‘Ittehad’: Interfaith love and coexistence in Sindh’s first woman writer, Guli Sadarangani’s novel

Sindhi literature, in India especially, if understood at all, is hardly associated with voices beyond the Sufi poets of Sindh. Its relationality with modernity, its presence in Partition literature, and its condition of being displaced in geography remain undiscovered. Translator and Translation Studies scholar Rita Kothari’s latest contribution towards the representation of Sindhi literature needs to be understood in this larger context of silence.

Scandalous beginnings

The work in question is a translation. Ittehad was the debut novel of the first woman Sindhi novelist, Guli Sadarangani. Published in 1941, Ittehad was a scandalous work: it dared to imagine a love story between a Hindu and a Muslim at a time when hatred between the two communities was intensifying. It would have caused even more outrage had the novel been published in its entirety: its last chapters offered a second resolution to the theme of inter-religious love, showing marriage between a Hindu man and a Muslim girl. These chapters were dropped in 1941 so that the novel ended on a “moderate” note of a marriage between a Muslim man and a Hindu woman. The “love jihad” angle makes it sensational even today.

In 1983, the novel was republished with its “original” ending in India, with a new Hindi-ised...

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