Sindh, 1947 and Beyond

In 1947–48, Mohammed Mustafa Zuberi and Laxmandas Makhija, both sixteen-year-old boys—one Hindu, the other Muslim—each made an irrevocable journey. The former went from Delhi in the newly independent state of India, crossing the border for Karachi in another new state, Pakistan, while the latter moved from Shikarpur in Sindh, Pakistan, to a new life in India. Through fortuitous circumstances, they became part of the same extended family, although they never met. In this introduction to our special section, ‘Partition and Sindh: Dispersals, Memories and Diasporas’, we introduce the predicaments faced by Sindhis and Muhajirs, people like Zuberi and Makhija, who were affected by Partition in very particular ways. Like most Partition migrants, Laxmandas Makhija spent his first ten years as a penniless migrant going from one city to another and one refugee camp to another in the newly formed Indian republic. Ironically, the Sindh that Makhija had left behind initially came to serve as a refuge to the Muslim immigrant from India—Mohammed Mustafa Zuberi—but he moved to Aden (Yemen) and eventually to the United Kingdom. The twin narratives of the boys moving in opposite directions provide a symptomatic window into the making and unmaking of two groups: Muhajirs and Sindhis. We bring them together in the epigraph to foreground the region of Sindh as a land of arrivals and departures. Most of our essays focus on migrations to and from Sindh in the aftermath of the 1947 Partition and their long-term impact. Among the issues we examine are the demographic transformation of the province, particularly of cities like Karachi; the construction or dilution of ethnic identities (Muhajir and Sindhi Hindu); the politicisation of ethnicities (Muhajir and Baloch); the dilution and/or minoritisation of the Sindhi language and culture in India; the effect of governmentalities, like the census, that were conducted against the backdrop of Partition-related migration; and the rise of the Muhajir Quami Movement and the politics of autochthony.

Sindh before Pakistan: Sindhi Hindus and the Relationship between Hindus and Muslims

As a frontier area—‘a transition zone between “India proper” and the vast region which was often called Khorrassan, in which were included southern Afghanistan, Balochistan and southeastern Iran’—Sindh had been only intermittently included in the greater Indian empire.Footnote³ Until the British annexed Sindh in 1843, it remained relatively peripheral to the main centres of power in India. Sindh's geographical location as a frontier province and its relative isolation from the pan-Indian empires shaped its unique character as a land of immigrants, typified by ebbs and flows of civilisation, one that paved the way for eclectic and non-textualised religious practices.

Sindh was part of the Muslim world from the time of its conquest by Muhammad bin Qasim in 711 AD until its annexation by the British from the Talpur Mirs in 1843. Persian cultural influences were very powerful in this region. As Hamida Khuhro notes, there was a ‘very significant difference between Sindh and the rest of [British] India. Sindh was the only province of the subcontinent which was overwhelmingly Muslim in population. In Sindh 75 percent of the population was Muslim, whereas in the Punjab and Bengal, their majority provinces, little over 50 percent was Muslim’.Footnote⁴ Although Sindhi Hindus were exposed to centuries of Muslim rule, and while it is true that Sindhi Hindu landowners and petty traders living in villages paid allegiance to Muslim pirs, wadheros and landlords, and may have lived in deference or even in fear, it would be fallacious to assume that Sindhi Hindus were persecuted by Muslims. Indeed, Sindhi Hindus were among the most prosperous members of Sindhi society and they came to dominate commercial life in both pre-colonial and colonial times. In his account of the situation of Hindus in Sindh during the Talpur regime, Claude Markovits notes:

Thus, the small number of Sindhi Hindus was more than compensated for by their commercial dominance, and to a certain extent by their economic and cultural success. Sindhi Hindu traders and moneylenders provided capital to the cities of Karachi and Hyderabad, while literary and public figures funded institutions, libraries and reading rooms.Footnote⁶

A distinctive feature of Hindu society in pre-1947 Sindh was the fluidity of religious practices and affiliations. Proximity to Islam and the cultural distance from ‘India proper’ modified religious practices to a significant extent. Indeed, scholars have discussed how British administrators found Hindu practices in Sindh mixed and corrupt, departing significantly from what they considered mainstream Hinduism. Observers even wondered whether Sindhi Hindus could be considered ‘proper’ Hindus at all. Sindh's ‘unorthodox’ version of Hinduism must be seen as an outcome of three predominant influences—Islam, Sikhism and Sufism. A large majority of Sindhi Hindus were Nanakpanthis—followers of Guru Nanak (non-Khalsa or Sahajdhari Sikhs)—and Sindhi tikanas (places of worship) often contained images of Guru Nanak and the Guru Granth Sahib along with those of Hindu deities. What is more, there is a lot of evidence that the majority of Hindus in Sindh were murids (followers) of the Sufi pirs (saints) who had played a very important role in Sindhi Islam. Being a Hindu in Sindh did not preclude visits to dargahsFootnote⁷ or fasting for a pir. While this participation of Hindus in Sufi practices was not uncommon in other parts of the subcontinent, ‘the practice was more generalized among Sindhi Hindus than in any other region of India’.Footnote⁸ To be sure, the protection afforded by the pirs to their disciples also provided the latter with many social and economic benefits, but there is no doubt that Sufi thinkers like Shah Abdul Latif and Shahbaz Qalandar inspired devotion in people of both religions. Sufism created an ethos for Hindus in which they did not think of Islam as inimical. Even today, Sindhi Hindus in post-Partition India have a strong legacy of Sufi thought despite the need to assert their credentials as ‘proper Hindus’.

Sindhi Muslims, in turn, participated in the worship of the samadhi of Hindu saints. Indeed, one could claim that the heterodox and divergent Muslim groups of Sindh and the profound impact of Sufism on the region made the understanding and practice of Islam in Sindh more flexible than elsewhere. While we do not seek to paint an idealised picture of the religious situation in Sindh, it remains true that the province was relatively free of the kind of communal conflict that impacted upon Punjab, Bengal and the United Provinces. Undoubtedly, a subtle and precarious balance of social and economic interdependence may have kept resentments from going deeper between the two communities, but ‘the eclectic character of regional Hinduism, as well as the impact of Sufism on regional Islam, certainly had something to do with it’.Footnote⁹ The complex and intimate relationship between Hindus and Muslims in Sindh is best described by Markovits as one in which ‘conflict and hostility mingled easily with amity and a syncretic attitude to religion’.Footnote¹⁰ This complex social fabric began to show signs of tearing in the wake of sharpened economic disparities in the nineteenth century, forming a plank for the success of the Muslim League. Moreover, the circulation of RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) rhetoric about Islam's corruption of the pure Indus civilisation made inroads among Sindhi Hindus after several abortive attempts.Footnote¹¹ However, as has been observed, it remains true that ‘the province of Sindh witnessed the longest period of proximity between Hindus and Muslims, and although the relationship was neither equal (the former were a religious minority) nor harmonious, it was the most intimate on the subcontinent’.Footnote¹²

Breaking the ‘Partition’ Mould: Sindh and the Relative Lack of Physical Violence

Violence has remained central to most literary and political narratives about Partition. However, unlike the Partition experiences of Punjab or Bihar or, to a lesser extent, Bengal, the case of Sindh represents an exception because violence was not constitutive of the Sindhi experience of Partition. There were remarkably few episodes of physical violence in Sindh. Cases of robbery, hooliganism and distressed sales of property were far more common than bloodshed. Three months after Partition, when Acharya Kripalani visited Sindh as president of the Indian National Congress, he noted: ‘There was only a slight exodus of the Hindus and Sikhs from Sindh. It did not suffer from any virulent fanaticism. To whatever faith the Sindhis belonged, they were powerfully influenced by Sufi and Vedantic thoughts. This made for tolerance’.Footnote¹³ Although, as indicated above, we depart from this somewhat romantic view of the relationship between Sindhi Hindus and Muslims as some sort of model of mutual tolerance, we have highlighted the significance of Sindh's geography as a frontier region and the economic interdependence between Hindus and Muslims as two of the possible reasons for the relative lack of communal conflict in the region until January 1948. Moreover, unlike the provinces of Bengal and Punjab, Sindh was not partitioned; it went in its entirety to Pakistan, thus avoiding the complete separation of religious communities and the tearing apart of families, homes, and linguistic and cultural communities that were the hallmarks of Partition in Punjab in particular.Footnote¹⁴

Indeed, most of Sindh's Hindu minority (barring those in rural Sindh such as in Thar Parkar district) fled to India after the city of Karachi witnessed riots on 6 January 1948. Although the incident that set off the riots was local and directed mostly at Sikhs from Punjab seeking refuge in Karachi, Sindh was engulfed by fear. Its Hindu population began to flee, more out of fear of persecution and violence rather than its actual experience. The rich and prosperous Hindus of Sindh felt insecure and frightened in the new state of Pakistan; the danger to their lives and property became palpable with the arrival of the Muhajirs. In her autobiography, Popati Hiranandani relates the enormous fear that made her family leave Sindh: in it, the immigrant Muslim is seen as a potential kidnapper and rapist.Footnote¹⁵ (Clearly, the first generation of Sindhi Hindus differentiated between Sindhi Muslims and Muslims from other parts of India.) Significantly, Sindhi Sikhs feared physical assault far more than Sindhi Hindus did because they were being lumped together with the Punjabi Sikhs, as Rita Kothari and Jasbirkaur Thadhani show in their essay in this collection.

Meanwhile, the modalities of travel from Sindh also ensured relative safety. A large number of Sindhi Hindus travelled by sea, arriving directly at the ports of Bombay (now Mumbai), Porbandar, Veraval and Okha in Gujarat, enabling them to avoid the dangers of border crossing. Those who travelled by train from the interior of Sindh arrived in Rajasthan, also evading the violence in parts of North India. A smaller number crossed the Thar Desert border area by camel. This occludes from the Sindhi experience the metaphor of the death trains, a central trope of much Partition literature and film.

The Trauma of Arrival

The fact that Sindh was ceded in its entirety to Pakistan has, as Nandita Bhavnani notes in this collection, challenged the model that drove the Partition experience in both India and Pakistan: ‘government policy regarding refugees was largely driven by the Punjab experience. In India, this meant that refugees from other areas, such as Sindh and Bengal, where there had been relatively less violence (as compared to Punjab), were viewed, both by the government and the general public, as cowards who had migrated unnecessarily’.Footnote¹⁶ Refugees from Punjab were privileged over other refugees, in terms of both popular attitudes and the government's willingness to accommodate them and to allocate resources for their rehabilitation.

To be sure, there were differences of caste and class among the Sindhi refugees that impacted upon their reception and their ability to rehabilitate themselves. The money-lending Sindhis of Shikarpur, for instance, had well-established networks in places like Bombay and Bangalore (now Bengaluru), which proved to be a definite advantage in their resettlement in India. The Amils, who had traditionally worked as administrators in the courts of the Talpur Mirs and eventually in the British bureaucracy, found corresponding jobs in a divided India. Yet, these were exceptions; the vast majority of Sindhis lived in refugee camps in horrible conditions, fighting for ownership of the land they occupied. The migrants who had had to leave Sindh and come to India often recounted harrowing tales of arrival, the indignity of life as refugees and the hostile reception they were accorded in many parts of India. The following note by S.L. Karandikar, the government official in charge of refugee rehabilitation in Bombay state, points to the negative perception of Sindhi Hindu refugees in India:

It is found in many instances that the refugees behave as if their miserable lot is the creation of people in this province. They must be told, sometimes with brutal frankness, that we have very little responsibility for what has happened to them. Of course in their misfortune we are one with them, we sympathise with them…but they must be told that they cannot turn themselves into a nuisance and if the Govt. has bowed down to their sentiments it is not because they have proved themselves to be a nuisance. That must be made clear to them. If I understood the Hon. Member Babubhai Patel, he said that many of the refugees want to live in cities because they have come from cities. Well, they cannot be sticklers; they cannot be choosers…all the refugees who have come to this province by some misfortune of their own or misfortune of ours…can at the earliest, be assimilated, not by putting all of them together, 5 lakhs of them, but by spreading them all over the province.Footnote¹⁷

The prejudice evident here is a reflection of a larger unwillingness on the part of resident populations and the government to accommodate the influx of Sindhis. In Rajasthan and Gujarat, where well-established conventions of business and entrepreneurship existed, the Sindhis provided new competition in the marketplace. The Sindhi shopkeeper (sometimes joined by his wife) was known for his phenomenal will to work all hours and provide sundry items at reasonable prices. Phrases such as ‘nirvasti nee dukaan’ (‘refugee's shop’) dot the memory of many local communities that resented the Sindhis, but had to grudgingly concede to their business acumen.

Moreover, Sindhi migrants from Pakistan looked very different from local communities. Living in proximity to Muslims had shaped habits of clothing, food, language and worship in such a way that Sindhi Hindus appeared to be quasi-Muslims to the people of Gujarat and Rajasthan. Their speech was peppered with words like ‘Allah’ and they had little regard for casteist ideologies of purity and pollution; consequently, local Hindus treated them with suspicion and hostility. (In other parts of the country, the reception may have varied, and less virulent attitudes may have been possible). It remains true, however, that Sindhi refugees, by and large, viewed their hostile reception at the hands of the local bureaucracy or resident communities as a far greater trauma than instances of betrayal or violence by Muslims in Sindh.

In her analysis of Mohan Kalpana's Sindhi-language novella Jalavatni (Exile), Trisha Lalchandani highlights the protagonist's feelings of rage and resentment at the local state officials at the Sindhu Nagar refugee camp on the outskirts of Bombay—one of the largest camps housing Sindhi refugees from Pakistan. Drawing attention to the conspicuous absence of Sindhi literature and Sindhi narratives of Partition in the corpus of Partition studies, including the sluggish pace of translation activities and the lack of Sindhi texts in the Devanagari script, Lalchandani attempts to rectify this omission by providing a close reading of Kalpana's novella. She argues that Jalavatni illuminates the complexities of exile as an everyday experience. She traces the growth of the protagonist, Mohan, from a frustrated young man struggling to survive in a refugee camp to someone who becomes a representative figure for his community, thus articulating its disillusionment with the Indian state and the migrant generation's anxieties about the loss of Sindhi language and culture in post-Partition India.

The Dilution of Sindhi Hindu Identity

In her essay, Nandita Bhavnani traces the dilution of Sindhi Hindu identity over subsequent generations in post-Partition India.Footnote¹⁸ Contrasting the divergent trajectories and strategies of resettlement of Sindhi Hindus in India and Muhajirs in Pakistan, she argues that many Sindhi Hindus believed themselves to be on the periphery of Sanskritised Hindu culture and felt compelled to incorporate themselves into the dominant regional cultures; however, this strategy of assimilation came at a cost to the community. She concludes that ‘Sindhi language and culture are on the decline in India’. While those Sindhis who grew up in (relatively smaller) cities like Jaipur, Ajmer and Indore, or small towns like Tonk and Pimpri, which have sizeable Sindhi populations, have been able to preserve some Sindhi customs and practices, others who moved out of the camps and built their homes in ‘normal’ parts of the cities of Pune, Ahmedabad and Bombay gradually shed those practices that identified them as ‘Sindhi’ as they responded to the universal need for upward social mobility.Footnote¹⁹ The gradual erosion of Sindhi identity manifested itself, first of all, in the decline of the Perso-Arabic script, and eventually in the use of the spoken language as well. The Sindhi language, used by Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims from Sindh, had been an inalienable aspect of Sindhi identity, but the use of Sindhi has waned over time, especially by the younger post-Partition generations. One of Kothari's informants, Makhija, explains the decline of the Sindhi language in pragmatic terms:

In contrast, Gobind Khushalani's short story ‘Kahani Kismet Jee’ mourns the peripheralisation of the Sindhi language on both sides of the India–Pakistan border.Footnote²¹ Jethanand, the protagonist, reluctantly escapes from Sindh when his Sindhi Muslim business partner, Murad, with whom he runs a printing press, cannot assure him of safety. Leaving the press to his partner, Jethanand starts life anew under harsh circumstances in India, where over time he becomes a wealthy businessman. During his old age he turns his attention to doing ‘social work’ for the community, and the first and obvious thing he feels he must attend to is the alarming decrease in the use of Sindhi. Determined to provide an easy primer for children so they can learn Sindhi, Jethanand calls up his old friend Murad, but he learns that the primer they had published together for Muhajirs to learn Sindhi in Pakistan remains unused. The story shows how languages like Sindhi were not necessarily divided, but rather minoritised—made to feel irrelevant in the new post-Partition dispensations. Even today, this trans-border dimension of the minoritisation of the Sindhi language sustains a bond between Sindhi writers in India and Pakistan.Footnote²² Yet, by and large, these concerns about the waning of the Sindhi language remain literary. Most urban Sindhis seem to endorse Makhija's pragmatic attitude, and among the younger generations, the loss of the language is not a matter of much concern.

Besides the declining use of the Sindhi language, Sindhi Hindus have also made a conscious effort to dilute their distinctively syncretic religious practices. While centuries of trade with and proximity to the Muslim population of Sindh had shaped the relationship of Sindhi Hindus with Hinduism in non-textual and accommodating ways, on arrival in India, they soon realised how the pursuit of textualised practices would help them to earn respect and legitimacy among the local populations. Many perceived themselves to be on the margins of Sanskritised Hindu culture and chose to downplay those aspects of their culture that were perceived as ‘Muslim’, such as visiting dargahs or having faith in a pir.Footnote²³ What is more, the majority of Sindhi Hindus have moved towards the Hindu Right in India in order to establish their credentials as ‘legitimate’ Hindus.Footnote²⁴

What remains, however, are traces of the specific ritualised practices that are a legacy of their rich regional heritage. Even though there has been a concerted effort to water down or bury those aspects of their practices that are identified as quasi-Islamic—although exceptions remainFootnote²⁵ —the blurring of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Sikh’ practices persists as a strong element of Sindhi religious traditions even today. Thus, Sindhi Hindus often frequent temples and gurudwaras; they follow both ‘Hindu’ and ‘Sikh’ practices and are familiar with scriptures from both traditions, much like many Punjabi Hindus who may also identify as Sahajdhari or non-Khalsa Sikhs. But what about those who identify as Sindhi Sikhs? Arguing that the Sikhs within the Sindhi community are the ‘missing’ people from the three archives of Sikh, Partition and Sindhi studies, Kothari and Thadhani seek to push the boundaries of existing scholarship in their essay. Through ethnographic accounts, they demonstrate that while the Sindhi Sikhs did not suffer the kind of physical violence that the Sikhs of Punjab did, their position differed from that of the Sindhi Hindus at the time of Partition because they were more vulnerable as Sikhs. Kothari and Thadhani also nuance their study to show how the community of Sindhi Sikhs finds itself torn between claims of linguistic–regional identity on the one hand, and religious identity on the other. Thus, competing desires to be Sindhi and Punjabi-speaking Khalsa Sikhs mark the internal and psychological struggles of the post-Partition Sindhi Sikh community today.

The Paradoxes and Shifting Connotations of the Term ‘Muhajir’

In this section, we focus on Urdu-speaking emigrants from India's Muslim provinces who settled in the towns and cities of Sindh and came to be known as Muhajirs. A number of scholars have noted how the word muhajir was part of Pakistan's political vocabulary from the outset as a means of encouraging Muslim solidarity between newcomers and those who already lived within the territory of the newly-carved Pakistani nation-state.Footnote²⁶ The term Muhajir alludes to the migration of the first Muslims from Mecca to Medina—a migration initiated by the Prophet himself—imbuing the (often forced) displacements to Pakistan with a specifically religious significance and likening the migrants to pilgrims as opposed to refugees looking for charity. Simultaneously, the use of the term allowed the state to constitute those who were already living within Pakistan as Ansars, the modern-day counterpart of the people of Medina who had offered hospitality to the followers of the Prophet, making the task of welcoming the new arrivals a quasi-religious duty. For instance, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan used the term Muhajir to refer to the particular suffering of the migrants, even though he used the terms ‘Indian Muslims’ or ‘Muslim settlers’ more often. In August 1948, he said: ‘The Government of Pakistan is fully aware of the difficulties of the Muhajireen and all our efforts are directed towards an end, that is to improve their lot. So long as each and every refugee is not suitably resettled, the Pakistani government would not relax its efforts’.Footnote²⁷ Clearly, the term Muhajir was initially deployed in a capacious and positive sense to evoke sympathy for the migrants from India; moreover, it included all migrants from India to Pakistan irrespective of where they came from and what language they spoke—it did not have an ethnic connotation.

However, the meaning of the term changed after these early post-Partition years. It came to be used as a synonym for ‘refugee’—in the negative sense as someone who is a passive object of charity—which is why it did not become the principle term of self-identification for the displaced Muslims from India. They saw it as a label imposed by others. As Sarah Ansari points out, while large-scale migrations have often been a feature of political conflict in the twentieth century, on the whole, refugees caught up in these often involuntary displacements have had little if any sense of personal claim in their lands of arrival. In contrast, the migrants from India perceived themselves to be there by right and not by invitation and saw themselves as founders of the nation.Footnote²⁸ Over the years, the term Muhajir gradually shifted from being an all-embracing term for migrants to a pejorative word (like the term Hindustani) that referred to the migrants’ (tainted) Indian past. Noting the shifting meanings of Muhajir, Oskar Verkaaik writes: ‘Once it had meant “welcome”. Now it meant: “you are not from here”’.Footnote²⁹ The term was therefore a constant reminder of their outsider/foreigner origins and of their belated arrival into the Pakistani nation-space. The use of the term became more widespread in the 1980s with the advent of the Muhajir political movement, when migrants from India who had settled in the urban centres of Sindh—and their descendants—came to refer to themselves as ‘Muhajirs’. The younger generation in particular—especially those who came from the middle and lower-middle classes—appropriated the once derogatory term and deployed it as a label to designate their collective identity. Consequently, in present-day Pakistan, the term is specifically used to describe the largely Urdu-speaking immigrants from India's Muslim-minority provinces who settled in the city of Karachi and other parts of urban Sindh, although it also includes Gujarati speakers and immigrants from Hyderabad, Deccan; it does not include the vast numbers of Punjabi speakers who migrated from East Punjab to West Punjab.

To be a ‘Muhajir’, therefore, has meant different, even contradictory, things at different historical moments. As argued in an earlier work, the use of the term Muhajir to specify the migrants, however well intentioned, from the outset constituted their identity in a paradoxical way: on the one hand, as would-be citizens who were enacting a homecoming rather than ‘refugees’ looking for charity or benevolence; and on the other, as guests who must be welcomed by the local residents.Footnote³⁰ And, as Jacques Derrida has shown, a guest, however welcome, can never be the host or the master of the ‘home’—in this case, the nation—in our conventional understanding and practices of hospitality.Footnote³¹ To be sure, this invocation of a long tradition of Islamic hospitality did enable the accommodation of many migrants from India, but the persistence of this term to designate those migrants who settled in the cities and towns of Sindh (along with other more derogatory terms such as Hindustanis and makkar or locusts)—and its subsequent appropriation by the migrants themselves—also eventually served to position them as eternal strangers/guests, despite their efforts to claim Karachi as a Muhajir city.Footnote³²

The Impact of Partition and the Contradictory Responses of Sindhi Politicians to the Arrival of the Muhajirs

It is important to appreciate how Partition-related migrations impacted upon the city of Karachi and the province of Sindh. Partition's main impact was demographic: as we have noted, the province of Sindh was not divided between India and Pakistan, but the existing proportions between different religious and linguistic groups was changed by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Muslims from India and the eventual departure of large numbers of Hindus and Sikhs to India. Interestingly, Sindh's experience with the movement of refugees was initially relatively limited. The vast majority of refugees who arrived in Pakistan were from East Punjab; they had moved across the nearest border into West Punjab. Those who arrived in Sindh headed for Karachi, which was now the capital of Pakistan, and the country's foremost port and financial and industrial centre. Karachi offered access to jobs and financial security, especially because many of the North Indian Muslim migrants who went there came from backgrounds with a history of service in the bureaucracy and in professional occupations.Footnote³³ As a result of the influx of Muslim refugees from India and the concomitant exodus of Hindus and Jains, Karachi went through a dramatic demographic and social change. Within a few years of Partition, Karachi had gone from having a predominantly caste Hindu population to having a majority Muhajir population, while Sindhis became a minority both in the city and in the province. What is more, the coming of the Muhajirs increased the city's population by extraordinary proportions.Footnote³⁴

In this context, the contradictory responses of local Sindhi Muslim politicians to the inflow of refugees from India and to the departure of Hindu Sindhis are worth underlining. After the outbreak of communal violence in early September 1947, followed by another episode in January 1948, Hindus and Sikhs started leaving Karachi in huge numbers. The Hindu exodus was viewed with increasing anxiety on the part of Sindhi Muslim politicians because Hindus were seen as vital contributors to the economic and professional life of the city. At times, Sindhi authorities went to great lengths to slow their departure, urging them to stay, but on other occasions, they facilitated their departure.Footnote³⁵ Moreover, as Ansari and Bhavnani note in their essays, Sindhi authorities vacillated between initially welcoming Muslim refugees from India into the province as Ansars, but later attempting to check the entry of more refugees in opposition to the wishes of the Pakistani government. Local Sindhi politicians saw the newcomers not only as a huge economic drain on the province, but also as catalysts for the Hindu exodus. In 1948, the chief minister of Sindh, M.A. Khuhro, insisted that Sindh could only accommodate a maximum of 100,000 refugees from Punjab; eventually, however, more than 200,000 arrived, and by 1949, more than 700,000 migrants had arrived in Sindh, with most settling in Karachi or other urban centres. In the 1950s, there was another wave of migration to Sindh in response to the heightened communal violence in India. The Sindh government's responses to the refugees—including asking them to return to India and the imposition of a permit system—led many Muhajirs to believe that they were not very welcome after all in the Pakistani homeland of their dreams.

Moreover, many ordinary Sindhis saw the Partition migrants as outsiders who were taking over their land and culture and turning their homeland into a strange and uncanny placeFootnote³⁶ because Muhajirs often viewed their culture, their language (Urdu) and their version of Islam as superior to Sindh's ecumenical Sufi traditions. As the numbers of migrants increased and their economic impact was felt more sharply, Sindhis felt that they were losing out in terms of access to education, jobs, land and political power, and they became increasingly resentful towards the new arrivals. Over the years, Sindhis also came to resent Punjabi (and Muhajir) domination of the federal state and the bureaucracy, as well as the peripheralisation of Sindh and Sindhi speakers, and sought to create a separate homeland for themselves.

Sarah Ansari's essay explores the execution of Pakistan's first (1951) census in Sindh, conducted against the fluid political and demographic context of migrations to and from the province, and amid many anxieties about numbers that went back to the decades preceding Independence. Considering the census as a deliberate effort at nation-building, Ansari shows how census volunteers for the first time took the state directly into people's homes, along with their questionnaires; in effect, the census brought people face-to-face with the state and incorporated them as citizens of the nascent Pakistani nation. Highlighting the many difficulties that confronted the census officials in urban Sindh, including the often very rough estimates of population, the frequent changes in the residence of migrants, and the lack of proper records about the numerous temporary dwellings that had sprung up since Partition, she views the census operation as a ‘mammoth bureaucratic undertaking’ which at once established the legitimacy of the Pakistani state—it represented an important ‘rite of passage’—and exposed the numerous political and bureaucratic challenges facing it at both federal and provincial levels. Significantly, the essay also sheds light on the legacies of this first census—above all, the officially verified increase in the number of Urdu speakers—on federal and provincial government policies, and in fuelling tension between Sindhis and Muhajirs in provincial political life: ‘Sindhi interests, it seemed, now clashed very openly with those of former refugees from India’. This became even more evident from the 1970s onwards when the Pakistan Peoples Party came to power under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Muhajirs began to feel that the Pakistani state was becoming hostile towards them.

Muhajir Estrangement: The Rise of the MQM and the Politics of Autochthony

In the 1970s, Bhutto introduced a series of policies to placate Sindhis and to quell the demands for Sindhi separatism which had become more strident after the creation of Bangladesh. State policy in Sindh increasingly differentiated between Sindhis and Muhajirs, or Sindhi speakers and Urdu speakers. Sindhi was promoted as the language of instruction along with Urdu and a quota system was implemented that allocated government jobs and places in educational institutions between Sindhis and Muhajirs in such a way that the Urdu-speaking urban Muhajir population began to lose its once-privileged position. While these steps were meant to provide better opportunities for rural Sindhis, they led to a sense of alienation among the Muhajirs who began to feel increasingly estranged from their new homeland.Footnote³⁷

A potent and visible instance of this sense of alienation was manifested in 1979 when a group of Muhajir students—led by Altaf Hussain—burned the Pakistani flag on the marble steps of Jinnah's tomb and ‘lit the fire of a mohajir ethnic identity’.Footnote³⁸ Altaf Hussain's political party, the MQM (Muhajir Quami Movement, now known as the Muttahida Quami Movement), went on to win the municipal elections of 1987 in Karachi and Hyderabad, and in the national elections of 1988, it became the third-largest political party in Pakistan. While its members and supporters see the MQM as a revolutionary party that represents the interests of the underprivileged sections of the Muhajir population, according to its detractors, it has contributed to a ‘kalashnikov culture of theft, blackmail, political assassination, and intimidation, which has made the cities and towns of Sindh unsafe since the mid-1980s’.Footnote³⁹ Most MQM activists are young lower-middle-class Muhajirs whose expectations for upward social mobility were thwarted, sometimes due to unemployment and the quota system. Many were former petty criminals from the katchiabadis (temporary dwellings) who were suddenly escalated to the status of political leaders. In fact, the Muhajir elite viewed them as a ‘lumpen proletariat’. But they began to sympathise with them at the beginning of the 1990s when MQM cadres in particular and Muhajirs in general became victims of violence, and all Muhajirs, rich or poor, developed a new sense of solidarity.Footnote⁴⁰ In 1992, the Pakistan government under Nawaz Sharif launched Operation Clean-up, a violent and oppressive army operation against MQM militancy in Pakistan's cities. This alienated a huge section of the Muhajir population through brutal house searches and the arrest of large numbers of people who had nothing to do with the MQM. The violence was exacerbated when the MQM split into two factions in the early 1990s—the MQM Hiqi (often accused of being a stooge of Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI) and the MQM Altaf—with the two groups at war with each other. In 1995, more than two thousand people were killed in ambushes, bomb blasts and shootings between various parties to the conflict, including the two factions of the MQM and government forces. As a result, ‘Karachi virtually became a city of war’ in the mid 1990s.Footnote⁴¹

In his essay, Oskar Verkaaik explores how the MQM embarked on a project to remake the political identity of migrants from India in the 1980s and how ethnic violence helped to forge a sense of the Muhajirs as a distinct people. Contending that ethnic violence should not necessarily be understood as the outcome of already-existing ethnic conflict, he argues that violence itself has been constitutive of the Muhajir ethnic identity because the violence—which was partially caused by the MQM itself—was staged and interpreted so as to posit Muhajirs as a separate people. MQM spokespersons portrayed Muhajirs as a persecuted people who had been pushed to the edge of the subcontinent at the time of Partition and were now on the brink of being pushed into the Arabian Sea. Verkaaik argues that Muhajir identity expressed itself from the mid 1980s onwards in ways that had not been done before; under the MQM, Muhajir identity became ‘more politicised and urgent than it had ever been’.

Priya Kumar, in her contribution, argues that the Muhajirs were able to invent themselves successfully as a quam—an ethnic community—by building upon and revivifying the notion of a shared diasporic identity.Footnote⁴² Through a close reading of two novels, Intizar Husain's Aage Samandar Hai (The Sea Lies Ahead) and Kamila Shamsie's Kartography, she shows how over time, Muhajirs came to see themselves as a diaspora with a strong ethnic consciousness through the repeated memorialisation of their Partition-engendered experience of displacement. Contending that there has been a lack of engagement between Partition studies and South Asian diaspora studies, she argues that the Muhajirs’ ‘self-fashioning as a displaced community…reveals how a particular migrant population originating, largely, in the cities and towns of northern India with many locally-circumscribed identities before Partition came to invent and maintain itself as a diaspora in post-Partition Pakistan’.

In the process, Muhajirs came to constitute Karachi as an essentially Muhajir city; indeed, from the 1980s onwards, it became the ‘last Muhajir bastion, a city so utterly connected to the fate of Muhajirs as a diasporic people that they would never give it up lest they be exterminated’.Footnote⁴³ This was partially in response to the anxieties surrounding the inflow of new migrants from within Pakistan itself and from neighbouring countries. From the 1960s onwards, Karachi witnessed a new influx of migrants from Punjab, the former North West Frontier Province and rural Sindh, a process that accelerated from the 1980s because of the war in Afghanistan. Millions of refugees from Afghanistan joined these migrants (along with others from Bangladesh and Iran), and the city rapidly expanded, changing from one of the subcontinent's cleanest to one of its most densely-populated and dirtiest. Ironically, it was now the Muhajirs who experienced the arrival of new migrants as an invasion by the tribal and the backward; as a result, their ties to the city became even more ferocious and territorial in the 1980s and 1990s under the MQM as they increasingly positioned themselves as the indigenous people who had to defend their city from the onslaught of outsiders.Footnote⁴⁴ In particular, they began to feel threatened by the assertiveness of the Pashtuns, who had gained control of road transport in the city and engaged in all kinds of trafficking, leading to the development of a Pashtun mafia.Footnote⁴⁵ The joint Western invasion of Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 in 2001 led to the migration of possibly another million people from Afghanistan and Pakistan's Pashtun belt, with the result that Karachi is today the largest Pashtun city in the word, threatening the former numerical dominance of the Muhajirs. What is more, ‘Karachi is increasingly becoming the most attractive hideout for Taliban, al-Qaida and other extremist elements, because of its massive make-up and all kinds of ethnic and linguistic societal fabric, where Pakistan and Afghan Taliban can melt in’.Footnote⁴⁶ In 2007, when Pashtuns were mobilising to support Chief Justice Chaudhury, activists of the Pashtun political party, the Awami National Party, were attacked by the MQM, which wanted to show the Pashtuns that they controlled Karachi. Fifty-eight Pashtuns died and on that day, ‘the Pashtuns of Karachi realized they were not welcome in the city’.Footnote⁴⁷

In sharp contrast to the MQM's territorial and proprietary attitude towards the city are the Baloch testimonies from the historic Karachi neighbourhoods of Lyari and Qiyamahsari, which we encounter in Adeem Suhail and Ameem Lutfi's contribution.Footnote⁴⁸ Among the oldest settlers in Karachi, the Baloch were crucial to the relations of production that built the city—‘they were people whose toil and sweat had given birth to the city’. Contending that the Baloch narratives offer fresh analytical perspectives on Partition, Suhail and Lutfi suggest that the Baloch enable us to understand Partition as a series of migrations and transformations rather than a singular event located in 1947, bound by the imagination of nation-states. Placing Karachi in the economy of the Makran coast and the Indian Ocean, and within a longer chain of migrations leading up to 1947 and beyond, they seek to extend Partition both temporally and spatially. Focusing on the Baloch experience, they argue, allows us to decentre particular territories and subjectivities that dominate Partition narratives. Through the testimonies of their Baloch informants, they show how Karachi's Baloch do not view the city as ‘an ur-site for claims to autochthony’, but posit it as a ‘rich tapestry woven through the lives of diverse peoples’ who, working together, made Karachi the bustling metropolis it is today. Indeed, the working-class solidarity and the ‘hotel culture’ of Lyari allowed the Baloch to simultaneously welcome the Muhajirs as the newest migrants to a city of migrants and to lament the departure of their former Hindu neighbours. However, Partition marked the beginning of the politicisation of ethnicity, which ended up constituting Karachi's Baloch as one ethnic group among others in the city—and as tethered to the province of Balochistan—rather than as the ‘indigenous proletariat’ they saw themselves as.

Migrations into India across Partition's western border continue to this day, years after Partition, especially into the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Most of these migrants are Hindus from Sindh and South Punjab who entered India on a valid travel document, overstayed and subsequently went on to apply for citizenship. (Sindh remains home to 95 percent of Pakistan's Hindu population of about 2.5 million). After the initial wave of migration of Sindhi Hindus at the time of Partition, a new wave occurred in the wake of the 1965 Indo-Pakistani war when approximately 8,000 people crossed the border from Sindh's Thar Parkar district. During the 1971 war, India occupied a large part of this district, which brought in some 90,000 more Hindus who refused to return when Thar Parkar was restored to Pakistan.Footnote⁴⁹ Most of these refugees were from various caste groups, although Rajputs and Meghwals accounted for about 50 percent of the total. There was also significant seasonal migration of agricultural labour in the other direction, following Partition and up to the fencing of the border in the early 1990s—from Rajasthan into Sindh and into southern Punjab in Pakistan. Following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, a large number of Hindus from Pakistan started migrating once again into Rajasthan, largely because of their sense of increased insecurity as a religious minority and the vulnerability of Hindu women to rape and abduction. The vast majority of these latter-day migrants are Dalits and Adivasis who live in camps in Rajasthan. In her ground-breaking work on these not-quite-migrants, not-quite-refugees, Niraja Gopal Jayal examines the citizenship claims of these people who were effectively rendered stateless and live on the periphery of Indian citizenship.Footnote⁵⁰ Although about 13,000 of the 17,000 who came after 1992 were granted citizenship in special citizenship camps in Rajasthan—about 3,000 still await legal citizenship—they all emphasise the hostility of the resident populations and the ways in which they are haunted by their Pakistani origins: ‘In Pakistan, they say we are Indians (Bharatiya) because we are Hindus, here we are called Pakistanis and all our actions are suspect’.Footnote⁵¹ Clearly, the legacies of Partition and the ratification of borders continue to impinge upon present-day migrations—even if the migrants belong to the ‘right’ side of the religious divide.

Our effort in this collection has been to broaden the present trajectory of Partition studies to focus on the rather different case of migrants to and from Sindh and to consider their different post-Partition experiences. As far as we know, this special section of South Asia is one of the first substantial attempts to study Sindhi Hindus and Sikhs, Muhajirs and the Baloch of Karachi together. It would not be an exaggeration to say that of all Partition migrants, Sindhis have willed themselves to forget Partition most successfully. Sindhi Hindus and Sikhs were dispersed into different parts of India and have remained fragmented groups groping for a historical memory. They do not function like a diaspora because they have tried to bury the memory of migration. In contrast, even though the Muhajirs had no history as a cohesive group prior to Partition—they were a heterogeneous assemblage of Muslims from many parts of India who found themselves in large numbers in the cities of Karachi and Hyderabad—they cohered around the idea of dispersal and movement and came to invent themselves as a diaspora. The idea of being from elsewhere, of being a migrant community, which is so important to diasporic consciousness, is by and large absent among Sindhis in India. While Sindhis in Hong Kong or Jakarta may function as a diaspora, that is hardly the case with the post-Partition generations of Sindhis in India. This special section underscores the essentially divergent path that Sindhi Hindus and Sikhs took compared to Muhajirs in their post-Partition lives. It also underlines the importance of giving a place to Baloch narratives and experiences in any study of migration and displacement—and their flip-side emplacement—to and from Sindh.