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.
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