GANDHI AND SINDH
(REPRODUCED & COMPILED)
1.EVERYTHING IN INDIA
attracts me. But when I first visited Sindh in 1916, it attracted me in a
special way and a bond was established between the Sindhis and me that has
proved capable of bearing severe strains. I have been able to deliver to the
Sindhis bitter truths without being misunderstood" -- wrote Gandhiji way
back in 1929.
Actually Gandhiji delivered to Sindh more sweet truths than
bitter truths. And, in any case, all these truths indeed established a very
warm relationship between Gandhiji and the Sindhis. He visited Sindh seven times
--- in 1916, 1917, 1920, 1921, 1929, 1931, and 1934. It was ``a Sindhi friend''
who had helped Gandhi shift from an expensive hotel to economical lodgings when
he arrived in London for his law studies. In 1893, C.L. Lachiram, a Sindhi
merchant, helped him organize the Natal Indian Congress. In 1899, Barrister
Gandhi successfully fought for seven Sindhi traders who were being denied entry
into South Africa. He supported
the case of K. Hundamal, a silk merchant of Durban, in his articles in the
Indian Opinion.
Gandhiji
admired Sindh for giving so many excellent professors to the country. Referring to the Sindhi professors at the Gujerat Vidyapeeth
as ``the treaty made between Gujarat and Sindh'', he asked the Gujarati
students to go as flood relief workers to Sindh and repay ``the debt to
Sindh''. During this same visit in
1934, Gandhiji met the Karachi press. When K. Punniah, the editor of the Sind
Observer asked him about -the separation of Sindh from Bombay, Gandhiji excused
himself and said: "Now you are taking me out of my depths."
When asked about his impressions of Sindh, he said: "My
impressions of Sindh have been very happy. I should have been happier if I
could get more money.'' Thereupon the pressmen happily collected 30 rupees on
the spot. Gandhiji said: ``I do not want to rob you of what little you get. At
least give me your pencils." And so Gandhiji took both 30 rupees and the
pencils, amidst general laughter.
And he was quite-horrified by the Sindhi custom of
``Deti-Leti'' (Dowry) particularly among the Amils. He told the D.J. Sind College students in 1934: ``Here
they try to imitate the sahibs and the Parsis. When I saw the girls during my
first visit to Sindh, I wondered how there were so many Parsi girls around.
Later on I came to know that they belonged to the Amil class. I was familiar
with the name ``Bhai-band'' (the business community). But I was rather scared
by the name ``Amil''. I wondered what kind of people they would be. When I saw
the Amils I found them exactly like the Sahibs.''
Gandhiji added: ``The Amils of Sindh are probably the most
advanced community in that province. But in spite of all their advance, there
are some serious abuses of which they seem to have monopoly. Of these the
custom of Deti-Leti (DOWARY SYSTEM) is not the least serious.... The parents
should so educate their daughters that they would refuse to marry a young man
who wanted a price for marrying and would rather remain spinsters than be party
to the degrading custom.''
It
was left to Hassanad Jadugar (magician) to set an example in dowry-less
marriage. He gave his daughters only five Ch's: charkha (spinning wheel),
chaadi (milk-churner), chakki (grinding-stone), chulha (native stove) and
chaunri (metal buc- ket). (I
heard that Lal Bahadur Shastri - second PM of India, also didn't take any dowry
except for a Charkha and piece of cloth, following Gandhi Ji's teachings)
When violence gripped Sindh from 1939 onwards, Gandhiji
raised his voice against it. He warned that ``what happens in India, whether
good or bad, in one part, must ultimately affect the whole of India.''
When
Partition came in spite of Gandhiji, he persuaded the Government of India to do
everything for the refugees. He spoke to the Maharao of Kutch and got Kandla
land for the Sindhu Resettlement Corporation. He told a Sindhi delegation, led
by Dr. Choithram, on 30 January, 1948: ``If there can be war for Kashmir,
there can also be war for the rights of Sindhi Hindus in Pakistan.''
Last delegation to Gandhi Ji
Professor Malkani met him only an hour before Gandhiji was
shot. Malkani had been just appointed Additional Deputy High Commissioner to
organise the migration from Sindh. Gandhiji gave him a resounding blessing-pat
on the back with the words: ``Take out everybody. See that you are the last to come out. And tell
Khuhro I want to visit Sindh to re-establish peace. Let him consult Jinnah and
inform me telegraphically.'' When Malkani told him how the Hindus in Sindh had to
wear ``Jinnah Cap'' and carry about an Urdu paper or Dawn to pass off as
Muslims, for security reasons, he said he would mention it in his prayer
meeting that evening. Alas, he died before he could visit Sindh --- or expose
`the excesses there! (http://gupshup.org/gs/history/547604-mahatma-gandhi-sindh.html#)
2.Before Partition, he’d visited the province nearly seven times and
according to his grandson Rajmohan Gandhi, he felt out of his depth when he
visited the province after the 1935 Government of India Act had separated Sindh
from the Bombay Presidency. Bapu, as history has taught us, kept fighting to
keep the Subcontinent together.
On the third day of the fifth Karachi Literature Festival, Mohandas Karmchand
Gandhi’s grandson sat down in front of the audience at the main garden at Beach
Luxury Hotel to talk about Bapu, Partition and Sindh again.
Rajmohan, who has written extensively on Partition,
was joined by historian Sarah Ansari from Royal Holloway, University of London.
The talk was moderated by Zafar Junejo, a Sindhi writer and translator. Junejo
opened the session with Sindh’s obsession with Gandhi.
He said it was odd that the province was producing so much
literature about a man from across the border and pre-Partition. He asked
Bapu’s grandson on why he felt it was so. According to Rajmohan, an
average human longed for something human and Gandhi was very appealing to
individuals.
While discussing what the legacy of the Mahatma was,
Junejo asked Rajmohan what was it about Gandhi that people still talk
about – was it satyagraha: a term coined by Gandhi which roughly translates to
insistence on truth, or was it his philosophy of love? Rajmohan replied it
could have been Gandhi’s self-realisation but it was up to the individual to
take away what they wanted from Bapu. He said whatever resonates in their minds
is what they take away from his legacy.
Ansari suggested that legacy as a word was static.
“Gandhi’s legacy has evolved in the last 60 years. It will evolve again
and keep evolving,” she said.
Gandhi’s love for India and her people was strong but it
was not blind. Rajmohan recalled a meeting of the Indian National Congress held
soon after the Jallianwala Bagh incident of 1919. “Now this session was
attended by the Ali brothers, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who was still part of the
Congress and the party president of the time, Motilal Nehru and the party’s
former head Annie Besant,” he said. “They wanted to pass a resolution
condemning the incident. While rereading the draft, they saw the last paragraph
or second half of the resolution which said that the party also deplored violence
by Indian hands a few days before Jallianwala Bagh.” He added that an English
woman had been assaulted by some Indians.
According to Rajmohan, the Congress men were wondering who
could have done that. “One of them said that no son of an Indian mother could
have written this. Insinuating that Besant might have written the second bit of
the resolution,” he said. “After many words had been exchanged, Gandhi
stood up and said that he had thought about it and felt that only the son of an
Indian mother could have written that.”
It didn’t come as a surprise to many to learn that it had
been Gandhi all along.(Published in The Express Tribune, February 10th,
2014.)
3.Mahatma
Gandhi on Sindhis
By Kirat Babani
You have called me here.
You
have called me the
greatest
man of the world,
but
you have forgotten
the
first essence of courtesy,
viz.
to address me in the
mother
tongue.
Today, in the October of 2003, we Indians are the proud and
prosperous citizens of a nation, a nation with a rich culture and profound
traditions. But only a little over half a century ago, India and the Indians
were under the British Rule. It was the great soul Mahatma Gandhi who Single
mindedly fought the foreign rule and made the British quit India. Forcibly and
on our own terms, with a swadeshi tool of Satyagraha. A totally Indigenous
tool, not less that any nuclear weapon, but so peaceful, so rooted in the
Indian ethos of non-violence, Ahimsa. And the man behind all this was Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi or Bapu as he was lovingly referred to by all Indians – the
man of the millennium, the father of the nation. This 2nd October, India
celebrates his Birth Anniversary.
Mahatma Gandhi had a special relationship with Sindh and Sindhis.
Many prominent Sindhis were part of his Satyagraha and Swadeshi movements. He
loved the Sindhi language and on many occasions had expressed desire to learn
the Sindhi language. During the freedom movement of the 20’s and 30’s, he
visited Sindhi almost seven times and addressed Sindhi gatherings of students,
political workers and so on. He loved Guru Nanak, whom he quoted very often and
was influenced by Sindhi Sufi views.
Right though the struggle for freedom, Sindhis supported Mahatma
Gandhi with all their might. After the partition, Gandhi felt sad at the plight
of Sindhi refugees migrating to India. It was Gandhi who was instrumental in
securing an alternative homeland for Sindhis in India. And the then Sindhi
leaders lovingly named their new homeland “Gandhidham”, after their Bapu’s
name. Such was the deep bond ‘Gandhi and the Sindhis shared among each other.
Today, the city of Gandhidham is a flourishing Sindhi settlement which is a
Sindh in Hind for Sindhis and Gandhidham stands as a testimony to the fact that
Mahatma Gandhi and the Sindhi community shared a common purpose and direction
for life.
Sindhishaan pays tribute to the great soul of India by reproducing
Bapu’s speech to D. J. Sindh College students and his diary jottings on
Sindhis.
Speech at D. J. Sindh
College to the students on 5th February 1929.
Sisters and Brothers,
I thank you for your giving me the address and the purse, which you have
collected for the Lalaji Memorial Fund. Whatever you have given me will go to
the Fund and nothing shall be left with me. You have said in your address many
things in praise of me. There is, however, an English proverb which I want to
remind you of. It says, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”. If I
praise anybody, I must act according to what he says. But I see that you have
gone precisely the other way about. You have, as it were, praised me to the
skies, but have done nothing according to my wishes. I am not profited by this,
nor are you. What have you done? You have presented me with an address written
in English. You have appreciatively mentioned in it all my activities, but it
is now clear that you have failed to understand me.
I wish that all the students, inclined to serve India, must work in some way.
They must try to speak in their own language. Perhaps, you thought that if you
gave me an address in Sindhi, I would not be able to understand it. But then
you could have supplied me with a Hindi translation of it and I would have
appreciated your patriotic sentiment and felt thankful to you for it. I would
have then said, ‘Well, whatever else the Sindhis may or may not have done, at
least they have followed one of my precepts, by giving me an address in Sindhi.
Not that I want to do away with English altogether. English will, no doubt,
have its place in India under Swaraj as medium for international commerce. But
that does not mean that it should be allowed to usurp the place of your mother
tongue. Even when foreigners come to see me, they at least try to speak as many
Hindi or other non-English words as they might be knowing in my presence and end
their conversation with a Vandematram or a Salaam.
You have called me here.
You have called me the greatest man of the world, but you have forgotten the
first essence of courtesy, viz., to address me in the mother tongue. Or was it that you wanted only to pull my
leg, raising me to the frozen Himalayan heights of mahatmaship and absolving
yourselves form the duty of following me in practice? Do not think, because I
am smiling, that I am happy at heart. Really speaking I am weeping in my heart.
My heart is bleeding to see you dressed in foreign [cloth]. This is very
strange to me. The Nehru Report has recommended that Hindustani should be
the lingua franca and
official language of India under Swaraj. But, perhaps, you will turn round and
say, ‘Oh, these are old ideas, suiting old fossils; we are not going to follow
them. We are Independencewalas.’
How dare you refuse to put on homespun khadi prepared by the pure
hands of your sisters? You have garlanded me with a Khaddar garland, how dare
you then yourselves put on collars of foreign textures! If you must put on
collars why can’t you put on the khaddar collars prepared by Vithaldas
Kerajani? These foreign fripperies are not decorations, they are your fetters
since they result in an annual drain of 69 crores of rupees of India every year
and help to keep her in bondage. That is why I am crying from the housetops.
Boys and girls, look to the money that you are wasting over fripperies,
remember your fellow-beings who are starving and dying.
But
let me remind you that you have been weighed and found wanting in my test.
There is another thing which I want to tell you. During the floods in 1927
Prof. Narayandas Malkani had written to me about the trouble here. He thought
it necessary to import some Gujarati volunteers here. Is it not a shame that
you should require Gujarati swayamsevaks to come here and serve you? At the most you
might accept financial help from outside, but is it not a humiliation that you
must ask Gujarat to help you with men also? In spite of all your professors’
teaching, in spite of all your knowledge, you are not ready to help yourselves?
Then there is a third thing even more important. I am told that as soon as
marriage is proposed to a Sindhi young man he wants to be sent to England at
the expense of his prospective father-in-law and that even after marriage,
misses no opportunity of exacting money from the bride’s father. You think
yourselves very clever. You get a good lot of money and try to become
barristers of I.C.S. Now what is the meaning of all this? You thereby tyrannize
over your own women, over your wives. Wife in our language has been described
as ardhangini or
the better half of man. But you have reduced her to the position of mere
chattel to be bought and sold. There is a word in Hindi – ardhangavayu. Can anybody tell me a proper English word for
ardhangavayu?
A voice from the gallery
: Paralysis.
Yes, paralysis is the exact word for it. This shows that you know Hindi very
well and a vote of censure should be passed for Mr. Lulla’s having presented to
me the address in English. Well, I was going to say that it is the suppression
of the better half of society by you menfolk that is responsible for the state
of paralysis in which we find our society today. You read your Milton, your
Browning, and your Whittier, all right. Is this what you have learnt from them
to reduce your wives who should be the queens of your hearts and your homes
into londis? Shame, shame on
you! Tell me that you will starve but you will never make your women
your slaves. Promise me that deti-letishall be wiped off. Swear
that you will cherish the freedom of your women, as much as your own, that you
will die to restore to them their full status and dignity. Otherwise, remember
the whole world will shower its contempt on you.
The other day Prof. Narayandas Malkani wired to me that he got his
daughter married with only a sari for dowry. He wanted me to send my blessings
to the couple. But I hesitated as a Sindhi friend to whom I mentioned the thing
told me that it was impossible for a man to get his daughter married in Sindh
with that much dowry. That shows what sort of reputation you have established
for yourselves. Promise me that you will die rather that be party to the
humiliation of your womenfolk by allowing the custom of deti-leti to prevail. Then I will understand that
you are ready for the freedom of your country. If I had a girl under my
charge, I would rather keep her maiden all her life than give her in marriage
to one who demanded even a pie as a condition for marrying her.
Remember these four
things then : use your mother tongue, wear only homespun cloth, free your women
folk from social disabilities, and do something to help our poor. Finally, let me warn you that if you do
not act up to my advice after all your professions of regard for me, you will
be called bhats or bards! You must give addresses even to the foreigners in
your own language.
Diary jottings on Sindh impressions on
21st Feb, 1929 which was published in Young India of that date.
Sindhi Impressions :
As it is, everything in India attracts me. It has everything that a human being
with the highest possible aspirations can want, but when I first visited Sindh
in 1916, it attracted me in a special way and a bond was established between
the Sindhis and me that has proved capable of bearing severe strains. I have
been able to deliver to the Sindhis bitter truths without being misunderstood.
I did not mince matters anywhere during the last extensive but hurried tour in
Sindh. The audience took my remarks in good part and where it was possible,
they gave immediate effect to my advice. The warning to the Karachi students
against presenting addresses in English and filling them with empty (empty
because of lack of action behind it) praise had instantaneous effect. The
numerous other addresses that followed were much more subdued and were read in
easy, simple and graceful Sindhi or in equally easy and graceful Hindi instead
of being in high-flown and bombastic English which 90 percent of the audience
could never follow. Perfection was almost reached at the students’ meeting in
Hyderabad. The address was first composed in Sindhi and a good translation in
Hindi was supplied to me. I must deal with this separately next week. The only
defect was that although it purported to come from the students they knew
nothing of the contents. There is too much of laxity observable among us about
such simple matters. Surely addresses presented on behalf of institutions must
be duly approved by them before they are presented.
Khadi
As in Travancore so in Sindh there is unlimited scope for khadi propaganda for
the simple reason that the women of Sindh young and old, do not go in for
coloured saris with picturesque borders. They wear white scarves without borders.
If men of Sindh will but do a little national propaganda among the womenfolk,
they should have no difficulty in inducing them to take to khadi. But the
painful fact is that with a few honourable exceptions they are not interested
in khadi. They will not part with their foreign clothing. The terrible poverty
of the people which they do not see fails to move them. Hence Sindh is perhaps
one of the most backward province in point of Khadi.
Of production there is next to nothing. Acharya Kripalani who now
better deserves the title of khadi hawker than of Acharya is emphatically of
opinion that there is great scope for khadi production in Sindh as he thinks
that is spite of the prosperous appearance of the Amils and the Bhaibands there
is much poverty in Sindh. He quotes in proof of his statement that the pie is
still current coin in Sindh. I can bear testimony to the fact that apart from
Orissa, I have never found so many pies in my collections as in Sindh. In one
collection of about ten rupees from among over a hundred men, forty pies were
counted. This phenomenon cannot be explained away by saying that the people
were stingy or unwilling to give. Stinginess I have never experienced in Sindh
A people who gave over Rs. 70000 in twelve days could not be considered
unwilling. And the fact that they had pies to give shows that a pie can fetch
something in the Sindh villages not even far away from the railway. In one
place I found even cowries among the collections. Upon inquiry I found that a
pice was equal to five cowries. At the same time, I am free to confess that
this khadi hawker’s evidence must be taken with a certain amount of reserve
because of the fact that for years together he has lived in self-imposed exile.
But this is certain that no serious, sustained, methodical effort backed by
expert knowledge has been made to test the capacity of Sindh for khadi
production. Add to this the fact that Sindh is a cotton-producing tract and has
compulsory primary education as in Hyderabad. If there was khadi atmosphere,
sacrificial khadi could always be produced through the numerous schools of
Sindh. A methodical daily manufacture of yarn under proper inspection in the
schools if not even in the colleges should yield good and durable cheap khadi
in large quantities. But want of faith is the father of an innumerable brood of
doubt.
(Reference from : Gandhiji on Sindh
and the Sindhis, compiled and introduced by Dr. Motilal Jotwani, Sindhi
Academy, Delhi.)
