Personal Price of Politics: Sindhis

Every family affected by the partition of India, to create the nation of Pakistan, in 1947, has grandparents with stories of the political divide of that time. Millions died, on both sides of the border, in a large needless human tragedy. The implications remain to date, not just in the politics of the region and countries but also in the human relations between the people. Even for the refugees who survived, the families bear the inter-generational trauma of the disruption and uprooting of their lives.

At the time of the partition, Goji maasi, my mother’s eldest sister, was a married woman, while my mother was not yet ten. Of the six sisters and four brothers in all, three were even younger than my mother at the time. They were all born in Sindh and lived in a large mansion with many servants, a car and a horse driven carriage called a tanga, and more than one horse, whose stables on the premises were called a tabela. My grandfather was a civil engineer with a responsible senior position on the construction of the Sukkar barrage on the Indus River in Sindh. Indus is a distortion of the local name of the river Sindhu, like Italy is for Italia. When the country was carved up, he had to make the difficult decision to relocate to the Indian side as a refugee. His three younger siblings with similar large and young families were on the Indian side of the new border so I suppose it was easier to uproot one family than three.

Although the countries were supposedly divided along religious lines, with Hindus in Hindustan, the vernacular name for India, and Muslims in Pakistan, there were more Muslims (94.5 mil) in India than in Pakistan (75mil, with 42 in current day Pakistan and the rest in East Pakistan that later became Bangladesh). Sindh is the land of Sufis where meandering saints sang and danced up and down the meandering Sindhu river and it’s tributaries. Locals worship Zinda Peer (living saint) also called the River God Jhulelal, often depicted as a sage riding a fish. He lived in the twelfth century and was a contemporary of Rumi, the better known Sufi poet. His real name was Syed Shah Hussain Marvandi but he was popularly known as Lal Shabaz Qualandar. His interfaith preachings led the locals to adopt him and give him the name Jhulelal. The river acted both as the super highway of the time and the force of nature it still remains to this day, despite the dams. Qwaals (choirlike group-singing with claps because instrumental music was haram amongst some Muslims) everywhere, even today, always end their devotional concerts with the best known dhamal — Dama Dum Mast Qalandar — in praise of Jhulelal. It is customary for audience to get up and dance in music-induced ecstasy and if they haven’t done it already, this old composition sung through the centuries would be hard to sit out in the always grand finale. Even with American audiences unfamiliar with this, I have danced to it when Pakistani qwaals performed in the local Unitarian Universalist church once and more recently last year at my favorite Memorial Church on Stanford campus.

Majority of Sindhis today are Muslims and the Sindhi language is written in a script similar to the Arabic one. However, my family, like several other Hindu Sindhis, worships in temples or gurdwaras, although the most common way is to worship at a domestic altar, with rituals individually selected and created, often by each member of the family. We have many devotees of Sai baba of Shirdi, another wandering saint from Maharashtra who most likely was a Muslim, and Dada Vaswani another holy man and living saint, along with a wide selection from the Hindu pantheon, represented in the domestic shrines. The only family religious rituals I have ever participated in are a rare Satyanarayan puja, literally prayers to the Truth God, on a full moon day, or a prescribed ritual say for housewarming or blessings on someone’s special day, say before their wedding or a big birthday, with a quick havan (fire worship) or Sukhamani Sahib path (prayers for Sukh/Blessings of Joy, chanted from the Sikh holy book). Religion is a personal individual choice for us. After spending the formative K-12 and undergraduate college years at Catholic institutions and the past fifteen years again at a Catholic college, and sending my son to Sunday school at the local church with our neighbors good friends, in practice I would qualify to be more Catholic than Hindu.

My grandfather’s two younger brothers were also engineers, one working with the Indian Railways and the other with a large industrial house, and his sister was a married homemaker. The migration from Sindh to India was piecemeal with married kids traveling separately, older unmarried ones traveling in batches, to stay with their uncles and cousins, and the youngest ones coming with the parents. The details of reunification and life in the refugee colony of Rajinder Nagar are limited. The school my mother attended was in tents and the ridge around the area was wild enough that an occasional big cat was a possibility and wolves were regularly heard at night. My grandpa built the first homes for the refugees there, with his engineer friends. By the time my mother grew up, married and had me, the occasional story of life from pre-partition days that were ever brought up in any family gathering were nostalgic and happy ones.

As impoverished refugees, they lived in a small two room house. We were told that our eldest unmarried aunt, Gopi maasi, use to have her bed on a loft suspended above the bedroom, about 3 feet from the ceiling, where some trunks were stored by the time my cousins and I were kids. My mother’s four brothers lived together in that house and to this day, two of my cousins live in newer construction multistoried flats built on the same location as my grandmas two room home, loaded with family history.

Before I was ten, I have memories of attending the weddings of two of my mother’s younger brothers and two of her younger sisters, in that home, and then that of my cousin closest to me in age, who married early. She grew up in that home as my eldest uncle’s daughter. For weddings or if there was a newborn or similar special family time, a trunk from the store room would be opened to find a piece of appropriate fabric, typcially, precious lace, sparkling brocade, Swiss voile or plush velvet or jacquard satin, to be tailored into something suitable to celebrate the special occasion. These pieces of fabric had been carried from Pakistan and were the only reminders of the past life of wealth. Like the Parsi community in India who recall their forced exodus from Persia over 800 years ago, Sindhis of my mother’s generation too would meet each other at social gatherings and always ask each other “Where in Sindh are you from?” It’s as much a way of keeping alive the memory of places left behind, as knowing the local variations: the Sindhis from Hyderabad or Karachi are city dwellers while those from Jacobabad are gothana — country folks or the finer distinctions that I don’t know between the bhaibands or Shikarpuris, and many others.

From her childhood in Sindh, my mother had two stories that were recounted periodically. As a child under 8 year herself, she was carrying one of her younger sisters, Vimla. Somehow she had an accident near a coal fired cooking stove, so the baby sister fell face down on live burning coals. Vimla maasi sustained serious burns on the side of her forehead, and narrowly escaped damage to her eye, before an adult came to help. The doctor who treated her also became a refugee and my grandpa gave him one of the two pieces of land he got in Rajinder Nagar, to help him in hard times as he had done for him in Sindh. That is how my grandpa expressed his gratitude to the doctor. My maasi lives with that permanent scar just above her eyebrow on one side of her face. It has defined a lot of her life’s experience, right down to who she would be considered eligible to marry.

The other story involved my mother as a kid walking along the river front to go from her home to her elder married sister Goji’s home, where she spent a lot of her time. A man approached her and offered her sweets if she would be willing to give him the bangles she was wearing. She liked the deal enough to accept the candy in exchange for her bangles, that happened to be pure gold for she was a wealthy man’s daughter. The thief escaped quickly and when the candy was over, she started to cry. That’s how a friend of her father’s found her and recognizing her, brought her safely back home. Everyone was so relived to have her back safely that no one complained about the lost gold bangles.

Goji maasi’s memory from Sindh was one of march of time. She would tell us about how the street lights in Sindh used to be gas lanterns and every evening a man would come with a lit torch on a pole to walk the streets and light each one. Nanki maasi was married to a wealthy judge’s son in Pakistan and when they moved to India, they too lost bulk of their wealth. Her husband went from being a tennis playing princeling to a government of India clerk, and he was considered a lucky one to have scored steady employment on relocation due to being from a well-connected family. His aspirations for his kids, my four older cousins, remained the best but their means were non-existent. There were whispered family discussions about how he was crazy to give his sons tennis lessons when he could barely afford the food rations for his family of five on his solo meager clerical income. My cousins were bright and while still in school, learned to generate their own pocket money by offering other kids tuitions. Two of them became doctors and one an engineer, with their only sister being a homemaker.

Only after I was all grown up and had relocated to America, and travelled to other countries, did I finally become curious about these family stories. Growing up, whenever these came up, we kids, my cousins and I, had zero interest in these repeated stories of the distant past. Such family folklore was strictly for the adults, who didn’t know how to play and have fun. Kids don’t get the concept of nostalgia. On my visits back to India, Lachu mama, my eldest uncle, would often bring out the old family photos and share some tidbits about the extended family, some of whom I was meeting in America and he had known as cousins when they were growing up together. While a student at Stanford, I met another student, a Sindhi from Sindh, and was surprised that there were Sindhi Muslims (no internet at fingertips in 1991). On my next visit to India, hanging out with Lachu mama, I said to him “I have only heard the stories of the big mansion in Sindh and the life left behind. We can go visit and see it all. Would you like to travel there with me?” His answer was quick and clear “No, thank you. Never going there and suggest you don’t entertain such mad ideas either”. Brought up to listen to our elders, I left it there. On a later visit, by when he was too old to travel, I tried to get the address and locations of the old places in Sindh. He was a school kid when they abandoned that life so he could only describe it the way we still navigate in the third world: there was a Gurdwara, and a hill, and you had to go past an open maidan (field) to get to the mansion, which is probably all gone by now anyway. That’s where the story ends. One of Lachu mama’s investigations into the family history had traced our ancestors to the 17th century kingdom of Surajmal in Rajasthan, where someone served as a minister. Sadly no one kept a trace of that work. The current family chart was created a few years ago by my son, based on many conversations with various uncles and aunts, and has about 150 cousins, mostly from my side of his family.

Where I live now has changed radically in the time I have been here and pace of change continues to accelerate. When I visit India and the locality where I grew up, I don’t recognize anything there. The dream of ever seeing where my mother or her siblings came from in Sindh, Pakistan, have long been abandoned. There is appreciation for what has stayed. My grandma’s house in Delhi, which I saw being rebuilt, is still there. My young nephew welcomes me to it with a “Jyoti Bua, you can sleep in my room”. My brain goes ‘kiddo, I slept here when I was younger than you are today, and my mother too grew up here when she was a kid’. But to him, I say “Thank you, I like your home. We can play the shadow game, if you sleep here with me”. The street light filters in through the window curtains and it’s fun to make up stories based on what shapes we can find in the shadows cast by it. Imagination is a refuge for the refugees and migrants. We carry the places within us in the stories we share when we can.

More first person accounts of difficult to tell partition stories, gathered by Guneeta Singh Bhalla’s unique and brave 1947 Partition Project, started from California, inspired by holocaust survivors telling their stories.