Sindhi Halchal Archive

About

About a million Sindhis came to India after Partition. Since Sindh was undivided and Sindhis did not get a home state in India, they settled into various cities throughout the country. The advertisements in this archive are a way of expanding the lens of studying the Sindhi experience of partition. It looks at the community’s efforts to rehabilitate themselves through entrepreneurial activity. It also takes a closer look at the stereotype of the wicked, miserly Sindhi businessmen who make counterfeit goods to eke out unreasonable profits at almost no cost.

Sindhi Halchal Archive invites you to explore the history and the geography of the Sindhi enterprises in independent India. It also draws attention to the rhetoric of advertising used by the enterprises and the publishers of books. It is a study in advertising history and publication history that draws attention to how Sindhis articulated what they do.

About the PG Sindhi Library

P G Sindhi Library is an initiative to make the private library of Late Shri Parmanand Ghanshyamdas available and accessible to all those interested in Sindhi literature and culture. The library consists of books published in India after the Sindhi migration during and after the partition of India. The attempt is to make this metadata available in 3 scripts: Sindhi (also referred to as the Perso-Arabic script), Devanagari, and Roman. This archive is intended at helping: Sindhi community seek information about the trajectories of culture and history through access to Sindhi writing Researchers with an interest in South Asian studies engage with Sindhi literature

The Archival Team

Soumik Kar

Soumik Kar is an industrial photographer and filmmaker based in Mumbai. He has worked as a photojournalist with India Today Group and Outlook Publishing. He has worked on data collection for Sindhi Halchal Archive.

Jintu Alias

Jintu Alias has a PhD in English. Her research is dedicated to fiction about Kochi’s cosmopolitan history. She has been teaching courses in English, communication skills, and English literature to undergraduate students She has contributed to the database management aspects of Sindhi Halchal Archive.

Merin Thomas

Merin is an architect and industrial designer specialising in furniture design. Her main interests revolve around making tangible elements and bringing things to life. She is behind the designing and functioning of the website for Sindhi Halchal Archive.

Allu Dhanvesh, Sohan Kumar, Praneeth Saikumar

Dhanvesh, Sohan, and Praneeth are BTech students pursuing computer science and engineering at SRM University, Andhra Pradesh. They have contributed to the database management aspects of Sindhi Halchal Archive.

Sai Phanindra

Sai is a developer at Catto - a tech co-op that develops public-interest software. He has an interest in archives, open knowledge and digital commons.

Saketh Varma

Saketh is a developer at Catto. He works on web development and data projects to create tools that are open, accessible, and built for the greater good.

Soni Wadhwa, The Archivist

Soni Wadhwa currently teaches Literature Studies at SRM University, Andhra Pradesh. She works in digital humanities projects that support her larger research area of Sindhi Studies. Two of her digital projects are active. One is PG Sindhi Library which is a digital archive of Sindhi literature published in India. Another is a project on Sindhi libraries in India which is funded by IIT Indore. She has recently received a grant from George Mason University (USA) for her research on the making of Sindhi literature as an Indian literature. Sindhi Halchal Archive is her project dedicated to publishing history of Sindhi literature in India.