Maan Kedayan

While filling an application form for a South Asian journalists’ training program, I stumbled across the section of “Ethnicity”. The programme being South Asian, it was obviously expected that people belonging to various ethnicities would apply therefore the question was not surprising. What put me in a dilemma was that I myself did not know what my ethnicity was.

For someone who is born to a mother, whose parents were from Lucknow, India, but who herself was born and brought up sometimes in London and sometimes in Karachi, and a father who is Persian by descent, born in Hyderabad Deccan, brought up in Chittagong (East Pakistan), and is now living in Karachi, it is a confusing phenomenon to decide what your ethnicity really is. Is it the race? Is it the common roots you share with your ancestors?

I am myself from Karachi, born and brought up there, never experiencing another city within the country even. Irregardless of this fact, I have missed out on my own language.

Not Urdu. I am talking about Sindhi. Urdu is my language which has been handed down from my ancestors, (though Farsi is lost upon me to a large extent), and of course living in Karachi, anyone gets to know Urdu especially its street slang terminology.

But it is Sindhi that I am talking about right now. Sindhi, that beautiful desert language, the language that sends a shiver through me, just upon hearing its melodious ups and downs, its lilting tone, its complex sounds. Sindhi – the language of my land.

The mere desire to ‘belong’ to this land, of the majestic Sindhu River, and the many generations of people that it has left behind, is not enough for me as a person. I realized this after I started living in Lahore a year ago. Unfortunately, my saying that I was a Sindhi, was not enough to prove my identity here. I had to know the language.

Throughout my Cambridge based school system, I was never taught the importance of learning my own regional language. Stress was laid upon English and Urdu, as if these were the only two languages which decided who I was. English of course was and still is upheld as a symbol of status and was the ‘most important’ thing to learn, while Urdu was one of those which marked “our culture” (and who knows what that is).

But there was hardly any mention of Sindhi. Never any mention of it during the classes, never any acceptance of its culture, or its people, in a class where students belonged to all kinds of ethnic backgrounds. Some had Sindhi speaking feudal families, but these were those families which taught their children that to speak in English was way cooler than anything else. Later they would go study abroad and forget about their own land and people.

Meanwhile, those students who were being educated by the Matriculation board, had to learn Sindhi. For us though, it was a relief, because it was being saved from giving an exam of an additional subject.

But today, living in Pakistan, I find that my language base has not paid off much. I write in English and use it even more than Urdu, except when speaking, when I am bilingual. But I often crave for the feeling of being able to unravel my mind in this deep, poetic language which should have been mine from the beginning. I am Sindhi, yet I do not know my own language. It is a shameful and embarrassing experience for me when asked about my ethnicity. And today, in order to travel within Sindh, my own homeland, in order to search for the history of my land, I should have been fluent in this language.

I have therefore decided that I must dedicate myself to learning this. Every other language will follow, but my own language, I must be aware of. Until then, I have no identity of my own, but only that handed down by my multi-cultural ancestors.