The Khoja Mohalla, Dongri and the memories of Killu Khatau
The Arabian Sea leads to the Indian Ocean at Chowpatty, Mumbai not too far from where our ancestors left the homeland of India and took to the oceans on dhows in search of the new lands in Africa and thereafter newer lives.
It was surreal to visit the Khoja Mohalla in Dongri, Mumbai on my trip to India in January 2022, which was my first trip to the amazing country of my ancestry. Dongri is the suburb where it all happened. It was where the schisms amongst the Khojas that led to bloodshed was seen (amongst other misfortunes), and where the Khojas of my ancestry declared their separation from the mainstream Ismailis to adopt the sect of Islam that we now profess today. All this transpired in the Khoja Mohalla. Today, the area is comprised mostly of the Twelver Shias, with the names of the Shia Imams on their streets, and in the main entrance to the Khoja Mohalla. However, the old Khoja Ismaili cemetery is still there and undoubtedly many of India’s other faith groups do peacefully cohabitate this area of Dongri with the Twelver Shias. I photographed this area with curiosity and am sharing my original pictures from this trip.
My people started out as Ismailis. This ancient Ismaili cemetery in Dongri houses many of our Ismaili ancestors.
In remembering this history, my father would often tell us the story of one Killu Khatau because Killu was related to us, albeit distantly. Killu’s brother, Manji Khatau, had a son (Abdullah) who was married within my grandmother’s side of the family. To be there, in the Khoja Mohalla, in Dongri, where this whole story happened, felt eerie. The story of Killu Khatau is but one tragedy of the schisms of the Khojas of India. More about Killu Khatau later.
The narrative of these Khojas is full of drama. It begins in the 14th century (c 1340) when a spiritual saint from Iran by the name of Pir Sadrudin shows up in Northern India from Persia and begins to convert Hindus to a form of Islam he derives from his own spiritual leanings, a combination of Sufism, mystical Islam, Ismailism and Hinduism. Since the fall of Ismaili fiefdoms of Alamut and Daylam to the Mongols in 1256, Ismailism was confined to Persia which is where Pir Sadrudin, himself a descendant of the holy Shia Imams, hails from. He calls his new path “Satpanth” and links it to the Ismaili sect of Islam but also adopts Hindu philosophies including the godly incaranations. He earns a number of converts to his ideology from amongst Lohana Hindus and he names them “Khojas”, derived from the word Khwaja, a title for a spiritually inclined person. The influence of his work spreads after his death, and more “Pirs” (missionary saints) continue this work and start to extend these conversions to Gujarat and Kutch, which is where my ancestors came from, and many Khojas thrived in these areas along with the native Hindu population with whom they shared common languages, ancestry and even shared relatives. Priestly Khoja figures emerged and were known as “Bawas” and “Bhagats”. They continued to proselytize the Satpanth way amongst the Khojas, absorbing both Hindu and Ismaili elements in their new religion. Over the next four centuries, the Khojas become a sizeable community in Northern India. Pir Sadrudin and his followers and descendants are buried in mausoleums scattered across the area and many of their writings continue to be studied and appraised in scholarly circles to this date. His mausoleum is found in Uch Sharif, Punjab, Pakistan.
With more urbanization under the British rule in India, the Khojas of Kutch and Gujarat started to settle in Mumbai, the closest large city to their villages. They moved mainly to Dongri in the area of the Khoja Mohalla. They continued to practice the religious paradigms of Pir Sadrudin and to identify as Ismailis. However, two big things happened which caused ripples amongst the Khojas of India, who were now crystallizing in Mumbai. The first was the migration of the Aga Khan to India and the second was the missionary work of one Mulla Qadir Hussein who brought with him a new ideology – the Twelver school of Islamic thought. These two vicissitudes of change were about to throw the Khoja community of Dongri into chaos, upheaval, conflict and bloodshed in the 1850’s and beyond.
One of the entrances to the Khoja Mohalla is marked with religious symbolism related to the Shia school of thought.
Today, the community of Khoja Mohalla in Dongri is primarily Twelver Shia along with other Muslims, Hindus and Ismailis. It is a peaceful community with little strife and their religious co-existence now seems harmonious. But the sectarian tensions in this region in the late 1800’s may have driven my ancestors away from the area leading us across the oceans to East Africa and eventually to the Americas.
The first cause of tensions within the Khojas began with the arrival of the head of the Ismaili community to India, and finally Mumbai, in December 1848. The Ismailis and the Twelver Shias had split after the death of the 6th Shia Imam, Jafar al-Sadiq, in the year 765. Ismailis believed that the authority of al-Sadiq continued through his son Ismail. Their descendants lived in Iran until 1848 when the Ismaili leader of the time, Hasan Ali Shah, was named as Aga Khan I by the Iranian monarchs. He then chose to re-establish himself in India and impose strict Ismaili teachings and taxes on the Khojas, whose urban headquarters were now firmly established in Dongri, Mumbai. The problem was that the Khoja disciples of Pir Sadrudin, although Ismailis on paper, were not strict in their practices and often turned to Sunni Muslims or Hindus for advise. When Aga Khan 1 moved to Mumbai, he wanted them to practice hard core Ismaili beliefs and pay him a tithe of religious dues and fees. This created a traumatic division amongst the Khojas resulting in many court cases, feuds and fights resulting in murders and deaths, often requiring the intervention of the British courts. In 13th November 1850, some of those Khojas who opposed the Aga Khan and his disciples were brutally killed during the Islamic month of Muharram. Thus began the back and forth bloodshed in Dongri over which many lives were lost. This was as the Aga Khan I, newly arrived in this part of Mumbai, sought to exercise his authority, and establish purist Ismailism amongst the Khojas of Dongri.
Shia and Sunni structures face each other in Dongri
The historic Khoja Shia Ithnasheri mosque in Dongri where Twelver Shia history originated
This area of Dongri, Mumbai is a testimony to Shia symbolism the sort of which I have only seen in the Shia hubs of Najaf and Kerbala, Iraq.
Samual Street, where the Khoja conflicts transpired and where many of the sectarian skirmishes happened .
Many Khojas pledged their loyalty to the Aga Khan, indicating their commitment to purist Ismailism. Others sought different avenues. A few turned back towards mainstream Sunni Islam. One adventurous Khoja, unwilling to commit to the Aga Khan, escaped to Zanzibar to establish a business there. His name was Jamal Dewji. Having set up his business, he returned to Dongri in Mumbai. And that’s when he met Mulla Qadir Hussein. And a new relationship began which changed the course of history for my people and really for world history itself!
Mulla Qadir Hussein was not a Khoja. Nor was he an Ismaili. His origin was in Madras. He had become a Mulla or religious scholar under the Twelver Shia Muslim ideology. His lectures and teachings were based on the Twelver sect which was the other mainstream Muslim denomination after the Sunni school of thought. Mulla Qadir’s memoirs were once translated into English but the book is no longer available except for the first few pages on Scribd. I was able to get hold of a copy of this extant book which provided context to the many details I researched. The story is interesting, almost miraculous. At one point, in the year 1873 or 1874, Mulla Qadir goes to the Islamic sites in Iraq and meets a spiritual leader, Ayatullah Mazandarani. Jamal Dewji happens to be on the same trip to Iraq and the three visionaries meet and have long discussions where the Ayatullah envisions a situation where the Khojas of Mumbai may wish to align themselves with the Twelver Islamic sect rather than the Ismaili ideology promoted by the Aga Khan. The Ayatullah appoints Mulla Qadir to work with the Khojas through the influence of Jamal Dewji to see if they could be liberated from the throes of the Aga Khan into a mainstream form of Islam. Mulla Qadir and Jamal Dewji return to Mumbai to begin this important work around the 1870’s, although Jamal Dewji at times was ambivalent about separating from the other Khojas now led by Aga Khan I.
Mulla Qadir acquired some popular students who gradually started to create a Twelver Shia presence amongst the Khojas. Starting with Jamal Dewji and extending to Gulamali Ismail (who is named as Haji Naji), these scholars did amazing work. In particular, Gulamali Ismail became a prolific scholar who convinced many Khoja Aga Khanis to turn to the Twelver faith. He translated books into Gujarati and authored many publications including the Rah-e-Najat, a regular magazine aimed at public education about the Twelver Islamic sect.
The Rah-e-Najat bookstand dates from the times of Mulla Qadir Hussein and his student Haji Gulam Ali Haji Ismail
Jamal Dewji, who had once escaped the torment of the Aga Khan and had moved to Zanzibar in 1860, now with the new found knowledge of the Twelver sect of Islam, extended this philosophy through his businesses and established the first Khoja Twelver mosque in Africa, which he named Quwwatul Islam. The year was now 1881. Adding his Twelver ideology to his businesses in Zanzibar (1860) and Lamu (1870), Jamal Dewji was thus not only a pioneer to Africa in the Khoja sense but also in the perspective of making the way for many Twelver Khojas to move to Africa, and establish independent presence there, away from the schisms of the Aga Khani Khojas they had descended from.
My family intersected with the work of Mulla Qadir probably through one of his other students, Killu Khatau, who we mentioned earlier. As far as I can tell, Hasham Shivji, my great-great grandfather and father of Rajabali Hasham, the currently known patriarch of our family, converted to Twelver Islam around this time in the 1870's. Rajabali Hasham (my great grandfather) was born in 1884 and was known to be a Twelver Khoja at birth. When he left India in 1918 and moved to Africa, he was around 34 years old. It would have been his father, Hasham Shivji, who would have converted from the Aga Khani to the Twelver ideology to which all subsequent generations of our family belong.
The story of Killu Khatau is a sad one. A student of Mulla Qadir, Killu Khatau spread the teachings of the Twelvers, leading to many Khoja conversions around Khoja centres in Mumbai and the villages of Kutch and Gujarat where Khojas settled. However, there was a stark secret behind Killu Khatau’s presence. Before he became a student of Mulla Qadir, Killu had actually been hired to kill the Mulla by the Aga Khani Khojas. When he instead switches sides, in admiration of the Mulla, the Aga Khanis decided to revenge this treachery by assaulting and killing many of Killu’s friends. Thus, Khojas who were switching to the Twelver side, were continuously harassed. Killu himself was beaten several times for his “betrayal” and the beatings never stopped despite Killu complaining to the authorities. Finally, on one occasion, Killu pleads with one of his adversaries, a man called Hasan Mukhi, to leave him alone but Hasan instead turns more reproachful towards Killu repeatedly. In desperation, on one occssion, Killu is cornered and attacks Hasan with a knife, killing him in front of witnesses. The ensuing legal action at the hands of the British prosecutors, who controlled the legal system, found Killu guilty and he is subsequently hanged in 1878 in the Dongri jail. He was buried in the Iranian cemetery in Mumbai. The Aga Khanis refused to bury him in the Ismaili cemetery and the Twelvers did not have a cemetery in Mumbai till 1899 when the cemetery below was constructed in Arambagh which was the first Khoja Twelver cemetery. It was a pleasure for me to visit this historic cemetery as well. A monument for the earliest Twelvers who were killed for their separation from the Aga Khani Khojas is found at Arambagh till today.
The Twelver Khoja cemetery in Arambagh (also called Arambaug) was established in 1899. During the schisms with the Ismailis, the Twelvers were not allowed to bury their dead in the ancestral Ismaili cemetery pictured earlier until this cemetery was built. An Iranian merchant, Haji Abul Hussain, acquired this land for the Khojas.
In testimony to the Khoja Twelver martyrs between 1870 and 1899, the years of the schisms between the Twelver and the Aga Khani Khojas. This monument is found at Arambagh near Dongri.
For me, these are my ancestors and this area described is my ancestral land. Whether Twelvers or Aga Khanis, both groups are Khojas descended from the Lohana Hindus who were mystified by the new religion taught by Pir Sadrudin in the 14th century. That the schisms of my ancestors led to bloodshed on this land was hard to absorb. That it led to our leaving India for our glorious time in Africa is perhaps a little bit of a panacea to the stark historical realities brought light by my trip to India.
The sun sets on the Arabian Sea leading from Mumbai to the Indian Ocean as a fisherman can be seen. My ancestors escaped the conflicts of religion and tribalism across these very waters to take their chances in Africa, where they lived from their arrival in 1918 till our departure for Canada in 1989.
In my tours of Mumbai, I often glared across the Arabian Sea and thought about my ancestors who left this country from a port not too far from where I would stare at the blazing Indian Ocean sunset, reflecting on why they would have nervously boarded a dhow with their children and families, sailing across the ocean to the unknown African wilderness. Maybe it was the anger of the schisms their community had undergone, the strife within the Khojas, the hate that led to the hanging of Killu Khatau, or maybe it was purely economic driven by the desire for more wealth, which is the ultimate motivation for sometimes crazy decisions. Either way, a new chapter began when after all this history, several Khoja families embarked on a new journey from the ports around Mumbai to the villages of Lamu, the islands of Mombasa and Zanzibar and the city states of the Zenj, the Eastern African lands, to leave behind the blood and history of India and to set foot on new sands with new visions, aspirations and dreams. To this day I am not sure if their dreams ever came true. Several decades later, I was born in Nairobi, Kenya and a different vision started. Yet the beginning of our journey, through the conversion of the Khojas, breathed a new life when I strolled through the Khoja Mohalla and the streets of Dongri. I felt in the air of Dongri, the souls of my ancestors, their struggles and their conflicts with their own people and their faith in a new belief which inspires us till today.