Parmanand Mewaram Parmanand Mewaram (1865 - 1938) Parmanand was a Hindu convert
to Christianity, for the propagation of which he started a fortnightly
journal fote (Light) in 1896 and continued its uninterrupted
publication for 40 years until his death. But his inherent literary
genius turned it from a religious to a literary paper containing
articles on all subjects under the sun, from the gravest to the gayest.
Parmanand introduced two new branches in Sindhi literature : the
humorous tit-bit full of healthy and intelligent fun, and the
travel-essay containing minute observations and descriptions of nature
and man. He was the essayist par excellence, the writer of the
personal, the chatty and the intimate essay, couched in inimitable,
chaste Sindhi abounding in homely idiom, freely bending a simple
Persian and Hindi diction without any sectarian prejudice. From this
vast output scattered in the files of Jote, Parmanand made a selection
of humorous tit-bits and published them in four volumes of Dil Bhar
(Heart's Joy) in 1912, which provided a feast of fun for his readers,
young and old. His second selection was the two volumes of- Gul-Phul
(Flowers) published in 1925, which are veritable treasure chests of
great thoughts on religious, philosophical, moral and social subjects.
This writer had also published Krist-ji-Perawai (1923), a lucid and
masterly translation of Thomas-a Kempis, " The Imita tion of Christ".
But the greatest contributions of this scholar and lexicographer were his two memorable dictionaries, which were the result of years of patient and zealous labour and research. His Sindhi to English Dictionary published in 1910, and English to Sindhi Dictionary published in 1933, are the most reliable works of reference so far. |