Sindhis were also seen as loud and flashy, which gave rise to the ethnic stereotype of the crude and crass Sindhi. Even today, Sindhis are perceived as materialistic, given to vulgar displays of wealth. According to a survey conducted by Subhadra Anand, of 100 Maharashtrians between 20-60 years in Ulhasnagar and Bombay in 1989, 83 per cent of the respondents thought that Sindhis are money-minded, 87 per cent thought that Sindhis display wealth in a vulgar fashion, 69 per cent thought that Sindhi businessmen have unethical business tactics, 86 per cent thought that Sindhis are loud and crude, and 69 per cent said they would not like to have Sindhi neighbours.3
Equally, there was also the public perception that some Sindhi Hindu refugees – especially those living in camps – were enjoying doles given to them without bothering to lift a finger to do any work. This perception was furthered by the way the Sindhis dressed, and abetted by newspaper articles which reported Sindhi refugees as people who ‘eat, sleep, play cards or just loaf about’.4 This naturally engendered public resentment, as also debates about material help given to refugees when a considerable section of India’s population – which had not been displaced – remained below the poverty line and without doles.
Finally, the general perception was cemented when refugees living in camps outside cities were unable to find any livelihood, yet refused any offers of agricultural labour, which in the Sindhi cultural context was demeaning to them. All this contributed to the common saying: ‘If you come across a snake and a Sindhi on the road, kill the Sindhi first.’
Sindhis had to face varying degrees of stigmatisation. As mentioned earlier, the region of resettlement played a large role, with greater stigmatisation occurring in the more Sanskritised Hindu areas of Gujarat and Rajasthan. Victor Barnouw, who conducted research on the Sindhi refugee camp at Pimpri in 1952 and again in 1963, reports:
Sindhis can be easily identified in Poona, at least the women who wear a distinctive dress which is quite different from the local sari. The silky fabrics of these clothes often look expensive, and partly for this reason there is a widespread notion among the local Maharashtrians that the Sindhis are all rich and only pretend to be poor. Stories about the misrepresentation of assets […] are well known. Sindhis are held to be energetic, enterprising businessmen; and since they have been underselling the local Poona merchants, it is believed that they are making large profits. Pimpri has been raided a few times by ‘outside’ gangs of thieves from Poona, who evidently assume the colony to be wealthy.5
Izzat
A significant reason for the Sindhi Hindu exodus from Pakistan was that they felt that their izzat had been eroded in a Muslim-majority nation, that they could not live there and also ‘hold their heads high’. It was, therefore, quite ironic that, on coming to India, the Sindhi Hindus experienced only further erosion of their izzat. To begin with, they had lost all their current sources of izzat – their wealth, their businesses, their homes and properties, their well-placed jobs and their spheres of influence and power. Moreover, with the process of migration and the physical splintering of Sindhi society, they had also lost the complex social web they had inhabited, which was the realm of their izzat. For instance, whereas in Sindh, one’s family background could add to one’s standing, in India this factor was rendered irrelevant, given the anonymity of the refugee in Indian society at large.
In India, Sindhi Hindus, stripped of their izzat, now found that they were looked down upon and discriminated against on various grounds – as ‘cowards’, as ‘quasi-Muslims’, as ‘helpless’ refugees, as competitors in business and as a ‘crude and unsophisticated’ people.
A factor which contributed to the sense of rejection felt by many of the Sindhi Hindu refugees was the very epithet of refugee. ‘Refugee’ in English, and its equivalents, sharanarthi in Hindi, and panaahgir in Urdu, together with nirvasit, meaning homeless, in Gujarati: All were considered pejorative terms by Sindhi Hindus, who felt that these words evoked a sense of helplessness and dependency.6 Kala Shahani and her husband, Shanti Shahani, were young Congress workers at the time of Partition. They survived the Karachi pogrom and resettled in Bombay. The writer, C. S. Lakshmi, who authored a brief biography of Kala Shahani, says:
Apart from the trauma of separation and uprooting was the humiliation of being branded as ‘refugee’. It was a term people like [Kala Shahani] found difficult to accept. ‘That very word, we hated it,’ she said. They felt that they were not being welcomed here. ‘…It pained us. We had suffered a terrible separation and now over and above that, [this] humiliation…’ Their response to being called refugees was – ‘We are not refugees… we are a part of you. We will stand on our own feet.’ ‘And we did so,’ Kala Shahani said, ‘we proved to the people of India that we could help ourselves.’7
The Sindhi Hindus reacted by producing other terms to describe themselves. From sharanarthi came the term purusharthi, meaning ‘industrious’, and going one step further, paramarthi, meaning ‘concerned with spiritual salvation’. In more cosmopolitan and westernised surroundings, many Sindhi Hindus preferred the sanitised term, ‘displaced persons’ or ‘evacuees from Sindh’; these terms were also widely used by the state.
The Sindhi Hindus felt their stigmatisation deeply, and they responded to this sense of social inferiority in several ways. Their first move to regain their social status was through their economic rehabilitation, with scant regard paid to legalities, on occasion. As one Sindhi refugee said:
When we left Sindh, we left all the privileges which naturally came by belonging to a region. But when we realised we had no region we decided to create security by making money. At least with money you can buy power, people and status.8
As mentioned earlier, some Sindhi Hindus also turned towards the Hindu right, embracing Sanskritic customs and rituals. Further, they sought to dilute or cloak their Sindhi identity (with its Muslim and rustic features and overtones) by trying to assimilate into local societies and by learning the regional language and customs. In the bargain, they cast aside their own language. Many in the younger generations were not taught at first to read and write, and later, to speak, Sindhi. According to a survey done by Subhadra Anand, of 100 persons between 60-80 years in Ulhasnagar and Bombay in 1989, 57 per cent of the respondents didn’t teach their children to write or read Sindhi, and 88 per cent of them didn’t send their children to Sindhi schools.9 According to the 1991 Census, Sindhi was ranked 33 in the list of Indian mother tongues (in descending order of strength); in the 2001 Census, it had slipped to 45. Seeking to adapt and assimilate, Sindhi Hindus also turned their backs on their own history and culture. As a result, today many in the younger generation have grown up with a sense of a cultural vacuum, unaware of their heritage.
In 1947, Keshowdas Madnani was a young man of 22. He and his newly married wife, along with the rest of his family, came from their native Shikarpur to resettle in Bombay, where his father’s business had a branch office. Keshowdas Madnani expressed his opinion on the future of his community’s culture to his daughter, the writer Lata Jagtiani:
We can’t do much for the Sindhi culture, we can’t preserve the traditions, many of which are too conservative. We lost the language because we did everything to blend with the local people and we spoke in Hindi. Parents taught children Hindi; they would brand somebody as [a] ‘refugee’ if he spoke in Sindhi, and [they would say] that he was a bumpkin and so they started looking down on [the] Sindhi [language]. That is how the language began to suffer. People pretended to be Gujaratis, Punjabis, etc., so that nobody guessed they were Sindhis. You see, people were contemptuous of Sindhis, who were forced into poverty and they were wrongly seen as poor and cheap. It was quite painful that we were denying our real identity, when we should have felt proud of ourselves. Even today, [Sindhi] people feel proud when they are told, ‘Oh, I thought you were a Punjabi, not a Sindhi.’ We should stop being ashamed of being Sindhi, we have done nothing wrong and we have, in fact, made something out of our lives when everything
was taken from us, for no fault of our own.10
However, ethnic identity in a multi-ethnic society like India is also reinforced from the outside. Hence, the writer Popati Hiranandani’s observation: ‘I am also a refugee; I want to assimilate but the local population always reminds me that I am a refugee.’11
Having been citizens of pre-Independent India, and not having identified with Pakistan, Sindhis also stressed their pan-Indian identity. This was bolstered by the then-prevalent Nehruvian ideology of Indian citizens rising above their ethnic affiliations and religions to unite as ‘Indians’. This ideology of assimilation was also actively propagated by several Sindhi Congress political leaders soon after migrating to India.
This sense of becoming ‘Indian’ and ‘more Hindu’ as opposed to being ‘Sindhi’ can be seen, for instance, in the pen-names that some Sindhi Hindus chose for themselves in the early years after Partition. It was traditional for writers, especially poets, to take on a nom de plume, and in Sindh this had typically come from the Persian language, such as Arjan ‘Shad’, Hari ‘Dilgir’, Parsram ‘Zia’, Lekhraj ‘Aziz’. Now in India, Sindhi writers continued to take on pen-names, but these proclaimed their new nationality or were derived from Sanskritised Hindi, as for instance, Narayan ‘Bharati’, Govardhan ‘Bharati’, Lachman ‘Komal’ and Mohan ‘Kalpana’. The name ‘Jai Hind’ also became popular, with a school, a college and a bank given that name.
It is ironic that a sense of being stigmatised persists even today among the younger generations of this community, who have been concerned about their izzat. Several younger Sindhi Hindus in India have grown up with a sense of ethnic inferiority, and are embarrassed about being Sindhi. They have little knowledge of their community’s background and history, and take little pride in their Sindhi identity.
Trauma and Stress
Is it even possible to describe in full the psychological price paid by the Sindhi Hindus and Sikhs who experienced Partition? The many months of living in a tense climate in Sindh before the winter of 1947-48; the agonising dilemma of whether or not to migrate to India; the rapid transformation of the socioeconomic fabric of the towns and cities of Sindh after the birth of Pakistan and the arrival of large numbers of muhajirs; the sense of living in a country where they were unwanted or, at best, second class citizens to be discriminated against; the difficulties in liquidating their assets; the ordeal of the searches and seizures of their baggage on departure, often leaving them with just the clothes they were wearing; the difficulties of their journey to India, often on overcrowded ships or trains; the bewilderment of not knowing where to go or what to do on arrival in India; the harrowing conditions of refugee camps, or living as unwanted guests in the homes of friends or relatives; their struggle to find a permanent home and a livelihood; their treatment by local peoples as ‘refugees’ or as aliens, or as quasi-Muslims; the loss of homes and of a homeland; the physical splintering of the community, and in many cases, of the immediate family; the demise of the familiar relationship between the self and society – all this created enormous trauma and stress for the Sindhis who migrated from Pakistan to India.
Partition was also hard on children, who were sometimes separated from their parents and deprived of education. There are also numerous accounts of students who appeared for their matriculation examination soon after migrating from Pakistan and who failed, or did not do well academically. Shobha Bhojwani* came from a large and affluent family in Karachi. The last but youngest among five brothers and five sisters, she was a small child of five in 1947, when she and her elder sister were sent to India. Shobha Bhojwani recollects the long months spent without her parents, without schooling, shifting from one city to another:
I was five-and-a-half-years-old at the time of Partition. We were living in Karachi, and had lots of relatives in our neighbourhood. My grandfather was a zamindar in Larkana.
One evening, I came home from my neighbourhood municipal school with my sister. I was unaware of what was happening, of the political turmoil around us. As I put my slate down, my mother said, ‘You have to go.’
‘Where?’
‘India.’
My elder brother was in the air force in present-day India. He had taken permission from the government to bring his relatives. My parents didn’t want to leave. So my mother just sent me and my elder sister. She put two or three dresses in a small bag, not even money.
My brother said, ‘Give them some necklaces, some jewellery.’
My mother said, ‘No, nothing will happen. Everything will be okay. They will come back. We won’t migrate.’
We were put in a Dakota. My brother was engaged at that time, and his fiancée and her whole family were in the Dakota too. They had brought all their luggage. The plane landed in Jodhpur, where my brother was posted. We stayed with his Punjabi friend, a squadron leader. The squadron leader’s wife was quite upset at having all of us at her residence; she used to make us feel like unwanted guests. We had a very tough time during our 10-12 day stay. Then we went to Lucknow, to live with another friend of my brother’s. This friend was also Punjabi. His folks made us do all the housework.
Finally, we went to Allahabad to my father’s sister’s house. My aunt’s family had come well before the Karachi riots. My aunt had seven daughters, and we were two more girls in the household. Two of my brothers were posted in Allahabad, one in the air force and one in the army. The brother in the air force used to come and visit us, bring us sweets. Every day, we would ask, ‘Where is our mother? Where is our father?’ Nobody could answer our questions.
Then my aunt’s husband was transferred, and we were compelled to move in with distant relatives who also lived in Allahabad. There, we were really made to work. We had to bring water from three miles away. I learnt to clean bathrooms, wash utensils. My sister and I didn’t know what was happening, we would just cry.
Then finally my parents left Sindh and came to Gujarat, since my mother’s brother was a conservator of forests in Ahmedabad. Then my eldest brother called us to Agra, and we stayed there for some time with our parents. We were not going to school at that point; my brother felt that it was not safe. Everyone in Agra – all the UP-ites – would give us dirty looks, especially my elder sister who didn’t study. We had to cover our faces if we wanted to go out to see a movie.
Our family got split by circumstance. In Kanpur, our joint family had been given one building in compensation for our eight buildings in Karachi. But all the relatives in our extended family began fighting over this. My eldest sister went to Kanpur with our grandmother, and later my other sisters followed to stake our family’s claim to the property.
Meanwhile, my father got a job as an engineer in Patna. So we all went to live in Patna. Our neighbour there was a Christian lady who told my mother to put her three youngest daughters in school. As a result, we were enrolled in a convent school for six months. Most students in my class were younger than me.
We lived in Patna for two years. Then my father secured a job in Bombay, but there was no house. So he went to Bombay alone, and we had to stay with our uncle in Ahmedabad. We didn’t attend any school there. Six months passed, and my father finally found accommodation in Bombay, at the Madh Island refugee camp.
The Madh Island refugee camp was a very bad experience, with toilets outside. Prem Ahuja (who was later shot dead by K. M. Nanavati) was the camp commander there. He was my brother’s friend and was very nice to us.
In Bombay, my mother happened to meet our school teacher from Karachi, Sita Samtani. She had helped transfer the Kamla High School from Hyderabad (Sindh) to Bombay. She told my mother to admit us in her school. She was very keen that we all should study. So we joined Kamla High School in 1950.
We would walk through the Madh Island jungle, come by boat to Versova, then by bus from Andheri to the school in Khar. It was more than an hour’s commute, each way. Nobody else at the camp went to school like this. Moreover, unlike most others, we had private quarters at the camp: a pe
rsonal bathroom outside our room, which nobody else could use. We felt as though we stood out, and the others at the camp began envying us.
After Madh Island, we moved to Bandstand in Bandra. There were military shacks there, with toilets outside. But at least we were by the seashore. Later my brother built a bathroom for us indoors. There were 13 of us in one room – my grandmother, my parents, my father’s brother and his wife, my father’s sister, and two brothers and five sisters. Yet we never felt like it was cramped.
We obtained government permission to build a small stone wall at the back of our shack, which was towards the sea. Our chacha-chachi began sleeping outside; there were no fans, no mosquito nets. My sisters and I, too, would study by the sea.
At that time, there were 18 shacks around Bandstand, and only two buildings. Film stars would come there for shoots. We had a lovely time, watching them, watching the sea. We would go for picnics to Bandra Fort, sing songs. I must say, I have not gone through difficult times like other people have.
After Kamla High School, I went to National College. Sita Samtani had told us, ‘Don’t give up your pursuit of academics.’ I was the only one who listened; my sisters stopped studying after completing their SSC Board exams. I graduated from National College, and later, from Law College.
The day I finished my SSC, I started working. First, at Kamla High School, teaching young children; then at Air India, with my brother-in-law’s help. I worked with Air India for over 30 years.12
Those who witnessed or had been subjected to communal violence were naturally even more affected by Partition. Rochiram Godhwani was a youth of 17 when Partition became a reality. He lived in Karachi with his widowed mother and his six brothers, in a flat on Burns Road. During the Karachi pogrom, his family saw a mob of about 50 people approaching their building; they were saved because their landlord used his connection with the Sindh government to arrange for police protection in the nick of time. Images of the Karachi carnage remain alive for Rochiram Godhwani even today:
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