Heritage
Five thousand years of history, a river that gave the subcontinent its name, and a community of saints, poets, traders and homemakers who carried their culture across the world. This is the story of the Sindhis.
How Old, Exactly?
It’s a fair question, and the honest answer comes in layers. The land itself has been continuously settled for close to 9,000 years, going back to early farming villages related to Mehrgarh, just beyond Sindh’s present border. Within Sindh proper, the fortified town of Amri was already standing on the Indus around 3600 BC, and Kot Diji by roughly 3300 BC — both centuries before Mohenjo-daro was even built.
The name “Sindh” is younger, but still immense — the river is named in the Rig Veda, composed some 3,000-plus years ago. Sindhi as a language descends from that same Old Indo-Aryan world — through Prakrit and Apabhramsha — giving it a linguistic lineage stretching back roughly 3,000 years, even though the oldest surviving written Sindhi dates to only around 1,300 years ago. Some Sindhi linguists argue for a deeper connection still, back to the Indus Valley civilisation itself — but since the Indus script has never been deciphered, that remains an open scholarly question rather than settled fact.
Kot Diji Fort (1785) stands on a hill first settled around 3300 BC — the same ground in continuous use for over 5,000 years.
The Motherland
Sindh takes its name from the mighty Sindhu (Indus) river, whose banks nurtured one of the world’s earliest civilisations. It is one of the oldest continually inhabited regions on earth — the Rig Veda itself speaks of the river, and the words “Hind” and “India” both trace their origin to “Sindh”.
Today Sindh is a province of Pakistan, home to the districts of Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur, Larkana, Thatta, Badin and others — but for Sindhis scattered across the globe since Partition in 1947, it remains, as the old family record books put it, simply “beautiful, sweet and lovable motherland.”
Built to Last
What sets Sindh’s ancient cities apart isn’t just their age — it’s how startlingly livable they were. The Great Bath at Mohenjo-daro, waterproofed with bitumen and fed by its own well, is considered the earliest known public water tank in the world.
Almost every home in the city had its own bathroom and latrine, draining into a covered brick sewer that ran beneath a street laid out on a strict grid — an integrated, citywide drainage system that historians note wasn’t matched at that scale in Europe until the 19th century. The bricks themselves followed a standardised 4:2:1 ratio, identical from Sindh to sites hundreds of kilometres away — shared engineering standards, forty-five centuries ago.
The Land
Sindh is the second biggest province in Pakistan by area, with its capital at Karachi. Historically, it comprised the whole of the lower Indus valley, from Kashmir to the Arabian Sea — modern Sindh forms the lower Indus basin and covers roughly 140,915 square kilometres, about as large as England.
Geographically, it is bounded on the north by Balochistan and Punjab, on the east by Rajasthan (India) and the Rann of Kutch, and on the west by the Arabian Sea and by Balochistan. The province can be divided into three distinct parts — the fertile central belt through which the river Indus passes, and the sandy desert regions to the east and west.
Timeline
Sindh’s history stretches back further than almost anywhere on earth — through empires, conquerors and dynasties, long before it became home to the Sindhi people we know today.
Early farming villages related to Mehrgarh take root near the Sindh–Balochistan borderlands — among the earliest settled agricultural communities anywhere in South Asia.
The indigenous Amri and Kot Diji cultures flourish on the Indus in Sindh itself — fortified towns that predate Mohenjo-daro by centuries and laid the groundwork for the civilisation that followed.
The Indus Valley sites of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa flourish among the most developed urban civilisations of the ancient world — described by Sir John Marshall as “the oldest of all civilisations.” Their script, found on thousands of seals, remains undeciphered to this day — one of the last great unread scripts of the ancient world.
Darius I of the Achaemenid Empire sends forces to annex Sindh to the Persian empire.
Alexander the Great, lured by the riches of the Sindh area, conquers Sindh.
Sindh is ruled successively by the Indo-Greeks, the Parthians and, from around AD 200, the Scythians and Kushans. Buddhism flourishes under Kushan rulers.
The Arabs conquer Sindh, bringing the area under Islamic influence as the administrative province of As-Sindh, from 712 to 900.
Sindh is ruled by the Mughals, then by several independent Sindhian dynasties, until 1843 when the region is lost to the British.
Sindh is established as a separate province in British India; after Pakistani independence it is integrated into West Pakistan from 1955 to 1970, before again becoming a separate province in 1970.
The “Priest-King” of Mohenjo-daro, c. 2000 BC, remains the most famous face of the Indus Valley Civilisation.
325 BC
By the time Alexander the Great reached the lower Indus, he had never lost a battle and had never met a man who wasn’t afraid of him. In Sindh, he met several — and what happened between them is one of the most remarkable encounters in the whole history of the ancient world.
A note on the sources: Greek writers such as Arrian and Strabo record two separate meetings — a Sindh-based riddle contest tied to Sambus’s revolt, and a philosopher named Kalanos linked instead to Taxila, further north. Sindhi tradition, and the name Kalinatha itself, has long held these threads as one story belonging to Sindh — this page follows that telling.
As the story is told in Sindh, when the great Brahmin sages of the land heard that a foreign king intended to conquer the whole world, they simply laughed. When Alexander asked why, they asked him what, exactly, he thought he would do with it. He told them: rule over all of it, every kingdom, every people. They laughed harder still — not out of fear, but pity — and told him plainly that no matter how much of the earth he seized, death would leave him owning nothing more than the small plot of ground it would take to bury him.
It was not bravado. These were men who owned nothing to begin with — no land, no gold, no clothes beyond what covered them — and so had nothing for a king to threaten them with. Their freedom was total, and Alexander, for all his armies, had never faced an opponent quite like it.
Soon after, a Sindh ruler named Sambus rose up against Alexander, and his soldiers blamed ten of these Brahmin sages for encouraging the revolt. Dragged before the king, they expected death. Instead, Alexander — unable to resist testing them one more time — put each of them a riddle, and declared he would execute whoever answered worst, working down the line from the weakest response to the strongest.
Asked which were more numerous, the living or the dead, the first sage answered without hesitation: “The living — since the dead no longer exist.”
Answer after answer landed sharper than anything his own court could offer. By the end, Alexander did not execute a single one of them — he let all ten go free, loaded with gifts, and instead punished the officer he had appointed to judge the contest, for daring to rank Sindh’s wisest men incorrectly.
Impressed beyond measure, Alexander asked the sages to accompany him back to Greece, to be seen and heard by the philosophers of the West. Almost every one of them refused outright — what could the West offer men who already wanted for nothing? Only one agreed: a sage the Greeks would come to call Kalanos, but who was known to his own people as Kalinatha.
He travelled with Alexander for years, through Persia, watched and admired by an army that had never seen anything like him. But when illness finally weakened his body in a foreign land, Kalinatha refused to let it take him slowly. He built his own funeral pyre, gave away every gift he had ever been given, and — in front of Alexander and the assembled army, trumpets sounding, elephants trumpeting in salute — walked into the flames without a flinch. It is said he sang as he burned. His last words to the king who had conquered half the known world were simple: we shall meet again in Babylon.
What the Greeks witnessed that day, and could barely find words for, was not despair — it was the deepest expression of a philosophy this land had been teaching for centuries: that the self is not the body, that death is not to be feared but met on one’s own terms, and that a man who has let go of everything cannot be conquered, however large the army at his door. It left a mark on Greek philosophy itself, feeding directly into the Stoic idea that a free mind cannot be enslaved by fortune.
Alexander did meet him in Babylon — in a sense. Almost exactly a year later, the man who had conquered from Greece to the Indus died there himself, far from home, having never set foot in Macedon again. In the end, the sages of Sindh were proven right: for all his conquering, Alexander the Great owned, in death, nothing more than the ground it took to bury him.
Centuries later, Sehwan — close to where Sambus once ruled — became home to the shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, one of Sindh’s greatest Sufi saints. Long before the Sufi era, it seems, this stretch of the Indus already had a reputation for producing people a world-conqueror couldn’t rattle.
Homeland
From the port city of Karachi to the holy town of Rohiri, each of Sindh’s cities carries its own story.
A natural seaport on the Arabian Sea, originally known as Kalachi and inhabited by fishermen. It shot into importance after the British conquered Sindh in 1843, growing into a centre for colleges, schools, star hotels, banks and offices — once called one of the cleanest and rarest cities in India.
The next important town after Karachi, naturally beautiful and famous for its forts. By one folk telling, the city took its name from Hyder-Hy, a serpent said to have been slain after killing many.
A steep town taking its name from Shikar, a hunting ground, linked with Baluchistan and Afghanistan by trade. The Shikarpuri Hindus, famed as traders, knew how to earn — and how to enjoy life.
Known to the British as Lloyd or Sukkur Barrage, this town on the banks of the Sindhu was the site of an engineering feat that irrigated a huge desert region — with Lansdown Bridge connecting the twin towns of Sukkur and Rohiri.
A township opposite Sukkur on the other bank of the Sindhu, considered a birthplace of many a Sufi saint, revered by both Hindus and Muslims — and known for its holy soil and the Rohiri Hills.
And beyond these — from Larkana to Thatta and Badin, the districts of Sindh are threaded together by the Indus, every town with a story of its own.
Faith & Folklore
The spiritual life of Sindh — its beliefs, its patron saint, its poet-saints and its folk heroines — is told in full on our About the Sindhis page, so that it lives in one place. Here is where each thread leads.
Sindh has never been a land of one faith — from its Sufi-shaped Muslim majority to the deeply rooted Sindhi Hindu tradition carried into Singapore, and the syncretic Nanakpanthi households that keep the Guru Granth Sahib in a home tikana.
Read on About the Sindhis →The patron saint of the Sindhis, revered as an incarnation of Varun Devta and born by the Sindhu in 1007 AD. His birthday is celebrated across the world as Cheti Chand, the Sindhi New Year.
Read on About the Sindhis →Shah Abdul Latif and Sachal Sarmast — the “Jewels of Sindhi Literature” — together with Sa’mi, whose simple shlokas expounded Vedic wisdom, revered by Hindus and Muslims alike.
Read on About the Sindhis →Sassui, Sohni and Marui — tragic heroines of the Shah Jo Risalo, chosen by Shah Abdul Latif for their courage, loyalty and defiance, and as central to Sindhi identity as any historical figure.
Read on About the Sindhis →Mother Tongue
As a spoken tongue, Sindhi’s lineage runs deep — linguists trace its descent from Vedic Sanskrit through Prakrit and Apabhramsha, a line of development roughly 3,000 years long. The written record is younger: the first surviving written evidence of Sindhi dates to around the 8th century AD, and Sindhi holds the distinction of being the very first language on the subcontinent into which the Quran was translated.
Over the centuries it has been written in at least five different scripts — Khojki and Khudabadi (developed by Sindhi trading communities themselves), Devanagari, Gurmukhi, and Perso-Arabic. The Khudabadi script was briefly decreed the standard by the Government of Bombay in 1868, before the British later settled on a standardised Perso-Arabic script for official use. Partition split the language exactly as it split the people: Sindhi is written in Perso-Arabic script in Pakistan today, and in Devanagari script in India — one language, carried forward in two alphabets.
Merchant scripts developed by Sindhi trading communities for their own ledgers and correspondence.
Standardised under British rule; the script Sindhi is written in across Pakistan today.
The script most Sindhi Hindus in India write and read their language in today.
The Same Word, Every Script
One word — “Sindhi” — in the scripts modern devices can display. The historic Khojki and Khudabadi merchant scripts are no longer in common use, and most devices lack fonts for them, so they are not shown here.
Identity
Sindhi names are rooted in Sanskrit and drawn from astrology, the calendar, and devotion — with even surnames carrying clues to a family’s history and place of origin.
Many names were kept according to the Nakshatra (birth star) — Hassomal or Hassi for those born under Aslesha, Menghraj and Jethanand for Jyestha, and Moolchand for Mool nakshastra. Others followed the day or month of birth — Sunday-born children carried names like Sunie, Aditya or Adumal, while those born in the month of Chaitra were named Chotrani.
Devotees of the gods took names such as Ishwardas (Ishwar), Kishinchand (Krishna), Ramchand (Ram) and Nanik (Guru Nanak) — while surnames ending in “Ja” trace a family to a particular province of Sindh, and Amils and Bhaibands often added “ANI” to an ancestor’s name.
| Basis | Examples |
|---|---|
| Nakshatra (birth star) | Hassomal, Menghraj, Moolchand |
| Day of birth | Sunie (Sun), Somomal (Mon), Mangaldas (Tue), Budhranis (Wed) |
| Month of birth | Chotrani (Chaitra), Asoomal (Assoi/Aswin), Pohumal (Poshya) |
| Gods & historical figures | Ishwardas, Kishinchand, Ramchand, Nanik |
| Region of origin | Arjandas, Jasoti, Nari |
| Amil / Bhaiband surnames | Talreja, Kukreja, Makhija, Hinduja |
Wisdom, Passed Down
“Jo chulh te, so dil te”
The family that eats together stays together.
“Jedo uth, tedo lodo”
Literally, “the bigger the camel, the bigger the jerks it feels” — the greater one’s standing, the greater the burdens that come with it.
“Jainh khaado taro, tainh khey nako soor”
One who eats from the bottom of the pot suffers no pain — a proverb praising humility over pride.
Attire
The traditional dress for the Sindhi male was known simply as “Dhoti, Jammo, Achi Paghri ain Bochhan Kulhete.”
Dhotis were worn by Brahmins, Bhaibands and Vaparis (traders) alike. The Paghri (turban) — usually white and elaborately decorated — was essential for every man, and considered as important as the Bochhan (long coat) it was paired with. Jamma coats, worn on special occasions, were often opened almost from the front and finished in gold-glorified buttons that spoke to a man’s personality.
Sindhi Amils, who served as Diwans under Mir rule, wore huge Salwar, Angrikho and a distinctive tall cap. Bhaibands — mostly traders — favoured Dhotis, Khamiz and a long coat, and always covered their heads, mostly in white. Wealthy Shikarpuri men wore the Pughri with Bochan, and were known for long beards and moustaches.
The Sindhi cap and Ajrak shawl remain the best-loved symbols of Sindhi dress.
Jewellery
Sindhi women traditionally wore an elaborate array of gold and silver ornaments, each with its own name and meaning — passed down as heirlooms through the generations.
Ivory bangles and bracelets worn all across the arms.
Bands of silver worn up to the ankles, tinkling with every step.
The traditional nose ring.
A gold necklace which, by some historical accounts, was worn as a symbol of being a second wife.
Pure gold earrings, prized for beautifying the ears.
Pure gold worn above and around the elbows — a sign of riches.
Livelihood
Cotton, rice, wheat and sugarcane were the main crops of Sindh, with rice by far the most important — Sindh also produced bananas and mangoes in abundance. The waters around Karachi were rich fishing grounds, famed for the sweet Pallo (Hilsa) fish, known as the “vehicle of Lal Saeen” (Jhoolelal). Sindh also earned a reputation for textiles, pottery, leatherwork and carpets.
Government servants who filled many appointments in the civil service — put above others in terms of status.
Merchants comprising Sindhworkis and Shikarpuris, who established trading posts around the world and dealt in fabrics, trade and commerce.
The Amils and Bhaibands filled most appointments of status. Sindhworkis established trading posts internationally; Vanyas were shopkeepers of every kind.
Kobe to Panama
Long before Partition, Hyderabad-based Hindu merchants known as Sindhworkis had already built one of the most far-reaching trading networks of the Indian subcontinent — by 1937, close to 5,000 Sindhworki firms operated across the globe, following two great sea-routes out of Bombay: one east through Colombo, Singapore, Surabaya, Saigon and on to Kobe in Japan; the other west via Port Said and Gibraltar, as far as Panama. Sindhi women were active partners in running these far-flung family firms, not merely supporting them from home.
Textiles sat at the very heart of this trade — the business was known simply as “Sindwork”: silk piece-goods, embroidered fabrics, curios and traditional Sindhi handicrafts, carried out to British, European and Far Eastern markets and sold to travellers and collectors alike. It’s genuinely how the Sindhi presence in Singapore began: Wassiamull Assomull, believed to be the first Sindhi to ever set foot here, opened a textile business in Singapore in 1864 — nearly six decades before this Association was founded — before expanding into silk and curios across Hong Kong and beyond.
Singapore sat directly on that historic Bombay–Kobe route — which is precisely why a community of Sindhi traders had already put down roots here well before this Association was founded in 1921. The global spread of Sindhis today isn’t only a story of Partition and displacement; it’s also the continuation of a trading diaspora that was already a century old by the time 1947 arrived.
That trading instinct hasn’t disappeared, but it has broadened. Where the Amils once filled the civil service and the Bhaibands ran the family firm, today’s Sindhi diaspora — including right here in Singapore — is just as likely to be found in medicine, law, banking, engineering, tech and academia. The professions changed; the drive to build something new in an adopted home, generation after generation, hasn’t.
1947
On the formation of Pakistan, the Hindus of Sindh lost almost everything they had. Karachi and Hyderabad were the two big cities of Sindh at the time of Partition; an organised raid was made on 6 January 1948 in Karachi, and on 21 December 1947 on each and every house of Hindus in Hyderabad. Hindu families were forced from their houses and gathered in camps and centres for evacuation to India by sea and rail.
Thousands upon thousands of Sindhi refugees sailed in ships from Karachi and landed in Bombay port every day. They brought whatever belongings they could — or were allowed to carry by the Pakistan authorities, who seized most of their valuables. Approximately 11 lakh — some 1.1 million — Hindu Sindhis left to find new roots on Indian soil.
Those who left, in going to the promised land, found that as their share of the fruits of freedom, they were to receive poverty, suffering, disease and privation. Those who had been masters of money and riches had become penniless.
Historians looking back on Partition add an important layer of nuance to this story. Unlike Punjab or Bengal, Sindh saw comparatively little large-scale communal bloodshed — the exodus was driven less by mass violence than by fear, economic pressure and the specific, traumatic incidents of dispossession described above, in what several historians have called one of the more peaceful, if no less devastating, migrations of Partition. It was a choice forced by circumstance rather than a single act of war — which makes it no less a loss. Sindhi Hindus are also often noted as the one major Partition-displaced community who never received a Sindhi-majority replacement state within India, unlike Punjabi or Bengali refugees — a homeland lost, with nothing quite like it regained.
“They started once again from sub-human conditions. They had nothing left but their intelligence and pride — yet they managed to build, brick by brick, their new life, and once again learned to live with honour and human dignity.”
Resettlement of Sindhis
Because of their need to survive, Sindhis spread their wings through the length and breadth of the globe. They set new roots in new and often unfamiliar lands, imbibing the customs, mannerisms and language of their new domicile — in return for the love, promise and security those countries provided.
Due to their perseverance and hard work, Sindhis succeeded by accommodating themselves to the way of life and customs of those who welcomed them. But as time passed, it became increasingly difficult for the newer generations to cling to their roots, and it has been observed that it grew harder still for them to speak the Sindhi language — which is why associations like ours remain so important today.
The clearest proof of that resilience is a real town. Around 100,000 Sindhi refugees near Bombay were given nothing more than a disused wartime military transit camp — 1,178 bare barracks, no roads, no streetlights, no running water. Rather than wait for help, they converted the barracks into workshops with their own hands. By August 1949 the settlement was formally declared a township in its own right and given a new name: Ulhasnagar — “City of Joy.” Within a decade it had grown into one of India’s major small-industry hubs for textiles and manufacturing, and it remains, to this day, home to the largest concentration of Sindhis anywhere in India — a camp that refused to stay a camp.
Did You Know
Sindh has a very ancient history — the Sindhu river is mentioned in all four main Vedas: Arathved, Rig Veda, Yajur Veda and Saam Ved.The Vedas
The words ‘Hind’ and ‘India’ both originate from the word ‘Sindh.’Origin of names
Mohenjo-daro, representing the Indus Valley Civilisation, is located in Sindh.Archaeology
Continue Exploring
From our Hall of Legends to our recipe archive and photo gallery, discover more of what makes Sindhi heritage so rich — and join us in keeping it alive here in Singapore.
