He would tell us about his friends and the assets and property (he had a building in his name, ‘Thakur Niwas’) in Karachi that were left behind. I have seen my father crying while watching Buniyaad (A popular Doordarshan serial, 1987-88). Our parents spoke about the Sindhi spirit and adaptability. Sindhyat means mitti ki khusbhu for me, as does Sindhi culture, food, love stories.īarkha Khushalani: We grew up in a typically Sindhi background with Partition stories being told to us. I do have the desire to see Sindh once in my life. But I have heard elders, poets and people around me speak of it. Rekha Sachdev Pohani: I have never seen the homeland.
A faint memory has stayed with me: the last day of school, me returning home sadly and asking Papa, where is our gaon? Apparently, everyone was heading to theirs.
I think keeping the essence of Sindhyat intact along with preserving the nostalgia and imagery of Sindh in the numerous stories, folklore and the poetry of Shah Abdul Latif and the kalaams of Sachal Sai is essential. But not all memories are terrible there are some valuable friendships and sweet memories basking in the warmth of the sun in the passage of time as well. The need to belong still plays an important role. Gayatri Lakhiani Chawla: The ancestral homeland will always be dreamlike, a picturesque place I have not visited, and wish to visit in this lifetime. How do you, as contemporary Sindhis in India, approach Partition and longing for the ancestral homeland? Poet and translator Gayatri Lakhiani Chawla (Courtesy the subject) The poet and translators discussed these and other points in a joint interview.
This bilingual and multi-script approach is an attempt to acknowledge and make space for plurality in the community. The translations also appear in the Perso-Arabic script rendered by Shobha Lalchandani. This volume features her poems in English as well as translations into Sindhi (Devnagari script) by Rekha Sachdev Pohani and Barkha Khushalani.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru addressing people at the Chhatarpur Co-operative farming colony near Mehrauli, Delhi, where 35 refugee families from Sind and Bahawalpur were settled. While acknowledging her generation’s place in contemporary India, she cherishes and nurtures the “Sindhyat” in herself and others and sees her community’s suffering in the light of a universal suffering, namely, that of the parting of lovers. The book represents her engagement with her community’s history of displacement, adaptation, loss and nostalgia. The post-Partition Sindhis’ longing for Sindh, a homeland never seen, but fashioned in the imagination from stories and memories, is featured in the recently published Borders and Broken Hearts: A Trilingual Collection of Poems on Parting and Partition, a collection of poetry by Gayatri Lakhiani Chawla, who lives in Mumbai.
0 kommentar(er)
