First my childish naiveté, and then my teenage arrogance, blinded me from the 80 years of history embodied in the grandparents that lovingly received my sister and I each year. My grandfather’s passing in 2005 was a harsh reminder that I could not continue to wait until the next annual family India trip to spend time listening to and recording his memories.

Since then, both a growing academic interest in themes of movement and partitioning along with the continuous personal exploration of my own multi-hyphenated identity have shaped my decision to commit myself to listening, and through the Sindhi Voices Project, encouraging others to do the same.

The Sindhi Voices Project (SVP) aims to engage communities in the production of their histories. Through a step-by-step oral history interview field kit and oral history interview how-to workshops, we are listening to and sharing the stories of people with connections to Sindh.

(Click here to view images of some of the narrators that have shared their stories with the SVP.)

Growing up in the United States, my co-director Neena Makhija and I heard stories of two recent family migrations, those of our grandparents from Sindh to India and of our parents from India to the states. Some of the questions that intrigue us include: How do we inherit memories? What kinds of things shape the way in which we collectively and individually remember the past? How do we remember events that we did not physically experience? How do communities and individuals experience forces of history and configure their identities accordingly? How may physical borders translate into community borders and fragmented or selective memories?

We understand and embrace the reality that labels and terms like “Sindhi” are dynamic and mean different things to many people. By “Sindhi Voices” we refer to Sindhi experiences and worlds which are inclusive of a wide range of ethnic, class, linguistic, national, and religious backgrounds. We ourselves identify in many different ways sometimes uniquely and sometimes simultaneously that hold varying levels of significance for us. Thus it is our hope that this project will contribute to a more in-depth, complex understanding of identities at large while inspiring other kinds of groups and communities to engage in dialogue and participatory media initiatives as well.

The 1947 Partition of British India yielded one of the largest mass migrations of people in contemporary history. The Sindh province, now located in Pakistan, experienced a huge efflux and influx of people and, like the rest of South Asia, continues to fall prey to conflict along the reductive ethnic and religious lines imposed and hardened in the haste partitioning of the subcontinent.

The SVP is invested in the critical reflection of the histories we are seeking out and hopes to complicate binaries like Hindu-Muslim and Sindhi-Muhajir that emerge in the era under consideration and are still in vogue. We aim to integrate the oral histories into a curriculum for Sindh based and diasporic youth to think through their histories and unpack their inherited memories and any prejudices.

As many of the oral histories illustrate, the drawing of territorial maps and borders too often does not correspond to the complex ambiguity of lived realities.  To further explore these intersections, we strive to situate our stories with collections from other communities that are also largely shaped by themes of movement and partitioning.

I’m writing this post from Dallas, Texas after having spent the past eight months in western India and Sindh, Pakistan getting this project off the ground. So far we’ve recorded 40 interviews and have conducted 12 interview how-to workshops. During my first and most amazing visit to Sindh, I was intrigued to hear some people, with varying degrees of Sindhi language fluency though all more advanced than my lack, who while born in Sindh with parents sometimes born elsewhere refer to me, born and raised in Texas, as “usli sindhi” or “authentic Sindhi” in implied contrast to themselves.  Perhaps I should have felt flattered, but I just felt a bit embarrassed.

Especially interesting is this marking when I recall that personal interviews with my elder family members in Jacobabad, my paternal grandfather’s birthplace, revealed that my ancestors were Seraiki speakers from Multan and Balochistan, which may or may not smoothly fit into some conceptions of Sindhi identity. Where does my authenticity stand now? Regardless, particularly significant are these kinds of ascribed to and prescribed upon claims of authenticity when coupled with shades of entitlement that shape configurations and re-configurations of spaces and territories, national, religious, ethnic, and then some.

In future blogposts, we plan to reflect on some of the interviews that have been conducted in the last year as well as examine the interesting questions and issues that have arisen as the project has expanded. If you‘d like to listen to or share a story, you can download an interview field kit, currently available in English, Hindi, Sindhi, and Urdu. Other ways to be a part of the process are listed on our website. With the optimism that we can get our technical and translation acts together in the near future, our website and later blogposts will include audio and video clips. In the meantime, please explore our Narrators album and share any comments or questions you may have for this project.

Natasha Raheja is an alumna of the University of Texas at Austin and will be entering the doctoral program in Anthropology and Cinema Studies at New York University this fall.

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