“No Birds of Passage: A History of Gujarati Muslim Business Communities, 1800-1975” by Michael O’Sullivan

Sir John Seeley once claimed that the British had “… conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” This would have bemused the many adventurers, mercenaries, and administrators who dedicated their lives to displacing indigenous power across India. More pragmatic than perfidious, Albion accommodated hundreds of princely states ruled by sundry begums, nawabs, nizams, and maharajas.

But the human terrain within these polities was more diverse still. After defeating the last vestiges of the Maratha Empire in western India, the British encountered communities that belied their neat Hindu-Muslim binary: entire castes that had converted en masse to Islam while keeping many of their earlier customs and traditions. Michael O’Sullivan’s new book No Birds of Passage: A History of Gujarati Muslim Business Communities, 1800-1975, explores how these groups both supported and challenged their rulers. Along the way, he provides a detailed case study in how precolonial institutions collided with modernity.

 

No Birds of Passage: A History of Gujarati Muslim Business Communities, 1800–1975, Michael O’Sullivan (Harvard University Press, September 2023)
No Birds of Passage: A History of Gujarati Muslim Business Communities, 1800–1975, Michael O’Sullivan (Harvard University Press, September 2023)

In total, the Bohra, Khoja, and Memon caste groups never exceed more than 1 percent of South Asian Muslims. But they held a disproportionate influence thanks to their organization into jamaats. These institutions functioned like independent corporations, protecting the community’s wealth in the form of religious endowments. The authority vested in leaders allowed them to allocate capital and resolve civil disputes, while the threat of excommunication maintained discipline. Despite their ambiguous hierarchies and regressive tendencies, jamaats enabled vulnerable minorities to thrive amid pervasive mistrust from the wider Muslim and Hindu populations. In that unfriendly setting, cooperation with their new British rulers was the logical choice.

Unfortunately for these fissiparous families, their differences often ended in litigation. Fortunately for the author, British legal sources left a lengthy trail of decisions that tried, however unsuccessfully, to establish just how the jamaats worked. Mountstuart Elphinstone, Governor of Bombay, struggled to reconcile the Common Law with the reality of castes and panchayats. Issues of inheritance and ownership compelled one judge to decide in 1866 whether the Khoja were Sunni or Shi‘i Muslim, only for subsequent case in 1908 to arbitrate what specific kind of Shi‘i . These judges set more than precedents; they set an example. In 1893, a young Khoja named Muhammad Ali Jinnah traveled to London in pursuit of his own career in law and politics. One gets the impression these English-speaking foreigners would have preferred to avoid parsing the finer points of Islamic jurisprudence or Hindu mores, but their plaintiff’s centrality to British rule made that impossible.

By that time, the jamaats were a vital component in the administration and logistics of the Empire. Indian Army troops fighting abroad in Afghanistan, Egypt, and South Africa slept in tents supplied by the Bohra leader Adamji Pribhai. A Memon magnate in Rangoon owned mills and factories that churned out rice, oil, and much else besides. A Memon financier pledged half the assets of the Mysore Bank to British war bonds issued during World War I. Small wonder then, that the Indian Muslim delegation to Versailles in 1919 included a Memon. But no sooner had the jamaats strode onto the world stage than the world intruded on the jamaats.

Capitalism and globalization have always forced people to question old certainties, but the answers vary.

When Adamji Pribhai assumed office as President of the Muslim League at its first session in 1907, he unwittingly contributed to trends that would defenestrate the jamaats. The quest for a single Muslim nation in India, coherent and undivided, meant that jamaats’ capital could no longer remain undisturbed inside opaque religious trusts. Thus did the financial audit become a regular feature of jamaat governance. Journalists and polemicists challenged old pieties, demanding answers from their leaders in vernacular broadsheets. When Sunnis in Bhopal deemed the Bhora insufficient in their sympathy for the Ottomans, they instigated a pogrom that turned the city’s business elite into refugees overnight. Within the jamaat, courageous women began to assert themselves, demanding their rights to inheritance according to the Koran and leveraging the English press in their fight against purdah. By the early 20th century, a Bohra woman would sue the leader of her own jamaat for defamation and win.

Soon thereafter, the dissolution of the British Empire brought about new nations with uncertain identities. Wiser leaders could have recognized the jamaats as an incipient business community with the resources and experience to provide a foundation for economic growth. Instead, short-sighted nationalists saw only foreign relics of imperial rule. To their loss and shame, Iraq, Uganda, and Tanzania expelled their Gujarati Muslim communities. For all his contributions to India’s Dalits, Ambedkar diminished India in 1948 when he dismissed the commercial castes as imperial toadies. And while Pakistan sheltered the jamaats in their hour of need at Partition, by 1972 their very success made them targets for expropriation by the wily populist Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

Capitalism and globalization have always forced people to question old certainties, but the answers vary. The zaibatsu and keiretsu allowed Japanese firms to compete the world over, while the chaebol did much the same for South Korea. O’Sullivan refrains from counterfactuals, but readers will inevitably ask: What if governments in East Africa and South Asia had seen the jamaats as flowers to be watered instead of weeds to be pulled? In that better and different world, the Bohra, Khoja, and Memon might have flourished by enabling trade and commerce across the Indian Ocean. Perhaps today Gwadar and Mombasa could look more like Busan and Singapore. They never got the chance, and that tragedy impoverishes us all.


A former US Marine and Iraq war veteran, Dr James Herndon worked in Udaipur, India while completing his PhD in Economics. He currently works as a consultant in Birmingham, Alabama.