30.Many Labana Sikhs subsequently resettled in Bharatpur. Several Labana Sikhs recall that Ahmed, who was the collector of Bharatpur in 1984, was intrepid and assertive enough to ensure that the Sikhs in his town came to no harm during the anti-Sikh pogroms. However, most Labana Sikhs in Bharatpur had friends and family in Trilokpuri in Delhi, a site of severe violence. Consequently, the high esteem in which they once held the Congress – for bringing them safely from Pakistan to India – has now dissipated.
31.Pribhibai Dohit, interview, December 2012.
32.Kewalsingh Dohit, interview, December 2012.
33.Arjunsingh Rawaan, interview, December 2012.
34.Hakimsingh Dingnot, interview, December 2012.
35.Pribhibai Varjitia, interview, December 2012.
36.Sundersingh Ramaan, interview, December 2012.
37.Pribhibai Varjitia, interview, December 2012.
38.Sundribai Kirnaut, interview, December 2012.
39.Names of prominent Sindhi Sufi poets.
40.Sardar Nihalsingh Ailsinghani, interviews, December 1997, January 1998 and February 1998.
41.Sri Prakasa, ibid, p 54.
42.Kirat Babani, Kujh Budhayum, Kujh Likayum, pp 160-161. My translation.
43.This theme has been explored in Partition literature also, a well- known example being Bhisham Sahni’s short story, ‘The Train Has Reached Amritsar’.
INDIA
CHAPTER 9
Arrival
Even though I am safe within these walls,
I have always felt
As though I am sleeping on the open road […]
Now you
Know only these open roads as your home,
These roads which will take you anywhere else
But will never turn towards your home.
– Arjan ‘Shad’ Mirchandani1
Bombay
Although exact figures are not available, it is estimated that between 12,00,000 to 14,00,000 Sindhi Hindus migrated to India after Partition, mainly by ship and by train. (There were also some Sindhi Hindus who travelled by air to Bombay, and to Delhi too, but these were relatively very few in number.)
Ships sailing from Karachi often headed to Bombay, berthing at the Alexandra docks. The first ships came to Bombay in early September of 1947, bringing Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan who had fled the communal violence in Quetta. The refugees on these ships, the S.S. Netravati and the S.S. Kalavati, were about 1,100 in all, mostly Sindhi with a few Punjabis. They were received by the refugee officer, Rao Bahadur Nayampalli, Nanik Motwane of the Sind Hindu Seva Samiti, and C. A. Buch, the general manager of the Scindia Steam Navigation Co Ltd as well as their friends and relatives in Bombay. Refugees who had no relatives in Bombay were taken first to Mahajanwadi, where they were given a meal, and then to refugee camps at Mulund and Chembur.
In the early days, there was much sympathy for the survivors of the Quetta violence. Impelled by cultural ideals of hospitality, Bombayites displayed a spirit of secular humanitarianism; others were sympathetic towards ‘our Hindu brothers’. Several extended help to the refugees.
As the tempo of refugee arrivals increased over the next months, especially after January 1948, the process of receiving refugees became more streamlined. Officers of the Resettlement and Rehabilitation Department of Bombay Province, and a Congress relief body received the ships as they arrived. The Congress worker and freedom fighter, Rochiram Thawani (who had earlier been in charge of the military training camp at Chittor fort) was appointed as the docks captain, and headed a group of about 100 volunteers who received ships filled with Sindhi refugees.
The disembarking refugees first had their luggage checked by customs officials. Then they were asked where they wanted to go to in India, and were given a coupon for free railway tickets. They were also given free transport to the major railway stations in Bombay city. Given the large numbers of refugees already in the city, they were all ‘encouraged and advised’ to leave Bombay. But conflict soon erupted between the refugees and the government.
One of the first few ships to sail from Karachi, carrying Hindu and Sikh refugees, after the pogrom of 6 January 1948, was the S.S. Ekma of the Bombay India Steam Navigation Co. When it reached the Alexandra docks on Monday, 12 January, there were rumours flying about that there were people on board involved in smuggling gold into India; as a result, the passengers were not allowed to disembark. There were also rumours that the ship’s crew had deprived the passengers of some of their belongings. The police searched the crew’s cabin but found nothing.
Meanwhile, there was a large crowd – friends and relatives of the refugees – demanding access to the quayside, so that they could meet the passengers. In an era of limited communication systems, they were anxious about their kith and kin after the Karachi pogrom. As the hours went by, and the sun climbed higher in the sky, tempers also rose. The restive crowd clashed with the troops guarding access to the docks.
Only in the afternoon, after the police failed to discover evidence of any smuggling, were the refugees allowed to disembark. When the passengers came ashore, some of them, angry at having to wait for hours, chased coolies and looted a dock canteen. One passenger was then thrown into the sea from the quayside but was later rescued by the chief officer of the Ekma. Some refugees resorted to stone throwing and a few coolies were injured. Forty persons were arrested, and released the next day on bail.
The next day, the port authorities banned the entry of unauthorised persons in the docks, when refugee ships from Karachi docked there. It was also decided that Muslims bound for Pakistan would not board their ship on the same day that Hindus and Sikhs from Karachi disembarked.
However, on the following day, 14 January, a crowd of about 400 people gathered at the entrance to the docks. These were mostly Sindhi refugees who had come to receive their relatives and friends aboard the S.S. Karagola and S.S. Dumra, which had arrived that morning from Karachi. A few held permits but the majority did not and their entry was barred. Some tried to smuggle themselves into the docks inside empty trucks belonging to naval contractors and relief organisations, but the police discovered them and threw them out. As the crowd grew restive, and then tried to force their way into the Alexandra docks, about a dozen policemen tried to hold them at bay, and made four lathi charges. The crowd destroyed a paan shop in their stampede, and traffic was held up for two hours. Finally, police reinforcements arrived and chased away the crowd. One person was arrested for disorderly behaviour.
There were other instances of conflict as well. As refugees began pouring in, many did not want to leave Bombay city. After being taken to the railway station, they would leave their luggage there and venture out in search of a house or livelihood. The authorities found that ‘it was usual to return daily a hundred unused railway tickets issued to absentee refugees.’2 Transit camps became full to overflowing with refugees who did not want to move on. At the transit camp at Dhariastan in Bombay, refugees were allowed to stay only for 48 hours. When many flouted this rule, the camp authorities threatened to call the police, in order to evict them.
On 18 February 1948, the responsibility for refugees arriving in Bombay was transferred from the government of Bombay to the directorate of evacuation under the Government of India, which had till then focused on the evacuation of Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan. The director of evacuation was a Sindhi himself, Lt Col M. T. Gulrajani. This arrangement, however, did not work out, and by mid-June 1948, the responsibility for Sindhi refugees was returned to the governments of Bombay and other states, which then set up their own departments of relief and rehabilitation.
Many destitute Sindhi refugees, who did not want to leave Bombay city, began to live at the Alexandra docks itself, as illegal squatters. Kewalsingh Dohit, a Labana Sikh, recalls, ‘When we reached Bombay, we spent about 10 to 12 days living on the docks. We just stayed there like sheep and goats. But at least we were in Hindustan.’3
This sq
uatting was deeply resented by the port trust authorities, the state and the general public, and was seen as a menace to public health and safety since the refugees were living there allegedly ‘under the most insanitary conditions’. In February 1948, The Times of India reported:
Taking advantage of the large number of refugees in the docks, over a thousand “goondas” moved freely there… They not only deprived the refugees of their belongings but committed thefts of articles in the warehouses.4
There were allegations that the refugees themselves had begun to pilfer various packing materials lying in the docks and use them as fuel. These refugees had refused offers of transport to refugee camps in other parts of India; they had insisted on staying put in order to be as close as possible to the city and its opportunities for livelihood. When Lt Col M. T. Gulrajani took over as the director of evacuation, he decided not to let fresh arrivals from Sindh remain in the docks for more than 24 hours. However, fresh refugees arriving from Sindh almost daily put paid to this venture. Efforts to clear them from the area were repeatedly made; in January, March and April 1948, they were forcibly taken to refugee camps. But many refugees went to Kalyan camp ‘under protest’ only to find that living conditions there were also inadequate. Evidently, the state was unconcerned that the same refugees would continue to live in unsanitary conditions in the camp: it appeared to be more concerned that they should be out of sight. The Bombay government, predictably, denied all allegations that the refugees had been ‘dragged’ to Kalyan camp by threat of force by the police. In April 1948, there were still complaints that there were 4,000 refugees squatting on the railway platform at the Mole Station and in two sheds in the Alexandra dock. They were allegedly stealing plywood and other packing material lying in the vicinity, and using this as fuel. Refugees were still there in mid-September 1948, believed to be pilfering milk tins and other foodstuffs stocked in the sheds at the docks.
Rajasthan
The other approach to India was by train. The metre-gauge trains, which originated at either Hyderabad (Sindh) or at the branch line of Mirpur Khas, and ran across the Thar Desert were those of the Jodhpur State Railway, colloquially known as Raja Ji Gaadi, or ‘The King’s Train’. These often terminated at Pali, Marwar Junction or Jodhpur, and transit camps were set up in these places. The Sindhi refugees were subsequently moved out to other, more permanent camps, or to cities of their choice. S. K. Kirpalani, the then secretary of the ministry of relief and rehabilitation, recalls the difficulties in setting up a transit camp at Marwar Junction in order to ensure the smooth running of the ‘refugee special’ trains and the timely evacuation of Hindus from Sindh:
The Ministry recognised that language difficulties practically enforced the recruitment of a large number of officers from amongst Sindhis, and that too without any loss of time. I had to badger and press into immediate service every young Sindhi man I could think of, whether he was willing or not, or merited a hundred per cent score of fitness. My most valuable officer, the kingpin director in charge of the temporary transit camp at Marwar, charged with the further responsibility of liaison with the Indian Princes in Rajputana and Kathiawar for establishing a ring of base camps and loading them methodically, was a young Hyderabadi Amil officer.
N. T. Gulrajani, later economic attaché in the Indian Embassy at Rome, was a junior customs officer at Karachi when he first attracted my attention. […] I summoned him at noon and asked if he was willing to accept a very difficult assignment in our ministry. He expressed polite interest. Within a few minutes I explained the urgent need for establishment of a transit camp in the Kutch desert at Marwar and other arrangements to be set up in the surrounding area. He wanted time to think the proposition over, but there was no time to be lost. With a stiff upper lip, Gulrajani left by train that very night with a couple of orderlies, an accounts clerk, two hundred tents and a stock of provisions. I had already arranged for supplies to be loaded on the metre-gauge Ahmedabad Mail on the premise that someone just had to go out. Within seventy-two hours of his arrival, this young officer was receiving train-loads of harassed refugees from Sind at a clip of five to eight thousand persons a day. In a week’s time, I had six officer cadets from the new Indian Administrative Service Training School in position under him. This was one of the toughest assignments under my charge at the ministry and it was discharged with capability and devotion well over and above the call of duty. I cannot think of another officer then at Delhi who would have left the comforts of the capital for the rigours of the desert in response to an SOS and have carried out this relief operation of assuredly large dimensions, and done so well.
Two months later, I accompanied the minister on a tour of inspection. The achievement at Marwar was impressive. When the Rajputana tract was saturated, it became necessary to establish a buffer camp at Ahmedabad, half-way down to Bombay, a chain of camps down the line, and a large base camp all the way down in the Central Provinces at the capital city of Nagpur.5
Narayan Malkani had migrated with his family from Mirpur Khas to Jodhpur. Together with some other Sindhi Hindus, he volunteered to assist Sindhi refugees coming to India by train. He recalls serving each incoming refugee two puris and curry in a leaf cup, at Luni Junction, before directing them to various other refugee camps. In his words: ‘It was a pathetic sight to see the refugees totally disoriented, not knowing where to go, and wondering what would happen to them.’6
Since Sindh had not been partitioned and had, in its entirety, become part of Pakistan, there was no part of India which the Sindhi Hindus could claim as their own. Wherever they went, they were refugees and, ethnically speaking, outsiders. Sindhi Hindus arriving in India had three options: to stay with friends or family who had been settled in India before Partition, to go to a refugee camp, or to buy or rent their own accommodation. (There was another, smaller, category of those Sindhi Hindus who had been central government servants in Sindh. When they opted for transfer of service to India, most of them received official accommodation in their new postings. These Sindhi Hindus were relatively more fortunate in their relocation to India, since the government assured them transport, housing and jobs.)
After migrating to India, there was another wave of Sindhi Hindus migrating abroad. In the years soon after Partition, those Sindhi Hindus who had business concerns outside India moved overseas to live permanently. Earlier, these Sindhi merchants living abroad – known as Sindhworkis – customarily lived and worked abroad for two to three years at a stretch, and then returned to visit their families in Sindh for six to twelve months, before returning to their foreign shops again to resume work. Now after Partition, two important changes surfaced. First, the general practice of leaving one’s wife and children behind in Sindh changed for both Sindhworki employees and partners, and entire families began to migrate. Second, since the Sindhworki had his family with him, there was little or no motivation to return home – if there was any home base in India – and his stay overseas became permanent. The diaspora consequently became cemented. It is quite difficult, if not impossible, to enumerate those Sindhi Hindus who migrated abroad from India.
The Sindhworki network, originally based on the British maritime empire, stretched from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean to Japan, from Europe to Africa. Today, thanks to this network and the scattering of the community after Partition, Sindhi Hindus are found all over the world.
Herded Around
Many of the Sindhi Hindus who had migrated to India before the Karachi riots were generally those who had exercised a relatively greater freedom of choice in doing so. As a result, they were in a better position to liquidate their assets in Sindh, which consequently put them on a better footing in terms of their resettlement in India, where they also had more of a choice in terms of deciding where to settle. Those who came after the Karachi riots had left in a state of panic. Most of them were not able to sell their assets, or get a good price for them. They were mostly middle class or lower middle class, and from the small towns of Si
ndh: those who had neither family nor friends to stay with in India, nor adequate means to rent a house or fend for themselves. These formed the bulk of the refugees who were dispatched to the camps, and who often had no say in the matter of their initial resettlement.7
Rochiram Godhwani was a youth of 17, who survived the Karachi pogrom. He recalls that when he and his family disembarked from the ship in Bombay, they stayed for a few days in some barracks opposite the docks. One day, they were informed that they had to board a train at a particular station. The train would take them to a refugee camp, but they were not told which one. The family managed to carry their 30 to 40 pieces of luggage and get good seats in the train. The train started late at night and reached Deolali early in the morning. Godhwani recalls that there were mostly military camps there, with hardly any civilians. Here, the Godhwanis were taken to some barracks and informed that henceforth this was where they were to live. Subsequently, Godhwani and his family shifted to Delhi, and later to Bombay.8
Kodandas Gopalani, who also survived the violence in Karachi, came with his family by ship via the port of Okha, in present-day Gujarat, to Bombay. He recollects his arrival in India:
We had thought that Jawaharlal Nehru had done a lot for us, bringing us to Hindustan. In Sindh, he had arranged for the military to take care of us; we automatically assumed that we would have every comfort here in Hindustan. Our illusions were soon to be shattered.
When we arrived in Bombay, a mountain of difficulties broke over our heads. First, when we disembarked from the ship, we had to oversee everything ourselves; there were no private facilities. The volunteers, the shewadharis knew they would not get paid; their chief aim was to empty the ship so it could carry more passengers. They made us disembark from the vessel onto the docks. ‘Clear out quickly!’ they shouted. Muslims were waiting to board the ship.
Furthermore, we had been made to believe that we would be looked after in India. Those of us who had left Pakistan, we had all been comfortable in Sindh. All of us thought that we would find every conceivable comfort in Hindustan. But there were not even arrangements for food or water or living.
THE MAKING OF EXILE Page 24