Out of the many philanthropic
initiatives initiated by fellow Sindhis, the one that I admire the most and
closely follow has been the establishment and growth of Indian Insitutute of
Sindhology (IIS) in Adipur, Kutch. IIS was established in 1989 with a clear
mandate of preserving and promoting Sindhi Culture.
I first heard about IIS during one of
the conversations in “Sindhi Sarvech” program produced by Dada Ram Jawahrani.
IIS runs a senior secondary school named ‘Sadhu Hiranand Navalrai Academy’,
after two prominent Sindhi reformists and educationists of Sindh, Sadhu Hiranand
and Sadhu Navalrai. The school is named after these two brothers to revive the
memory of “Union Academy”, which was established by them in Hyderabad, Sindh,
before partition and was renamed as Sadhu Hiranand Navalrai Academy, after
their death. If my information is correct, originally the school used to be a sindhi medium school, however, due to lack of participation from the community it is now a English medium school where Sindhi is taught as one of the languages. In addition, IIS also
proposes to set up Bharati Sindhu Vidyapeeth (Cultural University) in due
course of time (subject to availability of funds). Bharati Sindhu Vidyapeeth
will act both as an academic centre as well as will also be a cultural centre.
IIS has published a number of books, few
of which are also available on their website free of cost. I have read a few of them and find them to be
quite insightful. Gandhidham/Kutch area
in Gujarat has seen a number of initiatives to preserve Sindhi identity over
the past few years and I hope all the initiatives are able to accomplish what
they have set out to achieve. IIS also runs Sindhi language classes for those
who are interested to read and write the language.
Please do visit IIS web-site to see the
wonderful work they are doing in order to preserve culture and language. (http://sindhology.org/)
Whilst on this topic, recently a
national level Sindhi conference organized by National Council for Promotion of
Sindhi Language (NCPSL) was held in Maharashtra. A number of state level Sindhi
academies made presentation at the conference. I did listen to some of these on
you-tube. The presentation made by Sindhi Sahitya Academy Gujarat’s Dada (Dr)
Jetho Lalwani is absolutely remarkable. The academy has an annual budget of INR
1.3 million (roughly USD 18,000); however what they are able to achieve in such
meagre budget is absolutely remarkable. The link to Dada’s speech is as
follows:-
Jiye Sindhiyat!
No comments:
Post a Comment