A host of unrelated episodes from the past found a way into my consciousness upon reading Nandita Bhavnani's The Making of Exile: Sindhi Hindus and the Partition of India. For instance, her reference to an increase in dowry practices among Sindhi Hindus after Partition triggered an unpleasant story of greed that I thought I had forgotten. A relative of mine, a Shikarpuri Sindhi, had made a thriving business out of selling electronic and sundry items during her annual trips from Hong Kong to India. Rado watches, vanity boxes with eyeliners and lipsticks, the ubiquitous Charlie perfumes, all would be rolled out of her bags and sold at murderous profit to her poor relations living in not-so-posh parts of Bombay and the refugee camps around. The greed extended to unrealistic demands of dowry from the parents of a middle-class Sindhi girl whom her son married, in the process driving the bride's family to near-total penury. Bhavnani mentions:
Dowry had long been a social evil among Sindhi Hindus, despite efforts to eradicate it as early as the late 19th century. Now, in India in a context of economic strain, instead of asking for less dowry, families of marriageable boys began to ask for even higher amounts of dowry than before.
If works such as The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (2008) by Claude Markovits, and Cosmopolitan Connections: The Sindhi Diaspora 1860-2000 (2004) by Mark-Anthony Falzon put into perspective the history of multiple locations in the lives of the Sindhis, Sindhi Diaspora in Manila, Hong Kong and Jakarta (2002) by Anita Raina Thapan illuminated Sindhi Hindu patriarchal practices in the diaspora. Bhavnani's research hits upon the unfortunate deterioration of the moral fabric after Partition. Thanks to robust and emerging scholarship, it is becoming possible to locate smaller and apparently isolated narratives in the wider context of transnational networks and the changing sociology of the Sindhis after Partition.