Gujarati people

• 1. A People and Their Ports

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  Gujarati people stopped Ludovico di Varthema mid-sentence. The fifteenth-century Italian wrote of "a certain race which eats nothing that has blood, never kills any living things." He judged them neither Moorish nor heathen. He concluded they would all be saved "by the virtue of their works." That record, written by an outsider long before the age of global migration, opens a documentary about a community whose commerce and ethics have always been inseparable.

  Gujarat itself sits pressed against the Arabian Sea on the western edge of India. Anthropological surveys find that roughly 70% of people in Gujarat report their community originally came from somewhere else. Among Hindu communities alone, 124 out of 186 claim a migrant past. The Audichya Brahmins, for instance, trace their ancestry to what is now Uttar Pradesh. Migration was not something imposed on Gujaratis from outside. It was a condition they had already inhabited for generations before the first ocean trade routes opened.

  In 1790 and 1791, an epidemic killed 100,000 people in Surat alone. An 1812 outbreak of bubonic plague reportedly halved the entire Gujarati population. How does a community absorb losses at that scale and keep its networks intact? How does a people shaped by such a strict ethic become so formidably effective in trade? International commerce by Gujarati merchants had expanded significantly with the rise of the Gujarat Sultanate at the beginning of the 1400s.

• 2. The Ocean Merchants

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  Estimates from the fifteenth century place roughly one thousand Gujarati merchants living in Malacca. A thousand more operated across the Bay of Bengal and the Indonesian archipelago at the same time. Tomé Pires, writing before 1512, documented a Gujarati commercial presence in Malacca that predated European arrival by generations. These were not transient visitors. They were residents, embedded in port economies from the Malay Peninsula to the islands beyond.

  Surat served as the principal port for the most profitable of these routes. Gujarati merchants carried Indian cotton to Southeast Asia and received spices from the islands in return. Those spices then traveled onward to Persia. Three separate economies were linked through a single chain of exchange operating from western Indian ports.

  The Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama encountered Gujarati merchants on the East African coast. He noted their presence in Zanzibar, Pemba, Kilwa, Bagamoyo, Mombasa, and Malindi. The goods moving through that circuit included gold, ivory, and enslaved people from Africa, exchanged for cotton and glass beads from India. Most Gujarati traders in this network were Muslim, though Hindus and Jains also participated.

  Jain merchants were especially active during the Solanki period, working the Arabian and Red Sea ports. When the Portuguese established their own presence in the region, they preferred dealing with Jain traders over Arab ones. That preference gave Jain merchants a distinct role in the emerging colonial trade economy.

  The scholar Miller, in 2010, proposed that this centuries-long commercial presence left a mark on the written word itself. The indigenous scripts of Sumatra, Sulawesi, and the Philippines, he argued, may be descended from an early form of the Gujarati script.

• 3. Guilds and Tolerance

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  The Mahajan, which translates roughly as "guild assembly," was the institution that made Gujarati mercantile society function across religious lines. Alongside it stood the Nagarsheth, the head of that assembly. Both trace their formal structure to the sixteenth century, when a system emerged under Mughal authority. The model resembled medieval European guilds, with one key difference: these Gujarati guilds regulated commerce across communities of entirely different faiths and castes.

  Historically, Hindus and Jains filled the roles of shroffs and brokers. Muslims, Hindus, and Parsis dominated sea shipping. That division required each community to depend on the others for the full circuit of trade. Religious tolerance became a structural feature of Gujarati commercial life, not merely a philosophical stance.

  In Oman, Gujarati traders extended their influence into palace politics. The sultan Syed Said, who reigned from 1791 to 1856, moved his capital from Muscat to Zanzibar. Those two cities are separated by more than two thousand miles of ocean. The move came at the recommendation of the Shivji Topan and Bhimji families, who had lent money to the crown.

• 4. The Railway and After

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  In the 1890s, British colonial authorities transported 32,000 labourers from India to East Africa. Their assignment was to build the Uganda Railway, starting at the Kenyan port city of Mombasa. The line ended at Kisumu on the Kenyan side of Lake Victoria. Most of the surviving workers returned to India when the project was complete. But 6,724 chose to stay.

  Those who remained were soon joined by a second wave: Gujarati traders known as "passenger Indians." These were free migrants who paid their own passage and arrived to capitalize on the economic openings the railway had created. They set up shops across rural Kenya as the line expanded inland. Most of these dukanwalas, or shopkeepers, came from Jain and Hindu communities, with a smaller number from Muslim backgrounds.

  By the time East African countries reached independence in the early 1960s, the Jain community in the region numbered an estimated 45,000. Most of them belonged to the Halari Visa Oshwal Jain community, originally from the Jamnagar area of Saurashtra. South Asian settlers as a whole made up just 1% of Uganda's population, yet held roughly a fifth of the national income. The Mehta and Madhvani families controlled the bulk of Uganda's manufacturing sector.

  In 1968, Uganda's government convened a committee on Africanisation in Commerce and Industry. It proposed far-reaching measures to remove Indian traders from the economy. The following year, work permits and trade licences were introduced to restrict their commercial activities. Idi Amin came to power in 1971. He deployed propaganda that labeled Indian merchants "dukawallas" with contempt, portraying them as "greedy, conniving" people with no racial loyalty. The campaign ended with the expulsion and ethnic cleansing of Uganda's Indian minority.

  Most of those expelled made their way to the United Kingdom. Due to the efforts of the Aga Khan, many Khoja Nizari Ismaili refugees from Uganda were offered asylum in Canada.

• 5. A Presence Everywhere

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  Pakistan holds the largest overseas Gujarati population, estimated at 3.5 million. Nearly all of them live in Karachi, where community leaders estimate they make up about 15% of the city's total population. Only two Gujarati-language newspapers, Vatan and Millat, continue to serve the community there.

  The United States holds the second-largest Gujarati diaspora, concentrated in the New York City metropolitan area. India Square in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Edison in Middlesex County have become recognized centers of Gujarati-American life. Large-scale Indian immigration to the United States began after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Some community members are twice or thrice-migrants, having moved first from East Africa to Britain, and then from Britain to America.

  Gujarati Americans represent roughly 0.1% of the United States population. That share controls over 40% of the country's hospitality market, with a combined net worth exceeding US$40 billion and more than one million people in their employ. The Patidar Samaj has become particularly prominent as franchisees of chains including Subway and Dunkin' Donuts.

  The United Kingdom's Gujarati community, numbering around 600,000, accounts for more than half of the country's 1.2 million Indian residents. Gujaratis first arrived in Britain in the nineteenth century, drawn by the expansion of the British Raj. Shyamji Krishna Varma, a prominent member of the community, played a significant role in India's independence movement by pressing colonial authorities. The BAPS Swaminarayan Temple in Neasden, London, is a widely recognized place of Hindu worship. In Leicester, Jain Samaj Europe maintains its headquarters at a local temple.

  Two Gujarati communities have come to dominate the diamond industry of Belgium. The Palanpuri Jains and the Kathiawadi Patels from Surat displaced the Orthodox Jewish community that had previously controlled that trade. In Hong Kong, 350 diamond firms were Gujarati-owned as of 2012. Globally, Gujaratis constitute an estimated 33% of the Indian diaspora and are present in 129 of the 190 nations recognized by the United Nations.

  In South Africa, Gujarati Muslim merchants facing discriminatory colonial legislation in Natal sought legal help. They turned to a young lawyer named Mahatma Gandhi, asking him to represent a Memon businessman's case. Umar Hajee Ahmed Jhaveri was subsequently elected the first president of the South African Indian Congress.

• 6. Language, Food, and Folklore

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  In a study comparing diaspora attitudes toward language, only 19% of Gujarati parents believed their children would be better off speaking English over Gujarati. Among Malayali parents, the figure was 80%. Among Kannada parents, it was 36%. That gap reflects a community with an unusually active commitment to keeping its language alive.

  The poet Ardeshar Khabardar, a Gujarati-speaking Parsi who served as president of the Gujarati Sahitya Parishad, gave that commitment a defining line. His poem reads: "Jya Jya Vase Ek Gujarati, Tya Tya Sadakal Gujarat," meaning wherever a Gujarati resides, there forever is Gujarat. It remains widely popular in Gujarat and among diaspora communities around the world.

  Swaminarayan paramhanso, including Brahmanand and Premanand, contributed both prose and poetry to the Gujarati literary tradition: the Vachanamrut in prose form and bhajans in verse. Kanji Swami, a spiritual mystic honored with the title "Koh-i-Noor of Kathiawar," contributed to Jain philosophy and promoted the concept of Ratnatraya. Theatre found its Gujarati form in bhavai, a tradition of musical stage plays. The filmmakers Ketan Mehta and Sanjay Leela Bhansali both explored bhavai in their work, including in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam.

  Gujarati food has been described as "the haute cuisine of vegetarianism." Meals carry a balance of sweet, tart, and mild heat. The kitchen produces many varieties of flatbread, from rotli and bhakhri to dhebara and thepla, alongside snacks including khaman, dhokla, undhiyu, and fafda. Khichdi, a mix of rice and mung dal cooked with spice, is the standard choice on busy days for its ease of preparation. Families mark Sharad Purnima by eating doodh-pauva under moonlight. From Surat comes ghari, a puri filled with khoa and nuts, traditionally eaten during the festival of Chandani Padva.

  Garba, Dandiya, Padhar, Tippani, and Dangi are the folk dances of Gujarat, performed at festivals throughout the year. Toronto is home to the largest Navratri raas garba festival in North America.