Sindhi

The Sindhis are the Indo-Aryan people of Sindh, the lower Indus country of southern Pakistan, named from Sindhu, the ancient word for the Indus. Kindred communities spread into Kutch and neighbouring deserts. Sindhi was the first Indo-Aryan tongue to meet Arabic and Persian, after the Umayyad conquest of 712 made Sindh the first firmly Muslim-ruled region of the subcontinent.

From the eleventh to the sixteenth century the Soomra, Samma and Arghun dynasties ruled in succession, largely as Delhi Sultanate vassals; the Samma seized Thatta in 1351 and made it their capital, and the tombs of the Makli necropolis rose nearby. The Mughals annexed Sindh in the late sixteenth century, ruling directly until 1701, when the Kalhora dynasty took over under Mughal and later Durrani suzerainty, followed by the Talpur Mirs in 1783.

Sufism deeply marked Sindhi life, speaking through a native poetic tradition from Qazi Qadan in the early sixteenth century to the eighteenth-century mystic verses of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai.