[Reader-list] The Persistence of Partition: The Sindhis in India

[Shivam Vij]

Partition Lecture Series

Continuing with our year-long programme of lectures, dialogues, and
readings from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh under the Partition
Lecture Series, Zubaan, the Heinrich Boll Foundation, Max Mueller
Bhavan, and the India Habitat Centre have invited Dr Rita Kothari,
Associate Professor, Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, to
present a lecture on

"The Persistence of Partition: The Sindhis in India"
on September 20, at 6:30 pm, Gulmohar, India Habitat Centre

Sixty years, and two generations after Partition, it is worth asking
if as a historical event, or metaphor, Partition persists in the lives
of the Sindhis. Is Partition a shared referential trope for the
translocal Sindhi who does business in three continents, or the one
who lives in an urban Indian city and runs a cloth shop, or the one
who continues to live in what-were-once refugee camps, and waits for
more gentrified (and therefore non-Sindhi) location? Kothari's work on
the Partition experience and resettlement of the Sindhis defies some
of the oft-made generalizations about Partition. The focus shifts from
the history to sociology of Partition, from the day of departure to
the trauma of arrival, from collective memory to collective
forgetting. The narrative is not plotted in terms of
adversaries/friends from different religions, because the 'other' is
absent from oral testimonies of the Sindhis. The 'others' had to be
created, and believed as part of citizenship in the new nation-state,
and boundaries of religion and culture had to be redrawn for
membership in majoritarian circles.

The narrative of the Sindhis is shot through with irony: they emerge
as winners by having escaped brutal violence, by rising spectacularly
well out of the ashes of Partition and by putting behind the memory of
pre-Partition lives. And yet, as Kothari illustrates through Gujarat,
they paid some of the heaviest prices, and made losses which remain
unacknowledged by everyone, including the Sindhis themselves.

No passes or invitations are required for attending the event.