Rita Kothari has done great service in translating stories of Partition from Sindhi language, of which there has been no serious acknowledgment so far. This indeed has been the fate of the Sindhis themselves, who, although deeply affected by Partition, neither got to be heard significantly nor did they get any place of their own for their language and culture to flourish.
Sindhis on either side of the border suffered various kinds of losses — material, psychological, and spiritual. Some of them get articulated in in this collection.
Alive
“Perhaps of all Partition migrants,” says the translator, “the Sindhis have willed themselves to forget Partition most successfully.” This was as though an engineered forgetfulness on the part of the majority that wished to invest itself in business enterprise rather than indulge in a “crippling” nostalgia. But then, some of them, the writers, did not restrain themselves from giving voice to the “unspoken.” They articulate the silence and sensitively portray the lived reality rather than repress it. Nostalgia it may well be, but what lies behind this sentiment cannot be dismissed as mere sentimentalism. As the translator points out in his note: nostalgia can be seen as compensation for a world lost to the Sindhis.
When seen through Kothari's perspective presented in the “Introduction”, the stories come alive in the specific Sindhi context. What makes the Sindhi experience of Partition different?
She goes on to identify the reasons for the departures: the geographical position of Sindh, its “cultural isolation”, Hindu-Muslim economic interdependence, and so on.
Full report here The Hindu
No comments:
Post a Comment