While growing up, Aruna Madnani would often hear the refrain: “You don’t look or dress like a Sindhi”. Not knowing what to make of it, she would regard it as a compliment, till one day, when she started questioning it. “I realised that there was, and still is, a certain negative stereotype associated with Sindhis. So, I decided to dig deep into what it means to be a Sindhi,” Madnani, the founder and managing trustee of Sindhi Culture Foundation, who shuttles between Bengaluru and Mumbai, tells us. 

A deafening silence greeted her, when she started examining her identity. “My father and grandmother would only talk about the happy memories of Sindh; nobody ever talked about the Partition,” she recalls. It spurred her on to document oral histories of Sindhis, a displaced community of millions who were compelled to leave their homeland overnight when India embraced Independence, never to return again.