Happy Cheti Chand

My MIL posted this is in the family whatsapp group (I think the bit about income tax is exaggerated but at any rate with the amount of Sindhi Billionaires I’m hoping some Sindhi luck will rub off on me LOL/iA). I’m sharing it to BP:

Did you know thatAccording to latest Forbes Rich list,Sindhi billionaires cumulatively account for $ 36.7billion of the worlds wealth.

Hinduja family $14.8 billion,Mickey Jagtani $4.2 billion, Ramesh Wadhwani $ 3 billion,Raj Kishin Rk $2.7billion, Rajan Raheja $2.5billion,Chandru Raheja $ 2.4 billion, Sunil Vaswani $2 billion,Jitendra Virwani $1.6 billion, Ashok kumar Hiranandani $1.3 billion,Surendra Hiranandani $1.1billion,Niranjan Hiranandani $1.1 billion.

Famous Sindhi Ceo/ business Executives:

Chanda Kochar MD & CEO Icici bank

Harish Manwani chairman Hindustan Unilever ltd

C P Gurnani MD & CEO Tech Mahindra

Sanjeev Bikhchandani co founder Naukari.com (Info Edge)

Lila poonawalla female Ceo of an MNC

Meera Sanyal former chairperson RBS International

Suresh Vaswani board member Dell Inc

Indu Sahani board member of many prominent indian and mnc companies

Famous Sindhi Businessmen:

Patanjali Keswani chairman Lemon Tree hotels ltd

Vijay Advani co founder NIIT

Sunder Geronal Ceo of Page Industries $ 1.2 billion Forbes list

Bimal Kumar & Murlidhar Gyanchandani directors RSPL$1.2 billion Forbes List

Did you know that…

Richest Indian in France is Gope Hiranandani (Sindhi)

Richest Indians in UAE are Sindhis

Richest Indians in Spain are Sindhis

Richest Indians in Singapore are sindhis

Richest indians in Hongkong are sindhis

Sindhis started and still run more than 3 dozen famous colleges and educational institutions in Mumbai

Famous sindhi filmstars

Ranveer Singh,Sonam Kapoor,Kareena Kapoor,Rajkumar Hirani,Aftab Shivdasani,GP Sippy.

Did you know that

Sindhis contribute for 24% of total income tax collected in India where as they account only one percent of India’s population.

More than 50% of bollywoods financers are sindhis

India’ s no 1 lawyer Ram Jethmalani is a sindhi

All this inspite of the fact that they lost almost everything during partition and by sheer hardwork, integrity, business acumen, and Gods grace they build every thing from scratch.

On the occasion of Sindhi Hindu New Year Chetichand,

We wish and pray for the well being and prosperity of all Indians,not just Sindhi brothers and sisters

Proud to be a Sindhi

Proud to be a Indian First

Rrajesh Hinduja

Hinduja Estate Consultants

Www.affordablefurniture.in

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Vikram
6 years ago

I dont think Sindhis can rest on their laurels. A lot of work has to be done to ensure that Sindhi survives as a distinct literary tradition, and not just a ethnicity.

A primary indication of a pre-modern ethnicity’s success in the modern world is preeminence in a major metropolis. Marathi people have Mumbai. North Indians – Delhi. Bengalis – Kolkata. Tamil – Chennai. Telugu – Hyderabad. Sindhi folks dont have a single city where they shape the culture and mores. Without such a foothold, it will be difficult for a contemporary form of Sindhi literature and art to emerge.

Sindhis should press on their demand for a Union Territory somewhere in India, and then try and do an Israel there.

Kabir
6 years ago

Both are Muhajir cities

Kabir
6 years ago

Yes, Sindhi is an official language in the whole province. But ethnically Karachi is dominant Muhajir. I believe Hyderabad is too, but I’d have to check on that.

Vikram
6 years ago

Mumbai has a Marathi plurality, they are the single largest group with about 40% of the population. They control how the tax revenue generated by Mumbai is redistributed, and the middle and lower middle classes of Mumbai (bank and government employees, college and school teachers) have a comfortable Marathi majority. So Gujaratis are the richest group, but they dont have ‘control’.

Marathis, even of the nth generation, strictly speak Marathi amongst each other. It is amazing how quickly they figure out that the other person is also Marathi. You hear tons of Marathi in Mumbai.

There is a large Marathi population with disposable income now, which is why movies like Sairat are getting made.

As Kabir mentioned, Sindh’s premier cities remain Urdu speaking.

Kabir
6 years ago

According to Wiki:
“Hyderabad was a majority Sindhi Hindu city prior to 1948,[12] when many migrated to India and elsewhere[29] after the independence of Pakistan 1947. Hindus who departed had played a major role in the city’s economy, and formed the majority of the Hyderabad’s population.[12] The vacuum left by the departure of much of the city’s Hindu population was quickly filled by the newly arrived Urdu speaking Muslim refugees from India, known as Muhajirs.[18]

Following the arrival of Muhajirs, Hyderabad became a majority Urdu-speaking city, with Muhajirs making up 66% of the city’s population.[19] The arrival of Pashtuns and Punjabis from northern Pakistan further diversified the city’s ethnic composition over the next few decades,[18] and by 1998, the percentage of Urdu speakers had fallen to 58%. Most Punjabis and Pakhtuns are distinct and separately living near the railway station and its vicinity. The city therefore has cosmopolitan atmosphere with multiethnic and multicultural communities. The city is now a multi-ethnic and has a mix of Sindhi, Urdu speaking Muhajirs, Brahuis, Punjabis, Pashtuns, Memons and Baloch people.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyderabad,_Sindh

So the last reliable numbers say that Urdu speakers are 58% of the city’s population. We just had a census in 2017 but I don’t know whether they asked about mother tongue. It’s a very fraught issue in Sindh so I don’t know how much to trust the numbers either way.

Kabir
6 years ago

Happy Cheti Chand.

I do find it interesting that not a single name on this list of Sindhis is Muslim. Does Sindhi automatically equal Hindu?

As far as Sindh’s literary traditions go, I think Sindhis in Pakistan (which is where Sindh is)have got that covered. They’ve got an entire province, minus Karachi and Hyderabad.

hoipolloi
hoipolloi
6 years ago

Are all these Sindhi billionaires descendants of Vaishyas or Kshatriyas? What is the breakdown? Asking for a friend.

hoipolloi
hoipolloi
6 years ago

Zach, That is why I put my question rather round about way; from which caste they descended from? You ask any body from the subcontinent, they are quick to respond, I don’t believe in caste. They get offended and accuse you of casteism. This applies to all major religions and sects. Suppose a dalit community in a village converted to Christianity en mass, you think the caste is going to leave them in foreseeable future?

Buddhism, Muslim invasion, Sikhism, being landless in diaspora, western influence most likely loosened the grip of caste system in a population like Sindhis. My bottom line is, in a given population which groups intermarry freely. All things being equal, do all present day Sindhis intermarry without the man or the woman convincing the parents about the caste of the future spouse.

Vikram
6 years ago

Was an absolute disaster for the Sindhi Dalits to not have moved to India. They could have availed of reservations and linked up with other oppressed groups across India. Ambedkar would have been available to them.

AnAn
6 years ago

Vikram, affirmative action is helpful. But Ambedkar has harmed Indian Dalit Harijans. So have subaltern studies. Many of the mainline Hindu organizations now offer twice born sacred threads to Dalit Harijans provided they agree to a spiritually disciplined life style.

The best way to help Dalit Harijans is to surge capacity, competence, merit. The rest gradually takes care of itself.

Vikram
6 years ago

“In fact Sindhi Hindus don’t seem to connect that there are millions and millions of Sindhi Muslim.”

Is this a deliberate position, or just a structural consequence of the partition migrations ?

Vikram
6 years ago

I think this has more to do with the very low number of diasporic Sindhi Muslims than any feeling.

The only linguistic nationalism that developed among the Indo-Aryans could be said to among Bengali Muslims (around a specific dialect of Bengali) and the Marathis. People dont usually slaughter their ‘kin’ to the tune of hundreds of thousands …

Vikram
6 years ago

You might find this article interesting: https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/4600/1/02Khokhlova.pdf

I think a national consciousness requires more than just feelings, it needs a common narrative arc, one which is important enough to ‘make the heart skip’ and rich enough to provide continuous reference points for literature and national conversation.

Kabir
6 years ago

National consciousness requires what Anderson calls an “imagined community”. Pakistan is an imagined community. I would argue so is India (perhaps to a lesser extent). India was already there in some form, but Pakistan was an entirely new entity. I’m fairly sure it was Rushdie (who I think is a great writer, though his views on Islam are reprehensible) who stated that Pakistan’s problem is that it wasn’t sufficiently imagined.

I am planning to re-read “Imagined Communities” and perhaps I will have some thoughts on it in the Indo-Pak context.

AnAn
6 years ago

Kabir, I understand that Rushdie is a practicing muslim. What are your disagreements with Rushdie regarding Islam. Really curious to know:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/salman-rushdie-his-life-his-work-and-his-religion-419902.html

“But the Kashmir of Rushdie’s grandfather stands for him as an alternate Islam, a radically different way of being Muslim to the Khomeinist and Bin Ladenite head-choppers – a religion of peace, not a religion of pieces. “It’s really not so long ago,” he says, “and if it’s not that long ago, it doesn’t have to be gone for ever.” As he shows in Shalimar the Clown, Kashmiri Islam was – until the 1960s – a model of pluralist tolerance. It mingled and mixed with Hinduism, with mullahs even compromising on their austere monotheism by directing their followers to worship at the shrines of the local Hindu saints. As he puts it: “To be Kashmiri was to value what was shared far more highly than what divided.”

“Indian Islam was like that – and in many ways it still is,” he adds. “Even at this moment, when there have been explosions in a mosque or temple – it really hasn’t worked. The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning they were always very secular-minded.” Whereas the radicalisation of Muslims in Britain is “dreadful”, Indian Muslims “are a model which could be beneficially studied about how you show a minority community that their interests are best served by secular democracy, and not by religious communal politics. Because if you play the game of religious communal politics, you will always be outnumbered. That was the argument Nehru and Gandhi took to India’s religious minorities, and it worked.”

His grandfather’s pluralist, peaceful Kashmir has withered over the past 40 years under the burning heat of rival fundamentalisms. In Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie uses the story of the shredding of Kashmir’s secularism – of the metaphorical death of his grandfather – as a microcosm of a larger story, the collapse of the secular ideal across the world that has nearly consumed Rushdie himself.

After the partition of India, Kashmir found itself trapped between the two new nations, rubbing like a bed-sore. The valley had a Muslim majority, so many people thought it logically should have gone to the new Muslim state of Pakistan. But Kashmir’s Hindu ruler decided to stay with India, because he thought her secular traditions were best able to prevent the valley breaking down into the ethnic cleansing that was causing the new border to haemorrhage so much blood. And so the sharp wedge of communal grievance entered Kashmir.

The mild, mystical Sufi brand of Islam practised in the valley was gradually displaced by an austere Arab version – Islam 3.0. “

Kabir
6 years ago

Anan,
Rushdie has renounced Islam and is openly an atheist.
“Rushdie came from a liberal Muslim family[89] although he now identifies as an atheist. In a 2006 interview with PBS, Rushdie called himself a “hardline atheist”.[90]

In 1989, in an interview following the fatwa, Rushdie said that he was in a sense a lapsed Muslim, though “shaped by Muslim culture more than any other”, and a student of Islam.[22] In another interview the same year, he said, “My point of view is that of a secular human being. I do not believe in supernatural entities, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Hindu.”[91]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_Rushdie

I think his anger with the Iranian Regime (which is justified, I would be angry if a government wanted me dead) is misplaced upon the whole religion of Islam. Since 9/11, he has said many things which are frankly Islamophobic. This doesn’t make him any less of a writer (“Shame” and “Midnight’s Children” continue to be among my go-to books) but he is a fairly obnoxious human being. I have no time for Islamophobic people.

P.S. “The Satanic Verses” is a novel and should be judged as Literature. I’ve actually read the book. But there is a section in which prostitutes were given the names of the Prophet’s wives (peace be upon them). Even as a “liberal” Muslim, for me this crossed so many lines I can’t even tell you. When it comes to the Prophet and His family, one must remain deeply respectful at all times. The book obviously remains banned in Pakistan, but I read it in the US.

AnAn
6 years ago

I stand corrected Kabir.

Don’t many muslims name their children “Mohammed” [obviously they don’t add the peace be upon him], “Aisha”, “Fatima”, “Zainab”. I have not met a Khadija though. No doubt some of these children grow up to have weird professions and are not perfect people. So having a child with such a name who grows up to be a prostitute isn’t necessarily an insult to Islam.

This said, I understand your sentiment. Many Hindu prostitutes have God’s name as their birth name or call name. Hindus also feel uncomfortable but feel powerless to express themselves.

Jesus is great and revered for most of the world’s people (including Muslims and Hindus). Yet we all had to accept what happened to the divine mother . . . “Madonna”.

I think Muhammed pbuh didn’t have a problem with apparently Islamaphobic thoughts, feelings and words. Neither should we. The insults of others cannot harm or mentally affect us. This has been a theme in Hindustani Bharatiya Sanathana Dharma for thousands upon thousands of years. Being unaffected by the censor and insults of society is the beginning of spiritual progress.

Kabir
6 years ago

Interestingly according to Wiki, there are almost as many Sindhi Hindus in Pakistan as there are in India. The figure for India is 3.8 million while the figure for Pakistan is 2.5 million.

“Sindh also has Pakistan’s highest percentage of Hindu residents, with 17% of Sindh’s population overall, and 11.6% of Sindh’s rural population, classifying itself as Hindu,[81] and over 40% of residents in Tharparkar District identifying themselves as Hindu.[11] The communal harmony between Sindhi Muslims and Hindus is an example of Sindh’s pluralistic and tolerant Sufi culture.[82]”.

This explains why Muslims in Sindh are not that freaked out by Hindus as opposed to post-1947 Punjabis who have probably never met a Hindu. Punjab was probably the most ethnically cleansed province (on both sides) at Partition.

Kabir
6 years ago

While we’re on the subject of Sindhi Hindus in Pakistan, let’s also just acknowledge Justice Bhagwandas:

“Rana Bhagwandas (20 December 1942 – 23 February 2015), was a senior judge and former acting chief justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan (CJP). He enjoyed extremely high reputation as a judge.[1] He remained the acting CJP during the 2007 judicial crisis in Pakistan, and also briefly became the acting Chief Justice of Pakistan when the incumbent Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry went on foreign tours in 2005 and 2006,[2] and thus became the first Hindu and the second non-Muslim to serve as chief of the highest court in Pakistan.[3][4][5][6] Rana Bhagwandas also worked as the Chairman of Federal Public Service Commission of Pakistan. He headed the interview panel for the selection of the federal civil servants in 2009.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rana_Bhagwandas

Brown Pundits