Ismaili.NET - Heritage F.I.E.L.D.

This dissertation explores how ideas about cultural and religious difference motivate members of the Shi‘a Ismaili Khojas community in Mumbai to erect social boundaries around their community and reach out to others through volunteer service. As a minority within India’s Muslim minority, difference has been a particularly fraught issue for Ismailis throughout their history. Consequently, they have maintained strict boundary lines around religious institutions in their community, such as sharply restricting attendance at religious functions to Ismailis only.

This article explores late nineteenth-century identity formation and caste boundaries among the Khōjā of colonial Zanzibar. The central concern regarding children born to a non-Khōjā parent was what status, particularly regarding rights of inheritance, the multiracial children born of these relationships had within the caste structure. The case of Nasur Jesa v. Hurbayee suggests that the attitude toward these children was inconsistent; sometimes they were embraced,and at other times they were shunned by the Khōjā community.

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).