Today, Pimpri can well be called the wholesaler’s paradise having everything from clothes to carpets. Arya Samaj: The organisation which started in a temporary shed has now developed into a sprawling library with over 15,000 books. The school also had its origins in the shed started by the Arya family. What started as a temporary shed has now developed into a sprawling library with over 15,000 books. The Arya Samaj’s message of a casteless society as well as opposition to child marriage played an important role in shaping the refugees. Back in those days, Kishinchand’s father started an Arya Samaj in a small, temporary tin-and-stone shed. We cooked in the same space where we ate, and went down to the river to bathe” was how Kishinchand narrated his experience.Īrya Vidya Mandir, a famous school in the locality, owes its origin to the Arya family. When we slept at night, scorpions would sting us. “We were given free rations, and accommodation in the enclosure where the army animals – horses, cows, and buffaloes – were once kept. Aggarwal’s book ‘Sindh, Stories from a Vanished Homeland’ narrates first-hand the experience of the Arya brothers who went on to start the now-iconic Venus Traders in the city. The living conditions there could be described as primitive. Given the egalitarian nature of the society, Barnouw had particularly talked about the absence of any caste-based discrimination in the camp. The camp had four sections depending on the accommodations granted to the refugees who were asked to pay a nominal rent for the same. Jhulelal Mandir (Express Photo)īarnouw, whose book narrates the condition of the camps in the 1950s, talks of cattle sheds being converted into refugee camps.

A general panchayat of the refugees demanded conversion of the camp into a municipality complete with proper civic utilities. Author and historian Saaz Aggarwal refers to newspaper clippings of 1948 which talk about the visit of the then Premier of Bombay Province, BG Kher, to the Pimpri refugee camp. Pimpri, back then, was an abandoned military camp and dairy farm. Drawn mainly from the trading community, the refugees were from mixed socio-economic backgrounds but were strung together by the common thread of Partition. Victor Barnouw, in his book ‘The Sindhis, Mercantile Refugees in India: Problems of their Assimilation’ estimates that in 1941, of the 45.35 lakh Sindhi population as many as 12.29 lakh were Hindus.

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