“Sindhi literature in post-partition India: marginalization, challenges, and digital interventions”

ABSTRACT

Sindhi, both as language and literature, has had a precarious position in the Indian literary canon. In the aftermath of Partition, various social, educational, and political realities resulted in Sindhi being on the periphery of literary scholarship. Given the historical background of Partition and resettlement in a new social and geographical space, this article aims to explore the current status of Sindhi literature produced and distributed in India. Specifically, it seeks to assess the readability and dissemination of Sindhi literature, particularly among the post-Partition generations within the Sindhi community. To uncover the present ground realities in the canon of Indian Sindhi literature, the research incorporates deep-focused interviews with Sindhi intelligentsia, mainly comprised of Sindhi writers, scholars, and publishers. The selected interviewees represent the last Sindhi generation of writers and scholars that is entirely conversant with the practices of Sindhi culture and literature due to their educational and historical background; they articulate their first-hand experiences and perceptions concerning the challenges in the overall expansion and development of Sindhi literature in post-Partition India. The research employs an autoethnographic approach as it is useful to draw from the personal academic experiences of the researcher, who comes from the third generation of post-partition Sindhis. The autoethnographic approach aids in performing a comprehensive analysis of the interviews, which contributes to locating the challenges restricting the maintenance, accessibility, and utility of Sindhi literature among the young Sindhi generations in India. The interviews underscore irrevocable literary and cultural damage that is being caused due to the marginalization of the Sindhi language and education in India; they also discuss the existing challenges and opportunities in developing Sindhi literature. The study concludes with the possibility of employing digital methods to facilitate access to and comprehension of Sindhi literature and cultural history among the young Sindhi generations.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Vandana Govindani

Ms. Vandana Govindani is a Ph.D. research scholar at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Discipline of English, IIT Indore. She works with Professor Nirmala Menon in different academic areas including Sindhi culture and literature in India, Digital Humanities, Minority literature and education, Cultural Heritage Archiving and Diaspora studies. She has obtained a Master’s degree in English Lit. and also a Bachelor’s degree in Education. She is the part of Digital Humanities and Publishing Research Studies Group at I.I.T. Indore She is also engaged with Sindhi oral narratives and histories.

Nirmala Menon

Dr. Nirmala Menon is a Professor, School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), Discipline of English, IIT Indore. A PhD from The George Washington University, she also leads the Digital Humanities and Publishing Research Group at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indore, India. Menon is the author of Migrant Identities of Creole Cosmopolitans: Transcultural Narratives of Contemporary Post coloniality (Peter Lang Publishing, Germany, 2014) and Remapping the Postcolonial, Canon: Remap, Reimagine (Palgrave Macmillan, UK 2017). Apart from the books, she has published more than 50 research papers in numerous international journals (Oxford University Press, Taylor and Francis, Sage among others) and speaks, writes and publishes about postcolonial studies, digital Humanities, and scholarly publishing.