Sanjana Bhambhani's ancestors fled their homeland during India's Partition – and her family gradually lost their mother tongue. Can she now reclaim it?

When I was around eight years old, a teacher at my elementary school in New Delhi, India, asked us which languages our families spoke at home. India is one of the most linguistically-diverse countries in the world, with estimates suggesting that we collectively speak between 122 and 456 languages. In New Delhi, as in several other big Indian cities, people tend to use at least two languages daily: the one commonly spoken at work, in school or in government offices (as Hindi is in Delhi), and a regional language which connects people to their ancestral culture and is spoken within the family.

Of the Indian languages, I grew up only speaking Hindi. I had no idea what my family's second, regional language was. When I asked my father, his answer puzzled me.

"Sindhi," he said.

I had never heard of this language. My father explained that the region where Sindhi is predominantly spoken – namely Sindh – is not in India but in Pakistan, our neighbouring country. How did my family come to lose our ancestral tongue? Why, unlike other Indian families, did we no longer speak our regional language?

The answer lies in an event that not only disrupted my family's history but reshaped South Asia: the Partition of British India.

In 1947, as the British left India after almost two centuries of colonial presence, they drew what's known as the "Radcliffe Line", splitting the country in two: India (with a Hindu majority) and Pakistan (with a Muslim majority). During this division, Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus fled their homes, triggering one of the largest forced migrations in history. Between 14.5 and 17.9 million people escaped for their lives in the midst of immense violence and turmoil. Among them was my grandmother.

My grandmother is from Sindh which, before Partition, was a more religiously and culturally mixed province where both Hindus and Muslims lived, with a Muslim majority. Sindhi was the most commonly spoken regional language. As the country was divided, Sindh ended up in Pakistan, and its Hindu minority – including my grandmother and her family – escaped to India, fearing the persecution of Hindus.

And so, Sindh lost a majority of its Hindu community, and Hindus from Sindh – many of whom had fought for India's freedom from colonial rule – lost their home, the place where their mother tongue, Sindhi, is spoken.

At the age of 14, my grandmother left everything behind: the neighbourhood she grew up in, the streets she walked, the relatives and friends she held dear.

"We didn't have so much as a teacup and saucer to our names," she told me – two important symbols of community and bonding in our tea-drinking culture.

There was one remnant of her childhood my grandmother could bring across the border: her language, Sindhi.

One of the most intriguing things about Sindhi is that it unites linguistic features of two countries that are not just divided, but politically hostile towards one another: India and Pakistan.

Sindhi is derived from a dialect of the Prakrit languages which are precursors to Hindi, India's most spoken language. But the majority of Sindhi literature is found in a modified Perso-Arabic script. In a different modification, the Perso-Arabic script is the script of Urdu, Pakistan's national language.

When my grandmother left her home region, she carried this language, symbolic of her culturally-mixed upbringing, with her. However, arriving in a new India, she had to master the dominant language of her new state, Delhi, which was Hindi. It's the language in which I refer to my grandmother today, calling her........

© BBC