How the Sindhi 'Halchal' archive is preserving a community’s business legacy

There are multiple lenses through which to understand the history of a people, ranging from literary fiction to photography, from diaries to official documents. What if you were to look at a people through the lens of advertisements published in books and magazines of a certain timeframe? Soni Wadhwa, Assistant Professor, Liberal Arts Department of SRM University, Andhra Pradesh, chose to do just that.

Soni came into possession of a private collection of books in the Sindhi language, belonging to Parmanand Ghanshyamdas, a Mumbai-based educator and supporter of Sindhi literature. She built an online archive of the books, called the PG Sindhi Library (https://pgsindhi-library.sanchaya.net/). The books are accessible to anyone interested in Sindhi literature. In the process of looking at the books and magazines, Sonu was also drawn to the advertisements they included. The ads were mostly given out by proprietors of small businesses from the Sindhi community. Most of them have a “with best compliments from” tagline, suggesting that they contributed to the costs of publishing. The ads are a reflection of the entrepreneurial spirit of the Sindhi community post-Partition and serve as a people’s history. 

The advertisements that Soni culled from various books and back issues of ‘Halchal’ magazine are part of the online Sindhi Halchal Archive (sindhihalchalarchive.in) that she has set up exclusively for the ads.

The name is a hat-tip to the magazine, published by the Sindhi Sabha Western Railway, from which she has collated a majority of the ads. ‘Halchal’ also seemed like an apt name because it suggests activity and hustle — qualities that one may notice in the Sindhi businessperson, Soni explains.

The Ulhasnagar connection

Post-partition, the Sindhis who migrated to India were a scattered community spread across the country, including Mumbai and the rest of Maharashtra, parts of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Ulhasnagar, which was a Sindhi refugee camp, now a thriving township in Thane district, became well known for entrepreneurship —it was where many Sindhis set up and grew their businesses.

“The wealthy and greedy or stingy Sindhi businessman was a stereotype perpetrated by Hindi cinema. Growing up, I saw that very few people knew who Sindhis were because they had probably not met one,” Soni observes.

And yet, jokes and stereotypes around Sindhis stuck. There was the “Made in USA” (Ulhasnagar Sindhi Association) label that alluded to the means Sindhi businesses used to push their products. However, it is important to see the contexts and understand if these allusions were indeed true in all cases,” Soni says, explaining how a businessman busted the myth that Sindhi businesses used “low quality or fake labels” and said that it was often marketers from elsewhere who asked these Ulhasnagar businesses to compromise on the quality of raw materials to increase their profit margins. 

In the archive, there are ads from as early as 1966 and running into the 2000s. You can spot ads for textiles, electronics, real estate, jewellery and confectionery.

There are also ads for biscuits and toffees, traditional sweets (made of ‘pure’ ghee) and textiles as well. Some ads signal a sense of nostalgia, with mention of places the business people hailed from pre-Partition. An ad for the “first-ever Sindhi album” with “first-ever Sindhi rap and seven romantic catchy songs” catches attention.

Another ad for “sound recording cassette tapes” is a throwback to the era of mixed tapes. A biscuit ad published in the 70s depicts a child dialling a telephone with a rotary dial. Soni says that two recent exhibitions of the archive held in Bengaluru and Pune earlier this year drew curious visitors, both Sindhi and non-Sindhi. “A visitor recalled that the Sindhi Board of the Mumbai college he studied in offered him an interest-free loan that helped him study further,” says Soni, adding that she’s hoping to see the archive spark more such conversations.