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Sindhi Tapestry : reflowable version on Kindle
A collection of 60 pieces of writing, supplemented by evocative photographs, some rare and archival. Each piece of this splendid patchwork tapestry brings something unique to the reader. Some convey facts, theories, and insights. Others showcase lost worlds, lifestyles, and rituals. Some are memories; some tales of new lives in faraway lands. Together, they form a bridge to a dawning awareness of a historic environment that was rudely and abruptly disrupted by events that took place in 1947 – a bridge through which a rich cultural legacy may be gradually restored.
Read more about the contents and contributors on the sindhstories wordpress blog.
Read more about the contents and contributors on the sindhstories wordpress blog.
435 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 18, 2020
3 people are currently reading
62 people want to read
About the author
Saaz Aggarwal
14 books21 followersSaaz Aggarwal is a contemporary Indian writer whose body of work includes biographies, translations, critical reviews and humour columns. As an artist, she is recognized for her Bombay Clichés, quirky depictions of urban India in a traditional Indian folk style, view www.saazaggarwal.com. Her art incorporates a range of media and, like her columns, showcases the incongruities of daily life in India. Her 2012 book, 'Sindh: Stories from a Vanished Homeland', established her as a researcher in Sindh studies.
Book: The Songbird on my Shoulder (2011) http://www.songbirdonmyshoulder.blogs...
Book: Sindh: Stories from a Vanished Homeland (2012) http://www.klisma.in/viewdeal/books/b...
Book: The Songbird on my Shoulder (2011) http://www.songbirdonmyshoulder.blogs...
Book: Sindh: Stories from a Vanished Homeland (2012) http://www.klisma.in/viewdeal/books/b...
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January 18, 2021
When the British left India in 1947, they divided three states of India on the basis of religion. Hindu Sindhis had to flee for their lives. They arrived in what was left of India as refugees. The loss of a homeland was traumatic; memories, nostalgia and the need to resettle became their companions. The generations that followed succeeded in various businesses and professions in the truncated India, and to whichever part of the world they went. There comes a time when the ethnic groups that exist as diaspora begin to search for their roots. In 2020, a young Sindhi floated the idea of compiling an anthology of writing by, of and for young Sindhis
Saaz Aggarwal, an oral historian, a writer and an artist, took up the challenge of presenting the perspectives of the generation that had spread its wings 70 years after their forefathers lost their homeland. She received contributions from Sindhis of all ages. The result is a handsome volume of 432 pages. The essays,stories and poems reveal a perceptive depth of insight.
Trishna Lalchandani, who gathered and compared cultural impressions from colonial sources and folklore, found that the act of tracing origins was an act of movement into the past, and an act of storytelling. Studying his Sindhi roots made Dharmendra Tolani a well-rounded and centered person. An invitation to a conference in Sindh gives Nandita Bhavnani occasion to visit various cities and add dimensions to the stories she heard from her parents. The changing mores allowed Atul Khatri, from a traditional business family, to make a mid-career change and win recognitions as a much-in-demand stand-up comedian.
Lou Gopal, the child of a mixed marriage, grew up in Manila: couldn’t fill in the gaps where his father’s family till he found his eighty-eight year-old uncle through Facebook.
Education overseas and travel made Dr ‘Bindaas Rolu’, a Sindhi by birth, part Sindhi, part American, part Puerto Rican. The discovery of the term, ‘third culture kid’ led her to embrace her Sindhiness. Growing up, Nina Sabnani, a highly successful artist and storyteller, was terrified to identify herself as Sindhi because she had heard that a Sindhi is more dangerous than a snake. She came to understand that she was a world citizen and her “land was the land of inherited memories and animation.” Nandu Asrani points out that a snake is not an apt comparison; it is the spider, which, when weaving a web falls, gets up and starts all over innumerable times, that he likens Sindhis to. Asrani illustrates the analogy with stories of grandfather’s failures and successes.
Subhash Bijlani compares his reminiscences of Sindh to walking in a fog: “My recollections are an attempt to paint a landscape faintly visible in a distant haze.” We know that pain also causes haze.
To Tarun Sakhrani, a global, entrepreneurial Sindhi, living life to the fullest means “enjoying the fruits of everything we have achieved.” To Aroon Shivdasani, her identity “is a tapestry of (her) birth, Sindh the country of her childhood and (her) final adoptive country, USA,” where she has lived and nurtured her children and grandchildren. Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro takes the reader on a tour of religious sites of Sindh – Hindu, Sikh and Sufi – describes the activities that take place in them, blending in a lot of history in the narrative.
Captain ‘Gulzari Singh’ recalls the Sindhi tradition of many Sindhi families to give one son to be raised as a Sikh; he had to prove his credentials as a Sikh to be accepted by the troops as one of them. For Ritesh Uttamchandani, his “Sindhi identity has nothing to do with trauma or separation or loss of a land or worse.” It is that of a river: he immersed his mother’s ashes in Ramkund, where there is the confluence of two rivers; his father’s he immersed from Ladakh in the Indus, “the river that passed his home.”
Jai Alimchandani writes a brief biography of his father, a many-sided personality: a lover of ghazals, an educated man, a landowner in Sindh, a hotelier in India, a movie-maker, a taxi driver (exemplifying the Sindhis’ respect for the dignity of labour). This reviewer would have loved to have a beer with him – except that he never drank alcohol.
Nikhil Bhojwani recalls an encounter that established kinship, empathy and trust: the Black salesman in a mattress store in a Boston suburb who threw in a couple of free pillows when he recognized Nikhil as a Sindhi from his surname – he was from Jamaica and his mother was Sindhi.
The all-important question of Sindhi society being caste-free is examined by Shiksha Sharma; according to her, hierarchy among Sindhis is based on places of origin or occupations. Mushtaq Rajpar, who has a diplomatic background, and is a member of the Sindhi Association of North America (which has both Hindu and Muslim members), shares his dream that one day “the damage caused by Partition will heal and we can join in joyous celebration regaining and propagating our rich culture.” Devendra Kodwani, born in a refugee camp in India, opines that the ocean of Sindh appears as one of many wonderful cultures on this planet, thus making social identity a work in progress.
Bob Ramchand, in tracing the history from his forefathers, points out to another Sindhi trait, one that his father espoused: create your own high standards.
Maya Khemlani David, a Catholic with Christian maternal and paternal cousins, makes an important point: Sindhis mix freely with fellow Sindhis regardless of their religious and national affiliations.
Shakuntala Bharvani presents a good-humoured take on Sindhi eating habits in the guise of her maternal grandmother’s fondness for heavy traditional foods.
With justifiable pride, Deepak Kirpalani shares two projects he undertook: to draw up family tree and the sorting and archiving of his father’s and grandfather’s papers. The family tree covered ten generations. The archiving added faces, figuratively speaking, to names on the family tree.
Michel Boivin’s analytical essay deals with three topics: how was it that Hindu Sindhis practiced Sufiism in colonial Sindh? What does it mean for a Hindu Sindhi to be Sufi? Did Partition affect the Sufism among Hindu Sindhis?
Menka Shivdasani collaborated with Anju Makhija in collecting and translating Sindhi poems about Partition and getting the collection published by the Sahitya Akademi. This is one of the strands in an essay that also touches upon her own poems, her travels and her identity.
The dilemmas relating to career, citizenship, marriage, integrating different identities, and fighting a large brain tumour, are explored by Sanjay Mohinani.
The skill to make others laugh became the launching pad for Dirven Hazari for his channel, Sindhionism. Another interesting profession for a Sindhi.
The focus of Jurgen Schaflechner’s essay is the desert shrine of Goddess Hinglaj, where pilgrimages are undertaken to give thanks for the fulfillment of wishes and vows.
The excerpt from Parmesh Shahani book ‘Queeristan’ indicates how far the present Sindhi has come vis-à-vis his forbears, when he can talk openly and proudly about being gay.
Natasha Raheja delights in recalling the folksy Sindhi words her maternal grandmother used.
Sindh, for Kusum Choppra, began to ‘awaken and flow’ in her when she started researching her first novel, ‘Beyond Diamond Rings’. The novel spans five decades of change in the lives of Sindhi women.
Sapna Bhavnani made her film ‘Sindhustan’ “for young people to learn about their culture.” The film not only won a number of national and international awards, but also spiked online searches for Sindh.
Vimmi Sadarangani, though born in India, discovered and began to experience her Sindhiness when she began to study Sindhi language and literature; Sindh permeated her poems too.
Gitanjali C Kalro learnt the story of the strife and glory of Sindhis when, in 2017, she started collecting Partition stories. “Each story, each journey, each individual had a unique tale, family and history.”
Sajni Kripalani Mukherji draws on memory to talk about Sindhis in general as a species: about the Sindhis of Calcutta, pre-and post-Partition, and about the self-fashioning of Sindhis.
The time when Hindu and Muslim Sindhis lived together in harmony in villages and cities form the reminiscences of Pir Mohammed Metlo, in an essay with the title ‘We cried, we begged the Hindus not to leave’.
His son, Dr Ali Gul Metlo, laments that after most of the Hindu Sindhis had left, the Sindhi Muslims saw that they had lost their middle class, their businesses, their position in the bureaucracy, their cities. Sindhi writing, the Sindhi language, Sindhi songs were banned, and Sindhi schools began to be closed. No trees were planted in Sindh for 20 years!
Sadness is added to loss when Namrata Asudani applies for a domicile certificate for medical school: she is told that since her father was born in an enemy country, she has to formally renounce that connection. The pain was the memory of the conditions under which her family left Sindhi and the struggle of beginning a new life. But hope is still there, in the form of a large painting of Jhulelal that her mother chose to carry, in preference to other belongings, when the family fled across the newly created border.
The metaphor of the tri-lingual Roma Kripalani for the resilience, self-reliance, optimism, never-say-die spirit of the Sindhis is “like a snail which never goes anywhere without its house.”
Ravi P Tekchandani, invited to Karachi to present a research paper at an international conference, offered the water of the Sarayu river (in Ayodhya) to the Sindhu river, and filled the container with water from the Sindhu, with the hope that the distance between the two countries would end.
Dr Nijram Bhagwanani, a decorated IAF officer, with many interests, decided to remain active after retirement: he began to “learn more about my beloved Sindhi” and his ancestors, while continuing to trains doctors on applications of Laser and setting up and running a school for differently-abled children.
Saaz Aggarwal has put together a pot pourri of essays in her trademark historian’s manner. Her essay covers the obliteration of documentation; the survival of MP Mathrani’s album of the construction of the Sukkur Barrage along with an account of the illustrious Mathrani family; a profile of the multifaceted visionary Bhai Pratap; the family history of Sindhi families in the ledgers of hereditary priests of Haridwar; traditional and modern Sindhi names; the ubiquitous papad; the innumerable versions of what happened to her grandfather’s elder sister, Vadi Dadi.
A Sindhi born overseas, Pratap V Kriplani-Dialdas, finds his identity to be privileged by virtue of the his ancestors’ birthplace and the culture in which he was born and brought up, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Kishore Mandhyan credits his mother’s vision, “They must grow up not to be lords of a minor locality or corner, they must grow up to be princes of the world!” for motivating him to serve as Administrator of the United Nations and the Representative of the Secretary General on three continents, and his brother Indur to be one of the cutting-edge cyber architects in the world.
Despite the misgiving of people, Raaj Lalchandani was determined to bring out a magazine, ‘The Sindhian’, that would bring back the sense of pride and belonging to a distinct and evolved community. In its 17 years of existence, ‘The Sindhian’ has reached over half a million readers worldwide.
Sundri Parchani, who had the unusual privilege of having 3 sets of grandparents, writes movingly about her paternal grandfather who was a philanthropic doctor practicing traditional medicine. His greater legacy to his family was a prayer he fashioned from different chapters of the Gurbani relevant to the life of the family.
A Sindhi he met in Palo Alto, California, and the struggle of the generation that fled to India during Partition to reconstitute its social and economic status, fascinated Matthew A. Cook and inspired him to make Sindh the focus of his Ph.D. research.
The pledge made by a son, Naomal Hotchand, to his father on the occasion his thread ceremony to translate the Ramayana from Sanskrit to Gurmukhi, written between 1820 and 1860, resulted in a five-hundred-page manuscript inscribed on both sides in neat handwritten. It survived the destruction and is currently in the custody of one of his descendants, Subash Kundanmal. The visionary in Uttara Shahani hopes for “Sindhis in the future that they live in world not bound by the nation-state and that Sindhis divided by borders are able to mix with each other again and build a much broader sense of identity.”
Kajal Ramchandani’s passion for the Sindhi language is reflected not only in the initiatives she joined for its promotion but also her labour of love in transcribing words in the Romanized version of Sindhi so that readers will know how they are pronounced.
Rita Kothari studies the question of what it means to possess and lose a language, something that embeds the sense of self and community and becomes a repository.
The connection between language and thought is tellingly expressed by Ruve Narang, an artist and a multi-lingual speaker: “I continue to think in the same language that I speak. And this is the only way I can save my thoughts from getting Lost in Translation.”
Two short stories fit well into the idea of a tapestry. ‘The Wedding Tryst’ by Mona Melwani recall a time when issues of dowry could make or break the negotiations for an arranged marriage. ‘Behind the Rainbow’ by Murli Melwani traces the journeys of a father and son, as exiles, as outsiders, as transients with concern for a “rich and syncretic culture, blended, merged, submerged, the deserts of time, leaving behind a Mohenjo-Daro of memories.”
The anthology also carries a number of poems, including ‘Home’ by Smriti Notani; ‘Fries for Friendship and the Untoward Nature of Identity; by Mamta Sachan Kumar; ‘Matribhoomi-Karmabhoomi’ by Kusum Choppra; ‘Motherland, Mother Tongue’ by Murli Melwani; ‘Grandpa’s Mumblings’ by Vimmi Sadarangani; ‘Umbilical Connections’ and Her Mother’s Tongue’ by Anju Makhija; and a set of short and sharp verses from Sahitya Akademi award winner Mohan Gehani’s new collection ‘While Sowing Dreams’. The titles reflect the themes of these poems. They are touching, laced with pain, embodying a search, full of nostalgia, delicately indicating trauma. To comment on them would be a travesty; it would be like dissecting a bird to understand the principles of flying! They must be read, to be savoured.
The pickings here are like appetizers. 𝗦𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗵𝗶 𝗧𝗮𝗽𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘆 admits you to the spread, the aroma, the colours, the flavours and temptation of Sindhi dishes at a lavish banquet. This anthology, encapsulating a period in history, 70 years after the loss of a homeland, is destined to become a reference book.
Saaz Aggarwal, an oral historian, a writer and an artist, took up the challenge of presenting the perspectives of the generation that had spread its wings 70 years after their forefathers lost their homeland. She received contributions from Sindhis of all ages. The result is a handsome volume of 432 pages. The essays,stories and poems reveal a perceptive depth of insight.
Trishna Lalchandani, who gathered and compared cultural impressions from colonial sources and folklore, found that the act of tracing origins was an act of movement into the past, and an act of storytelling. Studying his Sindhi roots made Dharmendra Tolani a well-rounded and centered person. An invitation to a conference in Sindh gives Nandita Bhavnani occasion to visit various cities and add dimensions to the stories she heard from her parents. The changing mores allowed Atul Khatri, from a traditional business family, to make a mid-career change and win recognitions as a much-in-demand stand-up comedian.
Lou Gopal, the child of a mixed marriage, grew up in Manila: couldn’t fill in the gaps where his father’s family till he found his eighty-eight year-old uncle through Facebook.
Education overseas and travel made Dr ‘Bindaas Rolu’, a Sindhi by birth, part Sindhi, part American, part Puerto Rican. The discovery of the term, ‘third culture kid’ led her to embrace her Sindhiness. Growing up, Nina Sabnani, a highly successful artist and storyteller, was terrified to identify herself as Sindhi because she had heard that a Sindhi is more dangerous than a snake. She came to understand that she was a world citizen and her “land was the land of inherited memories and animation.” Nandu Asrani points out that a snake is not an apt comparison; it is the spider, which, when weaving a web falls, gets up and starts all over innumerable times, that he likens Sindhis to. Asrani illustrates the analogy with stories of grandfather’s failures and successes.
Subhash Bijlani compares his reminiscences of Sindh to walking in a fog: “My recollections are an attempt to paint a landscape faintly visible in a distant haze.” We know that pain also causes haze.
To Tarun Sakhrani, a global, entrepreneurial Sindhi, living life to the fullest means “enjoying the fruits of everything we have achieved.” To Aroon Shivdasani, her identity “is a tapestry of (her) birth, Sindh the country of her childhood and (her) final adoptive country, USA,” where she has lived and nurtured her children and grandchildren. Zulfiqar Ali Kalhoro takes the reader on a tour of religious sites of Sindh – Hindu, Sikh and Sufi – describes the activities that take place in them, blending in a lot of history in the narrative.
Captain ‘Gulzari Singh’ recalls the Sindhi tradition of many Sindhi families to give one son to be raised as a Sikh; he had to prove his credentials as a Sikh to be accepted by the troops as one of them. For Ritesh Uttamchandani, his “Sindhi identity has nothing to do with trauma or separation or loss of a land or worse.” It is that of a river: he immersed his mother’s ashes in Ramkund, where there is the confluence of two rivers; his father’s he immersed from Ladakh in the Indus, “the river that passed his home.”
Jai Alimchandani writes a brief biography of his father, a many-sided personality: a lover of ghazals, an educated man, a landowner in Sindh, a hotelier in India, a movie-maker, a taxi driver (exemplifying the Sindhis’ respect for the dignity of labour). This reviewer would have loved to have a beer with him – except that he never drank alcohol.
Nikhil Bhojwani recalls an encounter that established kinship, empathy and trust: the Black salesman in a mattress store in a Boston suburb who threw in a couple of free pillows when he recognized Nikhil as a Sindhi from his surname – he was from Jamaica and his mother was Sindhi.
The all-important question of Sindhi society being caste-free is examined by Shiksha Sharma; according to her, hierarchy among Sindhis is based on places of origin or occupations. Mushtaq Rajpar, who has a diplomatic background, and is a member of the Sindhi Association of North America (which has both Hindu and Muslim members), shares his dream that one day “the damage caused by Partition will heal and we can join in joyous celebration regaining and propagating our rich culture.” Devendra Kodwani, born in a refugee camp in India, opines that the ocean of Sindh appears as one of many wonderful cultures on this planet, thus making social identity a work in progress.
Bob Ramchand, in tracing the history from his forefathers, points out to another Sindhi trait, one that his father espoused: create your own high standards.
Maya Khemlani David, a Catholic with Christian maternal and paternal cousins, makes an important point: Sindhis mix freely with fellow Sindhis regardless of their religious and national affiliations.
Shakuntala Bharvani presents a good-humoured take on Sindhi eating habits in the guise of her maternal grandmother’s fondness for heavy traditional foods.
With justifiable pride, Deepak Kirpalani shares two projects he undertook: to draw up family tree and the sorting and archiving of his father’s and grandfather’s papers. The family tree covered ten generations. The archiving added faces, figuratively speaking, to names on the family tree.
Michel Boivin’s analytical essay deals with three topics: how was it that Hindu Sindhis practiced Sufiism in colonial Sindh? What does it mean for a Hindu Sindhi to be Sufi? Did Partition affect the Sufism among Hindu Sindhis?
Menka Shivdasani collaborated with Anju Makhija in collecting and translating Sindhi poems about Partition and getting the collection published by the Sahitya Akademi. This is one of the strands in an essay that also touches upon her own poems, her travels and her identity.
The dilemmas relating to career, citizenship, marriage, integrating different identities, and fighting a large brain tumour, are explored by Sanjay Mohinani.
The skill to make others laugh became the launching pad for Dirven Hazari for his channel, Sindhionism. Another interesting profession for a Sindhi.
The focus of Jurgen Schaflechner’s essay is the desert shrine of Goddess Hinglaj, where pilgrimages are undertaken to give thanks for the fulfillment of wishes and vows.
The excerpt from Parmesh Shahani book ‘Queeristan’ indicates how far the present Sindhi has come vis-à-vis his forbears, when he can talk openly and proudly about being gay.
Natasha Raheja delights in recalling the folksy Sindhi words her maternal grandmother used.
Sindh, for Kusum Choppra, began to ‘awaken and flow’ in her when she started researching her first novel, ‘Beyond Diamond Rings’. The novel spans five decades of change in the lives of Sindhi women.
Sapna Bhavnani made her film ‘Sindhustan’ “for young people to learn about their culture.” The film not only won a number of national and international awards, but also spiked online searches for Sindh.
Vimmi Sadarangani, though born in India, discovered and began to experience her Sindhiness when she began to study Sindhi language and literature; Sindh permeated her poems too.
Gitanjali C Kalro learnt the story of the strife and glory of Sindhis when, in 2017, she started collecting Partition stories. “Each story, each journey, each individual had a unique tale, family and history.”
Sajni Kripalani Mukherji draws on memory to talk about Sindhis in general as a species: about the Sindhis of Calcutta, pre-and post-Partition, and about the self-fashioning of Sindhis.
The time when Hindu and Muslim Sindhis lived together in harmony in villages and cities form the reminiscences of Pir Mohammed Metlo, in an essay with the title ‘We cried, we begged the Hindus not to leave’.
His son, Dr Ali Gul Metlo, laments that after most of the Hindu Sindhis had left, the Sindhi Muslims saw that they had lost their middle class, their businesses, their position in the bureaucracy, their cities. Sindhi writing, the Sindhi language, Sindhi songs were banned, and Sindhi schools began to be closed. No trees were planted in Sindh for 20 years!
Sadness is added to loss when Namrata Asudani applies for a domicile certificate for medical school: she is told that since her father was born in an enemy country, she has to formally renounce that connection. The pain was the memory of the conditions under which her family left Sindhi and the struggle of beginning a new life. But hope is still there, in the form of a large painting of Jhulelal that her mother chose to carry, in preference to other belongings, when the family fled across the newly created border.
The metaphor of the tri-lingual Roma Kripalani for the resilience, self-reliance, optimism, never-say-die spirit of the Sindhis is “like a snail which never goes anywhere without its house.”
Ravi P Tekchandani, invited to Karachi to present a research paper at an international conference, offered the water of the Sarayu river (in Ayodhya) to the Sindhu river, and filled the container with water from the Sindhu, with the hope that the distance between the two countries would end.
Dr Nijram Bhagwanani, a decorated IAF officer, with many interests, decided to remain active after retirement: he began to “learn more about my beloved Sindhi” and his ancestors, while continuing to trains doctors on applications of Laser and setting up and running a school for differently-abled children.
Saaz Aggarwal has put together a pot pourri of essays in her trademark historian’s manner. Her essay covers the obliteration of documentation; the survival of MP Mathrani’s album of the construction of the Sukkur Barrage along with an account of the illustrious Mathrani family; a profile of the multifaceted visionary Bhai Pratap; the family history of Sindhi families in the ledgers of hereditary priests of Haridwar; traditional and modern Sindhi names; the ubiquitous papad; the innumerable versions of what happened to her grandfather’s elder sister, Vadi Dadi.
A Sindhi born overseas, Pratap V Kriplani-Dialdas, finds his identity to be privileged by virtue of the his ancestors’ birthplace and the culture in which he was born and brought up, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
Kishore Mandhyan credits his mother’s vision, “They must grow up not to be lords of a minor locality or corner, they must grow up to be princes of the world!” for motivating him to serve as Administrator of the United Nations and the Representative of the Secretary General on three continents, and his brother Indur to be one of the cutting-edge cyber architects in the world.
Despite the misgiving of people, Raaj Lalchandani was determined to bring out a magazine, ‘The Sindhian’, that would bring back the sense of pride and belonging to a distinct and evolved community. In its 17 years of existence, ‘The Sindhian’ has reached over half a million readers worldwide.
Sundri Parchani, who had the unusual privilege of having 3 sets of grandparents, writes movingly about her paternal grandfather who was a philanthropic doctor practicing traditional medicine. His greater legacy to his family was a prayer he fashioned from different chapters of the Gurbani relevant to the life of the family.
A Sindhi he met in Palo Alto, California, and the struggle of the generation that fled to India during Partition to reconstitute its social and economic status, fascinated Matthew A. Cook and inspired him to make Sindh the focus of his Ph.D. research.
The pledge made by a son, Naomal Hotchand, to his father on the occasion his thread ceremony to translate the Ramayana from Sanskrit to Gurmukhi, written between 1820 and 1860, resulted in a five-hundred-page manuscript inscribed on both sides in neat handwritten. It survived the destruction and is currently in the custody of one of his descendants, Subash Kundanmal. The visionary in Uttara Shahani hopes for “Sindhis in the future that they live in world not bound by the nation-state and that Sindhis divided by borders are able to mix with each other again and build a much broader sense of identity.”
Kajal Ramchandani’s passion for the Sindhi language is reflected not only in the initiatives she joined for its promotion but also her labour of love in transcribing words in the Romanized version of Sindhi so that readers will know how they are pronounced.
Rita Kothari studies the question of what it means to possess and lose a language, something that embeds the sense of self and community and becomes a repository.
The connection between language and thought is tellingly expressed by Ruve Narang, an artist and a multi-lingual speaker: “I continue to think in the same language that I speak. And this is the only way I can save my thoughts from getting Lost in Translation.”
Two short stories fit well into the idea of a tapestry. ‘The Wedding Tryst’ by Mona Melwani recall a time when issues of dowry could make or break the negotiations for an arranged marriage. ‘Behind the Rainbow’ by Murli Melwani traces the journeys of a father and son, as exiles, as outsiders, as transients with concern for a “rich and syncretic culture, blended, merged, submerged, the deserts of time, leaving behind a Mohenjo-Daro of memories.”
The anthology also carries a number of poems, including ‘Home’ by Smriti Notani; ‘Fries for Friendship and the Untoward Nature of Identity; by Mamta Sachan Kumar; ‘Matribhoomi-Karmabhoomi’ by Kusum Choppra; ‘Motherland, Mother Tongue’ by Murli Melwani; ‘Grandpa’s Mumblings’ by Vimmi Sadarangani; ‘Umbilical Connections’ and Her Mother’s Tongue’ by Anju Makhija; and a set of short and sharp verses from Sahitya Akademi award winner Mohan Gehani’s new collection ‘While Sowing Dreams’. The titles reflect the themes of these poems. They are touching, laced with pain, embodying a search, full of nostalgia, delicately indicating trauma. To comment on them would be a travesty; it would be like dissecting a bird to understand the principles of flying! They must be read, to be savoured.
The pickings here are like appetizers. 𝗦𝗶𝗻𝗱𝗵𝗶 𝗧𝗮𝗽𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘆 admits you to the spread, the aroma, the colours, the flavours and temptation of Sindhi dishes at a lavish banquet. This anthology, encapsulating a period in history, 70 years after the loss of a homeland, is destined to become a reference book.
December 28, 2020
Identity as unifying glue, not a dividing wedge: Sindhis blur boundaries to show power of convergence
A defining feature of identity is existence of some boundary. Be that political, linguistic, geographic, ideological or religio-ethnic, boundary is a necessary construct to create a sense of identity. Permeability is defining feature of Sindhi identity. A static notion of identity contracts human vision, but as diverse contributors to Sindhi Tapestry show, Sindhi identity expands human vision. Blurring boundaries of all kinds comes out vividly in short memorial essays and self reflections. Sufis of Sindh defy the religious boundaries of Islam and Hinduism, traders of Sindh traverse over lands and ocean borders, for Sindhis social and caste boundaries are as porous as Sindhi seero (a sweet dish made from wheat flour). This book is a literary collection in free form mixing essays, memorials, poems and stories. Sindhi Tapestry thus blurs boundaries of literary categories and genres and celebrates Sindhi identity as flowing Sindhu river rather than a small land locked lake.
A defining feature of identity is existence of some boundary. Be that political, linguistic, geographic, ideological or religio-ethnic, boundary is a necessary construct to create a sense of identity. Permeability is defining feature of Sindhi identity. A static notion of identity contracts human vision, but as diverse contributors to Sindhi Tapestry show, Sindhi identity expands human vision. Blurring boundaries of all kinds comes out vividly in short memorial essays and self reflections. Sufis of Sindh defy the religious boundaries of Islam and Hinduism, traders of Sindh traverse over lands and ocean borders, for Sindhis social and caste boundaries are as porous as Sindhi seero (a sweet dish made from wheat flour). This book is a literary collection in free form mixing essays, memorials, poems and stories. Sindhi Tapestry thus blurs boundaries of literary categories and genres and celebrates Sindhi identity as flowing Sindhu river rather than a small land locked lake.
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