Popati Hiranandani

Born in Hyderabad in Sindh, Hiranandani belonged to the Amil community and was the eldest of seven children. In an engaging in-depth interview with poet Menka Shivdasani (conducted six years before her death and published here for the very first time), she spoke at length of her decision to remain single and take care of her family after her father’s death. She went on to recount various memorable anecdotes: from her spirited rejection of a suitor whose family demanded dowry to her inspirational encounter with the great Indian educationist Sadhu Vaswani; from her early passion for music to her acerbic rebuff of the man in the audience who asked her why she didn’t obey the scriptures and get married.

But the most defining moment in Hiranandani’s life was undeniably the experience of Partition in 1947. She speaks in the interview of the violent fracture and the legacy of anchorlessness that was to haunt her and her community for decades to come. She describes it as a yagna, a sacrifice, in which her community was betrayed by self-serving statesmen, their willful blindness and their false promises, and doomed to remain landless and fugitive ever after. One also hears a young writer’s anguish in her poignant line: “We had to leave everything that was dear to us – the house, the garden, my writing table!”

Her life in Mumbai continued to be one of struggle, as she tried to come to terms with the trauma of dislocation, battled health issues in her later life and fought various cultural battles, including an ongoing crusade to invigorate a fast-dwindling readership in her mother tongue as well as a feisty defence of the Sindhi script against those who sought to replace it with Devanagari. Her love of language is evident in the passionate argument she offers to justify the Sindhi script which she describes as a syncretic amalgam, “nourished by Sanskrit, Arabic and Urdu” and yet uniquely itself.

The two poems in this edition, translated by accomplished poets Menka Shivdasani and Anju Makhija, are resonant with nostalgia and loss, preoccupations that were never to leave her as long as she lived. Ironically, when Hiranandani died in Mumbai at the age of eighty-one after a long struggle with cancer, it went largely unnoticed, while condolence meetings were held in neighbouring Pakistan in recognition of her contribution to Sindhi literature.

In her poem, ‘A Homeless Sindhi Woman’, she condenses her abiding life theme into a single phrase: “homeless in history’s graveyard”. Although a refugee for the greater part of her life, there is little doubt that she finds a secure resting-place in the annals of Sindhi literature.

PIW would like to offer special thanks to Lakhmi Khilani, Director of the Indian Institute of Sindhology, for his help in sourcing material related to Popati Hiranandani for this edition.