Who are Sindhis

Imagine you are on tour with family, which language you will use for conversation with each other? The most common answer is Mother tongue and it leads to yet another question, which langue holds the status of mother tongue? Especially if we took the question in the context of cosmopolitan and world’s most scattered Sindhi community with very less population in any given part of globe.

The adaptive Sindhis are the masters in adopting the language, customs and traditions of the surrounding communities, hence you can see if a Sindhi, from Maharashtra, he/she sure to know Marathi, Gujrati, in Gujarat, Urdu, in Gulf Countries and German in Germany ------- .

In short Sindhi knows and hold a good command over the language of geographical region of which is native of. As at all places Sindhis are very less in numbers hence it is not possible for all to learn read and write Sindhi language. They are forced to take primary education in other than Sindhi language medium of instruction.

Here the question arose about the mother tongue? Will you identify Sindhi as the mother tongue in such situation? If not, again a new question will raise head before you “WHO ARE SINDHIS?”
 

Various Definitions For Sindhi

If we go by geographical and historical way, we can say the community lives on the bank of river Sindhu [in the ancient times was known as the Indus and you might be surprise to know that in world’s oldest written knowledge books Vedas reference of Ganga, the holly river comes only twice, where as, there are more than thirty places where name of river Indus is mentioned] holds the common name Sindhi for them.

In the views of our elders, native of Sindh are the Sindhi, but as at present ancestors of those forefathers are spread all over the globe and are the citizen of numerous other countries hence this become irrelevant.

Sindhi is community in the Hindu religion with faith in Jhulelal as their deity. With the present time this also seems irrelevant as Sindhis, who opted to live in Pakistan after 1947, most of them have adopted Islam as their religious faith, others who are scattered all over the world and are Hindu, they also adopted various panths.

Though most of them had do not discard Lal Uderolal from their life but it is hard truth that they don’t look towards Jhulelal as their religious God. The ceremonial procedures and rituals of the Nirankari Sindhis are a bit different from the rest of Hindu Sindhis. For example they don't need traditional Brahaman [Priest] for marriage and Agani Sanskar [Funerals] these duties are often performed by the head of Nirankari Bhavan in the city, even at many places Nirankari have either altered or discarded tradition of Barho (12th day from death) but still they are called sindhis.

If we look at our literature and try to define Sindhi, we can say that a community, which use language Sindhi to converse with each other, to express their thoughts either in written or verbal format is called Sindhis.

After 1947 ,a new dispute is in the air about the script of the Sindhi language. In India and many other geographical places we are having a negligible population hence due to lack of facilities, our younger generations are deprived of learning Sindhi language.

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