NEW DELHI, INDIA, August 2, 2015 (Hindustan Times by Saaz Aggarwal): Punta Arenas, Chile, is one of the southern-most cities in the world. There was a time when every ship crossing from the Atlantic to the Pacific through the Straits of Magellan or around Cabo de Hornos (Cape Horn) halted there. I first saw the name Punta Arenas on a map in a book by the French scholar Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants – 1750-1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama.
The map marks places around the world which had branches of trading firms headquartered in Hyderabad, Sind, between 1890 and 1940. I felt surprised and impressed to see that it included about a dozen places in South America. How had Sindhis got so far away from home so long ago?
In 1907, a Sindhi merchant, Harumal, came ashore. The account of how Harumal opened his first store; what happened during the First World War and then the Second; how Partition affected the Sindhis of Punta Arenas, will form part of Sindhi Tapestry, the companion volume to my first book, Sind: Stories from a Vanished Homeland.
More of this interesting history at source.