Routes of Return: A Study of Post-Partition Sindhi Travelogues

Abstract

The travelogue recording Sundri Uttamchandani’s visit to Sindh was published in the Sindhi journal Nayee Duniya in 1964. Ever since, the phenomenon of return has gained traction, giving rise to a substantial archive of travelogues by Sindhi literati and laypersons alike. Visiting homes and communities left behind at the time of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, these writers produce nostalgia-ridden images of the past. At the same time, however, they shape the contours of an emergent Sindhiness, and by forming empathetic bonds with Sindhi Muslims and non-ethnic Sindhis across the border, locate it in a transnational and transethnic framework. In doing so, these narratives undercut the dominant conceptions about the idea of return in scholarly discourses.

While return and homecoming are often associated with territorial nationalism, the ideas of travel and diaspora remain linked with cosmopolitanism, openness to difference and unbordered identities. In this paper, I attempt to unsettle this binary by reading Sindhi narratives of return, particularly those by writers Sundri Uttamchandani and Moti Prakash. Locating these texts in the broader context of travel writing in the subcontinent, this paper would attempt to explore the postcolonial constructions of the ideas of home and belonging through the diffusive perspective of travel. I would argue that far from leading to exclusionary identities, these narratives of return foreground a Sindhiness that is both rooted and mobile, attached to a home and simultaneously, on the move. Return, in this context, does not simply describe a completed, straightforward movement back to origins but instead, entails critical re-turns or reappraisals of origin and identity. In this sense, this paper would also argue for a focus on the hitherto unexplored idea of return in the context of Partition and its potential to unsettle the finality of borders.