Author Information:

Bhavnani Nadnita, Jai Hind College, I WILL & I CAN In the ‘60s and ‘70s, there was just one college a Sindhi was supposed to go to – Jai Hind. Parents who’d crossed over from Sind after Partition just naturally expected their kids would join the institution set up by their fellow refugees. Children who refused had to live with the disappointment of their parents. I will and I can Nandita Bhavnani’s The Story of Jai Hind College, which released last week, explains why this disappointment ran far deeper than the normal regret ambitious parents feel when their children let them down. Jai Hind wasn’t just a college. It was a continuation of the D J Sind College of Karachi, rated the best in Sind. Started by a band of professors from D J Sind, who had had to leave their beloved institution in 1948, Jai Hind very quickly earned a reputation for excellence.The founder-professors were respected names in the community, torch-bearers of a culture that had overnight become endangered. To what better hands could Sindhi parents hand over their children? So, when a teenager, growing up in cosmopolitan Mumbai, chose to reject Jai Hind because it was nick-named ‘Jai Sind’, the sadness his/her parents felt was palpable. Turns out ‘Jai Sind’ was a myth, probably created by the refugee community’s pride in “asaanjo (our) college”. Of course, there was a preponderance of ‘anis’ in the college, especially among the staff. But within five years of its founding, half the students were non-Sindhi. Today, Jai Hind’s principal is not Sindhi. At the book release, there was not a single Sindhi element in the programme, except of course, the managing board’s members on stage. Perhaps fittingly, the programme ended with an Urdu ghazal written by a Pakistani poet born in Lucknow, and sung by a Pakistani singer.Founder-principal T M Advani (he became the vice-chancellor of Bombay University in 1957) would have been proud. From the start, he made it clear he didn’t want Jai Hind to become ‘Sindhistan’. However, this was primarily a college started by refugees for their community.