The Khōjā are an Indic Muslim caste whose origins lie in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Punjab and Kashmir. Over the following centuries a section of the community began a migration down the Indus valley and eastward into Kutch and Kathiawar, located in present-day Gujarat. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the community began to migrate as traders throughout the western Indian Ocean littoral, establishing trading networks from Zanzibar to China (Nānjiāṇī 1–40, 256).