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1 comments about National Integration of Sindhis.

1. About the Author: Subhadra Anand, was born in Hyderabad, Sindh in 1947 into a Sindhi Brahmin family. She is a teacher and reads History and is a Vice-Principal of National College, Bandra, Bombay. She did her PhD and culminated her thesis in this book, National Integration of Sindhis. Despite having married outside her community, she holds the interests of Sindhis very dear to her heart. She has presented research papers on the subject at various levels and national seminars.

   About the book: The book deals with the life of Sindhi Hindus in pre-partition Sindh and socio-economic cultural pattern in their homeland. The snowballing of the tension in partition period uprooted the Hindu population from their homeland and sent them scattering into all parts of India, but mainly to Bombay where their psyche as trading and banking community could best be nurtured. Ulhasnagar, once a military camp, became a new homeland of this business community where they restarted life from scratch. Their goal of economic rehabilitation necessitated many changes in their priorities and personality.

   Though in their quest of money making the Sindhis have built large business empires, they have destroyed an edifice which is linked to their roots - the Sindhi culture. Today this culture with its rich language is fast disappearing. How these can be preserved in the multilingual states where Sindhis have settled forms the essence of the book.

   The book is broken into 6 chapters. The first two describe the history of Sindh and partition itself. The third goes into the events and nuances that Sindhi Hindus experienced in Karachi and the early days of partition that churned their thinking processes to leave Sindh for India. It describes in detail the influxes of the Mohajirs, the laws that discriminated against non-Muslims and the riots on Tuesday, January 6, 1948 that influenced a majority of Sindhi Hindus to leave.

   The next two chapters go into great detail about the extent of the conditions of refugees in camps, the plight of re-settled Sindhi families and the challenges they faced in a new country. These two chapters form the core of Dr. Anand's research.

   The last chapter delves into the almost non-existent Sindhi culture amongst the newer generation, threat of its extinction, some of the reason behind it and solutions to achieve a National Integration of Sindhis. It is a culmination of many theories and suggestions to improve the stature of Sindhiat in India, the social standing of Sindhis amongst Indians and self esteem of Sindhis themselves.

   The book is very well researched and documents the events from July 1947 to the mid 50's. It is well written and easy to read, with the authors comments and opinions on historic events. It contains surveys of Sindhi Hindus that provide a glimpse of their hardships experienced during that time. The book is also an archive of information for those looking at the social thinking structure of Sindhi's in the Ulhasnagar and Bombay. I recommend this to both the Sindhi Muslims and Hindus especially, to understand the tragedy experienced by those affected by this 'Tryst With Destiny' in 1947.

   Anil Balchandani

2 comments about The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society).

1. BY LAKSHMI SUBRAMANIAN

   The Global World of the Indian Merchant 1750-1947: Traders of sind from bukhara to panama

   By Claude Markovits, Cambridge, Price not mentioned

   This is a book many of us have been waiting for. Periodic pronouncements have been made about the resilience and prescience of the Asian trader operating within and against the writ of the colonial economy of the 19th and 20th centuries. Along with these, the long debate on the world economy has sustained a level of interest and enquiry about the dynamics of non-European commercial activity in widely dispersed areas of the globe. Serious gaps and doubts have, however, remained and we are often left wondering, "Whose world economy was it anyway?" Was Asian enterprise a tedious aggregate of small, but countless, transactions indulged in by the colonial state with its own calculations and compulsions.

   On the other hand, the visibility and movement of Indian merchant groups in the emerging global economy since the 19th century have invested the Asian experience with a certain significance, which, in turn, warrants a closer examination of the process, its antecedents and its projections. Claude Markovits's study attempts precisely to do all this and more, with the result that we have a narrative that is rich in detail, sensitive to the play of historical configurations and supported by a theoretical framework that is balanced and not overly ambitious. He focuses on two communities - the Shikarpuris and the Sindworkis, and through them proceeds to weave a story of dispersal and circulation, rather than that of a unitary diaspora with overarching Indian connotations.

   Markovits argues that south Asian merchant movements were essentially temporary migrations and that the settlements, when these did occur, were largely involuntary. Nor did these correspond to any unitary category of caste, territory or religion and were in every sense the outgrowths of regional compulsions and local realities. The experience of the two communities chosen by Markovits, the Shikarpuris and Sindworkis, illustrates the juxtaposition of local processes with that of the global economy, where the activities of merchant groups took on a fuller meaning.

   Obviously, such an approach is admissible when dealing with the operation of a colonial economy and not that of a national one, and it is no coincidence that the study should stop at 1947. Within this framework of local and global history, Markovits teases out a fascinating story of the merchant networks of Sind region, that has suffered an overdose of orientalizing descriptions. He also traces their emergence in the context of 18th century transition politics and their expansion in the high noon of British imperialism and Russian centralization. There is also the story of their spatial advance from Bukhara to Panama. The relocation of the south Asian merchant networks in the world economy in the 18th century is a well-established fact, even if its implications are not so well drawn out. The 18th century, in particular, is seen to have constituted a turning point in the positioning of the Asian merchants who suffered major reverses and in the process facilitated the marginalization of Asia in the newly emerging world economy centred firmly in Europe. The process of relocation was not coeval with that of decline and dislocation, and according to Markovits, it was marked by sharp regional and sub-regional variations.

   Additionally, the establishment and workings of the colonial economy reared a sub-stratum of commercial functions and operations that were deftly handled and taken over by enterprising indigenous groups. It is within this context that Markovits positions his communities. He argues that far from operating in a residual space left open by the colonial dispensation, these merchant networks adapted successfully to a trading world dominated by European capital through a complex process of collaboration and conflict. The Shikarpuri and Sindworki networks developed under very different circumstances. The surge in Indo-Central Asian trade from the 1840s enabled the Shikarpuris to rework an existing network of caravan commerce and credit transactions under the dispensation of the Uzbeg khanates of central Asia. Meanwhile, the Sindworkis regrouped under the British dispensation and took advantage of the extension of the colonial economy from Bombay into Sind to operate a trade of truly global proportions. The Shikarpuri network was forced out of its base in Sind by changes that followed in the wake of colonial subjugation and changing configurations of commercial exchange. They exploited their old connections with central Asia, Iran and Afghanistan to emerge as principal moneylenders and traders, especially in the khanate of Bukhara. The details of the network have been deduced from a mass of legal material that the Russian authorities felt compelled to share with the British government in the eventuality of any death-related succession dispute involving a British Indian subject. One of the most striking features of the network to emerge from this legal discourse is the working of Shikarpuri panchayats in most localities of central Asia. The Sindworkis, on the other hand, were very much part of the colonial economy and began as modest peddlers of native crafts to a European clientele. This venture expanded substantially to include, in subsequent years, a wide range of curios that found their way into the European markets. Their initiative and intrepidity were quite remarkable. Consider the trader who protested against Australian immigration restrictions and flashed his credentials as a trader of repute who bought and sold exotic goods besides carving the occasional tortoise shell or setting a piece in jade. Curios became doubly important as the tourist traffic caught the fancy of European visitors, enabling a massive expansion of Sindhi enterprise on both sides of the Suez that soon turned to trade in textiles and financial speculation.

   In all, this is a fascinating story of commercial dynamism. What makes the story even more fascinating is the exploration of the proclivity to spatial and social mobility among the networks. Caste did not play a central role in forging solidarities. The affinity seemed very much to lie with the region and with the ability to travel extensively and, in the process, ensure a circulation of skills and entrepreneurial labour.

   Circulation however, remained confined to males, very rarely did wives accompany their partners. The absence of female company did not, however, deflect the passion for riches as merchants alternated between celibacy and permissiveness to balance the sexual economy of circulation.




2. The author deserves great praise for a very well written account on a subject often ignored by historians. The people of Sindh have been excellent traders for a few thousand years and the author has done well to describe the development of 2 Sindhi networks developed in the past couple hundred years.

   I'd highly recommend this book (and not only because it covers the history of my ancestors).

   sb

No comments about Hindi self-instructor, with key: One month's course, specially prepared for South Indians, Maharashtrians, Bengalis, Parsis, Sindhis, Christians, Anglo-Indians, foreigners, etc., etc.

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2 comments about Cosmopolitan Connections: The Sindhi Diaspora, 1860-2000 (International Comparative Social Studies, Vol. 9) (International Comparative Social Studies).

1. "Falzon's is a rich ethnography of the Sindhis and an exemplar of the anthropological method. He meets the challenge of producing a translocal ethnography of a business community by using interviews and observations, and charts genealogies that map the spatiality of Sindhi social relations. The major challenge for him as an ethnographer was that the work became a multi-sited ethnography, in three places - Malta, London, and Bombay ... By locating his ethnographies in these three cities, Falzon uncovered a large amount of data on Sindhis all over the world. Falzon's work is not only useful for students of the Indian diaspora, it can also serve well in courses that seek to understand business and trade relations through an anthropological lens."



2. Mark-Anthony Falzon has produced a fine multi-sited ethnography, focusing on Sindhi businesspeople settled in Malta, London, and Bombay but evoking through their eyes connections to kinsmen and business partners in many other places. He uses his geneologies and interviews skillfully to establish the changing patterns of trade and residence before and after the 1947 partition of India that sent Hindu Sindhis out of the towns and villages of Sindh (now in Pakistan)and made Bombay the new heart of this cosmopolitan community; he uses them as well to theorize about business communities, showing how the Sindhis bridge the global and the local and link the scholarly fields of "merchant diasporas" and "immigrant entrepreneurs." The Sindhi relationships with nation-states and with each other could both be drawn upon, the latter especially in times of hardship when politics disrupted the former. This is a fascinating, highly competent study that will be of interest for both empirical and theoretical reasons to anthropologists, sociologists, and historians. It should also interest a more general readership, as it is well and accessibly written.

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