THE MAKING OF EXILE Page 4
Jhulelal
Once upon a time, Mirkh Shah, a hard and cruel man, was the king of Thatta, the capital of Southern Sindh. One day, he proclaimed that all Hindus in Sindh should convert to Islam over the next 24 hours – or else face death. The Hindus, alarmed and distraught, went together to petition his minister, Ahirio to give them two weeks’ reprieve. Ahirio consented. Then they went to the Sindhu, praying to the river for deliverance from their impending doom. They vowed that on the seventh day they would cast their children into the river, and then, by the 14th day, they would throw themselves into the waters.
On the seventh day, when they were about to drown their children, the god of the Sindhu manifested himself, a beautiful deity as white as the surf. ‘Fear not!’ he commanded them. ‘Before your time is up, I will be born as an infant to Ratno, the gram-seller of Nasarpur, and his wife Devki. Warn Mirkh Shah of my advent!’
Before the Hindus could be converted, the infant Uderolal was born on the last day of the fortnight given to them. This was the first day of the month of Chaitra, the first day of the Chaitradi year. He was called Jhulelal, after the cradle which held him. Mirkh Shah, who had learnt of the birth of this rare child, sent Ahirio to kill the baby with a poison-petalled rose.
When Ahirio approached the cradle, the infant smiled at him, and then at the rose, and gently blew it far away. The astonished Ahirio looked at the rose and then back at Jhulelal, staggered by what he saw. Instead of the baby, there was an old white-bearded man staring back at him. Suddenly the old man turned into a youth of 16, and then into a warrior on a white horse with his army springing out of the river behind him. And once more Jhulelal transformed before his eyes into an infant. Speechless with awe, Ahirio’s violence turned to faith. He begged the infant to come with him to Thatta and display his glory to Mirkh Shah as well. The baby replied, ‘Return to Thatta and call out to me by the banks of the Sindhu. I shall appear.’
Ahirio returned to Thatta, and related to Mirkh Shah what had happened. The king first scoffed at Ahirio’s impossible tale, and then cursed himself for his choice of minister. But at night he was plagued with strange nightmares: of a smiling baby sitting on his chest, of an old man on a fish, and of himself losing a battle to a warrior and a great army. As a result, he bade Ahirio to go to the Sindhu and call out to Jhulelal.
In those days, the Sindhu flowed past Thatta. As Ahirio called out, there appeared before him the same beautiful youth, riding a white steed, followed by thousands of warriors, on foot, on horseback, on chariots and on war elephants. Ahirio, terrified out of his wits, fell at Jhulelal’s feet, begging him to restrain his army. The young man turned around and dismissed the warriors, who then vanished immediately into the waters of the Sindhu.
Then Ahirio led Jhulelal into Mirkh Shah’s court and told him what had transpired. Mirkh Shah, frightened but wary, seated Jhulelal on his right and showed him respect. Now Jhulelal commanded him to show mercy to his Hindu subjects. But Mirkh Shah still had evil in his heart. He ensconced Jhulelal in one of his palaces, and then had the palace surrounded by his soldiers. Now he wanted to convert Jhulelal as well. But by the time the kazi arrived, Jhulelal had vanished into thin air.
Maddened with rage, Mirkh Shah ordered all the Hindus to convert immediately, or else he would kill them all. The alarmed Hindus rushed to Ratno’s house, and they found Jhulelal, a baby sleeping in his cradle. Now the divine infant consoled them, telling them to assemble at a temple near the river. Once the Hindus had collected there, two things happened simultaneously: a heavenly fire devoured Mirkh Shah’s palaces, and a celestial thunderstorm burst over Thatta. Mirkh Shah, Ahirio and the kazi, though severely burnt, somehow managed to escape the flames and reach the river. There they saw the temple, with Jhulelal, the beautiful youth, seated in splendour, surrounded by all the Hindus, sheltered from the storm.
Finally Mirkh Shah repented. He fell at Jhulelal’s feet and begged for forgiveness. Jhulelal dismissed the storm with a wave of his hand, and vanished. When the Hindus returned to Nasarpur to the house of Ratno and Devki, once more they found Jhulelal, a baby sleeping peacefully in his cradle.
The Rise of the Right-wing Hindus
The communal conflicts of the 1920s, the controversies surrounding the separation of Sindh, and now the Manzilgah riots in 1939, all these fuelled fears among Sindhi Hindus. Provincial politics in the decade after attaining autonomy, and the general level of insecurity in Sindh wrought by depredations by the Hurs in the 1930-40s, and the attendant Martial Law rule in 1942-43 had also contributed to raising communal temperatures.38 The 1940s also saw increased incidents of violence against Hindus, especially in Northern Sindh. It was during this period that the Hindus began to turn in greater numbers towards the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which had by this time begun to deepen its roots in Sindh.
Although the RSS had been founded in 1925, it came to Sindh in earnest only in the early 1940s, when an active member of the Punjab Arya Samaj, Rajpal Puri of Sialkot, moved to Hyderabad. Puri, known among his followers as ‘Shriji’, came to teach Sanskrit in the N. H. Academy there, and later became the prantpracharak, the head of the RSS in Sindh. He was largely responsible for popularising the RSS in Sindh. According to Atmaram Kulkarni, Sindh had the highest number of pracharaks (full-time propagator-workers) per district in India.39 Similar trends were taking root in other parts of India, where:
recruits were trooping into shakhas or branches, and money, too, was pouring in. It was a time of prosperity for trading groups, with ample opportunities for war contracts and profiteering, and traders have always provided the major social bases for the RSS. Significant inroads seem to have been made during these years into government services also.40
From 1943 through 1947, M. S. Golwalkar, then the sarsanghchalak or head of the RSS, made annual visits to Sindh, travelling to all its major cities and meeting prominent Hindu politicians, merchants, lawyers and educationists. Many Sindhi Hindus took to the RSS during this period, especially adolescent boys, its primary target group, who were first drawn to its physical training and were later indoctrinated into its hardline ideology.41
But after the Manzilgah violence, Dr Choithram Gidwani and other senior members of the Sindh Congress also felt the need for Sindhi Hindu youth to become more militant, citing grounds of self-defence.42 The Congress had traditionally represented the community in most matters vis-à-vis the Sindhi Muslims. But it had become unpopular among a large section of the Sindhi Hindus, for giving its assent to the separation of Sindh in 1937. In the first provincial elections held in January 1937, the Sindh Congress won only seven of the eighteen seats reserved for Hindus. The remaining seats went to various smaller Hindu political parties, bringing about a highly splintered Hindu vote. Moreover, several senior Congress leaders were jailed for lengthy periods after the start of the Quit India movement in 1942, and so could not play an active and direct role in Sindhi politics for most of the early 1940s.
However, the Congress’ role in the Quit India movement, as well as the jail sentences awarded to Congress workers in Sindh brought about a resurgence of the party’s popularity in Sindh, and it swept the provincial elections in Sindh in January 1946, winning all the 22 seats reserved for Hindus. When further infighting in the Muslim League led to a deadlock in the ministry, fresh elections were called for in December 1946. The Congress won 20 seats, again maintaining its supremacy among the Hindus of Sindh.
Although the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha both competed for the Sindhi Hindu vote, many workers in both parties shared a common animosity towards Sindhi Muslims, and the Sindh Congress had even been likened to a ‘cheap edition of the Mahasabha’ by a contemporary observer, around 1939-1940.43 Abdul Qaiyum Khan was a Congress worker who later joined the Muslim League. He subsequently became the chief minister of NWFP from 1947 to 1953.44 In 1940, he was deputed by the Congress to investigate the Sukkur riots. In his report to the Congress Working Committee, he observed:
What I saw an
d heard in Sind was an eye-opener. The Muslims constituted seventy-five per cent of the population, but they were mainly occupied in menial and low paid jobs. Hindu landlords were extorting rack rents from the Muslim peasantry, while the Muslim landlords were in debt to Hindu [vanias]. Caste Hindus dominated all the higher services, monopolized trade and commerce and also whatever industry there was in Sind. The provincial Congress committee and the local Hindu Mahasabha were presided over by two Hindu brothers who lived under the same roof.
In my report to the working committee, I strongly advocated a radical change in Congress policy in Sind. I told them that the Sind Congress and the local Mahasabha were interchangeable, and that unless the Congress took up the cause of the Muslim majority and rescued them from their economic slavery to the Hindus, the future of the Congress in Sind was dark indeed. I suggested that the soil was fertile enough for the Muslim League to dominate Sind. Nothing was done by the Congress, and Sind was one of the first provinces to stand out for Pakistan, and it offered its provincial capital Karachi as the seat of the central government of Pakistan after partition.45
But still, at a personal level, Hindu-Muslim friendships continued. Even individuals at extreme ends of the political spectrum had friends in the ‘other’ community. Pir Ali Mohammad Rashdi joined the Muslim League in 1938 and subsequently participated in the drafting of the historic Lahore Resolution of March 1940. Rashdi tells us in his memoir that, despite the Sukkur riots, and the fact that they faced each other on opposing sides in various court cases related to the Manzilgah controversy, he remained good friends with Basantram Motwani, the then president of the Sukkur municipality. As the editor of Sind Zamindar (a Sukkur-based Muslim right-wing newspaper), Rashdi was also good friends with Aratmal Panjabi, the editor of the Hindu League Gazette (a Hindu right-wing newspaper also based in Sukkur). Rashdi claims that politicians of that era did not allow political differences to affect their personal friendships.46
A certain level of porosity between the two communities continued in other ways as well. Rashdi’s brother, Pir Hussamuddin Rashdi, writes in his memoir:
The tikaanas (temples) in Sukkur used to prepare the kanaah prasaad [the sacred offering] every evening and the people regardless of their caste or creed, high or low station in life, went in for it reverently. Once we ate the kanaah prasaad of Sadhu Bela Ashram, Sukkur, we became used to it. For days together we lived on it and things like daal-pooree, khichiree, paapad that went along with it. But we kept all this a secret from our friends. Nobody knew that the “sons of Islam” of Sukkur who through their periodical Sitaaraa Sindh (1934-37) showered abuses on the Hindus, day in and day out, were living on the kanaah prasaad of Sadhu Bela Ashram.47
Uderolal
In the town called Uderolal, near Hyderabad, there are two places of worship. When Jhulelal was 12 years old, he instructed Phugar, his cousin, chief disciple and companion, to find a suitable place for his temple. Phugar chose a field, but it belonged to a Memon. Jhulelal wanted the Memon to give him the land as a gift, but the Memon wanted to sell it. Then Jhulelal took his spear and scratched the earth on the field; the astounded Memon could see gold and silver below. Transformed, he now offered the land as a gift to Jhulelal, and also requested that he be the mujawar of Jhulelal’s tomb. The saint blessed him that he would never want for food for the rest of his life. Then Jhulelal struck the earth with his spear again, releasing a spring of clear water. After doing so, Jhulelal mounted his steed, and with the earth opening up in front of him, he rode into the chasm below and vanished forever.
Now Phugar and other Hindus wanted to build a temple, but the Muslims wanted to build a mosque, and a quarrel began. Finally, Jhulelal spoke to them: ‘In my sight, there is neither caste nor creed.’ And so both temple and mosque were built, and even today, lamps burn in both, night and day.
Prelude to Partition
As the Muslim League became stronger in Sindh, and the Pakistan movement gathered greater ground, Muslim Leaguers in power now began to express their resentment towards Hindus openly, as well as their desire to dominate the province. In his 1946 election campaign, Mohammed Ayub Khuhro, one of the principal architects of the Manzilgah controversy, proclaimed:
I am looking forward to the day when the Hindus of Sind will be so impoverished or economically weakened that their women, even like poor Muslim women now, will be constrained to carry on their heads the midday food to their husbands, brothers and sons toiling in the fields and market places.
Other senior Muslim League leaders in Sindh also made similar speeches that whipped up anti-Hindu animosity among the Muslim public.48 Several Sindhi Hindus of that generation clearly and bitterly recalled these speeches and the rancour of those days.49
After the elections, in 1947, the new Muslim League ministry, headed by Ghulam Hussain Hidayatullah, now wanted to enact laws to diminish Sindhi Hindu domination in various spheres – trade, moneylending, education and civil service employment. This was strongly opposed by the Hindus, unwilling to give up their dominance. The Hindu members of the Sindh Legislative Assembly voted against bills they perceived as ‘anti-Hindu’, and also staged walk-outs in protest, no less than three times in one Assembly session. Finally, the Hindu members boycotted the proceedings of the Legislative Assembly in protest against the government’s ‘communalism in all spheres of life’.50
But most of the Muslim League leaders, who were landlords and pirs, came from a feudal background themselves. They were not interested in genuinely addressing socio-economic problems; they were more interested in safeguarding their own position and powers and using the issue of domination to drive a wedge between the Sindhi Hindus and their Muslim vote bank. As G. M. Syed51 himself observed:
[The Muslim League government was] bound to make all efforts for prolonging its domination by means of rousing up the chauvinistic hatred of the Muslim masses and diverting their attention from the specific problems that [affect] their day-to-day existence.52
Even today, decades later, many Sindhi peasants lead oppressed lives, and feudal inequalities continue their stranglehold on the Sindhi countryside.
The Pakistan movement, which gripped the imagination of Muslims all over the subcontinent, also resonated greatly with the Muslims of Sindh. Eagerly anticipating the return of Muslim rule to Sindh, Sindhi Muslims expected that they would be free from the domination of the Hindu government official, and the exorbitant interest rates of the Hindu moneylender in Pakistan. As early as March 1943, G. M. Syed had tabled a resolution in the Sindh Legislative Assembly, which invoked the two-nation theory and called for the creation of Pakistan, of which Sindh would be an integral part.
Pirzada Abdus Sattar, the reforms and development minister of the Sindh Cabinet, summed up these sentiments in a speech he gave in New Delhi on 21 May 1947. He said:
Sindh has been the gateway of Islam in India and it shall be the gateway of Pakistan too. It was the first to pass the Pakistan resolution in its Legislative Assembly, and it will be the first to declare itself a unit of the great Islamic State of Pakistan-to-be. Happily, we in Sindh are in a position to prepare the preliminaries for the great event, and we are already doing so.53
Nooruddin Sarki, the writer and advocate, was then a 20-year-old student from Shikarpur who had recently started college in Karachi. In his words:
We used to read, in newspapers and magazines, that the British had enslaved us, that we should become free, that Islam is the proper [path], that there is equality and justice in Islam. […] G.M. Syed, other Muslim leaders, and the Communist Party promoted the idea of Pakistan in newspapers and magazines. We thought that it would benefit us Muslims if we attained freedom. I also remember that, at this point, in our minds, the stereotypical Hindu was not the average man on the street, but a capitalist. You see, in Sindh, especially in the cities, the merchants and other traders were Hindu. In Shikarpur’s Dhak Bazaar, there were about 200-300 shopkeepers, but there were barely two or three Muslim shops. In Sindh, this led
to class conflicts, to class disparity. The difference between the rich and the poor was obvious to us, the distinction between rich Hindu merchants and poor Muslim peasants from the lower classes. Therefore, we believed, if we secured freedom, Muslims would attain equality and happiness.54
Colonial rule had drastically altered the balance of power in Sindh. Against a backdrop of cultural sharing and friendship, Sindhi Hindus and Sindhi Muslims, in their competition for supremacy, found their communal identities hardening and narrowing, and the gulf between them widening. Partition and the creation of Pakistan would only further widen this communal gulf in Sindh, taking it to a point of no return.
*
The medieval poet-saint Shah Abdul Latif speaks through Sassui:
Fallacy made me forget
That I myself was Punhu.55
Notes
1.I have used ‘Sindh’ throughout this book, except for where it is part of a proper noun, such as Sind Sabha or Hyderabad (Sind) National Collegiate Board.
2.Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, p 45.
3.James Burnes, A Visit to the Court of Sinde, p 83.
4.Capt. S. V. W. Hart, ‘Report on the Town and Port of Kurachee’, in R. Hughes Thomas, ed, Memoirs on Sind, p 216.
5.See, for example, Naomal Hotchand, A Forgotten Chapter of Indian History.