Kothari lives in Ahmedabad and teaches at St. She is currently engaged in translating a collection of Partition stories by Sind hi writers from India and Pakistan. Rita Kothari's works include Modern Gujarati Poetry: A Selection Coral Island: Poems by Niranjan Bhagat Angaliyat (The Stepchild) Translating India:The Cultural Politics of English and Speech and Silence: Literary Journeys by Gujarati Women. This multidisciplinary study is relevant to everyone interested in India's past and present. Going beyond partition studies, this book also makes an important contribution to the area of identity politics in contemporary India. Using intergenerational voices and combining history with personal narratives, Kothari's book examines the phenomena of psychological violence during and after partition, and explores a different facet of partition studies. In Gujarat, these losses are accompanied with a desire to become 'proper' Hindus by adopting a more monolithic Hindu identity and by denying their 'Sindhiness'. In their desire to assimilate with India (especially Gujarat), the Sindhis have risen from the ashes of partition as a model immigrant community, the Sufi syncreticism that informed their former life has been tragically damaged and they have also suffered the loss of their language. She delineates the contexts that made an atypical community like the Sindhis re-modify themselves to suit more textbook notions of Gujarati bourgeois society.
Through personal narratives, Kothari brings to life the story of various Sindhis as they migrate to India and begin their process of resettlement. The Burden of Refuge tells the story of the Sindhi Hindus of Gujarat beginning with colonial Sindh and tracing the socio-political dynamics of the pre-partition days.
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