In this excerpt from an interview with Kavita Puri from 2017, Geeta Daswani describes feeling uprooted and landless after Partition. She believes that Sindhi culture, tradition and community have been lost because it is no longer connected to a homeland. She describes feeling unsettled by not having a home to return to.

Who are the Sindhi people?

Sindhis are an ethnic group who are native to the Sindh region, which is in modern-day Pakistan. After the Partition of India, many Hindus and Sindhi from Sindh moved to India, leaving behind the land that had been in their family for generations. 

About Kavita Puri’s Partition Voices

In 2017 BBC journalist Kavita Puri led a project to mark the 70th anniversary of the Partition of India. Through interviews, the Partition Voices team directly documented the experiences of those who lived through this traumatic time and subsequently moved to Britain, as well as stories from their children and grandchildren. The testimonies recall epic journeys and forced migration, violence, partings with friends and family, and the end of Empire, with some speaking about these events for the very first time. The outcome of this project was an award-winning three-part series for BBC Radio 4 titled Partition Voices, and later an acclaimed book of the same name. The full recordings and transcripts from Partition Voices are archived at the British Library Sound Archive, with collection reference C1790.

GEETA DASWANI:

Any community without land is not called community because then you – because we were scattered all over. If we were given some special land – a piece of land in India to make our own Sindh, where all of Sindhis were there, we could have saved our culture, tradition, community, every single thing which is quite rich. We’ve got the richest literature in Sindhi and our big poet, the Shah Latif; you can compare him with Shakespeare, so far the poetry is concerned and the thought - depth in the thought. So because we didn’t get any land piece, and neither we are fighter Sindhis, still we are just keeping quiet.

KAVITA PURI:

And, but, but for you personally, just describe your sense of feeling uprooted from having left Hyderabad, going to the South of India, and then finding yourself in this awful military barracks. How did you feel?

GEETA DASWANI:

Still – no, no, after having family, children, your family system, living, every single thing, I think we had to just – I can say we compromised with our sentiments. Still I feel uprooted because if we were there, our relatives, our friends, our neighbourhood, everything was there, might be more safe emotionally, though emotionally still we feel, we are not – so, I don’t know how to put it in what words.

KAVITA PURI:

So, you’re saying that you still feel uprooted because of what happened 70 years ago.

GEETA DASWANI:

No, again, we feel second time again because from Sindhu we went to India. From India, we are here again to foreign country, which we just can’t say it is our land. Still we are landless. If we go to India, we don’t have any land, we can’t go to our hometown because somebody else has taken. So still we are just hanging.

KAVITA PURI:

You feel unsettled?

GEETA DASWANI:

Yeah, mentally. Mentally we feel unsettled.