Dal Pakwan kiosk!
Today I took a local field trip to the once Sindhi refugee camp, now predominantly Sindhi municipality, Pimpri. Post partition, the Indian government sanctioned for several army bases to serve as refugee camps for Sindhi Hindu immigrants. Pimpri is one of them, but you wouldn’t know it at first glance. One could easily miss the army barracks which are now so smoothly integrated into the landscape. The second and now third generations living in the area have few reminders that Pimpri was even an army base in the 1940s. The tumultuous past is being pushed further down as mid-sized bungalows and mini shopping complexes encroach upon the handful of remaining army barracks. It’s now very difficult to imagine that only 60 some years ago, this area served as a refuge for hundreds of displaced families. There are “Pimpris” all over Maharasthra, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. These camps which were initially just shelter for empty handed, penniless immigrants are now areas of flourishing prosperity. These former camps are the few remaining pockets of Sindhi culture in India– indicated by the fact that my teachers decided to take me to Pimpri to get some real time/field Sindhi language practice. Upon entering Pimpri, I was eager to hear Sindhi all over the place, however, the sounds of Marathi and Hindi drowned out the small bits of Sindhi I was lucky to catch.
I visited the local public school and learned that Sindhi was offered as a subject. Until recent years, the school also had an entirely separate “A” division in which Sindhi was the medium of instruction. Mrs. Ahuja, the principal of the school, was very excited to meet me and allowed me to sit in on a Sindhi class. I am a stranger to the formality and discipline so characteristic of Indian schooling,. Except for some giggles, the fifth grade students made me feel most welcome. We read aloud excerpts from a storybook and I was surprised to see that Sindhi was being taught in the Persio-Arabic script given the prevalent movement in India to write Sindhi in the Devanagari script. This movement, arguing for both national integration and practicality as far as preservation of the language is concerned, has many prominent supporters. i.e. Lachman Hardwani who was a guest lecturer at AIIS last week.
me reading aloud in a 5th grade class
After all the Sindhiness, we went to visit a very peaceful gurudvara in Akudi. Oh but wait, gurudvaras are not so far removed from Sindhiyat, nor are many other places of worship for that matter. The more I learn and read about Sindhi culture, the more I sense a deeply rooted pluralism. This pluralism is slowly getting masked by an increasing amount of polarization between Sindhi Hindus and Sindhi Muslims. A topic I hope to explore more fully in my MA thesis. Okay, then we proceeded to eat a delicious Marathi thali. Not so Sindhi. Though I just read a beautiful story, "Sindhu," by Anand Golani in which a Marathi and Sindhi girl are the two main characters. The story reveals how intertwined the two communities are.
Akurdi Gurudvara
