TITLE: THE BURDEN OF REFUGE by RITA KOTHARI
PUBLISHERS: ORIENT LONGMAN
NO. OF PAGES: 206
PRICE: RS. 675
“The Burden of Refuge” written by Rita Kothari, an English lecturer at a college in Ahmedabad, is a study of great academic interest for those interested in the Sindhi Hindus of Gujarat. The slim hard-bound book has a sober cover. The main body of Kothari’s book is found in seven chapters, including the preface.

When the Sindhi Hindus arrived into parts of India, including Gujarat, they came away from Sindh, their homeland, because they were Hindus by faith, but it was sadly ironic that when they arrived into post-Partition India, Indians here saw that very Hinduness with suspicion. Because they were non-vegetarians and dressed often in salwar-kurtas and duppatas, they were often seen as “Muslim-like” rather than as a displaced community of Hindus, homeless and stateless because of their faith. Their simultaneous worship of Hindu Gods along with Sufi saints, and Sikh gurus, bewildered the simple Hindus of Gujarat and made them at the same time wary and contemptuous of them.

The immediate fallout of this was that the Sindhi Hindu found it expedient to wear his Hinduism on his sleeve, and discard Sufism and Sikhism, which had become part of his Hindu ethos while in Sindh. However, even after this, the sense of shame persisted with several of Kothari’s own Sindhi Hindu students at college filling out forms, putting down “Hindi” instead of Sindhi as their mother tongue. The Sindhi stereotype of being fat, unhygienic and illiterate lent a great deal to the unnecessary shame the forced evacuee Sindhis felt in their new homes in Indian states.
The book really takes off in the fourth chapter, “Leaving Sindh” where Rita Kothari interviews Sindhis from both sides of the divide. It is the account of Amar Jaleel, a columnist of “Dawn” the Karachi newspaper, that stands out. Kothari prefaces the interview with her own valid observation, “While listening to him in his house at Clifton in Karachi, I could not help feeling the futility of dividing nations and along with it, tearing people away from each other.” Jaleel’s frank anger is reflected in his words, “The Muslims cannot build a democratic nation, they live with water-tight compartments. They can’t co-exit with differences.” He later adds, “What had the Hindus not given to Sindh? Hospitals, reading rooms, libraries. I used to live in Shikarpur and it was like New York. There was not a thing you could not find in its Dhakka bazaar. How enterprising that community was, and see how all they left has gone to seed. We have not even been able to create anything, nor preserve what they left. The greatest loss of Pakistan was Sindh.” After many such observations, Jaleel asks in agony, “It is as if a part of me has been amputated.” Then Khalique Jonejo, a Pakistani, shares with us how some Sindhi Muslims see events: “We carry a burden of guilt—of having collaborated with the new powers to cause the migration. I don’t think that guilt can be washed away.” When Salam Dharejo criticizes Hindus for considering Muslims as untouchables, Jonejo’s response is pristine in its fairness: “The so-called hierarchies between the Hindus and Muslims were differences of class and demography rather than religion. The Hindu shopkeeper would give respect to the wadero (roughly, Muslim landlords) of a village, talk to him and lend him money. Yes, his rate of interest may have been high, but the relationship was not without human concern. The discrimination your grandfather experienced would be the same as any poor person visiting a rich one, regardless of religion.”

When G.M.Syed moved a Resolution in the Sindh Legislative Assembly to support the formation of Pakistan, which was later adopted, the Congress’s Dr Choithram Gidwani criticized G.M.Syed, “Syed Sahib may be laughing today but the time will come when Syed Sahib and I will weep together if Pakistan is formed.” Dr Gidwani was right, since later, G.M.Syed did a volte-face and said, “Pakistan must die if Sindh is to live.” In 1970, when G.M.Syed was visiting India, the writer, Kirat Babani, invited Baldev Gajra, a Congress freedom fighter, to meet him. There, Kothari reports, Gajra refused to shake hands with Syed. He told Syed, and I quote Kothari, “Your hands are covered with the blood of Hindu Sindhis.” Syed’s reply to this was, “If twenty-five years are enough for capital punishment, I have suffered for twenty-five years. Do I still not deserve forgiveness?” End of quote.

The question is both serious and important. Was Gajra wrong? What can the Sindhi Hindu do about his loss of land, loss of culture, loss of language, loss of identity, loss of respect, loss of dignity? Some would say that twenty-five years of verbal regrets cannot suffice for an entire community living in shame, scattered across the globe, on the verge of being erased from people’s memories. They might feel as Gajra did, that mere words from Mr Syed do nothing for a teenaged Sindhi Hindu in Mumbai who squirms when movies deride Sindhis and their way of life. Punit Padnani says in the book, “Media shows Sindhis in a very bad light. Why can’t they show a decent-looking Sindhi professional?” To my mind, when Gajra felt that Syed’s hands were soiled in “ the blood of Sindhi Hindus,” he spoke as a person who could see the never-ending downward spiral of the tragic permanent damage to Sindhi Hindu youngsters who try desperately to fit in everywhere, and are forced, thanks to the community’s ouster from Sindh, (often in a penniless condition,) to deny their own real cultural identities. Syed’s question was unfair; Gajra, not an RSS functionary but a staunch follower of Mahatma Gandhi, had virtually bared his chest to gun-wielding Pathans. When such a freedom fighter adopts a stern view of G.M.Syed’s role in the loss of homeland it is not to be taken lightly, since he was no fanatic or fundamentalist.

Kothari (a Sindhi married to a Gujarati) admits to her own sense of shame in the chapter entitled, “Stigma in

Gujarat” that, “As a Sindh growing up in Gujarat in the 1970s and 1980s, I had an acute feeling of being in the wrong community, one that did not value education, or respect women.” From the tone of the book, one has an uneasy feeling that, perhaps, the shame hasn’t entirely left her. Additionally, Kothari appears to have a similar discomfort with pure Hinduism, sans the Sufi and Nanak ingredients, seeing it as “narrow” when Hinduism is at least as deep in spiritual terms as the next religion, if not more, and therefore, as complete as Sufism and Sikhism are without Hinduism.

There are a few errors such as the celibate Sadhu T.L.Vaswani having a son called Hari Vaswani, in “Stigma in Gujarat” and the erroneous assertion that Naroda Patiya is a constituency dominated by Sindhi Hindus when, we are told by The Hindu (October 2, 2003) that both Naroda-Patiya and Naroda Gam, have majority Muslim populations. If Kothari had retained objectivity and been even-handed when dealing with both communities, the book would have gained much in credibility. All in all, chapters 4-6 make the book a serious work of history, a must for researchers attempting to put together the scattered pieces of the jigsaw of the Sindhi Hindus and the Partition of India.