.

  Notes

  1.Kavita Daswani, Kishinchand Chellaram: Sindhi Pathfinder, p 60.

  2.See U. T. Thakur, Sindhi Culture, p 99.

  3.According to the 1941 Census, 13.80 per cent of Hindu women in Sindh were educated, as compared to 1.14 per cent of Muslim women. See H. T. Lambrick, The Census of India, 1941, p 48.

  4.Apparently Popati Hiranandani is mistaken about these rumours, since this incident took place in January 1948, well after she had migrated in September 1947.

  5.Popati Hiranandani, Muhinji-a Hayati-a ja Sona Ropa Varqa, pp 72-75. My translation.

  6.Nimmi Vasvani, interview, April 2012.

  7.Various Sindhi pickles and sweets.

  8.Maya Shivdasani, Maya’s Story, pp 37-38.

  9.Punjabi women were also similarly affected by Partition. See Karuna Chanana, ‘Partition and Family Strategies: Gender-Education Linkages among Punjabi Women in Delhi’ in Economic and Political Weekly, 24 April 1993, pp 25-34.

  10.Mark-Anthony Falzon, Cosmopolitan Connections: The Sindhi Diaspora 1860-2000, p 215.

  11.Vakil & Cabinetmaker, ibid, pp 104-111.

  12.See also Victor Barnouw, ‘Social Structure of a Sindhi Refugee Community’, p 150.

  13.Vishnu Sharma, Dr. Choithram Partabrai Gidwani ji Jeevani, pp 285-289.

  14.As quoted in Ram Jawhrani, Global Sindhis, p 91.

  15.Maya Shivdasani, ibid, pp 31-32.

  16.Horace Alexander, ibid, pp 93-94.

  17.Vakil and Cabinetmaker, ibid, p 13 and p 133.

  18.Devi Moolchandani, interview, November 1997.

  19.Ishwari Khanchandani, interview, November
1997.

  20.As quoted in Lata Jagtiani, Sindhi Reflections, p 448.

  21.Navalrai Bachani, interview, August 2000.

  CHAPTER 14

  Counting the Costs

  Hostility and Prejudice

  After reaching India, Sindhi refugees came into conflict with the local people and with the government over a number of issues. Their consequent unpopularity among the general Indian public was reflected in the press at the time. In Sindh, newspapers like Dawn and Jang had been biased towards the muhajirs, and prejudiced against the Sindhi Hindus. At that time, Indian newspapers such as The Times of India and the Free Press Journal, had shown great sympathy in reporting the difficulties faced by Hindus and Sikhs in West Pakistan; now these papers started speaking of refugees ‘invading Bombay’1 and the ‘refugee problem’.2

  There were many reasons behind this sentiment of unpopularity, which varied in degree from region to region. Firstly, since the communal violence in Sindh had not been of the magnitude found in Punjab or Bengal, the exodus of Sindhi Hindus from their home province was perceived by large sections of the public as unwarranted and, therefore, craven. Several Sindhi Hindus of that generation recall being called bhagoras, those who ran away, implying cowardice.

  As mentioned earlier, Sindhi Hindus had several characteristics – their dress, script, language and customs – which gave them a ‘quasi-Muslim’ image in the eyes of many Indian Hindus. The accelerated competition that they brought to the local markets (and their occasional disregard of the law) also did not endear them to the Indian public. Similarly, when the relatively affluent Sindhis’ demand for flats in Bombay drove the pugree market up, this was resented by the locals.