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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.