Tejshvi Sajju Jain

Tejshvi Sajju Jain is a curator and Founding Director of ReReeti Foundation for Museums. She has been working with heritage and museum engagements for over 10 years. Through this grant, Tejshvi seeks to explore and document the stories of the Sindhi community who have made Bangalore their home post the Partition of India.

The Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 led to an unprecedented displacement of people across the subcontinent. Many were forced to, and in some cases, chose to, travel long distances to rebuild their lives across the fresh borders drawn overnight. The government of Karnataka at the time created spaces for the Sindhi community in Cox Town and the Sikh community in Ulsoor to house those coming to Bangalore, seeking to create a new life in the growing city. The Sindhi Cooperative Housing Society was established so they could buy land, allot sites to community members and take loans to build single-storey houses. Thus was build the Sindhi Colony - a quiet residential area of Cox Town, located between Assaye Road and Wheeler Road, with the majority of Sindhi residents. This colony, once a marked-out area given to families coming in from Hyderabad in Sindh on the other side of the border, is now a microcosm of the Sindhi community with a temple, Sindhi Association and a Sindhi Social Hall where marriages and festivals are celebrated.

Tejshvi wishes to undertake this project to examine the memories and stories of the survivors of the Partition and their family members in Bangalore. Through interviews, she wishes to explore notions of identity and home, memories of tradition, and experiences with the changing cityscape across two generations of the Sindhi community - one that calls Bangalore its adopted home and the other that calls Bangalore their home. 

These interviews will come together in a short film, and the stories documented will feed into a larger project called Un.divided Identities - Unknown stories of Partition under the initiative titled Retihaas. These interviews will also become a part of a school engagement and travelling exhibition on the history of Partition of Bangalore city. The outcome of this project will be a short film. The project’s deliverables to IFA will be the short film and documentation of the interviews.