Saving Sindhi
“Hin sa Sindhi mein gaalayo,” my grandmother’s feeble but decisive voice travels to San Francisco via my old laptop. She’s instructing my cousin and sister-in-law to constantly speak in our mother tongue around my nearly eight month old niece.
Like most cosmopolitan Sindhi families today, insistence on speaking the language extensively - and consciously - is a dinner table talking point in mine too. To an outsider this conversation might sound normal, albeit peculiar. I mean, why would anyone have to remind people to talk in their own mother tongue? What many might miss out on is the butter paper thin sense of alarm in the voices.
Sindhi is in deep trouble.
Sure, it’s not on a UNESCO list of dying languages, and won’t be on it any time soon. Some may say the above statement is just me jumping the gun, but anyone who comes from a Sindhi family will tell you the rather unusual problem we face here.
The number of people who speak the language is dwindling with each generation, and the number of people who can read and write, even further. I’ll try to address these separately.
In India, Sindhis - quite like Parsis - are stateless. “Language refugees” is how you could best refer to the lot, one of the communities most deeply affected by the partition. Post migrating to India, the Sindhi populace moved to cosmopolitan cities and town centers in droves. Since there’s no separate state for Sindhis in India, we ended up moving to pretty much every state in the country, living in huge groups, which have slowly turned into Sindhi colonies most cities and towns inevitably now have. Despite the fact that we live in large societies and extended joint families, you won’t find many speaking in Sindhi outside of their homes or family circles.
Imagine hanging out with someone from your own community. Inevitably, you’ll sprinkle words, sentences or even have entire conversations in your own language. This doesn’t happen when two Sindhis meet. I’ll admit, this is a generalisation but not one too far away from what the truth is. I’m guilty of this too. Unless I need to share a secret with a Sindhi friend of mine, I rarely ever talk to them in the language.
The biggest culprits, in my opinion, to be blamed for the spoken language dwindling is the first generation Sindhi kids born post the partition. Read: the present 50, 60-somethings, from my parents’ generation. The struggle to make a living and city life caught up with the community, and the culture and language took a bit of a back seat.
I can’t blame them, though. Imagine coming from a family that’s seen the horrors of the partition, come to a whole new place, settled in refugee camp with virtually no money. Surely, the most important aim of the new gen kids must’ve been to educate themselves the best they can and get a steady job so they can lend a hand with expenses. Learn English, Hindi, the local language. Sindhi takes a bit of a backseat.
What happens when this generation has children? While trying to imbibe other values, language takes a backseat yet again. For most Indians, their mother tongue is second nature, but with Sindhis, not so much.
Here’s a picture of Dal Pakwan, because yum.
Alarmed by this dwindling number of Sindhi population, my own school started compulsory language sessions for kids aged 10 and up. In some cases, it was even forced upon us. Personally, I wanted to learn French in school, but wasn’t given the option since I happened to be born in a Sindhi family. Compounding my annoyance at having to learn the language by force was the absolute patriarchal, outdated Sindhi literature that was shoved down our throats. But that’s a story for another time.
My school faced another hurdle while trying to introduce the language to the children. Sindhi is typically written in the Arabic script; the same script used to write Urdu. You write from right to left and have a whole different set of alphabet to learn. The two forked issue was: one, finding someone who could actually read and write the language and was not past the retirement age, and two, teaching 10 year olds a whole new script.
Needless to say, the experiment was a bit of a dud and eventually my school gave up the Arabic script for a tamer Devnagiri. As a result, my classmates and I would read and write Sindhi in “Hindi”.
Which brings me to my second point. Can Sindhi actually have a better chance of survival if it evolves and drops the Arabic script? Writing in the Devnagiri script is commonplace and while the language can’t be as nuanced in it as it can be in the Arabic script, it’s worth a shot. Reading is easier, as is writing and could actually encourage the “younger” generations to explore the language a little further. (I can almost see my grandmother, fluent in five or six different languages frowning at the thought, but I’m clutching at straws here.)
Let me be honest here, though. Most of my observations are based on my family, friends, and other Sindhi families I know, who come from predominant metro cities of India, or are based abroad. When you go further into tier two and tier three cities in Rajasthan or Gujarat, you’ll find families who talk in thick Sindhi and follow cultural norms to the T. Let me assure you, though, they’re a rarity, possibly an anomaly in the community right now.
The thing that gets my goat currently, is the silly victim complex that most Sindhis have currently.
“I toh speak Sindhi all the time, it’s other people who don’t.”
“Arre yaar, it’s because of all those people who marry outside the caste,” is my absolute favourite excuse.
One of the reasons why I was compelled to put my thoughts down (for those of you who made it all the way here, you’re awesome) was because I was told by a Sindhi guy that, hypothetically, if I marry a non-Sindhi, my kids will never learn the language. Even on my assurance that I’ll make sure the kid respects both sides’ languages and cultures, I was scoffed at and told,
“Your child will probably just meet your side of the family 12 times and year, which isn’t enough. Besides, will your husband’s family be okay with it?”
Yeah, I won’t even get into that. Seriously, though, Sindhis, if you’ve made it this far,
“beyan ji titt munjhe gui mein na vijho”
(non-Sindhis, this is the best translation ever: do not put others’ farts up my ass). Shove your excuses, speak to each other in Sindhi a little more, your grandparents will probably give you an extra 100 bucks for the attempt. Don’t be shy if you can’t do this well the first time round, we all have to start somewhere. Do your bit to keep Sindhiyat alive. Cheers!