Sindh

"As it is, everything in India attracts me. It has everything that a human being with the highest possible aspirations can want. But when I first visited Sind in 1916, it attracted me in a special way and a bond was established between the Sindbis and me that has proved capable of bearing severe strains. I have been able to deliver to the Sindhis bitter truths without being misunderstood."

"[But, in spite of these alliances the power of the Arabs in Sindh continued to decline...] The people of India returned to idolatry with the exception of the inhabitants of Qassah. A place of refuge to which the Moslems might flee was not be found, so he built on the further side of a lake, where it borders on al-Hind, a city which he named al-Mahfuzah establishing it as a place of refuge for them, where they should be secure.... The governors kept fighting the enemy and seizing whatever came into their hands, and subduing the neighbourhood whose inhabitants rebelled."

"The toleration which the native Sindians enjoyed in the practice of their religion, was greater than what was usually conceded in other countries; but it was dictated less by any principle of justice or humanity, than the impossibility of suppressing the native religion by the small number of Arab invaders. ...But, where power had, for a short time, enabled the Moslims to usurp the mastery, the usual bigotry and cruelty were displayed. At Debal, the temples were demolished, and mosques founded; a general massacre endured for three whole days; prisoners were taken captive; plunder was amassed... At Nairun, the idols were broken, and mosques founded, notwithstanding its voluntary surrender... At Kawar, and 'Askalanda, all the men in arms were put to the sword, and the women and children carried away captive. At Multan, all men capable of bearing arms were massacred; six thousand ministers of the temple were made captive, besides all the women and children; and a mosque was erected in the town."

"Sindh, the province around the lower Indus River, happens to be the root of the name ‘India’ itself, derivative from the Greek river-name Indos, from the Persian form ‘Hindu’ of Sanskrit ‘Sindhu’, i.e., the Indus river. It contains Mohenjo-Daro, with the Priest King, the Dancing Girl and Shiva Pashupati, famous icons not of ‘5,000 years of Pakistan’ but of Hindu civilization. Of course, Sindh deserves to return to India. One day, when Pakistan has lost its reason for existing, it will."

"The conquest of Sindh was the first and last great achievement of the Arabs in India."

"“It is not an uncommon phenomenon for prominent Hindus who are sticking on to the soil of Sind to be accosted while going about even on the main streets by Muslims and threateningly asked to either embrace Islam or go out of Pakistan.... “Our Gurmandir in Karachi became lately the residence of Sydney Cotton, the smuggler of arms to Nizam’s Hyderabad of yesterday. Most of our religious places, shrines, temples and Gurdwaras have been occupied by Muslims. The scriptures have been destroyed and the valuables have been pilfered and safely appropriated. Some of these places have also been turned into mosques where the Faithful congregate and read their Friday prayers to Allah. All educational institutions are similarly occupied and converted into the Schools and Colleges for Muslims.”"

"The turning out of non-Muslims from Sind is very amply illustrative of the naked policy of turning out of Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan, for no other reason whatever except that they were not Muslims. There was a policy of systematic terrorization of Hindus. Their business premises were looted, their womenfolk molested, and the avenues of normal respectable life entirely closed to them. Thus, through terror and intimidation, within the period of less than a year twelve lakhs out of the fourteen lakhs of Hindus in Sind have been forced to migrate to India."

"On the evidence of Baladhuri's account of the conquest of Sind, there were certainly massacres in the towns of Sind when the Arabs first arrived."

"Among all these barbaric assaults on its history and culture and all these ages of occupation and dawns of independence Sindh has retained and maintained its separate historical and cultural identity as a pluralist, co-existent, tolerant and harmonious society where all the different cultures, languages and ideas of the foreign and native people have not only influenced each other but accepted and absorbed the common message of the human civilisation."

"“This historical synthesis of religions, philosophies and civilisation from the east and west has given our motherland Sindh a distinct place in the history of humanity."

"While the Sindh gave India its name, the Sindh citizens who pioneered in the fields of industry, philosophy, marine navigation, mathematics and astronomy are today chained by the Islam-o-fascist terrorist unconstitutional forced federation of Pakistan by the military might of Punjabi imperialism in the name of Islam."

"A spirit of religious toleration cannot be enumerated among the few virtues of the Sinde government or its subjects ; and in no respect whatever is the oppression of the Ameers more apparent than in their zeal for the propagation of the Mahommedan faith. It is really difficult to conceive how any Hindoos should have continued to reside in the country ; and the fact can only be accounted for by that attachment, which man shares with the vegetable, to the soil in which he is reared. The indignities they suffer are of the most exasperating description."

"From ancient times both Makran and Sind had been regarded as belong­ ing to India, even when these regions - as recurrently happened - were under Persian political control. The Arabic literature often conflates ‘Sind’ with ‘Hind’ into a single term but also refers to ‘Sind and Hind’, to distinguish the two. Sind, in point of fact, while vaguely defined ter­ritorially, overlaps rather well with what is currently Pakistan. It def­initely did extend beyond the present province of Sind and Makran; the whole of Baluchistan was included, a part of the Panjab, and the North- West Frontier Province. Sind derived its name and identity from the river which in Sanskrit was called Sindhu (meaning literally ‘river’ or ‘stream’), i.e. the ‘Indus’ of the Greeks and Romans, the Mihran of the Arabs. ‘The land of Sind’ designated the alluvial plains created by the river on both sides in its middle and lower course, from Attock to the coast, with varying por­tions of the rocky uplands (Kuhistan) adjoining Baluchistan and of the sandhills of the Thar."

"Desert. But the land of Sind was old: seventeen miles from Karachi we came to a necropolis of many acres on an eminence in the wide wasteland: tombs two to four centuries old, of decorated soft stone, block set on block, unmortared, to form little stepped pyramids: a dead tradition, perhaps enshrining older mysteries, but now, in modern Pakistan, just there, in the desert."