Dr. Radhika Mathrani Chakraborty is a sociologist specialising in migration, diaspora, and gender. She is a Lecturer at the University of Manchester and has previously taught at Ashoka University and the National University of Singapore, where she completed her PhD. Her research focuses on the Hindu Sindhi business diaspora, with particular attention to women’s experiences and cultural networks. She holds a Master’s degree in Women’s Studies from TISS and a B.A. (Hons) in English Literature from the University of Delhi.
Dr. Chinmay Tumbe is an economic historian and Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. His work explores migration, urbanisation, and pandemics, and he is the author of India Moving: A History of Migration and The Age of Pandemics. An alumnus of LSE, IIM Bangalore, Ruia College, and Rishi Valley School, he has held fellowships at institutions including Harvard Business School and the European University Institute. He has served on national task forces and helped establish the IIMA Archives.
A communication strategist, designer, and trained classical guitarist, Veda Aggarwal works at the intersection of art, technology, and community. Her career spans journalism, digital media, and the performing arts. As former director of the Calcutta Classical Guitar Festival, she built connections across continents and led music programmes reaching thousands. Since 2012, she has shaped the visual identity of black-and-white fountain and now the Sindhi Saaz Foundation. Based in Pondicherry, she creates meaningful digital spaces for artists and cultural projects, working largely with not-for-profit and community-driven organisations.
The journey began when the founder asked her mother, Situ – who had left Sindh at thirteen and never spoken of it – to describe her life before, during, and after Partition. Her memories, unspoken for sixty-five years, surfaced with astonishing clarity.
Those recollections – later woven together with oral histories from others and archival research – became Sindh: Stories from a Vanished Homeland (2012), reissued in 2013 by Oxford University Press Pakistan as Sindh: Stories from a Lost Homeland. It was among the earliest works on the Sindhi Partition experience to enter global departments of South Asian history.
What began as one family’s story grew into a wider effort to trace a dispersed people – through interviews in India, Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa and the Americas – revealing Sindh’s remarkable diversity: its global reach, multi-faith traditions, resilience, loss, and reinvention.
Sindh was not considered relevant in mainstream publishing, and in 2012 she founded black-and-white fountain, sustaining it through personal means, to safeguard voices that might otherwise have been lost.
The name Sindhi Saaz carries both personal and cultural resonance. Saaz – an instrument, a melody – was the name given to the founder at birth, often suggested to her by her mother as a standalone identity without a surname. It was the pen name her mother might have used herself, had Partition not taken her language from her. In carrying it forward, the foundation honours an unrealised legacy and affirms a collective inheritance – reclaiming a story long fragmented, yet alive.
SLIDESHOW IMAGES
1. Balkanjibari – Karachi 1946 courtesy Ashok Shahani. 2. Hotchand Advani, Popati Hiranandani and Kalyan Advani – Mumbai 1966 courtesy Ashok Kalyan Advani. 3. With Gandhi at the Hindu temple – Punta Arenas 2015. 4. Family at Kalyan OT Section 2 c1952 courtesy Nari Shahani. 5. Ghanshamdas, Jeramdas and Idanmal Kripalaney and their sons courtesy Ram Malani. 6. Saaz and Situ at JLF 2011.
