This collection brings together rare letterheads from early 20th–century Sindhi businesses in Malta (courtesy Malta historian Professor Mark Anthony Falzon).
Click on the image above to zoom in and view the gallery of letterheads.
Traders from Hyderabad, Sindh came to Malta in the late 19th century.
A family account from Bherumal tells the story of four brothers, a story of ambition, migration, tragedy, and persistence – the human side of the Sindhi mercantile story, invariably overshadowed by stereotypes of trade and prosperity.
Nichaldas (1860–1909) lost his father Mukhi Tejumal when he was 15.
The eldest of four boys, he went to work in his cousin Mukhi Sukhramdas’s office and later in Colombo with Mukhi Pritamdas, where he proved his worth. In time, his brothers also took to Sindhwork: Aloomal in Rangoon, Bagomal in Malta and Kundomal in Colombo. They prospered.
Bagomal, 17 when he went to Malta along with other Sindhworkis, saw its potential and on his first visit back to Hyderabad shared his excitement with his brothers. Nichaldas took a loan from Sukhramdas and in 1888 left for Malta with Bagomal and their brother Aloomal.
On their first night in Malta, it was freezing cold – far colder than they had experienced in even the coldest winters of Hyderabad. The brothers lit a coal–fired heater in their hotel room, closed the windows and went to sleep. When morning came, they were horrified to find that Bagomal had died in his sleep. It was carbon monoxide poisoning. The 20–year–old brother, based on whose strength and experience they had come to Malta, was no more. They braced themselves through shock and grief, and got to work. They opened a store, Nichamal Brothers in Persian Indian Bazaar Street, and their younger brother, Kundomal joined them. The business prospered and they opened branches which were run by Aloomal at Port Said and Cairo under the name M/s A. Nichamal.
In 1902, Nichaldas retired and returned to Hyderabad where he lived in his ancestral home in Mukhi Paro, later purchasing land and building his own house.
No trace remains in Malta of the business started by the enterprising brothers – and perhaps none in the other places either. This could be because, at a time when only sons could carry on the family name and business, none of them had sons. However – the story lives on because it was recorded by Bherumal Mahirchand Advani, who happened to be one of Nichaldas’s 3 sons-in-law.
Like many other Amils, Diwan Bherumal (1876–1950) was a government employee. He started his career as a Distillery Inspector in the Salt Department. During the course of his official duties, he travelled to many parts of Sindh and Punjab and never missed an opportunity to interview elderly people he came across and collect information about their families. Could he have been influenced by EH Aitken of the Salt Department, who compiled the 1907 Sindh Gazetteer? Perhaps. Like many others of the time with his education and skills, Bherumal moved easily between academia and administration. Towards the end of his career he was a professor of Sindhi at DJ Sind College. Bherumal’s research was tremendous and contains not just family histories and interesting details about interesting individuals, but local anecdotes, homilies, folk wisdom and even superstition.
