5 Quotes by Rita Kothari

Although the rich and prosperous Hindus of Sindh must have felt insecure and frightened in the new state of Pakistan, by and large, the threat to physical safety was relatively less in Sindh. The danger to the lives and property of Sindhi Hindus became palpable once Muslim immigrants, driven out of Bihar and the United Provinces, entered Sindh.

In the city of Ahmedabad where I live, a flight to Karachi takes less time than flying to Bombay, but arbitrary and tyrannical borders have made Sindh inaccessible to me in more ways than one.

Three months after Partition, when Acharya Kripalani (president, Indian National Congress) visited Sindh he noted that, ‘There was only a slight exodus of the Hindus and Sikhs from Sindh. It did not suffer from any virulent fanaticism. To whatever faith the Sindhis belonged, they were powerfully influenced by Sufi and Vedantic thoughts

I would learn many years later that although Sindh and Punjab had been geographically and culturally close, their experience of Partition was vastly different with respect to violence.

Unlike the Punjabis and Bengalis, the Sindhis were not coming to an ‘Indian’ part of Sindh because Sindh was not divided into east and west Sindh. It went in its entirety to Pakistan.