 Sorry, just testing it really. We're going to make a start now, so just to say a very warm welcome to all. Thank you so much for coming to our 10th Hidden History event. My name is Farizana Qureshi, and I, along with two of my colleagues that are here, Ludi and Ammar, who are seated here as well. They're part of the Hidden History's team. My other colleague isn't here, but we run these events to, I suppose our aim is to decolonise knowledge production, to reveal those sort of stories that you don't see in the mainstream media, and it's really representing Asian, African and Caribbean narratives. So today we are very happy to... Oh, okay, yes. I've been told to use this one, which makes more sense. Today we're very excited to have Saaz Agarwal with us, who is going to be telling us more about the Cindy narrative. I'm just going to do a bit of housekeeping. This is a hybrid event, so we have got people logged in on Zoom. We're going to start with, obviously I will hand over to the chair, and then Saaz is going to present. Then after that we will... You'll be having a conversation, and then after that we will open the floor to questions. And also anyone at home, please put your questions in the chat, so we will be making sure that all the questions get answered. And also please, if you have stories to share, we are very keen to hear your narrative as well. So please use this forum as a chance to share your stories with us. So I'm going to now hand over to Naftaj Parawal, who will be chairing the event. And Saaz, thank you. Thank you for Zana. And thank you everyone for coming. It's so wonderful to see so many people, who clearly I can see feel the kind of energy, interest and passion here today to come for this event. Of course I want to now welcome Saaz to Saaz, and also just to congratulate you on the beautiful book, which you can see. It's an honour to have Saaz here today to present this work and to introduce us to the idea and the inspiration behind the writing and the creation of the book. Saaz is based in Pwne, and has published a number of books and actually is a mathematician by training, and has jumped over to the art side, luckily for the world, I guess, to be able to see. Of course you can do a lot of very useful things in the world of mathematics as well, but to use the kind of creativity around storytelling and the production of books that are out there in the public sphere is a really impactful way to contribute to the ideas here. Saaz's earlier work, one of which is the Stories of a Vanished Homeline, which was published in 2012, and also then reprinted in 2013 with Oxford University Press, I believe was also presented at the Karachi Literature Fest as well. Kind of is the precursor in many ways, I suppose, to this book, which has also been published by Black and White Fountain, which is Saaz's own publishing house. So in many ways, I think he'll tell us the story around the production of this book. Saaz is a place really where we like to say that we're not only just doing the kind of decolonisation work that's happening for us through our colleagues in the library doing this important work through this series, but also just thinking across the borders in the region, which is also an activity colonisation. I just came back from Karachi, Pakistan, and I constantly like to go back and forth across the India-Bachistan border, which is not an easy one to cross, whether we try and do it conceptually or physically to cross the physical borders, but you're able to even to think across the border and to make those connections is something that we really pride ourselves on here at Saaz, especially in terms of the region of South Asia. My own work, I'm involved in a project called Border Crossings. I don't know if anyone had heard about it, but we had the virtual reality, which Frazana was involved in here with project Dastan last year. We still are actually going to be doing a couple of one-offs as well, which is using virtual reality technology as a way of crossing the border and thinking intergenerationally and also thinking through time travel really around the elders' experiences and how we can think about building a more progressive future, which allows us to think through ideas around empathy, connecting through these stories as well. That's enough about me. I'm a professor here in the Department of Development Studies. I was formerly the Deputy Director of the South Asia Institute and my own work crosses the India-Bachistan border on a regular basis. It's a real honour for me to be able to be part of this here today. What I'd like to do now is to invite Saaz to present about the book and to tell basically the story around it. There's multiple stories around the creation of the book. The format is that she'll be speaking anywhere between 30 and 40 minutes and then we'll then have a bit of a conversation and we'll open the floor to any questions that you may have or any stories that you may wish to share. Hi everyone. Thank you so much, Frazana. Thank you, Nafthej. It's such a pleasure for me to be here and thank you all of you for coming here to listen. I hope you'll enjoy the stories that I'm going to tell you today. It is going to be based around this book but I think I'll take you through the journey that I have been. So, will you start? I'm just going to give you a quick summary of what I'll be speaking about. So, these are what today's talk is going to be about. When I say that Cindy's didn't speak, I'm also... Is that any better? Just closer to the mic might be what I need to do. Thank you. So, when we talk about partition, we never hear... I read too. We never talk about synth. It's usually the Punjab story. That's what's in the mainstream. And it's really surprising to me even 75 years later there was this big article in the New York Times in December last year about when, in terms of the Indian partition, who owns the narrative. And it was an excellent piece of writing. It was really good. It talked about the literature around partition. The word synth was not mentioned even once. Again, just a few weeks later there was a seminar at SOAS about partition and I stayed up late to attend it. No synth. Nothing about synth. And I find that really odd because synth was not partitioned. That's for sure. But there was such a huge story and I'm going to try and share a little bit of that with you today. Even the Cindy's didn't speak and that might be part of it because if the Cindy's had been talking about their story it might have helped to bring it into the mainstream. But I think at least people were just busy adapting to the changes, getting on with their lives and nothing was recorded. Very, very little. I'll tell you what got me interested and some of the things that I learnt this is going to be the bulk of what I'll be speaking about which I find very exciting. Very interesting. Along the way I'll tell you about the things that I've done to try and spread the story. This is what actually got me interested. This is me and my mum and this was in January 2011. The picture was taken in 2011. I think we started on this project a few months after this. Basically I'm a writer and over the years I've specialised in working with people to help them write their memoirs. At some point I said to my mum, tell me what it was like in synth because none of us know. My mother was 13 years old when partition took place. None of us had ever been the least bit interested and none of them had ever said anything. It didn't seem like something that we wanted to know. It didn't seem like anything that they wanted to speak about. She said yes and she was actually very spotting. She would come and sit in front of me and I would interview her. We did that and on the second day or maybe the third day I realised that this is a huge story and it's never been done so I better do it. What really astonished me was that she had retained so much. She was telling me things that happened 65 years ago that she had not spoken about for 65 years and yet the images were so clear in her mind. I had actually planned to do something for the family which would have just been her story. We'd have got some photos from her cousins because she didn't have any. Subash probably had some. That's my mum's cousin. I then knew that that wasn't enough so I interviewed a lot of people. I had help from a very kind person who gave me lots of books to read and that helped me to put this together. Why I chose the date, I have to tell you this, I chose to put this book out on the 14th of November because she remembered the date on which her ship arrived in Bombay. She told me about why they had to leave, how they left, what the ship journey was like. They travelled, they lived in Hyderabad so they travelled from Hyderabad to Karachi by road and it was of course a very stressful journey because they didn't know what was going to happen to them on the road and they didn't know what was going to happen to them after that. They'd given away most of their things, they'd packed a few things and they were travelling by ship. They got onto the ship and there was a bit of culture shock there and it was different from what they were used to and it was two nights on the boat. And then they saw the next morning they saw that they could see Bombay. But she said we were not allowed to dock. We didn't get permission to dock. So it was scary because they didn't know what was going to happen next. They didn't know whether they were going to be sent back which would have been really horrible. They just left everything, they'd packed, they'd left. Or were they going to, or even worse, were they going to be sent somewhere else where they wouldn't know anyone in some strange place. Two nights they were on the ship. And then she says to me, we arrived in Bombay and it was the 14th of November and that really was so, I found it really moving. I honestly felt really guilty that none of us had ever bothered to ask anything before because it was such a big thing that had happened to them. We never respected the kind of losses they'd made and just took it all for granted. So this book happened and I was really very lucky because Oxford University Press in Pakistan published the book. They bought the rights from me for Pakistan and being a university press, that's how it got into the university libraries. Now Tej told you when we started. I did the book myself. I actually didn't have the time. I wanted it out on the 14th of November. I could do things like I registered an imprint. I got ISBN numbers from the government. I learned how to use InDesign so that I could make my own pages. And I got the book, I mean my daughter designed the book and she did a really good job. She's not a professional designer but she does say that people took the book seriously because it has such a fab cover. Oxford University Press did change just one word. The book was completely intact. They took out one chapter which was the story of somebody who left Sindh in the 1970s, a Hindu family who left Sindh in the 1970s and they actually migrated to my city, which is Pune. But they didn't change a single word of what I had written which gave me some validation for the work I'd done. But they changed a word in the title. And they said we can't call it a vanished homeland because the Sindhis of Sindh will not like that. They will tell us that our land has not vanished. We are here. So that also told me a little about how the Sindhis of Sindh felt which I really did not know till then. I had no idea. That was my first inkling that I had that there is something going on, not just with the Hindu Sindhis but also the Sindhis, the majority community who Sindh belonged to. After that, it was amazing because I started getting stories and people started sharing with me their stories, their photos. And you can see if you look at them the way people dressed, it makes you think. It tells you about a different era, the different kind of headgears and the embroidered caps and what they're wearing around their necks. And then apart from the clothes, which are kind of different to what I was just telling in our stage about somebody, a writer in Hong Kong who's writing about... She's doing a Sindhi story for children and she asked me at some point, did Sindhi women wear salwar camis? And I said, no, they had something a bit different. She said, but you know, online, it says that Sindhis wore salwar camis. So then I just thought I need to get out some more better quality information out there. Because if this isn't a salwar camis, they wore suthan cholo and a scarf which is called rawo. And apart from that also a little bit of the furniture and the kind of architecture. This is my mom's cousin Lagi at a refugee camp, in Mulund camp. And you know so many lovely stories, people sitting on the Khatta and doing crochet, this young woman doing crochet. So that was a big thing of course. And this is Nehru visiting the Sakhar Baraj. This image is actually in the book. This was given to me by Nalini Adwani, who is in the centre. She was probably 19 years old and she was in this camp, the Mulund camp again. And they started a school there. And she in Hyderabad, she had done extremely well. She had finished her school leaving exams and she wanted to study at the National College in Hyderabad. And she told me, you know, I wanted to study and study as much as anyone could study. But of course because partition took place, she couldn't. Now she volunteered as a teacher at the school. And it's an amazing story because the school came out of the refugee camp. And of course Nalini, she told us how for the first month the children sat on the floor and the teachers taught them that way. And then at the end of the month they collected fees from the students and in the third month they could buy furniture. And then they got recognised by the government and then there were other educationists from Sindh who had also lost their home who joined and who taught. And then she herself studied education. She eventually retired as a school teacher, a school principal in Delhi. And the Jehyn school which started that way now has 8,000 students or maybe more. But it was 8,000 probably more by now. So here this is... Okay, let me just play this little clip from an interview that I did. And they were staying directly opposite. And I still remember this though I paid no attention to it. I remember Manju, the younger one, telling me once, they are going to get that house of yours. So eventually a time came when they knew they had to leave. And I of course had these other things happening along the way, more books happened. This one I will tell you about a little later. Because last year in February I decided that I put together a lot of stuff and I decided I want to do something for the new generation and make it as concise as possible, put in all the stories, put in a range of representative stories but make it simple and pass on the messages that I want to pass on. So that's why I did this book. And one of the things that happened is that I had a difficult time finding a map. One of the people I interviewed, Tulsi Moinani, I'll tell you more about him later, he told me he was actually born in Indonesia where his father was a businessman. But then the family moved back to live in Hyderabad and he was one year old when partition took place. And he told me that nobody told us what partition was. Our parents didn't tell us. We went through the whole thing but we had no idea. So when you do this book, explain what partition was. So for that I needed, it wasn't going to be just the stories. It had to be an actual few lines of explanation about what partition was and it was not easy. But I thought we need a map and it was so interesting that I couldn't find a map that did justice to it. The thing is that the border kept changing. I think as we know the actual border was only announced after independence took place and that time before people knew where the border was was crazy because they did not know. You are celebrating independence but you don't know which country you live in. And another thing that a lot of people, I found a lot of people aren't really aware of that it wasn't all British India. There was this huge, there were so many princely states, 565 states which were autonomous. Anyway, this is a map we chose which seemed the less controversial border kept changing. Another thing I realised, the border kept changing till today we don't really have a border that is recognised by everybody. But I picked this because it didn't, it had the least questions to it. And I think we need to move back. Should I just use this? So then I knew I had to start with this. Which is the story I was again, I was told by, first by my mum and then by a number of people, which is that in Synth, you could fly a kite any day you wanted because it hardly ever rained in Synth. And the thing to remember is that people often think of Synth as this inhospitable place, desert with difficult language, difficult living conditions. But for children who lost their home, it was a place that you could go out and fly a kite. And that tells you a little bit what it means to lose your home. And then we came, of course, to the point of departure. This is quite a common experience. Many of the people I've interviewed, they remembered what happened as they were leaving. Many of them remember the name of the ship they travelled on. And of course, there were so many who travelled by train. And we've seen the pictures, and of course, pictures don't always tell you the story. I was lucky to interview people who gave me an insight into how things actually happened. This young boy with the pen in his hand is my friend, Roshna's father, Rusi Damanya. And I interviewed him when he was in his mid-80s. And he was in a boarding school near Nasik. And four boys from the school who had very good handwriting were picked to go and live in the Asali camp. And there their job was to write down the names of the refugees coming in. And Rusi remembered his time there. So much clarity. He talked about the trains coming in filled with people sitting on the tops and they were all wearing white. I didn't actually understand why they were all wearing white. And later I realised it's because that white is unbleached cloth which is easiest to procure. So a lot of people wore that. And he told us that he was... They were taught a few sentences of Sindhi. Tungio nal o chai, tungio pi, jio nal o chai. What's your name, your father's name. So they had to write down. They were documenting the people who were coming in. So that gives you a picture of what it was like that children were recording the entry of people. And he also told me about how horrible the food was and the conditions in the camp were really terrible. But he also told me that they were given an al-sation dog to God knows why. You just think of the way camps were set up and what it meant to be in a camp and dogs were a part of that. And I had this Nari Shahani who also told me his family story. Nari was a child. He gave me these photos and this is the illustration that the book has which is derived from these two. And this is in a place in Bombay, the biggest camp, the biggest refugee camp in India which is a Kalyan camp and the place was later named Ulhasnagar which means the city of Troy. Now for Nari, it was a happy time. He was living with his family. He was a child. He was very happy. He was living in a joint family with his parents and his siblings and across the road were his mother's parents. So for him it was a joy. It actually was Ulhasnagar. Then I had this other story from this lady who you can see at the window and her name is Sushila Rao and her husband was a camp commander. And when I interviewed her she would have been in her late 80s or maybe early 90s and she also remembered it in great detail. Now she's not a Cyndi. Her husband was a camp commander and she was living in a camp but completely separate from the... their lives were separate. They led a normal middle class life. She had a baby. She was newly married and the baby was born. You can read the story in the book but what she told me is that if I ever woke up in the early hours I would look out of the window and I would see them walking to the railway station and she described to me what she saw them. You can see in the picture of course what she told me the point she was trying to make is they were so hard working. They didn't want to live in the camp. They wanted to get out of the camp as soon as they could. So they were going to work in Bombay or they were selling things from door to door and then you can see young people going to college. I'll tell you about the picture. I've been showing you the picture so I want to tell you a little bit about it. I did say that I got the idea for the book in February and I was actually in a Vipashna course when that's a 10 day retreat, a silent retreat and it's a time when you're supposed to be meditating and of course I'm thinking about various things and I got this fabulous idea so it was quite distracting but when I came out I immediately looked for somebody I asked someone I know can you do these kind of illustrations and she said no. Anyway I found somebody and I was so lucky because he did this amazing job. All I wanted was and that's not asking for much all I wanted was that the illustrations of people should be recognisable so whether it's Nehru or Gandhi or whether it's somebody's grandfather whoever, if anyone knew that person they should recognize and he did it and you can see here from the clothes people are wearing we did a lot of work to make sure we didn't make any mistake on the footwear and on the packaging of the goods and the containers and stuff and he was really and this picture you can see the Kalyan station for him which is a picture of Kalyan station and on the internet it said 1945 but I don't think it was 1945 which tells you that you can't really trust the internet because if you look at it it says Kalyan in three languages and one of those languages is Cindy and it's impossible I mean it may not be impossible but unlikely that there was a Cindy sign on that railway station before it became a Cindy settlement and I showed you this before but since I was telling you about the illustrations I thought I'd just mention this one the story next to this is just a few lines it doesn't really tell you about the picture now the picture is actually Hyderabad in the 1940s and we made a lot of effort to include all the architectural flourishes that you could see in Hyderabad at that time and Hyderabad was actually did have a lot of very fancy buildings because there was money coming into Hyderabad which I'm going to tell you about a little later how that happened there Hyderabad had something called a mang which you can see on the roofs which was a wind catcher which is quite unusual you see it in some Arab countries but there were a lot of them in Hyderabad and you even can you see the pointer on this pointing at the car so that's an actual car which belonged to somebody called Bhai Pratap you know this was his home Maitri Bhavan so there's a lot of actual Hyderabad in here Bhai Pratap is very much there in the book the other thing that happened is when we actually had proof copies of the book out when somebody was looking at this picture and said oh this looks like a Rajasthani fort and I was like oh my god what a big blooper and we went back and looked at a fort of Hyderabad the Pakko Kilo and we fixed that Pakko Kilo I have people here from Hyderabad so I hope you will agree thank you so much okay so I told about the camps but of course there were so many people who just landed up in some place they'd never been to before and this story was told to me by somebody who I was working with to help him write his memoirs and he had nothing to do with Synth but because he knew I'm interested in these stories he told me about the time when he was a student at Bitspilani which is an engineering college in Rajasthan I think he was probably in the first or second year of the Bitspilani and he went home to Agra where his parents lived for the holidays and the city was filled with refugees and his father was a social worker that was very much part of his memoir so I'd been listening to him telling me about his father's life and the kind of things that he'd done they lived in a village in Uttar Pradesh and after he retired after independence they settled in Agra now people that's refugees were coming and by train Agra is not a port but as you know refugees were coming by train and by surface and there were camps but this family Mr Dubey's father met them at the railway station he brought them to his home so there was this man and his mother and his wife and two children and a baby and so he brought them home and they had nothing they had carried stuff with them and they left but they lost everything on the way so they came to Mr Dubey gave them their veranda and said you be comfortable here they had a bath and after the bath they had to wear the same clothes again because they washed clothes and wore them again so they didn't have anything else to wear and in the morning this man went to the wholesale market now you can see like he's quite well off person but he went to he may have had some kind of retail store in Sindin, Hyderabad or wherever he came from but he went to the wholesale market and he bought a huge sack of grain and he carried it to the retail section and he sat on the pavement and this is actually an Agra pavement which is from an illustration that used as a reference so he sat in the retail section and people who came to buy obviously bought from him because he was selling it at a lower rate so he sold everything in the sack and then he sold the sack as well and that's a metaphor again for the ways in these dealt with partition they sold everything and then they sold the sack and what he told me is that on the third day we didn't have to feed them anymore and within a few years they had their own factory making shoes so I showed you some of the books that I did so this was one particular community of Sind and this I did during the lockdown it's a collection of essays I didn't write it myself I put out word to people I knew who are interested in the subject and some of them are senior academics some of them were business people artists photographer various people actually got 59 contributions and I wrote one as well so there are 60 fabulous essays in this book which talk about the Sindy identity now one of the things which I will tell you a little bit about later is that many of them spoke about the prejudice that's in this phase and that's that's something which a lot of Sindys I told you about the man sitting on the pavement selling things at a price lower than what you can buy in the shops so obviously people selling in the shops felt they were being cheated in a way they didn't like it so we don't know where the roots of the prejudice are but it could be from there then I also found when I started writing right after my first book I started getting messages from people people would send me emails and it was very exciting for me because I was getting messages from all around the world I got a message from someone in Santiago Chile I got a message from Trinidad people in Indonesia people in the Philippines I didn't understand it at first I just thought that in these after partitions they went to all these cases but because I was meeting people and talking to them because I started travelling to document the diaspora I had the opportunity to do this I was really lucky and I also had the opportunity to meet other people in the field so I could hear listen to them their books and get their insights and that's when I realised that there is a global diaspora and it's not something that started after partitions it was something that started way before and this is a map which was made by Professor Claude Markowitz who is a French historian and researcher and he documented two trade networks coming out of Sint and these are the places that there were Cindy businesses way before 100 years it started 100 years nearly 100 years before independence and so that's I'll tell you quickly how this happened it was when the British conquered Sint and the British came into Sint in 1843 and I'm sorry most of you hear are British so I'm not actually talking about you you know that so they came in and in gross violation of the treaties they made with the princes of Sint it was a terrible thing they did so it was not that easy for the traders because A they had lost their biggest customers the mirrors and you know all the rulers were deposed and sent away they were horrible they separated them from their children they didn't kill them but they did terrible things to them so for the traders they lost their best customers and there was this new company they come in with their own products their own suppliers and they even introduced the company rupee and those who were trading lending money for a living it was a difficult time but they realized that the British love Cindy Handicrafts and Cindy Handicrafts are really something special so they started hooking them from door to door and you know they'd go in with a pile of things and they'd say the main sub would say, oh is that Sint work and then the guy says ha yes madam, Sint work so that they became called Sint workies and very soon they would see them you know with their steamer trunks with big bags full of Sint work so they started a bunch of young boys they got on board and they got off at I don't know where he did in Cairo Gibraltar whatever and they started doing well and once you start selling you have those skills of knowing how to sell you don't have to stick to Sint work you can sell anything then you set up a shop or your neighbour's son or whoever and then you establish a presence and then more and more of those annoying competitors come from Hyderabad so then you have to move on to the next port and soon enough this is what happens you're all over the world so this is where we were and I'm going to tell you the story that I picked for this book which is about Muli and there are many reasons because Muli's story is first of all you had this phenomenon where many of the men were going away on Sint work and the boys they would leave when they were 16 years old and then they'd go and live in these far off countries with a different language and a different climate and they would be living there for two or three years at a time and their families would be without them many of them and as I said they'd go at the age of 16 after the first Musafri they'd come back home and the family would have arranged a good match for them so they would get married and then they'd go again and then three years later they'd come back that's where the money was coming in from I told you this right they were building mansions some of them even had flush toilets which was really a big deal and all kinds of fancy furniture and things like that which you can see part of here and they weren't obviously everybody wasn't rich they had the capitalist and they had their workers so for the workers it was a difficult life because they lived in a room above the shop and they had to do their own house work and they didn't see their families for years at a time sometimes the bosses didn't pay them because the arrangement was that they would give the money to their families so here's Muli sitting in the centre she is I think 16 years or 17 years old at the time and her parents on either side of her and her father was actually working he was not it's a big thing among the Cindy business community whether you have your own business or you are working for someone else because I know that because when I say oh so your father was working in Durban and they'd be like no my father had his own business and I say that because I work so I'm saying over your father had a business so anyway Muli's father was working for her but he was so well off that he could afford to live like this and these people this is Rami who is she's come to see Muli for her son for her step son actually this is the elder boy Ramchand and this is their cousin and they've come to see Muli to see whether she's they like her for their son now what I was told is and there was a little bit of debate about this but when they had, they were so wealthy that when they had a special visitor as these people are they would give them a gold guinea in their drink which they could keep when they finished drinking and you can actually see the gold guinea that's Shubodip I told you that I found this really amazing artist I did tell you this right and his name is Shubodip Mukherjee and it was such a pleasure to work with him he was amazing I showed you the Hyderabad photo where we found the fort and he just didn't have any I mean I don't like it when people tell me can you just rewrite this bit he said okay fine I'm going to get it right so anyway that's Shubodip for you then what happened to Muli when partitioned a place so the men were all away she actually this one, the little one in her who she's carrying she's in the centre here he was actually born in Indonesia because she went after they got married she went to Indonesia and they had children she spent the war years it was a very very difficult time and at some point they decided that she missed home and life was hard so they decided to come and live in Hyderabad and when partition took place she was alone that's her sister on the side with her two children luckily some of her children you can see their daughter and her son and her elder daughter Muli they were bigger so they could help her they didn't know where they were going they were alone and this is there in the book you can read about it it's about how they had to they were just wandering from one station to the other and they were talking to other people who were also in the same situation getting ideas from each other eventually they were reunited her husband sent her money and they eventually arranged for them to come back to Indonesia it was you have this huge diaspora it was just trade out posts and they evolved into communities now when I travelled in the diaspora to an extent the thing is that it's so big I was in Ikeke, Chile with some Sindhis and they did not know Satguru is obviously a Sindhi name I mean it's a Sindhi warehouse nobody knew who it belonged to but you know even in that small community it's such a huge thing I did find out eventually because I put it on it's there in one of my YouTube videos and somebody said Satguru belongs to XXX so we do know it's not an anonymous person but at that point I found it told me how big the spread is this is one of the books I published which again is completely by chance sorry I thought I had my phone here can someone tell me? I just want to know the time to go on too long so this collection of stories somebody sent to me and he said will you read my stories and I was like Sindhi businessman has written a book no no no I don't think so so I just was lying on my the side of my table I don't know what am I going to get sent next and at some point I was presenting a paper at a conference at Jamia Amelia and the theme was related to this so I said okay I have to do research let me read this book and I started reading it and I only realised when the doorbell rang and I didn't feel like opening the door that I was on the fourth story and I was really enjoying it so I was very impressed and we obviously became good friends because he's such a lovely amazing person and I got him to write a few more and we published this book which is set in the diaspora so it's all around the world and it's an amazing book because A and Murli as it turns out he's not just a Sindhi businessman he grew up in Shillong, he loves to read he loves to read so much that one day when he was a child he got locked in the Shillong public library the security locked it and he was like oops what do I do now and he had crawled out in the morning so that nobody would know and then he studied English of course he was helping in his father's business of course when he got married he started a Coca-Cola distributorship but he kept writing and he did his PhD in English literature and he even taught at Thongar Dev College in Shillong and he wrote these lovely lovely stories so I and he called it a gift of my travels now I also have a gift of my travels which is that I saw religion in the diaspora and it's really quite it's quite interesting because when you look at partition you're looking at religion if you're a certain religion then you can't stay on this side of the border but if you look at the Sindhis you take a closer look you really don't know what religion they are and here this is Puntarenas which is near the south pole and I don't know how clearly you can see it but there are so many different religions represented here and this is in Malaga it's the same on the right you have the Hindu gods and you also on the left you have various divine and here this is interesting this is the church of the black cross in Panama and this person it's a bit of a blurred picture but he climbed up he took me to see it as a tourist but he wanted to pay his respect so he took off his shoes and climbed up to the altar which I thought was lovely you only see people doing that in the subcontinent taking off shoes it's not something people do in most countries I mean I don't think anyone else in this church took off their shoes but Lakshman Kriplani he did that and this is in Sindh where some people took us to this Dargar, it's clearly a Dargar but is it a Dargar, is it a temple is it a Gurdwara you can see Guru Nanak is there as well so it's all this so many choices so much flexibility and more striving towards good thoughts and peace in life and things like that and apparently it was like that in Sindh and this picture was taken in 1924 he lives in Thane he actually did this in his when he was in his 80s he was a teacher an art teacher but then he has his own body of work and he's done all kinds of things and of course the ones that I love the best are his Sindhi pictures his paintings and I didn't know I wouldn't have guessed he told me this is a family celebrating Diwali he's the best you can't really see that and even today if you look at this on the left is actually Sevan Sharif where you have a Hindu in charge of the procession and on the right is a shrine of Sufi saint in Ulasnagar so to an extent it's still there but of course I can't pretend that it's still the same story because we all know there's a lot of other stuff that goes on let me just quickly show you this was part of the Pantheon in Sindh but the procession which you take the idol down to a body of water at the end of 11 days it was actually done in Karachi but it was done by the Maharashtians because it was more of a Maharashtian festival then but when the Sindhis left Sindh and they lived in Pune and Bombay Mumbai they also started doing it and I know many many many Sindhi families who do it and they don't just do it in Pune and Mumbai but they do it in Las Palmas and they do it everywhere all around the world and you saw it in Kampala as well so quickly about Julelal I actually have had people I've interviewed telling me oh in Sindh there was no Julelal which is of course it's not true it's just what they mean is that in Sindh our family was Nanakpanthi and many of the people unfortunately that's been my demographic I haven't obviously covered everything because here again Mingraj Talreja showing us that in Sindh Julelal was very much this is a kind of procession that they had I love this because I think he might have actually got LK Advani in there does that look like LK Advani by any chance but yeah it's lots of different kinds of people again the headgear they're kind of you can see so many here look at him I mean you don't think this man with this with a hat like this is a Hindu do you here what I wanted to say is this is in the book it's about how Julelal became an icon of the Sindhis because after partition when people were in the camps they were really like distraught they were so lost and they were wretched actually and very bitter very disillusioned this person in the middle a lot of people a lot of the of Sindhis did their best to help them now this gentleman who you can see on the stage in the middle on the matka he is he was a professor of Sindhi at Juhin College and I've been told that he would travel at his own expense to the camps just to sing and you know cheer up people and I was told by an elderly Sindhi that he would always end his performance by singing Julelal and that's how you know that's why we had Julelal rising from the river behind them I mean that so yeah what I wanted why I'm showing you this again is basically just because we have I've told you about this huge a lot of homogeneity a heterogeneity in this community a lot of heterogeneity but when it came to this point of crisis they behaved like one and everybody and not just individuals but families community at large moved on and didn't look back settled in a new place adapted and began contributing and I've always felt that this is what nobody really understands and appreciates for me this is the biggest part of and that's why I wanted to write this book which I need this message unfortunately what happened is that they lost so much and this is one of the things they lost which was their mother tongue people stopped speaking in Sindhi to their children when they left Sindh they stopped speaking in Sindhi and unfortunately the stage had its role to play in this because in 1950 when the constitution was published Sindhi was not a national language so you know there was absolutely no point in learning Sindhi or designing your children to a Sindhi medium school Sindhi was still running Sindhi medium schools the government wasn't supporting it but that was the writers and the thinkers normal people they just want to get on with their lives right so people stopped then something else happened they said why are we using this script our script is Dev Nagri so they introduced Sindhi in Dev Nagri and you know I ask people how can you say that this script is difficult in Sindh children were learning it but they say no no we can't do it and they moved to Dev Nagri and that meant that there's a wealth of literature in this script and those who learn Sindhi in Dev Nagri don't they people don't know now today there's a lot of efforts being made to revive Sindhi but yeah and I do believe that it'll come back it's hopefully I learnt this which I didn't know this is another book I published and the interesting thing here is she's talking about my Sindh she's never been to Sindh hardly ever likely to go to Sindh but you know that feeling the nostalgia for places you've never seen that's something I've seen with many people and she writes about the Pahakas now Pahakas are there in many languages but you know she remembered stuff that was but she heard when she was a child and she also told me about the vocabulary where just for one thing which in English you have one word you have like seven words in Sindhi bad luck nobody knows any of those anymore and here we have Shah Abdul Latif who you might have heard of I had not heard of until I started you know talking to my mom in fact my mom said it didn't make any sense to me and I didn't feel attracted to it at all but I did realise now that the kind of influence those thoughts of secularism and of you know having not being compartmental in your thoughts about how to lead a good life I think they come from him and a lot of the vocabulary is what I've heard what I've learnt that it does come from Shah Abdul Latif the other thing other than the language is that the history of Sindh a lot of history got diluted and it just disappeared here this is something we came across when we visited Hyderabad very very sweet because it says sacred memory and there's this list of people who were associated with the Theosophy Hall they were all thinkers and nobody remembers them anymore and here this is Seth Harchand Rai Vishendas and this actually I got from Shakuntla whose book Cava I just showed you she married into she married his great grandson or was it his grandson sorry he was a father of the Karachi municipality and after partition all the statues were desecrated so this I saw in dawn where the peace was called the Beheaded Benefactor and Akhtar Baluch unfortunately we lost him he died a few months ago but he was somebody who went around Karachi feriting out stories of its history which was suppressed this is Shubhau and me the first time we met we had already done quite a bit of work on the book and he said to me a book like this you need to have a centre spread and that really freaked me out because I was like what am I going to do but right there I remembered this image which is again from Shakuntla Barwani's book it's in a book about her family called Ratanjot and this picture is of Gandhi's 1916 visit to Sindh so I said let's take this and let's parody it most of the images are very historic I mean they are historically authentic but I said let's take this let's put Gandhi in the middle and let's have a lot of interesting people all around and it became the symbol of Gandhi at the centre of things and Gandhi himself partitioned and Gandhi on both sides so that's our centre spread and you can see you can see a lot of people there are a lot of freedom fighters who I am of course LK Advani is there I got this picture from the BJP website but you can also see I had to obviously put my grandfather in and all his brothers this is Bhai Pratap who you learn more about when you read the book and various people very interesting people Anand Hingorani let me not tell you about Anand Hingorani because I just started this podcast a few weeks ago and this is today's episode which is about the freedom movement in Sindh which was huge people don't really know much in these fought for freedom and how extensive it was across the men, women and children Subash Bijlani was the guest on this was the guest on this episode and he talked about his I hope you are going to listen to it he talks about his family's contribution so I am going to tell you this story before I end and so this actually happened in London my friend Dr Gulmetlo who is here thank you so much all of you for coming it really means a lot to me that you are here so he introduced me to Dr Malkani Dr Mir Hassan Malkani Mir Hassan Malkani and his wife Parzana so they came he is actually a hair transplant he has a practice on Harley Street and he is London's foremost hair transplant specialist so they brought this rug and they told me the history so his mum was from the village of Malkani in Sindh and when partition came his grandfather's best friend was Mulo and Mulo came to him and said I am leaving and he said no no why are you leaving and Mulo said look everybody is going and I have to go and he wasn't able to convince him so Mulo left but before he left he gave him various things from the house which they couldn't take along and Mir Hassan told me that there was this fancy tray they had when they had guests in the house they would tell him so they had things that they were still using and they had this rug which had the name Balecha Kodumal Woven into it if you can see it's right across the middle and his mum gave it to him and he said now you have to find the owner so that you can tell you can give them the rug and tell them how much your grandfather how much your family meant to our family so we are still looking at a few nowhere Balecha Kodumales please get in touch and that's it for me for now thank you so much for being so attentive thank you so much Saaz for just such an illuminating talk and visually and the stories I'm not going to take up too much time but I wanted to just I have a few of my own questions and I'll be inviting some questions so you've spoken a lot about your personal, thank you you can join in as well so much of this project is about Sindh about this shared community which is dispersed and scattered and yet also exists within Sindh which is now in Pakistan but also there's global diasporas and quite a complex history and we might say even the social tapestry you've published a book on tapestry there's a tapestry there around Sindh I'm just wondering what does it mean for you in terms of your personal history and also the histories of these people how do you understand the idea of Sindh even the idea of homeland through this project for a long time now in a nutshell thank you so much for that lovely questions very very complicated I don't know where to start I think I should start by saying that I never really thought of myself as a Sindh and partly that's because I grew up in my father was not a Sindh we grew up in a third part of India which was very remote from Sindh and then we lived in Bombay where everybody is just a person you don't really think about where they are from or anything like that and as I said as I told you about when I was telling about tapestry there's a certain people think about Sindh as just being very money minded they'll try and cheat you and tasteless and actually there's that public perception but when I think about my family and I think about my grandparents they're just the opposite of that I mean exact opposite of that but somehow when there's a public perception like that that just overrides everything so to answer your question it became my project to put out a lot of good quality information authentic and meaningful and with a lot of detail about the Sindhis basically to dissipate that erroneous notion that's what I mean that's what I do this is hinting to what I was going to ask next which is this moment last year carrying on the commemorations of 75 years of the partition and actually I've really missed out from a lot of the discussions and the public narratives the public discourse but there's that silence and I've just, actually I've been following that myself is thinking why now and you know you see very hegemonic forces trying to own the narrative as well you know nationalism is huge in South Asia religion, religious nationalism is huge and it really owns the narrative I mean for some of us who were looking and you could hear it in your talk Sindh is a region that really does actually represent the antithesis of the kind of religious chauvinism which says it's for the majority and therefore it's either Hindu majoritarianism on the one side or Islamisation on the other and in between you have regions like Sindh which are articulating something very different which is from the bottom up it's syncretic culture it's a shared common composite culture there's the music there's the language there's the fact that it exists on the ground in Pakistan but the global diasporas how do we now understand this silence and so my question is sorry I had to add that in there in my own take is how can we take the inspiration from Sindh, Sindhi identity the kind of global diasporas we're sitting here also right as a way of saying actually this isn't silence how can we respond to the hegemonic ownership of the narrative through this kind of idea of diversity I mean Sindh represents diversity and the pluralism that many people hang on to and actually we're not saying it's lost or valished actually the pluralism which has been lost and maybe that is the longing that many of us have so I'm going to give it to you now to respond well you know what I agree with you completely but there's no way that you can argue with something that is senseless right so you just have to keep doing what you're good at and putting it out and I think that's what a lot of people here do I have this thing where sometimes on social media posts I have young people saying oh I didn't know my grandparents suffered so much and my thing is look it's not about suffering I mean suffering that's silly suffering is commonplace suffering is banal everybody has some issue that they're dealing with right let's not talk about suffering let's look at what they did you know how did they face their misfortunes what did they do let's just focus on the good things that's what I feel we need to do you know focus on the good things I'm going to now stop my questions because we could probably carry on all night I'll take a few and I think we have a roving mic that will come around so we've got one here just wait for the mic to come I think the sound doesn't travel so well in this room and we've got a recording going on too so we've got one I've seen one back there two three well since this I mean book has the background I mean related with the suffering and whatever those who migrated but to me very I mean thoughtful thing that you chose losing home losing home is understandable but finding home what do you want to you see ask and suggest you've asked me a really difficult question because I I mean we spent a lot of time struggling with that as you know such a so I had I didn't want it because when you say finding it's like you're just walking along and you found something it shouldn't be like that but I think that for the we tried to explain it and then we just left it as it is assuming that because when you look at Cindy's around the world and especially in India you never think of them as having come from somewhere else you never think of them as having come from somewhere else because wherever they are they found home it's not a question it's just a description and that's what the book is about thank you for your question oh thank you so much for bringing our history to us because I'm a father of two young daughters and they often ask about what's our history what do we believe in and so on and I try to fill in as much as possible but the diversity and the pluralism that we I think have also sometimes works to our disadvantage because our girls always say look at our Gujarati friends and look at the Punjabi friends they've got such a strong community and they've got something that they are actually going to like the Gurdwara or the Mandir whereas we are believing in both and that itself I think sometimes loosens the ties and the communities don't have that sort of hold and bind I'm not propagating that but I'm just saying that it is a product of that diversity that maybe we lost the language or are losing the language and to try to bring it back together again I think it's quite an uphill task yeah but I think it's not the plurality that's a problem I think it's having been scattered so widely not having a home ground that's actually where this feeling of being lost and the lack of secure identity comes from it's not really the plurality yeah I think you're right and it's also numbers isn't it it's numbers there are very few and I think in what's really important why there's no voice in India because it's just not enough to be a vote bank so but I must also say that I started off I talked about how the language is lost and partly it was the government that did it today the Indian government supports the Sindhi language tremendously there's this body called the National Council for the Preservation of Sindhi language which is part of the HRD ministry and they were well funded but it's a little bit artificial because you don't really have a space where the language is spoken on the streets and you know again I told you about the conflict between the scripts and so but still it's happening and the fact is language is well and alive in Sindh so there's no reason why there won't be a resurgence let's see I think we're trying here as well at the Sindhi Munder and so on I think I tried it myself but it as you said the language is not spoken so it's difficult to keep it alive it's like this artificial thing thank you very much so there's one question all the way in the back and then I'm going to take the next three in a minute and also just to say that we have got questions online that we'd like to address as well hello and Ki, I would like to ask a question but it might seem a little bit controversial but it is just out of my curiosity and Ki if it's controversial then I'm going to ask someone else to answer no no, it's okay and Ki, I guarantee fathers and grandfathers left all their property in Sindh and migrated to the rest of the world so what happened to that property in Sindh? very very long answer there's something called what's it called? Kilima there is a there's a body in Pakistan which deals with claims, I forget what it's called but it's still very much alive and evacuee there's a board of evacuee property and there are still properties which have not been claimed and of course a lot of the properties were claimed by people who had the power even though they didn't really have the entitlement and they've been knocked down new things have been built there's a long long long story there's a place called Guru Mandir which is Hindi slash Urdu but Guru Mandir which is the Sindhi word nobody knows where it is lots of stories so that's a very good example because the Mukhi House which was owned by the Mukhi family the Mukhi family they made this arrangement with the government that we will not claim it and you can have it but you have to make it a museum so they did that and there's a very good solid body called some endowment trust endowment trust of the preservation of heritage and they do a lot of amazing work so they have excellent they've developed some of the properties okay we have a few more questions coming from online also okay brief please from the to Devunagiri script so what was the reason for that is it that the Devunagiri script is easy and the earlier 52 alphabets in the is very difficult to comprehend and to read and write because I am a Sindhi and I have started to learn, read and write Sindhi from an app which is developed by Dada Vaswani but at this age it's very difficult for me to go through all the 52 alphabets so is that the reason well just keep trying congratulations for doing that and just keep going and I don't think it's that hard I think you could try learning Russian which has fewer alphabets and see whether you find it easy but I don't think so so it's okay thanks a lot, thank you sorry, I'm sorry can we just take his question this young man on the we'll take one here and then we're going to go online for a few more and then we'll come back and take another round just here I just had a quick question about the religious iconography in the houses of Sindhi Hindus so in a lot of the photos that I saw in the presentation there was a picture of Nanak Ji in the houses and my grandfather in his house in Sindhi also had a photo of Nanak Ji and being someone who's grown up and being brought up here I've always associated Nanak Ji with the Sikhism so what is the connection that Sindhi Hindus have specifically with Nanak Ji I think a lot of Sindhi Hindus were Nanak Panties and that the teachings may have been brought by those Hindus who migrated to Sindh from Punjab I think that's what happened and why today like many families still have Guru Granth Sahib in their homes and many still go to the Gurdwara for their worship and that's all, I mean that's what it is a lot of it has changed because politically Sikhism belongs to the Punjabis thank you very much okay so there is a question there's two questions by the same actual person so this is Vikas Wadwani has said so heart broken to not be able to be hit there today your work and that of Nandita Bhavnani is so commendable she was also at Sawas a few years ago launching her book The Making of Exile which I was lucky to attend she's based in Mumbai and you in Pune have you met her and is there any collaboration we Sindhis can expect have you read her book what do you think of her work and how just a few questions and how different or similar your book is to hers and thank you for what you are doing hi Vikas thank you for asking me that I love talking about Nandita because she's like my Guru and I couldn't have written my first book without her I mentioned to you that I I read a lot of books when I was doing that first book when I knew nothing I just talked to my mum then I interviewed a few other people and all the books I read were from Nandita she just opened her library she told me read this, read this, read this I staggered home with the load of the books she gave me she came to Pune with another load of books for me and that's how it was so I could not have written my first book without Nandita and even today I check with Nandita did I get this right before I put it out I've read her book I'm a great fan of her work and in my podcast when I my first season has eight episodes in it which I've tried to cover you know kind of outline of history of just before partition during partition and after partition so the episode on partition Nandita's a guest because she's an expert in that subject her book making of exile is it looks at every angle of the Cindy experience of partition and I would totally recommend that book as well and the other question is there are a lot of painful stories due to partition that our Cindy's went through I know in my own family itself both my set of grandparents lost everything and overnight had to leave their Havelis savings etc and moved India my mum's side built up their lives from scratch in Amadabad and dad's side in Ajmer have you touched on such difficult upsetting stories in your book yeah I have and I most of the stories are stories of loss most of the stories are stories of of devastated feelings of devastation, feelings of betrayal and I also feel that those are things that happen to many people in life in different situations people die, young people die people fall ill you know people suffer from you know all kinds of terrible things happen and I like to look at what happened after that especially for the Cindy's you know I think that what happened after that is the real story and just to say Kamal has asked if you could share a link to your podcast so the podcast is called Cindy Tapestry and you'll find it on any on every podcast platform just Google it's on YouTube the YouTube channel I hope you'll enjoy it I've really enjoyed putting that together and I really hope you will enjoy it too thanks okay I'm going to take just a few more questions and our time is coming close we have one here could you use the mic because it's being we've got people who aren't in the room just wait one second she's raring to go sorry a couple of things I wanted to say regarding the Cindy script being used my father used to teach Cindy many years ago here in the UK and it was not popular he's fought very hard but he was fought back when he was trying to say use the Cindy script he was told at that time if you're teaching the young children use the Devanagari script because it's easier for them to do Hindi afterwards as well and that was a whole thing that was happening 30 years ago here in the UK when they were being taught so we need to go back to he was very into doing that and I'm just saying it's something that we've got to promote from here down so that it goes forward it's very nice to hear somebody who calls himself elderly who might not be as old as he's saying he is but who is trying to learn the language I think that's amazing and there are apps Asha Chand is a campaigner for the Devanagari script and she's done amazing work so you can look her up she has an app through which you can learn the script and then the language after that I have another point the tapestry that you were trying to locate where it came from does the tapestry come from Manjand I've been asked because I know somebody with a very similar surname and I messaged them and they said their family came from Manjand if that tapestry is from there it belongs to their forefathers wow the name of the village is Malkani I'll ask her and I'll get your details that's very exciting so I've been asked to send a picture I'll write this down because I have to send it to the person who doesn't live in this country I'm trying to sort of say because they call their company Kodan Mal not Koduma so I'm trying to see if it's the same thing wow that would be great thank you so much my questions behind I have a little request to Vivek Ranjan he made Kashmir files and now the book is there which he wrote so that will help him so I request from this preform to Mr Vivek Ranjan that make Cindy files Cindy files, thank you thanks yeah I am very much demanding from you last time we made 10 years ago on the launching of your first book at Cricklewood at the Cindy London yeah not before that East London in a restaurant we arranged to get together so you were saying that the story is from the Venice homeland so I say what about the stories behind you left now who's going to collect those yeah the tapestry you have collected some of them and that is partially done but as my friend said finding home so why you need to find a home you are already in home caches of you that's true or some of the Cindy's they say Cindy linguistic territory so how about the indigenous people who did not migrate they were living since ever so would you focus on them and your next I think I am kind of done this is my work there are lots of young people who are doing that and they will continue to do it so there is a lot of work happening so I mean this is something an area where we can focus general perception is that Cindy is just the province of Pakistan Cindy is much more than that so all the adjoining areas whether it is on the other side of the border or in other provinces of Pakistan it's again a sin so Cindy is not confined to that just the province you are right I mean there is a lot in the partition story that has just not been done people are doing it thank you one more here we have kind of run out of time just to say after this please you are more than welcome to carry on the conversation outside the foyer we are just putting out some drinks and nibbles so give us about 5 minutes here afterwards but please do carry on the conversation thank you hello my name is Emma and I am part of the team that organizes the Hidden History series here and my question is because this is a hidden history how do you or we the wider we get this history to a wider audience beyond those who have a direct connection with this community well actually that's my question to you because we do want the story to spread and to be known everywhere and partly it's through the work that you are doing through your library and I think for us you know we use media we use social media but I think the global network of the libraries is one of the most important ways so thank you very much thank you for hosting this great on that note I would like to thank you Saaz for sharing your work with us here today at SOAS and then also to the SOAS library decolonization team for organizing the series which is just really you can see from people coming here that these are the places where these conversations are really needed but also places where we can take conversations into new places and kind of developing the ideas one thing I wanted to ask you Saaz is to share with us where people can get a hold of the book thank you, thanks for asking so we have people back available on Amazon the hardcover the really fancy one that we made was only available in India so if you want it then I'll have to send it to you from there we have I think two or three copies three copies Saaz has bought three copies only unfortunately that's great I think there are people holding their hands up already wanting to have the first one so just to say that Saaz will be releasing those three copies at the price of 15 pounds okay well there may be other ways but looking online there are a lot of Sindhi folk tales and the one collection that you will find very easily because it's on archive.org is by gosh I forget there was this King Cade English writer N-C-A-I-D King Cade actually he and his, there were two of them father and son who collected a lot of Indian folk tales and they've got two sets one is Pujrati and Sindhi and one is the Sindhi folk tales there are these seven heroines of Shah Abdul Latif so he's documented those so that's a start and I'm sure if you keep looking you will find more great that's brilliant thank you well thank you everyone for coming in person and online and we look forward to seeing you all in the future at our future events here at Saaz but thank you all and there are some refreshments outside