Some Complexities of Restoring a Lost Heritage
By Saaz Aggarwal
The past is a foreign country.They do things differently there - British novelist LP Hartley
We have always understood that Sindhis suffered material loss during Partition. Looking back, we now realise how much more was also lost, in terms of language and cultural heritage. Today, seventy-five years after Partition, there is a growing urge to rediscover, or at least piece together, the lost legacy. This essay is about how difficult it is, impossible, in fact, to assemble the shards that were flung apart in the explosions caused by Partition.
In our era of fake news, a community eager to learn more about its history and roots is particularly vulnerable to that tendency to hit ‘send’ and forward ugly nuggets of misinformation.
History was lost
When I began interviewing elderly Amils to write The Amils of Sindh, I was bewildered by, and a little sceptical of, the number who told me that their father or grandfather had built the Sukkur Barrage. In time, I realised that the Sukkur Barrage was no ordinary dam. It was an enormous network of canals nearly 10,000 kilometres long, feeding what was at the time the largest irrigation system in the world, with more than 20,000 square kilometres of irrigated land. So there was plenty of scope for a tribe of senior engineers to have held positions of responsibility and authority there.
History was also rewritten
As for the less common but also quite frequent “My grandfather was the mayor of Karachi,” I believed it blatantly untrue at first, because Wikipedia systematically lists the mayors of Karachi from November 1933 onwards, even specifying the religion of the first few.
It soon became obvious that even if the Karachi Municipal Corporation was founded in 1933, the city’s civic infrastructure had been in existence long before that. Sure enough, the book Seth Harchandrai Vishandas (Father of Modern Karachi) by Khadeem Soomro, lists the civic development of Karachi and outlines Seth Harchandrai’s role in it. This book creates an evocative picture of life for the aspiring Hindus of Sindh in the early 20 th century. Seth Harchandrai himself served as president of the KMC from 1911 to 1921. After Partition, his statue – which was installed in the compound of the grand Karachi Municipal Corporation building in 1934, six years after he died – was beheaded. His name no longer features in any wiki document pertaining to the KMC and its history.
One of the chapters in Khadeem Soomro’s book is a brief history of the Karachi municipality, and it mentions the contribution of some other illustrious city fathers. (Notably, in the listing of names, there is no mention of religion. Why should religion be specified in a field where only contribution and performance are relevant? In what kind of world is the religion of a mayor relevant?)
Anyway: the list solved a minor mystery, as many names were familiar: they had left Sindh when Partition took place (or passed away before, as did Seth Harchandrai) – and their descendants used the word ‘mayor’ to describe their roles, which was what the leader of the corporation was called in their time.
Some complexities of …
Duly corrected in these two cases, now eager to believe everything everyone told me and publish it, here are a few snippets of what made me wary once again of the thorny path that lay ahead:
- One lady claimed that her illustrious grandfather was the one who had come across the top hat when he visited Europe and America, and returned to invent the ‘inverted’ top hat. In fact, this headgear had long been prevalent among Sindhi nobility.
- Another believed that her illustrious grandfather had built a temple in Karachi which had the biggest ‘Shivling’ in the world – and that it was a protected monument in Pakistan. No such enormous Shivling could be traced in Karachi so even if it did once exist, the protection appears to be a myth.
- Some blithely confused muhajir with mujahideen!
- Who could blame even the most erudite for not knowing the difference between the Kalhoras and the Talpurs? Or for confusing their ancestor Gidumal with the illustrious Dayaram Gidumal (who was in fact a Shahani)?
- Most could not distinguish Sukkur from Sakrand (an educated lot alert, however, to the possibility that it might be a spelling mistake).
- A surprising number turned out to believe that it was their grandfather who brought Sikhism to Sindh
Ostrich
Collecting information from online written sources turned out to be equally confusing.
Here is an example of a page in a rich source of information where every single sentence is inaccurate. Every single one!
Substantial resources have clearly been invested in preparing the well-designed website. And sadly, though it carries a voice of authority, no effort whatever was made to check facts! There are easily accessible historical sources – even online – which could have been referred to and cross checked to convey a more realistic history.
Such examples proliferate.
In this link we learn that Lalchand Nalandas sailed to Bhaucha Dhakka in Bombay in 1947 as his family escaped the violent effects of the Partition.
Did sea-faring ships really bring passengers from Karachi to Ferry Wharf (Bhaucha Dhakka, the terminal where local fishermen bring in their daily catch) in 1947?
Or was it the Victoria and Princes docks (and possibly Ballard Pier and Alexandra Dock wall) where they docked, as this post indicates?
And here is another blog post – well written, well designed and carrying a powerful true story – in which we learn that “The first preference of all the Sindhi migrants was Udaipur.” Is that true? Can one family’s story serve as the story of an entire community?
The elephant and the blind men
Most interesting is how perspectives can vary so widely. In this beautiful essay Robert James has written about the Sindhi experience of Partition, with a lot of affection and regard. However, two parts of it alarmed me. First, the sentence
After World War II the British were eager to rid themselves of the problems of India which included the infighting between the Muslim and Hindu populations.
As a historical event, Partition is sometimes compared to the Holocaust. Of the many differences between the two, the major one is that in the Holocaust there is never any doubt about who the villains were. When it comes to Partition, however, it’s not that simple. Both sides suffered. Both sides helped the other community, sheltering them, assisting them to escape, often at risk to their own lives. Both sides were victims. Both sides were heroes. Who were the villains? The British, perhaps? But not according to this interpretation!
The second jolt, more charming, is the misinterpretation of the origins of the Sindhis settled in the Caribbean islands. Despite the extensive work of scholars like Claude Markovits, Mark Anthony Falzon and other easily accessible sources, their knowledge remains in clusters even today.
There are hundreds – thousands – of such examples. The more I read, the more I think, the more I interview people – the more I wonder whether things will ever actually come together. Will we ever really have detailed accounts, clear and simple accounts, of those years of turmoil? Will the far-flung community ever have reliable, comprehensive sources to refer to about their own past, their own identity?
Even the most careful researchers find mistakes or misinterpretations in what they wrote as time goes by and more facts come to light. This has happened to me, but there are also bigger puzzles which I fear may never be solved. Here are some of the questions I continue to ask people who lived in those days (sadly – but naturally – fewer and fewer as time goes by):
- What exactly did RSS mean to you when you were young?
- Why did you stop reciting japsahib every morning but sing aarti so devoutly every one of the ten days of Ganpati?
- Is that really a Jinnah cap that Bhai Pratap is wearing on page 268 of Sindh: Stories from a Vanished Homeland? I said it was, but have always feared I was wrong – please tell me, is it?
- And did you know that Bhai Pratap was an extraordinary and very worthy person to whom the community owes a huge debt of gratitude, and who was wrongly imprisoned and died a tragically premature death?
- Do you remember the tall red statue at the end of the Hirabad promenade? It was a statue of Sadhu Hiranand Advani and carried an inscription, a Shah Abdul Latif bait, do you remember it?
Maanoo Mireyi Na Maanoo – Not all men are alike
Pakshi mireyi na hansa – Nor is every bird akin to a swan
Kain-kain manu a manjha – It is only but a few
Achay boye bahara ji – Who exude the fragrance of Spring
- Are you sure it was your grandfather who built the Sukkur Barrage?
Hyderabad or Hyderabad?
The December 2021 issue of Sindhi Samachar embedded a beautiful video with a really lovely Sindhi song playing in the background which I enjoyed very much.
What worried me about this was the Charminar. Was there really a Charminar in Hyderabad, Sindh? If so, how come I had never heard about it? I have interviewed hundreds of people who lived in that city – were born there and grew up there and lived to have their beloved homes snatched away from them by Partition. The descriptions of Bhaikhanjicharhi, Tilak Charhi, Holmestead Hall, Bombay Bakery, the neighbourhood tikanas, the evenings walking in Hirabad, the young men diving off the Phuleli bridge into the water below on hot summer evenings … so many memories! Many of them,
including my mother, told me, “When I close my eyes, I can still see those places.” After hearing those descriptions so many times it became true for me as well: “When I close my eyes, I can see those places.”
But why had nobody ever mentioned the Charminar?
And surely Hyderabad – or even Karachi for that matter – never had double-decker buses in 1943?
Was it really over such a grand bridge that the Phuleli was crossed at 1.41 minutes of the video?
And what was that grand colonial building on the other side, did Hyderabad really have such a building?
I asked someone I know who lives in my city but grew up in Karachi. She said she wasn’t sure as she didn’t know Hyderabad well. However, she sent me this interesting link which compares the two cities – and shows that our Hyderabad did indeed have a building that looks like the Charminar!
Had I been wrong about the video after all?
But this Facebook post reassured me, perhaps not!
Who can ever know the truth?
Saaz Agarwal is a comtemporary Indian writer whose body of work includes biographies, translations, critical reviews and humour columns. As an artist she is recognized for her engaging interpretations of incongruities of daily life in India, imbued with pleasing details.
www.saazaggarwal.com
www.blackandwhitefountain.com
