📺 MUKHI STORY
These rooms were occupied by the grandmother and families of the two brothers Jaithanand and Gobindran. Jaithanand was meticulous in his daily rituals. He rose early, and after breakfast, his personal servant gave him a slice of soap, which he discarded after washing at a sink in the back courtyard close to the kitchen.
Following lunch and prayers with the family priest and wearing a pagri to cover his head, he rode on a horse-driven chariot to his kothi in Shahi Bazar. After two failed marriages, Jaithanand's family no longer lived in the Mukhi House, and he doted on his brother's children and chatting on the new phone with relatives. Inspired by her health-conscious father, who played tennis at the club and exercised in the front courtyard, she learned to roller skate and bike and often danced in the rain, pouring down water spouts from the rooftop.
She delighted in the Diwali fireworks that her brothers ignited in the courtyard, ducking from misfired rockets. Tipptoeing to peek over the Mukhi House courtyard walls into the crowded street below, Dharam loved her home, naming it the Mukhi Palace, a fitting tribute to her beloved uncle Jaithanand's bold vision. Outside the sandstone walls of the Mukhi House, political and social change continued to accelerate.
By 1930, inspired by Gandhi's Satyagraha movement, Indians practiced widespread civil disobedience. English imports were boycotted throughout India, often resulting in violent clashes with the British. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a persuasive Muslim lawyer and politician from Karachi, rejected the Satyagraha movement.
Concerned that Muslims in independent India would be a suppressed minority, he proposed that representation in government should be based on religion, not geography. His proposal was rejected by members of the Indian National Congress, setting Jinnah and the Congress on divergent paths for the future of India. Within the Mukhi House, a new era had begun.
By 1928, Gobind Ram's wife Lakshmi, his brother Jaithanand, and his mother Ami had all passed away. Gobind Ram now became the head of the Mukhi family and of the Mukhi Bhaibans. Continuing a custom widowers often followed, he married his wife's sister Putli from the Dhulandas Asomal family and had four more children.
Gobind Ram lived on the second floor and introduced modern amenities to the Mukhi house, making it the only building in Hyderabad with a western toilet and therefore a popular destination for foreign visitors. Some local residents had seen brass beds and gold-painted ceilings, and a rumor had spread in the city that the Mukhis slept on golden beds on the golden ceiling. As leader of his community, Gobind Ram continued generations of family tradition in philanthropy and social service.
He held leadership positions in local organizations and schools, was a member of the Hyderabad Municipal Council for 15 years, and became a steady voice of the Hindu-Sindhis during turbulent times. In 1931, Jawaharlal Nehru, future Prime Minister of India, visited Karachi to preside over the Indian National Congress. During his visit, he was invited to stay with the Mukhi family at the landmark Mukhi house.
Nehru arrived at the Mukhi house with his wife, mother, and sister and lived in the northeast bedroom on the second floor of the Mukhi house. He did not like being held by servants and served himself during dinner. When he watched Tilly Mukhi, Gobind Ram's eldest daughter, struggle to cut a pineapple, he offered to demonstrate a simpler way.
During Nehru's stay, Dharam was away at their Karachi home because her younger brother Ram was ill and wanted his elder sister to stay with him. When the British conquered Sindh, it was made part of the Bombay Presidency, which benefited mostly merchants such as the Hindu-Sindhis. As the Mukhi house evolved into its increasing public role, Dharam Mukhi blossomed into a beautiful, slender woman.
Earning the respect of her father for good taste and intelligence, she had the responsibility of preparing the Mukhi house living room on the second floor to receive guests from around the world. She displayed the Mukhi's collection of ivory and bronze statues from Japan, silk carpets and silver from India and Iran, fine china from England, and large bouquets of roses from the nearby Mukhi gardens. Mangoes and grain arrived regularly from the farms in Nawabshah, and wild deer from Gobind Ram's hunting trips were skinned in the front courtyard.
Dinner was served in the dining room, and steaming food and cakes from Bombay Bakery were brought up the winding steps from the kitchen on the first floor. When the Governor, Sir Lancelot Graham, attended a dinner at the Mukhi house, Dharam was surprised by his fluent Sindhi and noted that he spoke better Sindhi than she did. He replied that British governors in India were required to learn the local dialect to facilitate the governing of the people.
In 1945, the family hosted Lady Rama Rao and other key members of the women's suffrage movement when their meeting was held in Hyderabad. The Mukhi children were not allowed to attend most parties on the second floor. They spied through cracks in the door of the first-floor living room, stifling their giggles when a guest would slip on a worn-out marble tile at the entrance.
Their brother, Gordhan, would smuggle drinks from the kitchen for the children to enjoy, and Gobind Ram Mukhi would call for more of Dharam's popular cucumber sandwiches on thinly sliced bread for the guests. Dharam's passion for sewing elegant clothes, inspired by Sindhi culture and Hollywood movies, soon became the talk of the town. A couple at their wedding noted that many guests had arrived mainly to see what new outfit Dharam would wear.
She was regularly photographed by professional and family photographers and collected more than a hundred photographs, which became an important record of life in and around the Mukhi house. Her grandfather's prophecy of becoming well-known in the city had already begun to come true. Preoccupied with the war, the British imprisoned the entire Indian National Congress leadership.
Unrestrained by the Congress, Jinnah rejected the Quit India movement, gaining more political power for a separate Pakistan. In Sindh, Gobind Ram Mukhi ran for elections a second time for a seat in the Chief Minister's Cabinet in a climate where there were rising communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims. One evening, when Dharam Mukhi was alone in the Mukhi house, she heard a knock on the front door.
When she opened the door, two men wearing burqas to cover their faces pushed her aside and ran upstairs to Gobind Ram Mukhi's bedroom in an apparent assassination attempt. Dharam shouted out and, when no one came, called the office for help. When help did arrive, they struggled to unmask the intruders but they escaped.
Gobind Ram Mukhi hired a security guard to protect his family, but the intimidations continued, and packets of Sindhur related to black magic rituals were thrown into the courtyard. Undeterred, Gobind Ram won a seat in the 1946 elections and once again became a minister in the State Cabinet. World War II had ended, and India was hurtling towards the independence it had sought for decades.
But the simultaneous forces for partitioning India into Hindu and Muslim majority states, which Gandhi had tried so hard to avoid, had triumphed. Pakistan was to be a separate nation from India, with districts divided up between them based on religious majorities. Eleven years ago, Sindh had been separated from the Bombay Presidency, giving it a sizeable Muslim majority.
All of Sindh would now be part of Pakistan. Gobind Ram Mukhi faced a public and personal crisis. On the one hand, he was an elected official representing Hindu Sindhis and therefore had to be present in Sindh to protect his constituency.
On the other hand, early reports of violence between Hindus and Muslims were an imminent danger to his family. Two months before independence and the simultaneous partition between India and Pakistan, he sent his children to Bombay, where his eldest daughter Tilly lived, but he chose to remain indefinitely in Hyderabad with his wife and son. When independence came, it was a mixed blessing for the Hindu Sindhis.
India was free, but so was Pakistan. Many Hindu Sindhis were split between the two. Property and centuries of culture and identity in Pakistan and an unknown future in India.
With no specific location in India to call home, many headed to Bombay due to Sindh's past connection, while others dispersed to places they had known in India and around the world in the great Sindhi diaspora. Muslims in India faced a similar crisis and, fearing violence, headed up north. This massive two-way exodus of almost 12 million people on trains, boats, bullock carts, and foot was a cinderbox that exploded into communal violence.
Centuries of peaceful coexistence between the Hindu and Muslim Sindhis was disrupted by a huge influx of Urdu-speaking Muslims from India who had the same religion as the Muslim Sindhis but with a vastly different culture. Gobind Ram's political position provided some degree of protection from this major social disruption. He attempted to sell his vast ancestral lands and his prized possession, the Mukhi House.
With limited success in selling or swapping his land for property in India and no buyers for the palatial Mukhi House, Gobind Ram was in dire straits. For a brief period, the Mukhi House was occupied by the Indian consulate. His family lived in a private section of the building, and the consulate occupied the rest.
The partition therefore not only divided the country but also physically separated his family, divided the Mukhi House, and decimated his fortune. But the additional time gave Gobind Ram an opportunity to ship furniture and other movable assets safely to Bombay, a luxury few Sindhis had. Dharam Mukhi's photograph collection was salvaged during this time.
Just eight years later, when Dharam returned with her daughter to visit the Mukhi House, the building and gardens had significantly deteriorated, and young Geetu had difficulty reconciling her mother's stories of past grandeur with what she was witnessing in modern Hyderabad, Sindh. In 1957, Gobind Ram Mukhi was tragically killed in a car accident while commuting from Bombay to Hyderabad. Koshu, his youngest daughter, still has vivid memories of the accident that killed her father.
His wife Putli Mukhi, who survived the accident, attempted to return with her son Ghodan to sell the Mukhi House, but they were detained on charges of espionage. Putli and her son escaped on a ship from Karachi back to Bombay, never to return again. During the next 50 years, the Mukhi House changed many hands, first becoming the property and office of the Evacuate Trust Property Board.
In the 70s, the building suffered significant collateral damage during the violent language riots in Sindh, where the Urdu-speaking Muslim immigrants from India resisted the Sindhi language becoming the official language. Paramilitary forces used the Mukhi House as a hideout, reportedly burning window frames at night to keep warm. After surviving three attempts by thugs to burn down the building, it was briefly used as a high school.
Soon, the Mukhi House was abandoned, with reports of stray cows wandering through the rooms that once housed the wealthy and prestigious Mukhi family. In 2003, Kavita Mukhi, granddaughter of Gobindram Mukhi, organized the formal process of relinquishing future claims to the property on condition that it be conserved and converted into a museum. The conservation was led by Dr. Kalim Lashari from the Department of Antiquities in Sindh.
Dharam's photographs, which are the only surviving record of the Mukhi House interiors, were used to guide the conservation in an effort to preserve the vision of Jaitanand Mukhi for future generations. In January 2013, Dr. Kalim Lashari organized a reunion of the Mukhi family descendants with a private inauguration of the Mukhi House museum. While many Indians grew up listening to Hindu mythologies from their grandparents, the Mukhi House was our mythology.
As children growing up in India, we imagined a palatial home in Sindh with spacious marble courtyards that appeared to be forever frozen in a sepia-toned past. Walking into the restored Mukhi House in 2013 enabled me to directly confront this mythology. Standing in the courtyard, I heard my mother's voice as she danced in the rain pouring from the rooftop and rediscovered the location of each photograph from her collection, which had been used to painstakingly conserve the Mukhi House to its former glory.
(END)