How Dawoodi Bohras came to be seen as model migrants in Sri Lanka

This month, more than 15,000 members of the Dawoodi Bohra community went to Colombo to mark Ashara Mubaraka, a period of 10 days at the beginning of the Islamic New Year. The Sri Lankan capital had been chosen by the spiritual leader of the community, Syedna Mufaddal Saifuddin, as the venue from where to watch the live broadcast of the congregations conducted in Karachi.

The sight of groups of men in white kurtas, loose trousers and a white topi with a crocheted gold design, and women in bright and colourful ridas was hardly unusual in a country that has had a Bohra minority for centuries.

It was in the early 19th century that this close-knit Shia Ismaili community began emigrating from Gujarat. “Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, with the guidance and encouragement of the dais (spiritual leaders), Bohras migrated to many regions across the globe, including East and Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and the Horn of Africa,” according to a community website. “These pioneering Bohras often engaged in trading and entrepreneurship, in keeping with the community’s long-standing tradition of trade and enterprise.”

The community’s history on the island began thanks to a twist of fate.

“The very first Bohra who set foot on Lankan soil was Jafferjee Essajee and he’s believed to have come to the island in 1830,” Sri Lankan historian Zameer Careem said on The Lost and Forgotten, a programme on the Newsfirst Sri Lanka channel. “He came from India, from Gujarat, from Kutch, but it was in fact a serendipitous encounter.”

At the time, Essajee traded between the Maldives and Gujarat. In 1830, while he was sailing towards the Maldives, his schooner was caught in a storm. “So, the schooner battered by relentless gales was washed ashore and he landed in Galle,” Careem said. “When he was in Galle, he realised there were many Muslim communities who had already settled over there, so he thought of establishing a business.”

From Galle, Essajee exported rice to the Maldives while importing Maldives fish, which has since become a virtual staple of the Sri Lankan diet. Perhaps encouraged by the outturn, the trader moved his family to Galle, and as word spread, more enterprising Bohra families moved from Gujarat to the southern Sri Lankan city.

Community hub

Essajee’s son Careemjee Jafferjee, who helped expand the family business, financed the construction of the first Bohra mosque in Galle. By the middle of the 19th century, Jamali Masjid became the centre of community activity. It still stands on Galle’s Old Matara Road. While continuing to speak Gujarati at home, the Bohras in what was then called Ceylon learned Sinhala and Tamil as the wider trading Muslim community on the island spoke the latter.

In the 1860s, the British authorities began to fully modernise the Colombo port, turning the city the main hub of economic activity on the island and and making it an attractive destination for Bohras. In large part, the community moved from Galle to Colombo, where they set up their shops, warehouses and offices in the Pettah area, near the port.

“They used to run their businesses on the ground floor, while their families lived on the top floor,” Careem said. “What is special about the Bohra community is that the Bohra women were also engaged in various businesses. They supported their men as well as they ran their own businesses in the country.”

Jafferjee expanded his family’s businesses to Kandy and Jaffna, where some members of the community established the Husaini Masjid. Bohra families continued to live in Jaffna until the beginning of the Sri Lankan civil war in 1983, when they were forced by the Tamil separatist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or LTTE, to leave the peninsula. The community’s mosque was damaged during the fighting but was restored after Bohra families moved back to the city after the end of the war.

Expanding footprint

When Bohra families first settled in Colombo in the 1870s, they mainly traded in commodities, but it did not take them long to spot other opportunities. “They realised that the Parsis were also involved in various businesses, while they were many Europeans who had settled in our country as planters,” Careem said. “So they became interested in purchasing tea estates, rubber plantations as well as coconut estates.”

Among Bohra names that became famous as business houses in Ceylon were Adamaly, Lukhmanjee, Jeevunjee, Noorbhai and Hebtulabhoy.

The Hebtulabhoy business empire’s roots go back to 1864 when Sheikh Hebtulabhoy moved to Pettah, Colombo, from Kutch. The family ran a highly successful food import and export business and had its own vessels transporting commodities from Ceylon to India and the Maldives.

By the end of the 19th century, the family owned a large amount of land in what are now some of the prime areas in the heart of Colombo. In 1907, three of Hebtulabhoy’s sons started a firm named MS Hebtulabhoy, which managed to break the well-protected British monopoly on tea exports. The family continues to be one of the leading exporters of tea on the island.

Another successful Bohra entrepreneur was Adamjee Lukmanjee, who in 1907, set up one of Ceylon’s first coconut oil-manufacturing facilities.

Like Lukmanjee, TAJ Noorbhai was another businessman who had large industrial units. Although an exporter and tea planter, Noorbhai owned the Wellawatte Spinning & Weaving Mills at one time and produced the first film to be made in Sri Lanka: Rajakeeya Wickremaya. The silent film released in 1925 and was directed by an Indian known as Guptha, notes Nuwan Nayanajith Kumara in ‘Sri Lankeya Cinemavanshaya’.

Noorbhai was known for making generous donations to schools and charities. Other members of the Bohra community also contributed to charitable causes. The Lukhmanjee family, for instance, set up the Adamjee Lukmanjee Maternity Home.

The success of the community must have caused envy and resentment among European competitors in the early 20th century. But even if it did, there was little they could do about it: Indians at that time had the right to live and work in Ceylon, thanks to the nation’s fuzzy citizenship rules.

Although the community focused mainly on business, some eminent members did foray into politics. Kurbanhusen Adamaly served as deputy mayor of Colombo and as a member of the upper house of Ceylon’s parliament from 1949 to 1961.

Life after the Raj

Bohras continued migrating to Ceylon from India until both countries attained independence from the British. In this account, Fatema Shabbir Baldiwala mentions her father, then a “rebellious” teenager, being sent to Ceylon at the time of Partition, to live under the care of her great uncle.

By the time Ceylon became independent, the Bohra community was firmly settled on the island and viewed positively by the larger public. Unlike other Indian communities, such as plantation workers, it occupied a position of privilege.

After getting freedom, Ceylon began to impose visa restrictions on Indians to prevent large-scale migration, especially from southern India. With a growing wave of Sinhala nationalism, there was pressure to not renew residence permits for Indians.

Two laws passed in independent Ceylon ensured that most members of the Bohra community became citizens. The first, the Ceylon Citizenship Act of 1948, allowed citizenship to anyone who could prove that his or her father was born in Ceylon. The second, the Indian and Pakistani Residents (Citizenship) of 1949, granted citizenship to anyone who had 10 years of uninterrupted residence (seven years for married couples) in Ceylon and had income over a particular threshold. These laws were passed in particular to stop Tamil plantation workers in the country from obtaining citizenship since they usually went to India for deliveries and rarely registered births. The new laws did not affect better educated and affluent Indian communities like the Bohras, Sindhis and Parsis.

Independent Ceylon made the Bohras feel welcome and wanted. In the 1950s, Prime Minister John Kotelawala assured the community of its place in society. “You have lived with us for so long that we feel we cannot live without you,” he said. “I know that when the call comes you will help preserve democracy.”

Almost 200 years after Jafferjee Essajee’s schooner ended up in Galle by a twist of fate, the community he helped establish remains one of Sri Lanka’s greatest success stories.

Ajay Kamalakaran is a writer, primarily based in Mumbai. His Twitter handle is @ajaykamalakaran.