MUHAMMAD IBRAHIM KHOKHAR , DR. SHAZIA ROSE
DOI: https://doi.org/This paper explores the role of cultural syncretism as Sindh's main weapon of anti-colonial resistance in Sirajul Haq Memon's (Siraj's) historical trilogy Echo Is the Call (translated by Dr. Amjad Siraj Memon, 2015), Rendezvous with Death (translated by Dr. Amjad Siraj Memon, 2017), and Parched Land, Wandering Clouds (translated by Dr. Amjad Siraj Memon, 2018). Using Catherine Belsey's (2013) qualitative textual analysis and Tony Bennett and John Frow's (2008) cultural analysis which understands culture as a set of practices that constitute social life and identity - within the wider purview of postcolonial theory, especially Homi Bhabha's (1994) idea of cultural hybridity and the Third Space, Aijaz Ahmed's (1992) critique of nationalist essentialism, and Arjun Appadurai's (1990) theory of cultural flows, the paper demonstrates that across the three centuries of colonial encounters, Arghun-Tarkhan in the sixteenth century, Mughal in the 17th century and British in the 19th and 20th centuries. Sindhi people in Siraj's fiction use their composite cultural identity as the most resilient and potent tool of anti-colonial resistance. The paper discerns four interrelated aspects of syncretic resistance in the trilogy: multi-religious solidarity in the shrine-based Sufi tradition; the material culture of language, textiles, and folk art as markers of inevitable Sindhi identity; the collective practices of music, poetry, and festival as assertions of cultural identity; and the political philosophy of land-belonging that grounds Sindhi solidarity across tribal, caste, and religious divisions. The paper shows that Siraj's portrayal of syncretism is not just descriptive - not just a realistic depiction of Sindhi life - but normative and political: the composite soul of Sindh is what colonial violence most fears and most aggressively attempts to eradicate, and what remains.
