Zahir Bhalloo

Gravestones

Besides the “qalamdān-step” graves, the Lawatiya cemetery in Jibroo also contains at least five gravestones made in the late nineteenth century. These gravestones contain bilingual Sindhi and Persian inscriptions. The Sindhi element is written in Khojki Sindhi script, while the Persian part is written in nastaʿliq script. Two gravestones appear to be related to a single family. The first records the death of Rubab wife of Hajji Muhammad ʿAli Hyderabadi on 23 Rabiʿ I 1315/22 August 1897 (fig. 5) and the second records the death of his daughter Shahi in the following year on 19 Shaʿban 1315/13 January 1898. A third gravestone records the death of Fatima bt. Hajji ʿAbd al-Rasul Qasim Hyderabadi on 26 Shaʿban 1317/30 December 1899. These three gravestones are simple in style and are smaller in size than the remaining two gravestones.

The remaining two gravestones are far more elaborate. They were probably commissioned by wealthy Lawatiya merchants. The Persian element consisting of honorifics in these gravestones is longer. The Persian is also inscribed in Arabic naskh script not Persian nastaʿliq used for the simpler gravestones. There is also an additional Arabic element in these gravestones, mainly pious Arabic formulas such as huwa l-ḥayy al-ladhī lā yamūt (He God is the Everlasting who does not die) or verses from the Qurʾan relating to the inevitability of death such as Q: 28:88: kullu shayʾin hālikun illā wajhahu (everything is perishable except his (God’s) Face). The first gravestone records the death of Safura daughter of Hajji Fadil Hyderabadi on 25 Shawwal 1298/20 September 1881 (fig.6). The artisan who produced the gravestone (ʿAbd al-Khan Shuma? Birdi?) has recorded his name at the top. The second gravestone is dated the beginning of Dhu l-Hijja 1312/May 1895. It records the death of Aqa ʿAbdulu Muḥammad Mukiya Ghulam ʿAli Hyderabadi described as the Hyderabadi merchant (tājir-i ḥaydarābādī) (fig. 7). It is not clear where these gravestones were produced. Given the usage of Persian, it is likely they were produced for individuals belonging to Lawatiya lineages that had initially settled in Iranian ports along the Persian Gulf coast such as Bandar Lingeh or the port of Chabhar in Iranian Baluchistan, before eventually settling in Matrah, Oman.

Devotional Texts

In their ritual performance, the Lawatiya rely on a corpus of Shiʿi devotional poetry in Arabic, Persian and Sindhi relating to the martyrdom of the grand-son of the Prophet, al-Husayn in Kerbala in 680 A.D. The Sindhi poetry recorded in Khojki Sindhi script consists of elegies known as marsiyo. These elegies were recorded into long vertical pothi manuscripts, which resemble the registers used to record accounts (see fig. 10 below). The exact number of such surviving manuscripts among the group is not known. These manuscripts are sometimes even used in actual recitations of the marsiyo by the Lawatiya today. The only manuscript I have examined so far is dated 1326/1908-1909 and belonged to ʿAbd al-Ghafur al-Hyderabadi. Some of the elegies recorded in Khojki Sindhi script in this manuscript can be traced to the work of the Sindhi poet of Sehwan Sharif, Sabit ʿAli Shah Kerbalai (1740-1810).44 There is some evidence to suggest that the Khojas in Kutch also preserved similar manuscripts containing the marsiyo of Sabit ʿAli Shah.

Accounting Records, Letters and Registers

Besides gravestones and devotional texts, the third type of written artefact among the Lawatiya in Khojki Sindhi script are commercial accounting records, letters, and registers. Khojki Sindhi was used as a mercantile script among the Lawatiya well into the 1980s before falling into disuse. The Lawatiya appear to be the only known Khoja group that preserved the usage of the script in its mercantile variant into the twentieth century. During fieldwork in Muscat, I came across the archive (fig. 8) of a textile broker active in the Matrah suq, ʿAli Mukhtar b. ʿAli Muhammad Salih al-Lawati (al-Hyderabadi) (d. 1988) in the attic of his brother.46 Bundles of documents and twenty-two registers in Khojki Sindhi script were crammed into an old suitcase and a wooden chest (fig. 9). Many of the registers (fig. 10) and documents (fig. 11) were wrapped in cotton cloth. Given the fact that there is almost no research on the usage of the Khojki Sindhi script in its mercantile form, this corpus of material is of outstanding historical significance. It is likely that many of the other Lawatiya lineages in Oman also preserve similar commercial documentary corpora in Khojki Sindhi script. This includes Arabic deeds known as waraqa with witness clauses in Khojki Sindhi script.

Conclusion

The main objective of this study has been to shed light on Oman’s transregional connections to Sindh and Gujarat through the example of the mobility of the Lawatiya Shiʿi Muslim presence and its material heritage. Oman has ancient historic ties to Sindh and Gujarat. The mobility and settlement of the Lawatiya is only one recent episode of a longue durée history of movement and settlement between these regions.48 The Lawatiya are, moreover, not the only diasporic group that settled in Oman from Sindh and Gujarat. The Hindu merchant communities of Oman also moved to Oman from Sindh and Gujarat, while the Sunni Muslim Zadjali community is also known to have ties to Sindh. The material heritage of the Lawatiya points to different transregional mobilities which resulted in the formation of this social group. These mobilities involved movement between Sindh and Kutch itself, and across the coastal zones of Baluchistan, southern Iran, the Trucial States (today the United Arab Emirates), and Oman. Not surprisingly, culturally, and linguistically, the Lawatiya have been shaped through their mobilities by Sindhi, Kutchi, Baluchi, Persian and Arabic. This is also reflected in their material heritage in terms of their distinctive funerary architecture and written artefacts.

The Lawatiya example is significant as it demonstrates that the historic emergence of Khoja groups brought together individuals with different caste backgrounds through a complex integrative process that occurred from the late eighteenth century onwards. This integrative process took place within the context of transregional mobility and involved repeated shifts in adherence of the newly formed group to rival spiritual genealogies. The Lawatiya of Oman are the only known Khoja group who have retained the name of the original caste, lotia/lutiyah, to which some of the founders of the Lawatiya lineages belonged. In all other Khoja groups the pre-Khoja caste or group names have not been preserved.

Besides the integrative process that led to the emergence of the Lawatiya Khoja group, it should be noted that the Lawatiya have also integrated over time, through marriage, individuals from the Baharina Arab and Iranian Shiʿi communities with whom the Lawatiya share the same Twelver Shiʿi religious identity. What is less clear are social links, if any, past or present, between the Lawatiya lineages and the Sunni Muslim Zadjali or Baluchi communities in Oman. More recently, there are also examples of intermarriage between the Lawatiya and Omani Ibadhis. These new integrative processes have taken place alongside new transregional mobilities of the Lawatiya within the Middle East, as Lawatiya migrate and return to Oman after work or study in places such as Iraq, Kuwait, and other parts of the Gulf. The result is the emergence of an entirely new generation of Lawatiya, many of whom have lost the ability to speak the Sindhi sociolect of the group. For these Lawatiya, there is little memory of a shared Khoja past. Their connection to South Asia, is understood, if at all, through the Banu Sama b. Luʾayy narrative of their tribe’s origins in Oman and its subsequent return to Oman from Sindh. Only among older Lawatiya, is there still some consciousness of links with other Khoja groups, and a desire to interpret Lawatiya difference, while, transmitting at the same time, the few material, ritual, or linguistic remains of a transregional heritage that separates the Lawatiya of Oman, both from other Khojas, and from Arab and Iranian Shiʿis of the Gulf region. (Concludes)

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Zahir Bhalloo – Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC), Universität Hamburg

Research for this paper was generously funded by the Sultan Qaboos Higher Centre for Culture and Science (SQCCS) through an Oman Research Grant visiting fellowship at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin. An earlier version of the paper was presented online on 8 July 2021.

Courtesy: Open Edition Journals

Click here for Part-I and Part-II

The post Oman’s Trans-regional Connections to Sindh and Gujarat – Part-III first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Mobility and Material Heritage of the Lawatiya

Zahir Bhalloo

The complex mobility and settlement of communities from South Asia in the Arabian Peninsula before the discovery of oil in the twentieth century is often studied from the perspective of the administrative paperwork produced by former colonial powers preserved today in state archives. While the insight provided by such archival sources is significant, recent research has sought to decenter the state perspective by studying the material (architecture, written artefacts) and non-material (linguistic, ritual) heritage of the mobile actors themselves, or, more accurately, their descendants. In an ideal situation, such research should be multi-sited considering both the point of departure of the mobile actors in South Asia and their place of arrival and settlement in the Arabian Peninsula. In most cases, however, including in this article, the focus is on studying the mobile communities either at their point of departure or arrival. Paul Bonnenfant, for example, focusing on the point of arrival, suggests that the Indic elements in the vernacular architecture of the town of Zabid on Yemen’s western coastal plain can be explained by the historic settlement in Zabid of Indians from Sindh, today a province of southeastern Pakistan, and the neighboring western state of Gujarat in India. Olly Akkerman’s recent study, focusing on the point of departure, has shown that the Arabic manuscript culture of the ʿAlawi Bohra Ismaʿili Shiʿi community in Vadodara (Baroda), Gujarat, was shaped by the mobility of Bohra traders, scholars and students between Gujarat and Yemen and their settlement in these places.

In the present article, focusing on the point of arrival, I examine how the funerary architecture (graves) and written artefacts (gravestones, commercial registers, and documents) of the Lawatiya Shiʿi merchant community sheds light on their mobility and settlement in Oman from Sindh and Gujarat. Before examining the material heritage of the Lawatiya, however, in what follows, I provide an overview of how the Lawatiya presence in Oman is understood today from three different perspectives. The first perspective is from nineteenth and twentieth century British colonial sources, the second has emerged from within the Lawatiya community itself, and the third is from two closely related groups from Sindh and Gujarat which formed diaspora mercantile communities across the Western Indian Ocean during the nineteenth century, the Nizari Ismaʿili or Aga Khani Khojas and the Twelver or Ithna ʿAshari Khojas.

Lawatiya, Khoja, Hyderabadi

The Lawatiya community is today one of the most powerful socioeconomic groups in Oman and in the wider Gulf region. The exact numbers of individuals belonging to the community is unknown but is estimated at fifteen to twenty thousand. Unlike most of the Omani population, which is either Ibadhi or Sunni, the Lawatiya are Twelver or Imami Shiʿis. The precise origins and settlement of the Lawatiya community in Oman is difficult to reconstruct today. The fact that the community is known by three different names, Lawatiya, Khoja and Hyderabadi, is an indication of its entangled past.

The Lawatiya, also referred to as Hyderabadi, are seen as identical to the Khoja merchant caste found in Sindh, Gujarat, Bombay

In British colonial sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Lawatiya, also referred to as Hyderabadi, are seen as identical to the Khoja merchant caste found in Sindh, Gujarat, Bombay, and elsewhere across the Western Indian Ocean littoral. The Lawatiya are conceived of in these sources as a South Asian Khoja diaspora that settled in Oman from Sindh, Kutch, and Kathiawar. The walled quarter that the Lawatiya occupied in Matrah, today a suburb of Muscat, known locally as Sur al-Lawatiya, is referred to in British sources as the “Khoja Fort”. This emphasis on a Khoja identification in the colonial sources for the Lawatiya was not accidental. The British consular authorities were keen to establish their protection over all Lawatiya traders who had migrated to Oman after the British conquest of Sindh in 1843 as British Khoja subjects. This protection, as in the case of Sindhi and Gujarati Hindu merchants, gave the British strategic influence not only across the Omani coastal zone, but also in the Trucial states, in Baluchistan and southern Iran where Lawatiya merchants had also settled. Not surprisingly, after mentioning how the Khojas of the region were known locally as Lawatiya and Hyderabadi, Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman, and Central Arabia (1908), meticulously records their geographic distribution, including their ownership of land and property. Most British protected Lawatiya subjects in turn, chose to explicitly identify themselves as Khojas in their communication with the British colonial authorities.

The British colonial understanding of the Lawatiya as a South Asian Khoja trading diaspora in Oman and the Gulf has been challenged more recently by some of the Lawatiya. In the 1970s, a member of the Lawatiya community, Jawad al-Khaburi (1912-1984), also known as Jawad Muscati, traced the origins of the Lawatiya to the Arab Ismaili emirate of Multan (tenth-eleventh centuries). This emirate was founded by descendants of a certain Sama b. Luʾayy who had settled from the Hijaz in Oman. His descendants were known in Multan as the Banu Munabbih and the Banu Sama. According to this construction, the Lawatiya were descended from the Banu Sama in Multan who later settled in Sindh where they adopted Sindhi names, language, and customs before ultimately returning to their homeland, Oman, in separate waves of migration, the most recent being via the city of Hyderabad, Sindh. The Lawatiya or Hyderabadis as they came to be known are thus conceived of by al-Khaburi as an Omani Arab diaspora in South Asia which later returned to Oman. This construction of the trajectory of the mobility of the Lawatiya provides a remarkably similar South Asian equivalent to the return to Oman of an Omani Arab diaspora from Zanzibar and East Africa. This was perhaps not accidental and can be seen as part of the nation building efforts following the arrival of Sultan Qaboos to power in 1970.

Al-Khaburi, however, also added a new layer of complexity by suggesting that the Arab origin Lawatiya lineages that returned to Oman initially lived in the Sur al-Lawatiya alongside a few Khoja lineages of Indian origin that had also migrated to Oman from Sindh and Gujarat. The latter, however, were expelled from Sur al-Lawatiya after they recognized the religious authority of Hasan ʿAli Shah Mahallati (1804-1881), Aga Khan I, as a Nizari Ismaili Imam in the mid-nineteenth century. In brief, therefore, the Lawatiya or Khojas of Arab origin, were not the same as the Khojas of Indian origin as reflected in the way the term Khoja was used in British colonial sources. According to al-Khaburi, the Arab origin Lawatiya lineages from Sindh rejected the authority of Aga Khan I and identified themselves as Twelver or Imami Shiʿis. While the quest for a patrilineal Arab descent within the Lawatiya community can be traced at least as far back as the 1940s, al-Khaburi’s Banu Sama construction of Arab origins for the Lawatiya is the first to have received, at least outwardly, wider acceptance within some sections of the Lawatiya community today. This process has gained pace following the publication of a recension of al-Khaburi’s text and its dissemination within the community. More recently a doctoral thesis written by an Egyptian author based on al-Khaburi’s construction and several popular works all of which reaffirm al-Khaburi’s Banu Sama hypothesis have also been published.

In addition to the representation of the Lawatiya in British colonial archival sources and Jawad al-Khaburi’s construction of their origins, the Nizari Ismaili or Aga Khani Khojas and the Ithna Ashari or Twelver Khojas of South Asia also preserve their own oral traditions regarding the Khojas that settled in Oman and the Gulf. The term Lawatiya and Hyderabadi is hardly known among the Aga Khani Khoja and Twelver Khoja communities. The Lawatiya are generally referred to within these communities as “Muscati” or “Muscat” Khojas. In both the Aga Khani Khoja and Twelver Khoja oral tradition, Muscat mainly appears as an important site of dissidence against Aga Khan I in the nineteenth century. As early as 1829, while Aga Khan I was still in Iran, his mother, Bibi Maryam Khatun (1157-1248/1744-1832), is said to have visited the Khoja community in Muscat to quell Khoja dissent related to the collection and transference of various religious dues to her son and attempts to centralize the ownership of all Khoja caste property under his name. Later when Aga Khan I arrives in Sindh from Iran in 1843, he is said to have appointed, in 1844, a certain Baledina Asani as his “estate agent” in Muscat. Baledina Asani was responsible for collecting religious dues from the Khojas residing in southern Iran, Iraq, and the Gulf and transferring them to Aga Khan I in Bombay via bills of exchange (hoondis). In the Twelver Shiʿi Khoja oral tradition, Muscat only appears briefly in connection to the formal excommunication in Bombay in 1877 by Aga Khan I of prominent Khojas of Zanzibar such as Dewji Jamal, and of Muscat, such as Suleiman Khalfan. Recently, both the Aga Khani Khoja and Twelver Khoja communities have become interested in emergence of the Muscat Khojas as a successful socioeconomic elite in Oman and the Gulf and there have been attempts to re-establish connections and document their shared Khoja heritage.

In the analysis that follows, I suggest that the formation of the present day Lawatiya community and its social equivalence to other Khoja groups cannot be reduced to the three perspectives outlined above. The present day Lawatiya group in Oman is descended from individuals that were part of multiple mobile transregional trajectories. The evidence of the material heritage of the Lawatiya as we shall see below, along with the community’s spoken Sindhi sociolect, and its Shiʿi devotional ritual practice and repertoire of religious texts, have all been shaped and transformed by these mobile transregional trajectories. It is these mobilities of the Lawatiya, I suggest, that sets them apart from other Khoja groups which have had a different set of mobile trajectories and, therefore, acculturation, both in the past and present. (Continues)

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Zahir Bhalloo – Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC), Universität Hamburg

Research for this paper was generously funded by the Sultan Qaboos Higher Centre for Culture and Science (SQCCS) through an Oman Research Grant visiting fellowship at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), Berlin. An earlier version of the paper was presented online on 8 July 2021.

Courtesy: Open Edition Journals

The post Oman’s Trans-regional Connections to Sindh and Gujarat – Part-I first appeared on Sindh Courier.