In a quiet corner of Bangalore, simmering in a pot older than memory, the Sindhi Kadhi bubbles gently. Its scent carries across time, across a border, through a gate named Haathi Dar in Shikarpur, Sindh. The pot, sturdy, timeworn, is inscribed in the Hatvanki Sindhi script (once used by Shikarpuri bankers to keep their books of accounts in a non-mainstream script to maintain privacy).
Chef Deepa Chauhan stirs this pot the way her grandmother probably once did, the way her great-grandmother likely did before her. And through every dish she makes, she tells a story of a people who carried their flavours across the Radcliffe line, not just in recipes, but in patrilineal script, smuggled utensils, and heirloom textiles.
For most Sindhis displaced by Partition in 1947, memory was the last thing they could carry from their homeland. As they fled Shikarpur, Hyderabad (Sindh), Karachi and other cities that had once been thriving commercial and cultural hubs, there was little time to gather belongings. And yet, somehow, recipes survived. Masala blends were memorised, cooking techniques tucked away in muscle memory. A generation that lost everything, homes, businesses, land, even their place on the map, held onto the one thing they could: flavour.
“It’s funny how Boli (language) and Boti (food), two things that probably have two-and-a-half inches of real estate in your body, specifically on the tongue, are the most essential things one holds on to and reminds us of who we were,” says Deepa Chauhan, a home cook, an ex MasterChef India contestant and food chronicler who began to document Sindhi food in her 40s.
Deepa has always been blessed with the ability to replicate things that she tasted or things that had been described to her. “When we were growing up, my mom was in charge of the kitchen. While we cooked Sindhi food at home, there were influences in our food from places such as Secundrabad and Pune, where my maternal and paternal sides of the family had initially settled,” says Deepa.
“My husband is from UP, and when we got married, we decided not to communalise the food or the habits in our house because we wanted the children to grow up in a neutral environment. For example, Sai Bhaji would be called saag, Sindhi Kadhi would be called Nanu Wali Kadhi,” she explains.
When Deepa moved cities, her mom would still make the pickles and send them to her. That’s when she thought that she wanted to learn how to make these herself. However, it was during the pandemic that the realisation came: “If we don’t preserve, talk about, and document our food, our stories, then we lose everything.” That’s when the ladles came out and the notebooks opened. Measurements were converted, and recipes were written down. This was more than home cooking. It was archival work.
Post the partition, Bengal retained West Bengal. Punjab was split and still partially retained. But Sindh? Sindh stayed across the border.
So the Sindhis adapted. Quickly. Resourcefully. Local flavours entered the kitchen. The women who made papad, vadis and lachis (sugar candies) now lived in camps and started small cottage industries. “What we now call home chefs,” Deepa says, “were just women trying to support their families.” She points out that people from the community would help those running these businesses from the camps by referring them to other Sindhi families who could buy from them.
Yet, despite the upheaval, the Sindhi spirit refused to become generic. Recipes evolved but never lost their soul. Take Sindhi Kadhi, for instance. Made with no yoghurt and cooked with slow-roasted chickpea flour, spices and fresh vegetables, simmered in a tangy base of tomato with tamarind, or kokum. Depending on whether you’re from Hyderabad, Karachi or Shikarpur, you’ll use a different souring agent. And each family will swear theirs is the only right one. “There’s a fascinating anecdote shared by London-based Sapna Ajwani, author and Sindhi supper club host, about how the Goan kokum ka phool possibly travelled to Sindh and the Shikarpuris adopted it into their kadhi, making it an integral part of the flavour profile of this dish.”
The migration and Sindh’s geographical location also inspired the community to be frugal. “Like many other communities in India, zero waste is innate to us. Please remember that 70% of Sindh was a desert. You had no choice but to be judicious with what you had. Take, for example, the Seyal Maani, a popular breakfast made with leftover rotis. Even with drumsticks, we make drumstick and potato curry, bhaji and also a drumstick flowers ki sabzi, which is my personal obsession. We use all parts of the tree. We don’t use the leaves as much, but we use the flowers, the tender drumsticks and the mature drumsticks as well.”
Apart from the popular Dal Pakwan and Sindhi Kadhi, there’s a lot more to Sindhi food. “We are obsessed with greens. Even if you have our kheema and other similar dishes, we have more than a generous handful of dill and mint. There are also some fried bits like a kheecha or a papad, or a kachri and pickles that are a staple. There’s also the lotus stem or Bhee. We make sabzi out of it, and we also make pickles and pakodas out of it. Our parathas are also slightly different. When you make a paratha, you tend to fry it. Ours is a varki roti, but we take it off the gas and then put the ghee and crush it.”
There’s also Seyal mutton, a dum-style dish made without much water. Suran ki Kachi bhaji, made riverside in picnic pots sealed with dough, allowed to slow-cook in its own steam. Pallo, the prized hilsa of the Indus, is now lost to barrage waters in Sindh and fading memories.
Sindhi identity itself is hard to box. Syncretic, inclusive, and often misunderstood. “We didn’t fit into the Brahminical, Sanskritised stereotype of a Hindu household,” says Deepa. “Our mandirs are called darbars, with Jhulelal and Shivji, the Granth Sahib, Radha-Krishna, and Devi all under one roof. We didn’t wear sindoor or mangalsutra. As a symbol of being married, we wore a different kind of nose ring.” This multiplicity was complex to place in post-Partition India. “People didn’t know where to slot us,” she continues. “We were refugees in our own country. But we didn’t ask for grants or reservations. We built our institutions, schools, and businesses. Quietly.”
“Sindhi food too isn’t a monolith — it’s rooted in fluid identity,” says Deepa. “We were traders and travellers. Fusion was simply a way of life. In the 19th century, if you were sailing for months to Spain or beyond, you didn’t carry groceries — you carried goods to trade. You cooked with what you found. That’s probably how the Kheeme Jo Lolo (Macaroni with Kheema) came about. People make ‘Achari Pasta’ today; Sindhis were known to make this a century ago. They didn’t call it fusion. It was just food, a result of trade routes, foreign ports, and faraway homes.”
Today, across continents, the diaspora is returning to its roots. In Lagos, a spiral-bound cookbook compiles recipes by Sindhi women who moved there and adapted to West African ingredients and techniques. In Bangalore, the Asanka (clay mortar and wooden pestle) comes from Ghana because that’s the only way a cook can replicate the pounding technique she grew up with. Cookbooks are being written. Kitchens are being reclaimed. And food, once stripped of identity for survival, is now being worn proudly on the sleeve.
That’s how Deepa cooked her way through MasterChef India, not with fancy foams and deconstructed nostalgia, but with Kadhi Chawal and Tuk, plated neatly. While she turned khoya into delicious fudge quennelles, but made sure they retained their grainy halwa-like core. She also made Machchi Mani, where she elevated the dish by layering it like a lasagna but kept the flavours rooted to bring back childhood nostalgia. There was also Lolo, a sweetened wheat flatbread made during Thadri, a unique Sindhi festival where cooking with fire is avoided for a day and cold food is served.
“I felt that people who are not from the community do not have access to the taste of Sindhi food or the way it is made in our homes. So I would rather put out a representation that is home-style. There would be tweaks in the way I would cut the vegetables or fry certain elements, but the idea was to keep the flavour profile intact.”
Deepa took to social media to share a photograph of a shelf bearing pots, silent witnesses to a lifetime of journeys. The oldest pot, deep and worn, was a pateela from Shikarpur, brought across the border from her ancestral home. It still carries stories of her grandmother cooking for large family gatherings. Another one inherited from her mother is a thread connecting four generations of women who cooked with quiet authority.
“I have a roti ka dabba from my great-grandmother. In 1947, when she left Sindh, people were still not open to eating from carts or restaurants along the way. She was travelling with seven children. The youngest of whom was 40 days old. So she had to carry something to be able to feed them on the way. They carried whatever was the lightest and easiest to carry.”
Every once in a while, Deepa receives a message or a photograph from Dr Razak, who used to live in what was once her family’s mansion in Shikarpur. “He refers to the mansion as our house,” she says. “It’s because of people like him that I have glimpses of a world my family had to leave behind.”
Through him, she’s seen images of their ancestral home, the arches, and the engraved doorways. He’s even helping her decipher the inscriptions on the pateela and lid, decoding a culinary genealogy. When she looks at each of these things, she knows this: home is not just a place. Sometimes, it’s a pot on a flame, carrying a recipe, a name, and a memory across generations. And for a community once forced to shed its identity to fit in, food is a way to say: we were always here.
