While the first merchants from the Indian subcontinent (largely from Gujarat) reached Indonesian peninsula in the fourteenth century, if not earlier, Sindhi traders "discovered" the Dutch East Indies archipelago only in the late nineteenth century. British conquest of Sindh in 1843 boosted trade activity of Sindhi merchants opening new horizons for trade. Most Sindhis who started trading in Java were from
Hyderabad,15 and belonged to bhaibands, literally "brothers", a jati of Hindu Sindhis from a lower social strata, who were concentrated in the commercial sector.16 The first Sindhi firms Wassiamul Assomull & Co in Surabaya and K.A.J. Chotirmall & Co Ltd in Jakarta were established in the late 1870s. The success of Chotirmal family, who expanded their trade business from Java to Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok,
Yokohama, Shanghai, Tsintao, and Port Arthur (Mani 1993a:101), encouraged other Sindhi traders to try their luck on the Dutch East Indies shores. The Sindhi language still reflects the success of Sindhi traders on Java in the saying "Whoever goes to Java comes back very rich". Moreover, the word "Java" is used as a verb meaning "spending very lavishly" (java tho karain)17 (Thapan 2002:25).
In the 1930s the contacts between Sindhi merchants and Javanese trade centres, Surabaya, Semarang, Malang, Batavia, later known as Jakarta, intensified. An
increasing number of Sindhi merchants started exploring the opportunities to establish
15 There was another network formed in Sindh with the base in Shikarpur. For historical
differences between the Hyderabadi and Shikarpui networks see Markovits (2000).
16 Although Hindu Sindhis do not have a four-tier caste system and form one caste, known as
lohana, there are still some inner divisions, i.e. amils and bhaibands. "Basically the distinction in Sind was amils = educated = service as different from bhaiband = uneducated = business" (Falzon 2004:33) Education meant "knowledge of Persian and the affairs of court and revenue matters" (Falzon 2004:35). For more on the inner divisions within the Sindhi community see Falzon (2004:32–35) and Markovits (2000:46).
17 Interestingly enough, a similar saying is mentioned by A.Mani, but in regards to a group of
Gujarati traders: "If one goes to Java, he is presumed to be lost. If he returns, he will bring enough to last for seven generations (as told by Gujarati traders in Jakarta)" (Mani 1993a:96).
their trade businesses on a more permanent basis. Many Sindhi traders visited home, Hyderabad, only once a year, spending most time of the year on Java or Sumatra. Despite that, the Sindhi mode of living could be best described not as migration, but circulation (Markovits 2000:5). Neither people, nor goods or finances were permanently concentrated in one locality. On the contrary, they were constantly moving between Hyderabad, the network centre, and other parts of the world.
The family history of Raam Punjabi, probably the most famous Indonesian Sindhi, and "raja sinetron" (king of Indonesian soap opera), is in many ways a typical example of Sindhi merchant business trajectory and lifestyle back in the 1930s and the early 1940s. The father of Raam, Jethmal Tolaram Punjabi, came to Surabaya as a shop assistant in 1933 following the advice of T.D. Kundan, the leader of the local Sindhi community, who described the city as a very lively place, full of traders and customers (Endah 2005:4). On his arrival Jethmal was struck by the number of Sindhis residing in Surabaya and it "immediately felt like home" (Endah 2005:4). Despite that, his home was still in Hyderabad, which he visited every year. The wife of Jethmal, Dhanibhai Jethmal Punjabi, whom he married during one of his visits home, continued to live in Hyderabad for the first five years of the marriage. She moved to Surabaya in the late 1930s when Jethmal left his boss and started his own business selling carpets from India, Persia and Iran for local and colonial elites. Jethmal like many other Sindhi traders, was proficient in several languages including Dutch, English and Indonesian and skilful in treating his customers with due respect, and he ran his business well. His family, which by 1943 had eight members, with five out of six children born in
Surabaya, had a placid life.
Colonial administration classified Sindhi traders as Indians, along with other settlers from the Indian subcontinent, who, apart from their place of origin, had little in common among them. The category of "Indians" unified an extremely diverse group of people with different economic, social and cultural backgrounds. In 1930 The East Indies census showed that there were "27,684 Indians, of whom 12,684 were born in India and among whom the men outnumbered the women by a ratio of 2 to 1"
(Thompson & Adloff 1955:122).18 The report also showed that most Indians stayed in
18 As mentioned in the Introduction, ethnicity was defined based on the place of birth and such
Java and Sumatra (25,638) with around 2000 scattered widely through the outer provinces. It also documented the differences between Indians in Sumatra and Java: "On Java, most of the Indians were small shopkeepers, while on Sumatra many were to be found in the plantation areas of Deli as coolies, drivers of motor vehicles, cattlemen, and night watchmen" (Thompson & Adloff 1955:122). According to Mani, Sumatra hosted around 20,000 Indians, most of whom were Tamil Chettiars working on tobacco plantations (Mani 1993b:60), which means that around 5000 resided in Java, where traders from Sindh constituted the majority, with other merchant communities coming from Punjab (Sikhs) and Gujarat.19
Despite being categorised as one group, migrants from the Indian subcontinent did not mingle with each other, being separated along linguistic and religious lines. As Mani stated, "there was no common identity among various groups coming from British India" (Mani 1993a:104). While for business matters Sindhis interacted with people of different origins (who, however, largely belonged to the elites), outside of trading activities, the life of Sindhis was limited to their own community. Sindhi men took wives only from Hyderabad, with intermarriages being unknown. They followed religious and cultural rituals and spoke Sindhi (and in some cases Hindi) at home. It should be mentioned that such a lifestyle was not unique to Java but was maintained by Sindhis in other places where they conducted trade activities (Falzon 2004, Markovits 2000, Thapan 2002). In those quite rare cases when Sindhi merchants brought their families with them, their children went to schools established and run by the community, where English was the medium of education, and Sindhi or Hindi was taught as a compulsory subject.
Being categorised as Indians, Sindhis were part of the residual legal and
administrative category of "Foreign Orientals", which after 1925 was clearly separated from the "Natives". That meant that Sindhis and natives were subject to different laws—while natives were tried in "the second-class" Landraat courts, Sindhis were subject to Raad van Justitie, the court which settled the disputes between Europeans (Fasseur 1994:43). Moreover, as Foreign Orientals they had more freedom of
movement. Although it seems that the Dutch administrative system did not make any
19 Two other groups who came to Indonesia not as indentured labourers were Punjabi Sikhs and
formal distinction between the indentured labourers and free traders from the Indian subcontinent, Dutch patronised Sindhis, a wealthy community that supplied colonial elites with textiles and luxury goods (carpets, embroidery, wooden and ivory carvings). For example, in Surabaya, one of the main trading centres in colonial Java, the leader of Sindhis was assigned a title of Hoofd der Indiers (head of the Indians) and given an authority to issue visas for the newcomers. In other words, the economic well-being and global connections secured Sindhis a higher status in colonial Indonesia.
As Foreign Orientals and as newly arrived, Sindhis were similar to the so-called
totok Chinese, literally "full-blooded" Chinese. Unlike peranakan Chinese, a "mestizo Malay speaking group", whose descendants came to Indonesia centuries back, totok
Chinese started arriving in Indonesia in the late nineteenth century and "tended to maintain a more exclusively Chinese milieu, often bringing wives from China rather than intermarrying with local women" (Strassler 2008:401).20 But this resemblance between Sindhis and totok Chinese is in fact illusory: class as well as nature of migration distinguished Sindhis from the recent Chinese migrants. Although Sindhis spent most of the time in the places where they had their businesses, their families and their homes were still in Hyderabad. Sindhis had no intention of settling in Indonesia on a permanent basis. They were temporary sojourners. As such, they did not seek
positions in colonial administration and focused on trading activities. As Bonacich pointed out, this "sojourner mentality" led to a particular pattern of political behaviour that did not facilitate integration with the host society (Bonacich 1973). Furthermore, unlike the recent migrants from China, who were mostly of lower social strata, "with no social and other ties to the upper echelons of Javanese and European society" (Strassler 2008:415), Sindhis were a prosperous community, well-connected to the colonial elite through the nature of their business.
Overall, during Dutch colonial times the relationships of Sindhis with colonial elites were mutually beneficial. The business of Sindhis was profitable and their lifestyle was comfortable, as is evident in the increasing number of Sindhi traders coming to Java and other islands from the 1930s. Meanwhile, the colonial
administration valued the relationships with well-connected self-sufficient merchants
20 More on the distinction between the mestizo peranakan Chinese and the full-blooded, more
who did not challenge the established order. They were temporary sojourners, whose relationships with the local population and administrations were mainly those of traders and customers. Equally important was the status of Sindhis as free and wealthy traders, which distinguished them considerably from the indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent working on the Dutch plantations as well as from recent migrants from China. These differences in the nature of migration, economic position (class) and connection to the elites made the experience of Sindhis in the colonial Dutch Indies barely comparable with the experiences of other Indian migrants as well as other Foreign Orientals.