‘Then, when the British conquered Sindh and decided to make Sindhi the official language of the Province of Sindh, Sir Bartle Frere, the first Chief Commissioner of Sindh, issued an order in 1851, which required all officials and civil servants to pass an examination in colloquial Sindhi,’ she said. Hiranandani explained that in the early days, Sindhi had 12 or 13 scripts. Ours is a pure Sindhi script and we can proudly say that' (Shivdasani 2010). It is a combination that is why the Sindhi script has fifty-two letters, while Urdu has twenty-six and Arabic twenty-two. Panjabi, in a commemoration volume brought out on the occasion of Panjwani’s 70th birthday (1981).Īs Popati Hiranandani (1924–2005), author of more than 50 books, explained to this writer in an interview six years before her death, ‘The Sindhi script has been nourished by Sanskrit, Arabic and Urdu, but it is not any of these in themselves. ‘He has imbibed the Sufi spirit so well that he has become a worthy successor of the Sufi poets of Sind,’ wrote K.L. Described as a Sufi by those who heard him, Panjwani-poet, singer, novelist, dramatist, short-story writer-carried forward the tradition, becoming a household name in the post-Partition era, spreading the message of love and Sindhi culture in the horrendous refugee camps where displaced Sindhis suddenly found themselves. 1947), who founded the school of poets to which Panjwani belonged, along with Hari Dilgir, Hoondraj Dukhayal and Gobind Bhatia, among others (Ajwani 1957).
Panjwani himself was deeply influenced by this Trinity, and by Kishinchand Bewas (d. ‘He brings the kettle to the boil, Sachal takes the lid off from it, while Sami passes on the beverage to the rank and file of the people so that they may be brought to an intense awareness of God, even when engaged in the day-to-day affairs of life.’ ‘Shah, however, is the first and the foremost among these three ‘greats of Sind’, writes Panjwani (1987:29–30). Shah Latif was the first and the greatest of what came to be known as the ‘Trinity of Sindhi Poets’: joining him were Sachal Sarmast (1739–1827) and Chainrai Bachomal Dattaramani Sami (1743–1850), who spouted Vedic wisdom in his Sindhi shlokas. A recent translation of Shah Latif’s work in India is Seeking the Beloved (Katha) by Anju Makhija and Hari Dilgir, which won the Sahitya Akademi award in 2011. Shah Latif’s richly layered verses are still sung his Shah-jo-Risalo has seen several translations and his simple tales are the subjects of Sindhi folklore. In Latif’s vocabulary, the ascetic is a ‘Jogiaro’, ‘Lahooti’, ‘Veragi’, ‘Kapri’, ‘Babu Bekhari’, ‘Nango’, ‘Mawali’ and much more (Panjwani 1981). His vocabulary was so rich, Panjwani writes, that a single word-camel-was named variously as ‘Uth’, ‘Karaho’, ‘Todo’, ‘Bodo’, ‘Chango’, ‘Dachi’, ‘Jangho’, ‘Goro’, ‘Kanvat’ and ‘Mahri’, to name just a few. Shah Latif, often known as the Shakespeare of Sindh, ‘burst on the scene with his passion and his melody’, in the words of Ram Panjwani. It was during the reign of the Kalhoros that the mystic poet Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai (Novem– January 1, 1752) made his presence felt. Ajwani also observes that Qazan’s verse ‘bears witness to the most remarkable character of Sindhi poetry-the mingling of the twin streams of Hindu philosophy and Muslim faith to form the swelling waters of what is popularly known as Sufistic poetry (1957:254).’Ī page from Mukesh Tilokani's Selected Poetry of Shah Abdul Latif in calligraphy In his essay on Sindhi literature in the Sahitya Akademi publication, Contemporary Indian Literature (1957), Ajwani also notes that the first recorded Sindhi poetry is the verses of Qazi Qazan at the end of the 15th century, cast in doha form, and ‘uttering the note that is a constant feature in Sindhi poetry, namely that without the sight of the Beloved (or realisation of the Infinite), external accomplishments such as scholarship and piety are so many monsters of the deep to drag one down to perdition’. ‘Sindhi literature has vanished into this limbo of oblivion,’ Ajwani writes, ‘and no excavation can give us an idea of the Sindhi literature earlier than the sixteenth century’. Rakhal Das Bannerji’s epoch-making excavations in the 1920s unearthed Mohen-jo-Daro, the Mound of the Dead, revealing that as far back as 3240 BCE–2750 BCE, Sindh had a civilisation in many ways more advanced than that of Sumer or Egypt. Ajwani in his History of Sindhi Literature (1960), ‘The Sindhu has had a profound effect on Sindhi life and culture’, but its shifting character made Sindhi life unstable as the river constantly pushed its boundaries across the valley, wiping out whole towns, converting bustling ports into desert tracts. Back cover of Dr Parso Jessaram Gidwani’s book, Glimpses of Sindhi Language, showing the mighty SindhuĪccording to L.H.