The Sindhi Diaspora's Invisible Empire

Five thousand merchants, two sea routes

Everything belongs to everyone, nothing belongs to anyone.

The Sindhi commercial diaspora did not begin with Partition. It predated it by nearly a century.

After the British annexed Sindh in 1843, disrupting local financial systems, Hindu merchants from Hyderabad (हैदराबाद, Sindh) — known as Sindworkis — launched one of history’s most ambitious trading networks. By the 1870s, pioneer firms like Pohoomull Brothers, Wassiamal Assomull, and Dhanamal Chellaram had established branches from Cairo to Singapore. Historian Claude Markovits, whose The Global World of Indian Merchants remains the definitive work on this network, mapped two principal sea routes: an eastern corridor running Bombay–Colombo–Singapore–Shanghai–Kobe, and a western corridor running Bombay–Port Said–Malta–Gibraltar–Tenerife–Panama.

By 1937, an estimated 5,000 Sindworkis were scattered across more than 100 countries. Their initial specialisation was “Sindwork” goods — embroidered textiles, silks, silverware, curios — produced by Muslim artisans in Sindh but traded globally by Hindu merchants. The firms were headquartered in Hyderabad, Sindh, which Rabindranath Tagore described as “the most fashionable city in India.” Personnel rotated between headquarters and far-flung branches, spending up to three years abroad at a stretch. Trust was maintained through kinship networks and a secret accounting script called hatvanika, designed to be unintelligible to tax collectors and competitors.

A parallel network operated from Shikarpur (शिकारपुर), in Upper Sindh, where Shikarpuri Shroffs ran a sophisticated indigenous banking system. Their hundis — negotiable credit instruments — financed caravan routes stretching from Astrakhan on the Caspian to Calcutta. Explorer Richard Francis Burton, no stranger to hyperbole, called the hundi “the crude instrument with which the Shikarpuri Rothschild work.” The Hinduja family, who would become Britain’s wealthiest, started as Shikarpuri traders when Parmanand Hinduja established a trading venture there in 1914.

This was not a primitive system waiting to be replaced by modern banking. It was a sophisticated, trust-based financial infrastructure that operated across legal jurisdictions, currencies, and languages — a century before fintech borrowed the concept.

The province that crossed whole

On 14 August 1947, Sindh became part of Pakistan. Unlike Punjab and Bengal, which were divided between the two new nations, Sindh went whole. Hindu Sindhis received no reciprocal territory. An estimated 1.2–1.4 million people were displaced — not into a designated homeland, but into the general population of a newly independent India that had its own catastrophes to manage.

They became, in the language of scholars, a “deterritorialised” diaspora. Every other displaced community from Partition — Punjabis, Bengalis — could point to a state on the map. Sindhis could not. Their province, their language, their cuisine, their social structures — all survived in memory and practice, but not in geography.

The most concentrated resettlement was in Bombay, where the wealthy established themselves directly and the rest crowded into refugee camps. The largest was the Kalyan Military Transit Camp, a complex of WWII-era army barracks with no roads, no water supply, and no electricity. Over 100,000 refugees occupied it. In 1949, it was renamed Ulhasnagar (उल्हासनगर) — “City of Joy,” a name whose irony was not lost on its inhabitants. Within a decade, Ulhasnagar had become a manufacturing hub. Its goods were humorously branded “Made in USA” — Ulhasnagar Sindhi Association.

What the refugees carried was not material wealth but what economists would later call portable capital: trading skills learned from childhood through a system of shadowing fathers and uncles, multilingual abilities sharpened across decades of international commerce, global networks of kinship-based trust, and an intimate knowledge of the hundi credit system. The pre-existing Sindwork merchant network provided a ready-made infrastructure for relocation. Families who already had branches in Hong Kong, Singapore, Lagos, or Panama simply moved their base of operations. Those who had only operated within Sindh leveraged connections with established diaspora nodes to rebuild from scratch.

It was, as Markovits documented, a global commercial community that reassembled itself within a generation. Delhi absorbed 200,000–300,000 Sindhis into Karol Bagh and Lajpat Nagar. Hong Kong’s existing Sindhi trading houses — already in their second or third generation — became anchors for new arrivals. Singapore, Gibraltar, the Canary Islands, Curaçao — every pre-existing Sindwork node became a landing pad. The network was not destroyed by Partition. It was redistributed.

The empires nobody sees

The brands that emerged from this diaspora span six sectors and fourteen countries. Their scale is extraordinary. Their visibility is not.

Start with fashion. Anita Dongre (née Sawlani) was the first woman in her extended Sindhi family of fifty cousins to work outside the home. She started with two sewing machines on a 300-square-foot balcony in Mumbai after every department store rejected her designs. Today the House of Anita Dongre operates over 1,000 points of sale across four brands, with revenue estimated at $120 million. Kate Middleton and Hillary Clinton have worn her designs. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Sam’s Tailor (सैम्स टेलर) in Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui has occupied the same Kowloon shopfront since 1957. Three generations of Melwanis have measured the shoulders of US presidents, rock stars, and millions of tourists. Roshan Melwani, NYU-educated and the current proprietor, represents the third generation of a masterclass in heritage craft.

In food, the Partition story is most direct. Kailash Parbat (कैलाश पर्बत) traces its origin to a pani puri stall in pre-Partition Karachi. The Mulchandani brothers lost everything in 1947 and rebuilt from a Mumbai street corner. Today the chain operates 80+ outlets across 12 countries, preserving Sindhi culinary traditions like dal pakwan and Sindhi kadhi for a global audience. Choithram’s (चोइथराम्स), started in 1943 by Thakurdas Choithram Pagarani in a four-square-metre store in Sierra Leone, has grown into a supermarket chain with 55+ locations across the UAE and West Africa — the entire enterprise now owned by a charitable foundation. In Penang, Malaysia, Maya Mahtani now runs her flagship tailoring shop inside the Bayview Hotel, applying the same Sindhi diaspora merchant logic her grandfather used when he arrived in the Straits Settlements: position where capital flows, not where costs minimise. In Delhi, Sindhi Dry Fruits has operated from Lajpat Nagar since before Indian independence — a heritage brand whose name carries its identity in the open, yet whose Partition backstory is known to almost no one outside the community.

Electronics and retail follow the Sindwork tradition of global positioning. Jumbo Electronics secured the exclusive Sony distributorship for the UAE in 1974 — a partnership that proved spectacularly profitable during the oil boom. When founder Manu Chhabria died suddenly in 2002 at fifty-six, his wife Vidya — with no prior business experience — stabilised and grew the operation into a $2.5B group. Binatone, founded by Gulu Lalvani in London in 1958, pioneered importing Japanese transistor radios to the UK and once outsold Sony’s Walkman. Shoppers Stop (शॉपर्स स्टॉप), launched in 1991 by the K Raheja Corp (a Sindhi family enterprise), became India’s first modern department store chain — now 110+ stores across 45+ cities.

The West African presence is particularly striking. Melcom Group, whose Sindhi founders trace their Ghana roots to 1929, operates 72+ stores under the motto “Where Ghana Shops.” The Mohinani Group manufactures Polytank water storage tanks — a brand so dominant it became the generic term for water tanks across the country. The Mohinanis also hold Ghana’s KFC franchise, with 34+ outlets. In Nigeria, Chellarams PLC — founded in 1923 by Kishinchand Chellaram — has been listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange since 1978, spanning FMCG, chemicals, and packaging.

But the single most hidden brand may be Officer’s Choice. Kishore Chhabria — brother of Jumbo’s Manu — built it from a smaller distillery into the world’s best-selling whisky by volume. Allied Blenders & Distillers went public on India’s NSE in 2024. A Sindhi-founded brand outselling the most iconic Scotch whisky on the planet. Virtually nobody outside the industry knows it.

Hospitality spans three continents. The Harilela Group’s boutique brand The Hari operates in London’s Belgravia and Hong Kong. Chalet Hotels (K Raheja Corp) runs JW Marriott, Westin, and Sheraton properties across India. In Fort Lauderdale, Ramola Motwani — whose husband died unexpectedly — rebuilt from a single rundown motel into a $3B+ development portfolio anchored by Four Seasons and Conrad properties. The pattern of a widow taking the helm and scaling a business appears again and again across the Sindhi diaspora; it is not incidental but structural, a function of kinship networks that support continuity when the patriarch falls.

The Landmark Group, founded by Micky Jagtiani in Dubai in 1973, may be the largest of all: 2,200+ retail outlets across 22 countries — Lifestyle, Max, Splash, Home Centre — with revenues estimated at $7–8B. And above them all sit the Hindujas, who began as Shikarpuri carpet traders in 1914 and built a diversified conglomerate now valued at ~$50B, making them consistently among Britain’s wealthiest families.

When the patriarch goes

The founding generation — those who survived Partition or built businesses in its immediate aftermath — is passing. The succession question is now existential.

The Hinduja Group is the cautionary tale. For decades, four brothers operated under a shared motto: “Everything belongs to everyone, nothing belongs to anyone.” In 2014, they formalised this in a letter. But as the third generation positioned for influence, the arrangement shattered. Srichand Hinduja’s daughter challenged the letter in UK courts. Legal fees exceeded £20 million. Srichand developed dementia and died in May 2023. A settlement was announced in November, but Gopichand’s death in late 2025 triggered fresh uncertainty. The lesson: even billion-dollar families need formal governance beyond informal agreements.

The Harilela Group offers the opposite model. After Japanese soldiers killed their father in occupied Hong Kong, the brothers hawked soap outside army barracks and built a 19-hotel dynasty. When Hari Harilela stepped down in 2012 and died in 2014, his son Aron became chairman. The Harvard Business School and Kellogg School published case studies on their governance model. Over 90 family members still live together in a Kowloon Tong mansion — Hari’s promise to his dying mother.

Vitabiotics demonstrates the textbook transition. Tej Lalvani started in the warehouse driving forklifts, worked every department, then became CEO while his father Kartar remained Chairman. Tej’s three seasons as a Dragon on BBC’s Dragons’ Den added consumer visibility that operational excellence alone could not.

The Kewalram Chanrai Group pioneered a rarer model: professionalisation. In the early 1990s, the family moved from family management to professional management, enabling the spin-off of Olam International — now a multi-billion-dollar agri-commodity company majority-owned by Singapore’s Temasek — and Redington India, a listed IT distribution company. The family retained ownership while delegating operations, unlocking institutional-grade scale.

And when Manu Chhabria of Jumbo Electronics died suddenly at fifty-six in 2002, his wife Vidya had to learn to run the business overnight. She stabilised the core operation, shed problematic acquisitions, and focused the group on what it did best. Daughters Kiran and Komal now manage different business lines. Sometimes the cleanest succession happens when there is no plan — only survival instinct.

Across these cases, a pattern emerges. First-generation Sindhi businesses were built on individual brilliance and kinship trust. Second-generation transitions succeeded when they combined formal governance with informal cultural capital. Third-generation transitions — where the diaspora now finds itself — require something new: a reason for cousins and in-laws to stay together beyond the founder’s gravitational pull. The families that solved this created enduring institutions. Those that did not saw fragmentation and courts.

What invisibility costs

The gap between the Sindhi diaspora’s commercial scale and its public visibility is not merely a curiosity. It is a market failure.

For investors scanning emerging markets, entire categories of opportunity are invisible because the networks behind them are undocumented. A family office evaluating West African retail would struggle to discover that Ghana’s two largest consumer brands — Melcom and Polytank — share a common diaspora origin, succession dynamics, and kinship-based governance. A venture fund looking at India’s wellness sector might never connect Vitabiotics in London with Officer’s Choice in Mumbai, Jumbo in Dubai, and Chellarams in Lagos — four expressions of the same commercial DNA.

The academic record is thin. Markovits published his landmark study in 2000. Falzon’s ethnography appeared in 2004. A handful of papers on individual communities — the Sindhis of Gibraltar, the textile traders of the Canary Islands, the pioneers of West Africa — have appeared since. But no comprehensive mapping of the diaspora’s contemporary commercial footprint exists. Ram Buxani, the late Dubai pioneer who authored Sindhis: God’s Gift to Global Economy, understood this deficit. The title carried the confident self-awareness of a community that had built globally but remained invisible locally.

What makes this diaspora distinctive is not its wealth — other diasporas are wealthier — but its pattern. Partition stripped everything material and left everything portable.

No other modern diaspora lost its homeland so completely and rebuilt so broadly. Trading skills, kinship trust, the hundi system, multilingual facility, and an extraordinary tolerance for volatile markets. These same assets have now been deployed for three generations across electronics and whisky, vitamins and water tanks, haute couture and pani puri. The Sindhi story is not about one sector or one market. It is about a commercial logic — honed in Sindh, forged in displacement, and distributed across the planet — that keeps producing empires that nobody sees. The Sindworkis who traded silks from Malta to Kobe would recognise the instinct that drives a third-generation Melwani measuring shoulders in Kowloon, or a Mohinani manufacturing water tanks in Accra. The vessel changes. The logic does not.

Until now, nobody was mapping it.

Last updated: April 5, 2026