INDIA :

The cities created in the Deccan by Muslim leaders introduced the concept of public space to the Indian world. 

Photograph of Aurangabad from the Allardyce Collection: Album of views and portraits in Berar and Hyderabad, taken by an unknown photographer in the 1860s. This view is of the Kham River, the city lies along its right bank. Photo: Public domain/Wikipedia.

When India specialists examine what Islam has brought to the country, they often focus on cultural aspects such as language, poetry, music, painting, culinary arts, or spirituality. They rarely consider the urban dimension. 

Certainly, historians and geographers readily examine how what the Marçais brothers called “the Islamic city” spread throughout India, but mainly to see it as an exogenous institution, even an enclave sheltering an elite that came from outside and was cut off from society. Pratyush Shankar’s recent book covers this dimension, of course, but goes further.

In History of Urban Form of India, a work based on the analysis of 42 Indian cities, the author distinguishes three types of cities – which form the three parts of the book: ancient cities, medieval cities, and cities produced by the modern state.

Ancient cities, apart from those of the Indus civilisation, are mainly epitomised in the “temple cities” of southern India. While medieval cities follow several different patterns, Pratyush Shankar distinguishes above all between merchant cities – typical of Gujarat – those of the Himalayas (whose form is conditioned by the terrain), and those built by Muslims in the Deccan.

Comparing them proves very useful in understanding Islam’s contribution to the Indian civilisation – something Pratyush Shankar helps us to do, without attempting it himself – thanks to his morphological approach to the city: he is interested only in the form of the city, not in its local mode of governance or its relationship with the state.  

All Indian cities inherited a significant part of their form or structure from the caste system. Pratyush Shankar points out in the introduction that the “Caste system had a huge impact in determining the location and formation of neighbourhood clusters that were inward looking (in cases of Jodhpur and Udaipur) and the possibility to shut off from the city by controlling the gates (Pols of Ahmedabad)”. 

History of Urban Form of India: From Beginning till 1900’s, Pratyush Shankar, OUP, 2024.

The caste logic is naturally at work in the “temple city”:

“The idea of using a Brahmin settlement (with a temple) for creating a surplus economy was central to the birth of cities in South India. This was legitimized through the Brahminical ideology of the Brahmin-Kshatriya coalition expressed through Vedic and puranic religion”.

And naturally, the “temple city” is “divided into various sectors based on function differentiation that was represented through various caste-based housing. The caste system was strictly observed and manifested itself in the planning of these urban centers”.

The cities built by Muslim leaders from the 14th century onwards in the Deccan did not escape the caste system – especially since distinguishing between Hindu and Islamic cities constitutes “a very simplistic binary” that does not reflect a much more complex reality. But these medieval cities of the Deccan added something new to the urban form that had prevailed in the country until then. This innovation did not take place within the city, but outside – and still, that was a key element of the city dynamics: not far from the city walls, but well outside the city itself, Sufi saints settled in an almost systematic manner. They deliberately distanced themselves from the city to show their detachment from material things and live in peace. At the same time, the inhabitants revered them: “People would leave the material city behind to spend a day at the sacred Sufi sites and return by evening”. 

After their death, these saints were buried in the very place where they stood, and a mausoleum called “Dargah” was built around their tomb, the size of which varied according to the popularity of the saint. 

What Pratyush Shankar does not say is that throughout society, Sufi saints were attributed with considerable powers, even beyond death: many devotees continued to visit the Dargah centuries after the saint’s death to ask him to grant their wishes (whether it be to have a child, to be cured of an illness, or to pass exams). This votive logic, due to its transactional nature, transcends social barriers of all kinds: Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, etc. worship Sufi saints, people from all walks of life, from the elite to the lower castes, rub shoulders at the Dargah and, finally, even in the Holy of Holies, women and men are admitted on an equal footing. But Pratyush Shankar assumes that the reader what I have mentioned above when he concludes:

“The unique contribution of the Deccan cities was perhaps not so much in any extraordinary formation within, but rather in the development of the prominent district of the Sufi saints and the suburbs. Sufi saints were popular amongst the masses and provided the much-needed counterpoint to the state. If the city represented the material world of trade, commerce, and power, the suburban precincts of Sufi tombs were just the opposite; a sacred and spiritual space with frugal infrastructure which is out there in the lap of nature. Over the centuries, this typology took firm root as these complexes of tombs became public places that were frequented by city dwellers like a pilgrimage out of the city, as they often lay just outside the fort walls of the city”.

The word is out: “public space”!

The cities created in the Deccan by Muslim leaders in the 14th century introduced the concept of public space to the Indian world, which had ignored  it until then due to the deep cleavages that divided society along lines of religion, caste, and gender. This is a contribution of Islam to India that some would call paradoxical, given that the image of this religion, today, is often dominated by the idea of segregation, even exclusion. But before Islam entered India, such open spaces did not exist in the country. 

View of the Feroz Shah Kotla, Delhi, 1830, 1843 (oil on canvas) by Colonel Robert Smith (fl.1880-90). Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Certainly, ascetics established their ashrams out of cities – like Ramana Maharshi’s cave above Tiruvannamalai – but his followers did not disturb him there, and when they did, they interacted with him on the mode of the guru-shishya parampara, whereas around the Dargah, one would find play grounds as well as picnic sites.   

In his book, Pratyush Shankar confines this contribution to the Deccan, but it is tempting to argue that the innovation he points to can be found throughout India. In the north too, Sufi saints settled on the outskirts of cities  – did Nizamuddin not choose to live far from Delhi?  – and their mausoleums still offer the image of a public space open to all. This is even more striking when the Dargah is still surrounded by greenery, even though it has been incorporated into the city, such as Sarkhej Roza in Ahmedabad or Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi, where Anand Taneja has clearly shown that people from all walks of life still gather today, as befits a public space!                    

Christophe Jaffrelot is Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London, Non resident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Chair of the British Association for South Asian Studies.

source: http://www.thewire.in / The Wire / Home> English> Opinion> Urban / by Christophe Jaffrelot / October 18th, 2025

GUJARAT :

By recreating a whole world around a group of traders in western India, Chhaya Goswami’s Globalization before Its Time is business history as it should be.

A Dutch trading ship from the late 17th-century. Credit: Wikimedia

The Arabian Sea has a special place in Indian business history. For centuries the cities and settlements on the Arabian Sea littoral traded with each other, exchanging Indian textiles for horse, armaments, pearls and ivory. In turn, some of the textiles were passed on to the Atlantic slave trade in Africa as a medium of exchange, or sent overland to European markets. Coastal merchants indigenous to the region bordering the sea engaged in this business and developed sophisticated systems of banking and shipbuilding to support the mercantile enterprise. The Hindu and Muslim traders of Kachchh were examples of such groups of people.

In the 17th century, the Arabian Sea trade flourished thanks to the control that three powerful empires – the Ottoman in Turkey, the Safavid in Iran and the Mughal in India – exercised on some of the key seaports, and regular transactions amongst them. This was also the time when the European merchant companies established themselves in the Indian Ocean trade, even though the Portuguese had arrived in this world somewhat earlier. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Mughal empire had almost collapsed and its access to the Arabian Sea ports had long come to an end. Europeans were in the ascendance.

What happened to the indigenous traders and bankers during this period of transition? Two contending stories exist on this question. The first says that they lost ground to the Europeans while their patrons lost political power. The second says that the indigenous traders found partnerships and agency with the Europeans lucrative, and as their fortunes flourished, the Europeans gained in political power. Both stories overstate the Europeans’ commercial prowess and understate the Indians’ capacity to shape the course of history.

Chhaya Goswami’s book is a corrective to such biased histories. It shows that the Kachchhi traders did gain from European trade, and withstood well the decline of empires, but they could do so thanks to their own resources, which included well-developed institutions of commerce and banking, knowledge of the seas, shipping, and shipbuilding, past history of collaborating with political actors, and access to both maritime and overland trading routes.

The book is divided into four chapters, each one of substantial length. Chapter one explores the special characteristics of Kachchh that make it a “land of entrepreneurs”. Chapters two and three describe Kachchhi traders’ activities in Muscat and Zanzibar respectively, and chapter four deals with some of the prominent firms in the maritime trade, and how a few of them extended their operations beyond the southwest Asia region.

Why Kachchh? What is special about the region that it should produce so many merchant groups? The convenient location of the region on a navigable part of the eastern Arabian Sea, as well as the Mandvi port, of course, supplies a part of the answer.

Another part of the answer has to do with politics. The western coastal regions were ruled by small states that depended heavily on income from trade. This dependence was due to the poor agricultural conditions in the region. In turn, these states, though nominally vassals of the Mughals, could exercise a great deal of independence in policy. They used their freedom to create a model of rule where merchants and bankers had a prominent place, not only during warfare, the all-too-common palace intrigues or disasters, but also in normal times. Merchants and bankers helped the business of governance by collecting taxes, revenue farming, making loans, and taking part in administration, whereas the states helped them by offering lucrative contracts and implicitly recognising their laws and practices.

But the political and geographical environment explains little unless we also consider the social and institutional basis of entrepreneurship in the region. The merchant groups in question were ready to establish diaspora networks in port cities around the Arabian Sea. They conducted extensive and complicated financial operations including bill and insurance, and their bills were acceptable to the distant trading points thanks to the diaspora network.

The book shows in interesting detail how Vaishnavite temples and monasteries became effectively banks, clearing houses, and guarantors of reputation. Community law had great force. The merchants had considerable interest in shipbuilding, which in turn encouraged timber trade. In banking, trading, shipbuilding, and navigation, master-apprentice hierarchies were highly developed, showing how much skills were valued and how skills formed.

The book is well-researched and builds on the author’s deep knowledge of vernacular sources and the regional context. It is business history as business history should be, that is, it succeeds in recreating a whole world around a group of traders, and fills an important gap in Indian economic history scholarship.

One wishes, at the same time, that the author had tried to place the Kachchhi traders more firmly in debates on the 18th century economic transition in southern Asia, and attempted some comparative discussion of trading ‘firms’ in Kachchh and elsewhere in the world. Surely the Europeans operated in the same world, with a very different model of a firm. Did the difference matter to institutional and political change? But, perhaps wisely, Goswami’s book steers clear of dry historiography. Instead, it keeps in mind its readers – who will no doubt find the material presented fascinating and the quality of the narrative superb.

Tirthankar Roy is a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

source: http://www.thewire.in / The Wire / Home> English> Books / by Tirthankar Roy / July 04th, 2016

GUJARAT :

An excerpt from ‘No Birds of Passage: A History of Gujarati Muslim Business Communities, 1800-1975,’ by Michael O’Sullivan.

The Memons (left) and the Khojas of Gujarati Muslim community in the 1800s. | Southern Methodist University / Wikimedia Commons.

The fracturing of Mughal power over the course of the 18th century had assorted regional effects throughout the subcontinent, ushering in a volatile mixture of market expansion and rapid political turnover. As historians writing on late Mughal North India have shown, the weakening of central Mughal power fostered the conditions for an assortment of parvenu entrepreneurs and social groups to vie for abundant, albeit hotly contested, political and mercantile resources.6 Although conforming to patterns seen elsewhere on the subcontinent, Western India was arguably an exceptional case, for there a matrix of corporate merchant power, state fiscalism, and political polycentrism coalesced (and persisted, albeit to a lesser degree, after the colonial conquest), with few parallels in other parts of South Asia.

At the risk of oversimplification, while in the second half of the 18th century, the Mughal successor states in the north, south, and east of the subcontinent tended to be expansive entities covering large tracts of territory, in Western India the political map was far more disjointed. Alongside the heavies like the Afghans, the Marathas, the Sikhs, and the British East India Company stood innumerable smaller potentates of Rajput origin whose dynasties survived until the end of colonial rule as princes under British suzerainty. Beneath these potentates were the smaller caste combines, able to flex their corporate muscles in the face of grasping state power.

To be sure, such groups were scattered across India – for example, in the Gangetic Plain, where Hindu and Muslim corporate groups arose throughout the “rurban” landscape, which was segmented by a hierarchy of markets and occupational structures. These groups were of a piece with the Bohras, Khojas, and Memons in that they never acquired the capacity to seize political power outright but nonetheless were highly active players in the theatre of politics. What these Hindu and Muslim corporate combine in interior North India lacked was not only access to transregional export markets via a presence in overseas shipping. They also lacked the middle power eventually afforded to the Gujarati Muslim commercial castes by way of Western India’s idiosyncratic incorporation into frameworks of company rule.

Even before the cementing of company hegemony, the corporate power that Indian merchant communities acquired in eighteenth-century Western India was conspicuous but disconnected. In Surat the preeminent trading entrepôt of the region before Bombay’s rise in the early 19th century, corporate merchant bodies were pivotal to the functioning of the state taxation system from the late seventeenth century onward. But even in Surat corporate power did not mutate into a single merchant assembly arrayed against state authority, and merchants showed no willingness to emancipate themselves entirely from the boundaries of community. Yet the divide between merchant and state power remained porous into the 1830s. This porousness stemmed from a phenomenon that historians have identified as portfolio capitalism, whereby entrepreneurs blended interests in trade, revenue collection, and kingmaking. The conditions of portfolio capitalism permitted individual entrepreneurs and the corporate bodies to which they belonged by dint of caste origin to shape the flight path of political fortunes. The permeable political/mercantile divide intrinsic to portfolio capitalism persisted throughout the first half of the 19th century, until formal colonialism eventually drew a definitive wedge between the political and mercantile spheres. Gujarati Muslim middle power emerged within the interstices of that wedge.

In spite, or perhaps because of, its political fragmentation and volatility, eighteenth-century Greater Gujarat has often been framed as one of the select regions of India that possessed the “sprouts” of a dynamic mercantile capitalism in the precolonial period. Some historians assert that its pre-1800 economic indicators may have even rivalled southern England and southern China in the period before the so-called Great Divergence gathered pace.

None of that preempted Surat, from enduring considerable commercial setbacks in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Muslim-owned shipping is said to have especially suffered, but with the demise of late Mughal-era merchant dynasties, new Indian corporate groups came to the fore, among them the Bohras, Khojas, and Memons. While the latter two groups were still outside circuits of British East India Company rule, the Bohras relied heavily on British ships for freighting to ports in Western Asia, a partnership that foreshadowed a deeper relationship to come. Moreover, regional textile networks – and the broader global “cotton sphere” – continued to serve as a link between Greater Gujarat and various parts of Afro-Eurasia into the 20th century, even in the face of de-industrializing trends in the first half of the nineteenth century. Surviving examples of these textiles, such as a late 19th-century silk garment produced by Memon women, reveal a level of artisanal sophistication which surely contributed to the perpetuation of Gujarati Muslim economic prowess.

Just like the textiles they trafficked, the Bohras, Khojas, and Memons were in no sense secluded to Greater Gujarat in the late eighteenth century. Over centuries of sultanate and Mughal rule they had extended their footprint throughout considerable portions of Central and Western India. By the late eighteenth century, traces of these three groups can be found as far east as Ujjain, as far west as Karachi, as far south as Poona, and as far north as Udaipur. In other words, even within the subcontinent they were scattered throughout Baluchistan, Greater Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Sindh. They thus inhabited a territory that was, by the reckoning of an Indian lexicographer in the 1840s, larger than Great Britain and Ireland, with their shared mother tongues serving as the principal language of business in Central and Western India.

Even if these groups operated across a swath of territories, the problem is locating them in this medley of dissonant sovereignties and attending to their specific trajectories. Unfortunately, so far as is known, source material for these centuries has not survived. Still, one can safely surmise that these groups became part of the increasingly differentiated fabric of Muslim life in Gujarat, which revolved around the twin poles of Sufi orders and sultanic authority.

The Bohra, Khoja, and Memon commercial profile was not exclusively maritime in its contours but operated along the dividing line between agriculture and trade. In a telling case, a Kachchhi Memon jamaat was founded in Bhuj in 1799. Bhuj is thirty-odd miles inland from the port of Mandvi, and the decision of the Memons to settle there is a reminder that they did not merely hug the coasts of Western India but also operated in the hinterland. Nonetheless, the ability of Bohra, Khoja, and Memon ship captains to maintain their overseas presence – even amid the partial decline of Indian shipping from the mid-eighteenth century onward – was fundamental to the preservation of their precarious economic position in the transition to colonial rule. It meant that the Gujarati Muslim commercial castes were present, albeit in small numbers, in Jeddah, Madagascar, Mocha, Mozambique, Muscat, and Zanzibar by 1800.

A Gujarati pilot’s map from around 1750 betrays familiarity with the leading commercial entrepôts of the western Indian Ocean, well before formal colonial conquest.21 British East India Company and Dutch East India Company sources from the eighteenth century reveal passing interactions with Bohras and Khojas. This intimacy with overseas trade was consequential in facilitating Gujarati-Muslim interactions with the bricolage of political authorities jostling for supremacy in Western India. But it also partially insulated these groups from the recurring cycles of economic depression that beset agricultural production in colonial India throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

For all their commonalities, it is best to attend to the finer points of each community. The Memons materialise on only rare occasions. Community traditions of later centuries state that the Memons moved out of Sindh to the Kathiawar Peninsula in the early 15th century. From a supposedly once unified community of Lohana Hindus four umbrella Memon communities emerged in the wake of their conversion to Islam in this period: the Kachchhi (Cutchi), the Halai, the Surti (Surati), and the Sindhi. As they migrated, each developed its own incipient corporate identity based on geographic origin.

In the late 18th century, Memons began to attain influence over upstart political authorities. An illuminating and representative example comes from the early history of the Dhoraji Memon jamaat. According to community traditions, in the early 18th century, a Memon merchant named Abd al-Rahman settled in Dhoraji. There he was granted worship and trading rights by the Darbar Haloji of Gondal. Some of Abd al-Rahman’s descendants stayed in Dhoraji, while others migrated to Bantva, about thirty-two miles away, which became another haven for Memons. By 1780 the population of Memons in Dhoraji had reached critical mass, compelling one Adamji, a grandson of Abd al-Rahman, to establish a Dhoraji Memon jamaat. Eventually, the Dhoraji Memon jamaat became a vehicle for local Memons to voice their grievances with the local darbar (royal court) and to combat what they regarded as the arbitrary power of the mahajans, essentially a guild of Hindu moneylenders.

Perturbed both by the taxation policies of the darbar and the influence of the mahajans, the leaders of the Dhoraji Memon jamaat decided to migrate as a group in response to these taxation measures. They ended up travelling to Junagadh, which was only some seventeen miles away but was governed by another ruler. In time, however, the Dhoraji Memon jamaat was attracted back to Dhoraji by the local ruler, whose revenue had been hard hit by the Memon exodus, and he had decided to reextend privileges. Dhoraji, though witness to occasional scenes of tension between the Memons and local authorities, would be a center of Halai Memon corporate power in Greater Gujarat until 1947. The example of the Dhoraji Memon jamaat was repeated among Memons across Western India in the transition from Mughal to colonial rule.

Excerpted with permission from No Birds of Passage: A History of Gujarati Muslim Business Communities, 1800-1975, Michael O’Sullivan, Harvard University Press.

source: http://www.scroll.in / Scroll.in / Home> Book Excerpt / by Michael O’Sullivan / September 02nd, 2024

GUJARAT :

Michael O’Sullivan’s groundbreaking intervention in what is a much longer debate on Islam’s tryst with Western capitalism is his study of the ‘jamaat’ through the analytical category of the ‘corporation’

Bohri havelis in Sidhpur, Gujarat / Stock Photographer

Book: No Birds of Passage : A History of Gujarati Muslim Business Communities, 1800-1975

Author: Michael O’Sullivan / Published by: Harvard / Price: Rs 799

pix: amazon.in

A sleepy pilgrim town called Sidhpur in the Patan district of Gujarat has now become a major site of global tourist attraction. Tucked away in a corner of the old precincts of the town is a spectacular residential enclave of the Dawoodi Bohras, a trading community that flourished in the region from the 1890s to the 1930s. The Bohras built elegant mansions made of wood and stone with stuccoed facades, ornate pilasters, trellised balconies and gabled roofs. These Victorian-style row houses are now completely empty. Apart from being a rare visual treat in an otherwise crumbling town, these empty mansions bear witness to a remarkably rich history of the community recorded in this book that studies the Dawoodi Bohras, along with Khojas and Memons, as a distinctive group of closely-knit endogamous mercantile castes that enjoyed a spectacular record of success in both regional and maritime trade from the early 18th century onwards.

The Khojas, Memons and Bohras lived in the region identified by Michael O’Sullivan as “Greater Gujarat” that included Kutch, Kathiawar, Rajasthan and Lower Sind. Their community narratives described them as descendants of formerly Hindu trading castes who were converted to Islam by Shia missionaries in the 13th century. Their names were derived on conversion, with Bohra derived from ‘vohra’ or trader, Khoja from ‘khwaja’, and Memon from ‘mumin’. It must be noted here that the Memons were the only Sunni group among the three.

The three collectively constitute 1% of the Muslim population of South Asia today. But since the third decade of the 19th century, they acquired an economic prominence vastly disproportionate to their numbers. This was largely because their trading activities, first, in the regional and global cotton textile circuits and, later, in the opium networks, made them active participants in the complex circuits of trade and finance that birthed 18th-century capitalism and a new Indian Ocean economy. They occupied what were deemed to be the interstitial spaces or the ‘middle-power’ among the Dutch, the French and the British mercantile companies. They used their political clout to extend their trading activities with proselytising initiatives in the port cities of Southeast Asia and East Africa.

The largest groups among them lived and operated from Surat but many migrated to Aden, Yemen, China, Malaya, Singapore, Japan and Zanzibar. They spoke Urdu and Gujarati with equal ease. Their fortunes grew steadily from about the 1830s up to the Great War, but the Depression that followed broke their businesses and eroded the wealth they had accrued over decades. They were unable to cope with endemic market shocks, litigations, and the complex web of obligations that sustained their trans-imperial businesses in Asia and Africa. This was also a time when the rising tide of anti-colonial nationalism and swadeshi on the one hand and the emergence of a distinctive Muslim politics on the other challenged these groups to recalibrate their relationships with the colonial State, mainstream Islam and non-Muslim communities at large. O’Sullivan charts the ebbs and the flows of the economic fortunes of these groups by focusing on the complex social, economic and religious bonds that held them together through their jamaats, or a kinship of believers. The jamaats came to define the ‘life-worlds’ of these communities in three distinctive ways: as economic entities that acted as depositories of individual capital and collective assets, as legal entities that acted as arbiters in conflicts among colonial law, customary practice and Islamic jurisprudence and, finally, as social entities that regulated the personal lives of members through decisions on marriage, inheritance and succession as wells as on the terms of participation in anti-colonial and pan-Islamic politics.

The author’s groundbreaking intervention in what is a much longer debate on Islam’s tryst with Western capitalism is his study of the jamaat through the analytical category of the ‘corporation’. He concedes this is contentious terrain, but argues compellingly that the legal, social and economic character of the jamaat in all these communities has a story to tell not only about the entanglements of caste, community and capital in non-Western contexts but also about the plural, heterogenous lives of South Asian Islam and its volatile relations with colonial and post-colonial States as both beneficiary and victim.

This is an audacious scholarly conversation between received categories of classical political economy and South Asian Islam that is likely to provoke debate among specialists in the field. For the general student of history however, it is a book that demands close attention for its outstanding contributions to the craft, both in its expansive approach toward the archive as in its deft interweaving of religion, culture and politics within the complex terrain of capitalist enterprise and law. The structure, prose and narrative richness of the book are likely to ensure a life for it outside the scholarly niche of economic history.

source: http://www.telegraphindia.com / The Telegraph Online / Home> Culture> Books / by Madhumita Mazumdar / book pix edited, source: amazon.in / December 08th, 2022