Summary information

Study title

Sindh Is Not a Piece of Territory: Sindhi Belonging in India, 2019-2021

Creator

Shahani, U, University of Cambridge

Study number / PID

854774 (UKDA)

10.5255/UKDA-SN-854774 (DOI)

Data access

Open

Series

Not available

Abstract

This article was published on the anniversary of India's Republic day in January 2021 for the well-known online publication The Leaflet's special issue on citizenship, for a non-academic audience. The article traces a history of the Sindhi refugee diaspora in India in the aftermath of the partition of India, the absence of a linguistic and ethnically defined territory to which they could claim belonging, and the implications of this for their resettlement in India. The article looks back at how religion, ethnicity, and caste intersected with a lack of territorial belonging to produce Sindhi citizenship in India and the refugees' own struggles to claim belonging in India.In 2017 the Sindhi Hindu brothers Srichand and Gopichand Hinduja from the Shikarpur region of Sindh topped The Sunday Times' Rich List of the UK's wealthiest residents. Sindhi Hindus form the world's most widespread if not the most numerous South Asian diaspora. They have a long history of travel for trade and banking, for which evidence is available from the sixteenth century (although historians suggest that they were a highly mobile community even before this). They established more permanent roots outside of Sindh after the 1947 partition of India. When the British divided their Indian empire in 1947, unlike Punjab, Bengal, and Assam, they did not partition Sindh (today a part of the Muslim-majority country of Pakistan), despite the minority campaign for a partition of the region. Sindh's 'partition' in 1947 was thus a deterritorialised and demographic one, producing over a million 'non-Muslim' refugees who resettled in India and abroad, including the United Kingdom. Sindhis have played a significant role in the UK's economic, political, legal and social histories, however the origins of this diaspora remain relatively unknown in the UK and even in India. Often mistaken for Punjabis and Gujaratis in both countries, they tend to keep a low-profile. They do not follow orthodox Hindu religious...
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Topics

Methodology

Data collection period

01/10/2019 - 31/03/2021

Country

United Kingdom, India, Pakistan

Time dimension

Not available

Analysis unit

Geographic Unit
Text unit
Other

Universe

Not available

Sampling procedure

Not available

Kind of data

Text

Data collection mode

This is an article largely based on historical research carried out in archives such as The British Library, The National Archives of India, The Sindh Archives and legal archives such as the repositories of case law of the Indian Supreme Court and High Courts.

Funding information

Grant number

ES/T007788/1

Access

Publisher

UK Data Service

Publication year

2021

Terms of data access

The Data Collection only consists of metadata and documentation as the data could not be archived due to legal, ethical or commercial constraints. For further information, please contact the contact person for this data collection.

Related publications

Not available