In India, Sindhis are considered to be an entrepreneurial lot. They are seen as a minority community that understands how to make money but are, culturally speaking, unintelligible, and even hollow. While it is easier for lay people to think of writers and poets in several Indian languages, the names of Sindhi writers are known to a closed group of Sindhi writers. That is because, generally speaking, only Sindhi writers are readers of each other. The minority status of the community, along with their scattered presence in the country, lack of a territory that they can call a linguistic home or state, and their experience of displacement because of the Partition of India makes them a unique example for understanding the sociology of literature.
In this essay (and hopefully in the forthcoming instalments in this series on Sindhi literature in India), I intend to explore the writings of one Sindhi text or one Sindhi writer as a means towards understanding the politics of this literature and its socio-historical anchorings. For this inaugural piece, poet Hari Chothani is an ideal example. Born in Karachi in 1948, Hari Choithani (with ‘Hari’ as his pen name) is an engineer by training. His interest in Sindhi literature, literary expression in general, and a deep familiarity with Sindhi poetic tradition, especially of the ghazal, makes him a fascinating figure for the young generation. For the Sindhi youth who is brought up on Bollywood’s expression of love in terms of partying and chilling, Choithani’s lyricism comes across as soft and tender. Reading his poetry about love makes the feelings and emotions around love unfamiliar. One begins to wonder, how come we didn’t realise that Sindhi too has a vocabulary of love?
‘Hari’ generously gave me two of his books when I met him at a library where he has been holding literary gatherings for many decades. One is called Nigaahun-Adaaun (Those Eyes and Those Mannerisms) and the other is Mahtaabi Mukhdo (Your Face, the Moon). Both are self-published books printed in two scripts: the Perso-Arabic script that very few people manage to read today in India on the right and the Devanagari script that keeps written Sindhi a bit accessible to those who can read Hindi. Both collections of poetry contain pieces about life and love, self-talk, and moments of talking to the beloved. The rhyme evokes a sense of a style that is evocative of Urdu idiom. The syntax is the same, and the words too are the same: what’s slightly different is the rendering of the sound. The rhyme here echoes Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s famous poem “Hum Dekhenge”.
madhuru mithhdyun sandani gaalhyun, lagin dil ke sada pyaaryun
budhaainda agar sika saan, beshak kanu laaye budhandaasiin
the sweet words you utter, my heart craves for them
if you’re opening them up to me, I’ll be all ears
The inter-text between languages and the way they talk about collective (hum) action (dekhenge) in the plural point to a conception of a community in similar terms in both languages.
The other Faiz one cannot help remembering is “Aap ki yaad aati rahi raat bhar” (I was soaked in the memories of us all night) when reading these lines by ‘Hari’:
sika mein saarindi vayi, guziri saari raat
muhabata maarnidi vayi, guziri saari raat
It kept me burning and pining for you – the night I mean
This love for you that it brought kept me tossing – the night I mean
Reading about being in love in Sindhi makes one blush! Here is one more:
disu ishaarin saan gazabu kedo na dhaayun thyun akhyun
laba rahin chup para ishaarin saan jataain thyun akhyun
Look, these gestures of your eyes wreak havoc within me
Your lips are so quiet but your eyes are making me go wild
The individual poems offer a lot to poetry enthusiasts. Some numbers evoke a smile, some uncover a lesson in happiness, and some just take the reader by surprise with a clever play on words or a clever take on the subject matter.
But where this poet’s aesthetics gets very interesting for the contemporary literary scene is the lesson in persistence. As mentioned earlier, it is hard to find Sindhi readers. But to keep writing, self-publishing, distributing or gifting one’s books among potential readers – these are actions of creativity (as much as the real deal of writing) that define what it means to be productive in the sense of an artist. What makes ‘Hari’ a benchmark, or some kind of ideal in regional literary traditions, is the humility his example puts forth. He cannot take readership for granted. He writes because there are things he wants to express in a poetic idiom and these are things that need to be shared, and in Sindhi. A literary tradition is not rich because it has Shakespeares of the world. It is rich because it has writers who write irrespective of the volume of readership. In a way, writing in the minor languages – in the sense, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari(1986) defined the idea of the ‘minor’ in terms of quality rather than numbers – is about writing in the truest sense of the expression. There are no rewards in the sense of immediate appreciation or reception but there is a sense of labour involved: just as an engineer ‘engineers’ stuff, a writer writes. And how can a community not have a writer?
It is hoped that through such platforms (such as Doing Sociology), societies and communities develop a means of reflecting on the role of art in society: not just in the sense of what it means to specific readers but also what scholars, researchers, and translators can borrow from myriad writers and their sensibilities to see what can be made of the idea of (capitalised) Indian literature.
This is the first of a series of essays on Sindhi language and literature in India. With my essays, I seek to touch upon the sociology of Sindhi literature while writing about sociopolitical contexts of writing and reception in Indian society and within the context of migration and partition.
Reference:
- Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. University of Minnesota Press.
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Soni Wadhwa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Languages at SRM University, Andhra Pradesh. Her digital archive PG Sindhi Library is dedicated to post-partition Sindhi writing published in India.