Refugee Watch-30- Book Review by Ksenia Glebova

Rita Kothari’s new book is a personal quest in search of Sindhi Hindu identity in Gujarat. A Gujarati Sindhi herself, Kothari sets out to make a contribution to identity politics in contemporary India by presenting a case of the stigmatised Hindu Sindhi minority that moved from the Sindh area in modern day Pakistan to the Indian state of Gujarat. Kothari’s own imbibed discomfort with her identity, mirrored in other Sindhi Hindus, led her “to a larger historical pursuit”.

Myths and popular perceptions surrounding the Sindhis in Gujarat are many and complex. Kothari sets out to map the journey of Sindhi Hindus from the Sindh to India after Partition attempting to ‘recreate’ Sindhi history in independent India along the way. The Sindhi identity has developed under turbulent circumstances in the frontier province of British India, which has traditionally been an area of immigrants and mixed population. The Hindus, in turn, were simultaneously a religious minority in a province with four centuries of unbroken Muslim rule and the most prosperous section of society. Moreover, the unique religious practice of the Sindhi Hindus “bewilders anyone with a well-defined notion of Sanskritic Hinduism” as they propagate a form of Hinduism influenced by Sikhism and Sufism. The Sindhis’ loose interpretation of caste and an apparent workable harmony between Hindus and Muslims did not help their integration in the host Gujarati community either, and the integration process has been slow. As the British left India in the flames of Partition, so were the Sindhi Hindus forced to leave their native Sindh settling in the neighbouring Indian states including Gujarat.

Kothari draws an interesting comparison between the Sindhis of Gujarat and European Jewry especially prior to the Second Wold War. Both communities have a reputation for shrewdness in business and money lending; both evoked distrust and dislike despite their remarkable success as a minority community. Both were displaced on religious grounds although their experiences of displacement and in the new homelands could not have been more different. “The Burden of Refuge” suggests that the Sindhi experience of Partition is rather unusual in the sense that, as a community, they escaped mass slaughter and violence that accompanied the population movement across the new border.

Ritu Kothari’s primary interest in “The Burden of Refuge” stems again from personal experiences – most of the Hindu Sindhis of Gujarat seem to have “disposed of a religio-cultural pluralism and their mother tongue in order to erase their Sindhiness for the sake of more mainstream identities”.

The stigma associated with being a Sindhi in Gujarat is thus another leitmotif of the book. The nature of Sindhi stereotypes is unremitting, uncompensated by any positive feedback from any quarter. For Gujaratis, Sindhis are “dirty” and even educated Sindhis themselves internalisee this stigmatising perception. In the process of her research Kothari encounters Sindhis of different generations, social class and professions but, almost without fail, their all share a sense of identity discomfort, although they may deal with it in their own different ways. Kothari unveils the process of shedding not only language but also sense of identity and shows that every generation of Hindu Sindhis in Gujarat contributed to the dilution of the identity that she is in search of.

The book tells a story of three generations encompassing those who fled Partition and their descendents in today’s Gujarat. According to Kothari, the first generation, the so-called midnight’s children, was too busy piecing their lives together in a new place and thus adopted a very pragmatic approach to survival in the new setting. The second generation lived in a “cultural vacuum” thriving for acceptance and integration into the mainstream Gujarati community. Kothari’s own students in Ahmedabad provide a sample of younger generation and she shows that once educated they are no longer in prison of negative perceptions. However, others have opted for complete circle of integration shedding the language and assuming the new Gujarati Hindu identity. Yet others have gone further in this search for acceptance and desire to become mainstream Hindus – by supporting Hindu fundamentalist organisations and by proxy forgetting that their exclusion came from Hindus and not Muslims.

Kothari lets her subjects speak for themselves. The book is rich in first-person accounts especially by members of the first generation migrants to India. The author herself grew up in Gujarat in the 1970s and 1980s amid the social stigma and marginalisation experienced by the local Sindhi Hindu community. In the book, she revisits her childhood and adolescence while interviewing young Sindhi Hindus living in Gujarat today. Some of the interviewees are Kothari’s personal acquaintances, neighbours or even family members, others she randomly encounters on her journey through the past and present. Kothari also interweaves the account with her own stories of growing up as a Sindhi Hindu in Ahmedabad thus creating “a version of the Sindhi story of migration, told through memory”. Kothari collects and presents interviews – or, rather, disjointed narratives by strong and often opinionated characters with which “neither an interview nor a conversation was possible”; and rambling accounts of their lives that do not necessarily answer the author’s questions but perhaps create more questions in the process.

In “The Burden of Refuge” Kothari seeks to construct a coherent sense of Sindhi identity. She does it with a pinch of nostalgia, as a desire to stop the linearity of time. Her personalised account brings to life and eases off the burden of refuge as borne by one marginalised community in modern India. Kothari strives for her ultimate goal of promoting self-critical attitude among the Sindhis and creating a sense of self-awareness as a group at the cost of emotional bias and nostalgic longing for the past.