What happened to the lost property of sindh in pakistan?
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Amar Jaleel, one of Pakistan’s most respected and controversial writers, writes in Sindhi – an official language in both India and Pakistan. He is technically a Muslim. However, his personal creed, spiritual outlook and politics recognise no borders of religion, nation and tradition. A follower of the 17th-century Sufi saint Sachal Sarmast, Jaleel draws radical courage from Sufism and fearlessly critiques any abuse of human dignity in the name of religion and national borders. He mocks the absurdity of containing subcontinental identities within the confines of nations and of equating nations with religions.
He wrote his most controversial story, Sard Lashun Jo Safar (The Journey of Cold Corpses), in the face of unrelenting censorship in the Pakistan of Zia ul-Haq. In the story, Jaleel takes us to Kundkot, a village in interior Sindh, where Hindu families live in a colony called Nanak Mohalla. We are then taken to the house of Gopal, technically a Hindu (his Hinduism as incidental as Jaleel’s Islam). While Gopal is busy reading a Sindhi translation of the Quran, a bunch of religious fanatics are raping his sister Savitri. Unlike most Hindus of Sindh, Gopal had chosen not to leave Pakistan to go to India. Perceiving himself to be an integral part of Sindh, he made his family stay back in the new state of Pakistan. His troubles started not in the 1940s, but three decades later, when religious fanaticism flared up with state support. The story shows how Gopal, an ordinary man from a village, had a sophisticated and unbiased understanding of religion. The rest of the story is much too gruesome and violent to be narrated here. Not surprisingly, the story was banned in Pakistan. In India it remains unknown beyond a tiny circle of Sindhi writers. To my knowledge, this is the only story in the Sindhi language that explicitly addresses Islamic violence against Hindus and, contrary to our expectations, it is not situated during Partition but after, and written not by a Hindu who suffered, but by a member of the majority community in Pakistan who empathised with the suffering.
Does that mean that the Sindhi community did not face violence? Or did not perhaps fulfil the expectations of ‘violence’ of the kind that characterised Partition stories? Both questions need to be answered. The Hindu minority of Sindh migrated to India during Partition and also the subsequent years, amidst immense fear and insecurity. When Punjab was caught in a maelstrom of hatred and hair-raising violence; the Hindus of Sindh were, at best, wary. Unlike the Partition experiences of Punjab or Bihar or, to a lesser extent, Bengal, the case of Sindh represents an exception because violence was not constitutive of the Sindhi experience of Partition. There were remarkably few episodes of physical violence in Sindh. Cases of robbery, hooliganism, and distress sales of property were far more common than bloodshed. Three months after Partition, when Acharya Kripalani (president, Indian National Congress) visited Sindh, he noted that, “There was only a slight exodus of the Hindus and Sikhs from Sindh. It did not suffer from any virulent fanaticism. To whatever faith the Sindhis belonged, they were powerfully influenced by Sufi and Vedantic thoughts. This made for tolerance.” Given today’s context and cynicism, this may seem archaic if not untrue. Frontier regions, and the two that I study – Kutch and Sindh – do diffuse some continuities and strait jacket definitions. Sindh was “a transition zone between ‘India proper’ and the vast region which was often called Khorrassan, in which were included Afghanistan, Baluchistan and southeastern Iran” – Sindh had been only intermittently included in the great Indian empires.
He wrote his most controversial story, Sard Lashun Jo Safar (The Journey of Cold Corpses), in the face of unrelenting censorship in the Pakistan of Zia ul-Haq. In the story, Jaleel takes us to Kundkot, a village in interior Sindh, where Hindu families live in a colony called Nanak Mohalla. We are then taken to the house of Gopal, technically a Hindu (his Hinduism as incidental as Jaleel’s Islam). While Gopal is busy reading a Sindhi translation of the Quran, a bunch of religious fanatics are raping his sister Savitri. Unlike most Hindus of Sindh, Gopal had chosen not to leave Pakistan to go to India. Perceiving himself to be an integral part of Sindh, he made his family stay back in the new state of Pakistan. His troubles started not in the 1940s, but three decades later, when religious fanaticism flared up with state support. The story shows how Gopal, an ordinary man from a village, had a sophisticated and unbiased understanding of religion. The rest of the story is much too gruesome and violent to be narrated here. Not surprisingly, the story was banned in Pakistan. In India it remains unknown beyond a tiny circle of Sindhi writers. To my knowledge, this is the only story in the Sindhi language that explicitly addresses Islamic violence against Hindus and, contrary to our expectations, it is not situated during Partition but after, and written not by a Hindu who suffered, but by a member of the majority community in Pakistan who empathised with the suffering.
Does that mean that the Sindhi community did not face violence? Or did not perhaps fulfil the expectations of ‘violence’ of the kind that characterised Partition stories? Both questions need to be answered. The Hindu minority of Sindh migrated to India during Partition and also the subsequent years, amidst immense fear and insecurity. When Punjab was caught in a maelstrom of hatred and hair-raising violence; the Hindus of Sindh were, at best, wary. Unlike the Partition experiences of Punjab or Bihar or, to a lesser extent, Bengal, the case of Sindh represents an exception because violence was not constitutive of the Sindhi experience of Partition. There were remarkably few episodes of physical violence in Sindh. Cases of robbery, hooliganism, and distress sales of property were far more common than bloodshed. Three months after Partition, when Acharya Kripalani (president, Indian National Congress) visited Sindh, he noted that, “There was only a slight exodus of the Hindus and Sikhs from Sindh. It did not suffer from any virulent fanaticism. To whatever faith the Sindhis belonged, they were powerfully influenced by Sufi and Vedantic thoughts. This made for tolerance.” Given today’s context and cynicism, this may seem archaic if not untrue. Frontier regions, and the two that I study – Kutch and Sindh – do diffuse some continuities and strait jacket definitions. Sindh was “a transition zone between ‘India proper’ and the vast region which was often called Khorrassan, in which were included Afghanistan, Baluchistan and southeastern Iran” – Sindh had been only intermittently included in the great Indian empires.
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