‘You are not you and I am not I
What are you and what am I?’
I HAVE been reading the poetry of Shaikh Ayaz, who, the writer and critic Asif Farrukhi says, is for Sindh what Garcia Lorca is to Spain, Pablo Neruda is to Latin America, and Nazim Hikmet to Turkey.
As I perused Farrukhi’s excellent translation of Shaikh Ayaz’s work, I came across the couplet which resonated with a question I’ve been asking myself for a long time now: who, exactly, is a Sindhi?
When I was young, the only marker of Sindhi nationality I was aware of was that one had to speak Sindhi. Having grown up in America, I returned to Pakistan still quite young and was always asked by curious relatives: can’t you speak Sindhi? Their shock and horror when I replied in the negative (in English no less) has always stayed with me, and most Sindhis today take it as a point of pride that they should speak, understand, and promote their own language. So at the very basic level, a Sindhi is someone who can speak Sindhi.
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