THE MAKING OF EXILE
Sindhi Hindus and the Partition of India
Nandita Bhavnani
Westland and Tranquebar Press
434 pages; Rs 599
In the 1990s, an important controversy arose in Indian intellectual and political circles when Delhi-based Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin opened the domain of social science studies to the brutalities, bloodshed and human depravity that riot victims experience.
One of the arguments against such studies was that writings on the violence-ridden post-Partition tragedy would do more harm than good by reviving those memories among the millions of survivors. Why not allow the healing process to run its natural course so that the memories fade?
This argument was furiously contested by the proponents of such writings. They argue that it was essential to refresh those memories of a dark phase in India's modern history so that people can draw appropriate lessons from and never repeat such animal behaviour.
Do people really learn from history? The answer is, a big no. But that is why it is better to keep everyone informed about the "war of all, against all" in partitioned Punjab, Bengal and the Sindh province.
Now, Sindh was not partitioned, it was made part of the new state of Pakistan. But, the author of this important new book points out, the plight of the Sindhis was different from people in Punjab and Bengal. Hindu Punjabis and Bengalis had the option of migrating to the Indian half of their partitioned provinces. Sindh's sizeable population of Hindus and Sikhs did not have that option. Instead, they were resettled in Bombay (now Mumbai), Gujarat, the princely states of Rajasthan and some cities of Madhya Pradesh. As a result of this scattered rehabilitation, the Sindhi identity became a non-factor in post-independent India.
Still, the Sindhis also experienced the wrenching brutalities that accompanied the formation of Pakistan and India, and Nandita Bhavnani says the book is "partly a people's history of Partition". She has introduced an important methodological innovation so that the stories told by common Sindhis highlight "the cultural self-definition of the Sindhi Hindus as a community".
The 16 chapters of this study are divided into three interrelated narratives: the first part is on "Sindh", covering the eve of Partition (June 3, 1947) to the traumatic exodus to India of Sindhi refugees after August 15, 1947. The next section is on their experiences in India, and the third on their plight in Pakistan.
It is interesting to discover the nefarious and duplicitous role played by the Congress, the Muslim League and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in the fate of the Sindhis in Sindh in the period leading up to and during Partition. Retaliatory violence became a common affair. Initially, many Sindhi Muslims were protective of Sindhi Hindus. But as the news of violence against Muslims in the Indian part of Punjab spread, the Hindus of Sindh became victims of revenge.
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, in spite of his famous statement on August 11, 1947, that "Pakistan is not a theocratic state", remained a helpless witness to growing violence against Hindus in Sindh till his death in 1948. If Gandhi was persuading Sindhi Hindus not to leave Pakistan, the RSS worked to communalise Hindu Sindhis. In fact, RSS leader Mohan "Kalpana" Lala acknowledged the organisation's contribution to sabotage and violence in his autobiography.
Nor was life any better for those who stayed behind. In chapter five on "The Role of the Sindh Government", M A Khuro, who headed it, forced Hindus to stay and continue their work as traders and businessmen but did not provide them any security.
The second part of the study shows how Indian central and provincial governments, who were expected to "rehabilitate" these Sindhi refugees, did not rise to the occasion. The accounts of those who lived in refugee and relief camps in an inhospitable atmosphere in different cities of the princely states of Rajasthan or Bombay are particularly poignant and disturbing.
Chapters nine ("Arrival"), 10 ("The New Geography") and 12 ("Picking of the Pieces") tell the story of the lives of these refugees and the hostility they faced from Hindus already settled in India. The latter could not understand the suffering of those who had fled Pakistan. In places like the Kalyan refugee camp in Bombay, these refugees were regarded as an "unwanted burden". The author makes an important reference to prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru's statement in mid-August 1949 accepting Sindhi refugees as citizens, which slightly changed the dynamic for them.
The chapter "An Endless Partition" is also worth reading. Many Hindu families continued to stay in Pakistan owing to their loyalty to Sufism, pirs (saints), darghas (places of worship) and because the worship of Sufi pirs gave them a sense of spiritual satisfaction. But Pakistani society turned its back on these communities, so much so that Hindus continue to emigrate to India even up to 2014.
A clear lesson - even message - of this important study based on subaltern voices is that if the state and its bureaucratic, military and police apparatus is ideologically controlled by fanatics and religious fundamentalists - whether "Hindu Rashtrawadi (nationalist)" or "pure Islamic believers" - minority religions will continue to be treated as "second-class-citizens".
