Subscribe
“Punjab, Sindh, Gujarat, Maratha…” most of us would remember the controversy that erupted a few years ago regarding the word ‘Sindh’ in the Indian National Anthem. Some quarters demanded that ‘Sindh’, now a province of Pakistan be removed and ‘Kashmir’ be added instead. This led to a strong reaction from the Sindhi community in India, who asserted that while their homeland was now part of a nation considered ‘hostile’, it was nevertheless the heart and soul of India, the home of Mohenjo-daro.
That feeling of alienation is not lost upon Sapna Ajwani. Growing up in the then-Bombay, the grandchild of Sindhi refugees who migrated to India after the Partition remembers the hostility her community encountered after their arrival. “When Hindu Sindhis came after the Partition, we were told that we dressed in a ‘funny’ way, spoke a ‘funny’ language and ate meat and fish. We were told that we were more ‘Muslim’ than ‘Hindu’ and in some extreme instances, asked to ‘Go back to Pakistan’,” she told Down To Earth (DTE).
This feeling of suspicion that she first met with in school, persisted in later years. “There are not many people who know about us. I used to come across many people who used to ask me who Sindhis are and what their food is like.”
She recounted a recent incident where a popular food journal came out with a series on cuisines from the 29 states of India. “Of course, Sindhi cuisine was missing. I told them we do not have a state but we have a cuisine. And we are a people. So why are we not featured?”
Ignorance about Sindh and Sindhis struck Ajwani hard. “Unlike Punjab and Bengal, Sindh was not partitioned. It became entirely a part of Pakistan. But it is so important to India’s history. Both ‘Sindh’ and ‘India’ are named after the Sindhu or Indus river. But people would not be able to pinpoint Sindh on a map.”
Ajwani wanted to do something for her people and tell their story. “We do not have a state. We also have largely lost our language. But we identify as a people from our food. I thought somebody had to spread the word and tell the story.”
That story has now taken the form of a book, Sindhi Recipes and Stories from a Forgotten Homeland (HarperCollins).
Ajwani migrated from Mumbai to London in 2005, where she worked as a banker for several years. But as her desire to tell the story of her people and their cuisine grew, she soon took an important decision.
“Before I wrote the book, I started hosting supper clubs. I left my job in banking. I used to cook for my friends and they used to love the food so I thought ‘let me tell the story of my people through their food’,” Ajwani said.
For her, Sindh is all about one great water body: the mighty Indus. The river emerges from Sengge Khabab in Tibet and traverses Ladakh, Kashmir and Pakistan’s Punjab before entering Upper Sindh and flowing through the land and finally discharging into the Arabian Sea near the city of Thatta.
“For me, Sindh is all about the river because the Indus has shaped the fortunes of Sindh over thousands of years. Wherever it moved, civilisation moved with it. The desert also moved in because one of the tributaries of the Indus dried up. We do not know whether it was the Saraswati or not. But that is the reason why part of Sindh became a desert,” she said. However, thanks to the Indus’ annual inundation (before dams were built upstream) Sindh’s fertile, soft soil allowed different crops like red rice and lotus stems to grow and fish to spawn. Many travellers through Sindh have written about the quality of its produce, said Ajwani.
The Indus flowing through Sindh to the sea means fish has a prominent place in Sindhi cuisine. Not just any but palla, known as hilsa or ilish on the other end of the subcontinent in Bengal. But now, with climate change and anthropogenic activities, the palla has become dearer in Sindh, says Ajwani, who travelled to her ancestral homeland before the pandemic to research for her book.
“It (palla) has already become dearer. When I was in Sindh, I was told this by vendors. So many dams have been built upstream on the Indus that the river is not getting any fresh water. Because of which the palla is not moving upstream to spawn. So, they are now having to import a lot of it from Iran. And it is very expensive. The same thing is happening in India too. It is really sad,” said Ajwani.
Sindh is geographically positioned as a frontier region of the subcontinent and a historic crossroads. From Darius to Alexander the Great, Muhammad Bin Qasim, the Mughals and Sir Charles Napier, Sindh has seen it all. All this has made Sindhis an enterprising lot. Sindhis have especially been skilled at mercantile professions and are spread across India and the world.
“It is basically all the influences that have come to us from across the world. We have been a trading outpost so we have had people passing through our shores all the time. So, although we were so far removed from South India, we cooked with all kinds of spices for example green cardamom and black pepper. Or asafetida which comes from Afghanistan and Iran. We even have a macaroni type dish in our cuisine called Makroliyun patata. This was all a result of the trading that was happening through Sindh’s shores because Sindhi traders went all over the world,” said Ajwani.
The last great upheaval in Sindh’s history, the Partition of the Subcontinent, played its own role at determining cuisine within the province. So, Karachi is today unique as one of the world’s few port cities where seafood is not usually a top draw.
“Karachi was a majority Sindhi city before the Partition. After the Partition, obviously changes happened everywhere with the influx of refugees from India. They came from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and other parts of India, who took their own cuisines with them. It is more common in Karachi to find a Nihari than any of the dishes which I mention in my book. You cannot even hear Sindhi being spoken there. You don’t find Sindhi food also. You do find places selling fish but you have to seek them out. But I did notice that some people are trying to revive Sindhi food. One place I visited, called Café Sindh, had quite a few Sindhi fish dishes on their menu like Seyal Machi, which is fish braised in onions and Machi ji Maani, which is a stuffed roti with fish,” Ajwani told DTE.
The fact that her book has come at a time when human movement and migration are in the news is not lost upon Ajwani. “Nobody leaves their land and goes somewhere else for enjoyment or fun. They are doing it to save their lives. Everyone had to undertake that perilous journey during the Partition and people are doing so now too. Somehow, we are not able to appreciate it. Just as migrants and refugees were looked down upon after the Partition, the same thing is happening now.”
Ultimately, she hopes her book will help in preserving the Sindhi legacy in future generations. “That is the idea of my book. It is not just telling young Sindhis about recipes but also the stories behind them. About how this food came about. And how it has been carried down generations which allowed me to identify as a Sindhi.”