Sindh Is Not a Piece of Territory: Sindhi Belonging in India, 2019-2021

This article was published on the anniversary of India's Republic day in January 2021 for the well-known online publication The Leaflet's special issue on citizenship, for a non-academic audience. The article traces a history of the Sindhi refugee diaspora in India in the aftermath of the partition of India, the absence of a linguistic and ethnically defined territory to which they could claim belonging, and the implications of this for their resettlement in India. The article looks back at how religion, ethnicity, and caste intersected with a lack of territorial belonging to produce Sindhi citizenship in India and the refugees' own struggles to claim belonging in India.In 2017 the Sindhi Hindu brothers Srichand and Gopichand Hinduja from the Shikarpur region of Sindh topped The Sunday Times' Rich List of the UK's wealthiest residents. Sindhi Hindus form the world's most widespread if not the most numerous South Asian diaspora. They have a long history of travel for trade and banking, for which evidence is available from the sixteenth century (although historians suggest that they were a highly mobile community even before this). They established more permanent roots outside of Sindh after the 1947 partition of India. When the British divided their Indian empire in 1947, unlike Punjab, Bengal, and Assam, they did not partition Sindh (today a part of the Muslim-majority country of Pakistan), despite the minority campaign for a partition of the region. Sindh's 'partition' in 1947 was thus a deterritorialised and demographic one, producing over a million 'non-Muslim' refugees who resettled in India and abroad, including the United Kingdom. Sindhis have played a significant role in the UK's economic, political, legal and social histories, however the origins of this diaspora remain relatively unknown in the UK and even in India. Often mistaken for Punjabis and Gujaratis in both countries, they tend to keep a low-profile. They do not follow orthodox Hindu religious or caste practice; their faith is a blend of Sikh, Sufi, and Hindu traditions and they are therefore difficult to 'fix' in 'place'. However, Sindhis continually reappear on the fringes of discussions about religion, ethnicity, and territory. Their post-partition history needs to be recovered. The main objective of my fellowship will be to publish my research on the Sindh diaspora in the United Kingdom and India for both an academic audience and the wider public. It will illuminate a history of British partitions from Sindh, a region that witnessed a movement for autonomy within the empire much before the partition of 1947. It will demonstrate the influence Sindhi nationalism had on British administrators as far away as Palestine and partition plans there. It will trace the paths of Sindhi refugees after 1947, particularly to the United Kingdom, where they have made a huge but understated economic and social impact. I will collect data on the dates of arrival of this diaspora in the UK from Sindh and India; the sorts of businesses they established in the UK, and the relative rates of success of these businesses after partition. My research will also address the question of how heterodox South Asian religious traditions survive or have been threatened in the aftermath of partition and how this relates to Sindhi Hindu commercial and organisational support for militant Hindu nationalism in India and the UK.