Sindhi literature

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Sindhi literature

Written by Motilal Wadhumal Jotwani, Christopher Shackle•All

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Related Topics:: Indian literature

Sindhi literature, body of writings in the Sindhi language, an Indo-Aryan language used primarily in Pakistan and India. The beginning of Sindhi literature can be traced back to the 11th century in the stray verses of an Ismāʿīlī missionary. But it was the poetic works of Qadi Qadan (1463?–1551), Shah Abdul Karim (1536–1623), and Shah Inat Rizvi (late 17th century), three Sufi mystics, which gave Sindhi literature its distinctive character. The most-important feature of Sindhi literature is the coexistence of Vedantic thought and Islamic mysticism.

The body of religious poetry that grew in Sindhi from the 15th to the 18th century is entirely dominated by a religious liberalism. The greatest poet in Sindhi is Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit (1690–1752), known for his collection of poems Risalo. Latif criticized all forms of religious orthodoxies and preached the oneness of God and the universal brotherhood in a language charged with Sufi emotionalism. He was followed by another poet, also a Sufi saint, Abdul Wahhab Sachal Sarmast (1739–1826), who enriched the tradition of religious songs. His contemporary Sami (1743?–1850) was a Vedantist. He represented the tradition of bhakti poetry then in decline in other parts of India.

Another important feature of Sindhi literature is its intimate relationship with Perso-Arabic literary tradition. Sindh was an important centre of Indo-Persian poetry, and Sindhi poetry was strongly influenced by several Persian genres, such as the ghazal. Sindhi Hindus too participated in Sufi mystical poetry. The finest example is Diwan Dalpatram Sufi (died 1841), who composed a heroic ballad, a Persian jangnama about the famous Sufi martyr Shah Inayat of Jhok, whose death in 1718 was celebrated in several later poems. Sayyid Sabit Ali Shah (1740–1810) not only composed ghazals in Sindhi but also initiated the marsia genre, an elegy on the deaths of al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī and his followers at the Battle of Karbalāʾ.

After the British annexed Sindh in 1843, modernity became prominent in an age of prose. The four great prose writers of that era were Kauromal Khilnani (1844–1916), Mirza Qalich Beg (1853–1929), Dayaram Gidumal (1857–1927), and Parmanand Mewaram (1856?–1938). They produced original works and adapted books from Sanskrit, Hindi, Persian, and English. Kauromal Khilnani published Arya nari charitra (1905; “The Indo-Aryan Women”) and wrote extensively on the panchayat system, health, agriculture, and folklore. His style was simple and stately. Mirza Qalich Beg, nicknamed “the Book Machine” by Kauromal Khilnani, published more than 300 books that were creative and discursive. The most-learned Sindhi author of the era, Dayaram Gidumal, was distinguished for his elegant and eloquent prose, as seen in his essays on the Japji Sahib (1891), the Bhagavadgita (1893), and the Yoga darshan (1903). Parmanand Mewaram’s magazine, Jote, published essays by him and by other writers. Those essays were rich and varied in content and lucid and forceful in style, and some of them were published in Dil bahar (1904; “Spring for the Heart”) and Gul phul (2 vol., 1925–36; “Flowers”). Modern Sindhi literature prior to the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 was marked by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s influence, which worked not only on the Sindhi verbal expression but also on the Sindhi emotional and imaginative levels. A lively literary scene continues to flourish in the scattered Sindhi-speaking Hindu community settled in India since 1947, but the principal centre of Sindhi literature today is in Pakistan, which has been home to many fine writers, notably the outstanding modernist Sindhi poet Shaikh Ayaz (1923–97), who is also well known for his fine verse translation into Urdu of the classic Sindhi poetry of Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit.

Sisir Kumar Das Motilal Wadhumal Jotwani Christopher Shackle The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Characteristics

As a result of the historically isolated situation of Sindh in the lower Indus valley, Sindhi is distinguished within Indo-Aryan by many linguistic features of its own. Its closest relative is Siraiki, with which it shares the four distinctive implosive consonants /b/, /d/, /g/, and /j/, which are pronounced with indrawn breath and contrast phonemically with the usual /b/, /d/, /g/, and /j/. Sindhi also preserves the old short final vowels lost in most other Indo-Aryan languages—e.g., gharu ‘house,’ ghara ‘houses,’ versus Siraiki (and Urdu) ghar ‘house, houses.’ Sindhi is further distinguished by numerous items of vocabulary and by many complexities in its grammatical system, such as a large number of irregular past participles—e.g., ditho ‘saw’ from disanu ‘to see,’ muo ‘died’ from maranu ‘to die’—and the use of suffixed pronouns, as in atha-mi ‘is mine,’ atha-si ‘is his.’

Scripts

Various indigenous scripts were formerly used by Hindu business communities to write Sindhi, but those are all now obsolete. The Muslim majority always favoured the use of the Arabic script with some necessary adaptations to record Sindhi sounds. Finally standardized in 1853 by the British colonial authorities, that Sindhi-Arabic script has since been in general use. Distinctively written in the printed naskhī form as opposed to the cursive nastaʿlīq used for Urdu, the Sindhi script has 52 letters (as against 35 in the Urdu script). They include not only letters with special combinations of dots to write the implosive consonants and the distinctive set of nasal sounds but also numerous other dotted letters to write most of the aspirated consonants, such as bh, dh, th, and so on, that appear in Urdu as combinations of the simple consonants with -h.

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Languages & Alphabets

The distinctive appearance of the Sindhi-Arabic script is a matter of great cultural pride to most Sindhi speakers, whose cultural solidarity is reinforced by the universal appeal of the great symbolic figure of classical Sindhi literature, the Sufi poet Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit (1690–1752). Although attempts were made in India to encourage the writing of Sindhi in the national Devanagari script used for Hindi, the Sindhi-Arabic script continues to be generally current in both India and Pakistan.

Sindhi since 1947

The cultural homogeneity of Sindh that embraced both Hindu and Muslim speakers of Sindhi in the colonial period was severely disrupted by the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Most Hindu Sindhi speakers migrated to India, where they form a minority scattered among speakers of other languages. Their leading position in the urban society of Sindh in Pakistan was assumed by the immigrants known as muhajirs, the Urdu-speaking Muslims who came from the towns of North India to settle in large numbers in Karachi and other cities. The subsequent history of Sindh has been marked by a continuing tension between the indigenous Sindhi speakers, who have often felt marginalized, and the numerically superior muhajirs, whose overwhelming urban presence has allowed them to maintain a separate linguistic identity.