[1] Bombay Gazetteer, Hindus of Gujarāt, pp. 55, 56.
[2] Tribes and Castes, art. Khatri.
[3] Bombay Gazetteer, Hindus of Gujarāt, p. 55.
[4] Bombay Gazetteer, Hindus of Gujarāt, p. 189.
[5] Ibidem, pp. 58, 59.
[6] Hindus of Gujarāt, pp. 58, 59.
Khojāh
Khojāh.[1]—A small Muhammadan sect of traders belonging to Gujarāt, who retain some Hindu practices. They reside in Wardha, Nāgpur and the Berār Districts, and numbered about 500 persons in 1911 as against 300 in 1901. The Khojāhs are Muhammadans of the Shia sect, and their ancestors were converted Hindus of the Lohāna trading caste of Sind, who are probably akin to the Khatris. As shown in the article on Cutchi, the Cutchi or Meman traders are also converted Lohānas. The name Khojāh is a corruption of the Turkish Khwājah, Lord, and this is supposed to be a Muhammadan equivalent for the title Thākur or Thakkar applied to the Lohānas. The Khojāhs belong to the Nazārian branch of the Egyptian Ismailia sect, and the founder of this sect in Persia was Hasan Sabāh, who lived at the beginning of the eleventh century and founded the order of the Fidawis or devotees, who were the Assassins of the Crusades. Hasan subsequently threw off his allegiance to the Egyptian Caliph and made himself the head of his own sect with the title of Shaikh-ul-Jabal or Lord. He was known to the Crusaders as the ‘Old Man of the Mountain.’ His third successor Hasan (A.D. 1163) declared himself to be the unrevealed Imām and preached that no action of a believer in him could be a sin. It is through this Hasan that His Highness the Aga Khān traces his descent from Ali. Subsequently emissaries of the sect came to India, and one Pīr Sadr-ud-dīn converted the Lohānas. According to one account this man was a Hindu slave of Imām Hasan. Sadr-ud-dīn preached that his master Hasan was the Nishkalanki or tenth incarnation of Vishnu. The Adam of the Semitic story of the creation was identified with the Hindu deity Vishnu, the Prophet Muhammad with Siva, and the first five Imāms of Ismailia with the five Pāndava brothers. By this means the new faith was made more acceptable to the Lohānas. In 1845 Aga Shāh Hasan Ali, the Ismailia unrevealed Imām, came and settled in India, and his successor is His Highness the Aga Khān.
The Khojāhs retain some Hindu customs. Boys have their ears bored and a lock of hair is left on a child’s head to be shaved and offered at some shrine. Circumcision and the wearing of a beard are optional. They do not have mosques, but meet to pray at a lodge called the Jama’at Khāna. They repeat the names of their Pīrs or saints on a rosary made of 101 beads of clay from Karbala, the scene of the death of Hasan and Husain. At their marriages, deaths and on every new-moon day, contributions are levied which are sent to His Highness the Aga Khān. “A remarkable feature at a Khojāh’s death,” Mr. Farīdi states, “is the samarchhanta or Holy Drop. The Jama’at officer asks the dying Khojāh whether he wishes for the Holy Drop, and if the latter agrees he must bequeath Rs. 5 to Rs. 500 to the Jama’at. The officer dilutes a cake of Karbala clay in water and moistens the lips of the dying man with it, sprinkling the remainder over his face, neck and chest. The touch of the Holy Drop is believed to save the departing soul from the temptation of the Arch-Fiend, and to remove the death-agony as completely as among the Sunnis does the recital at a death-bed of the chapter of the Korān known as the Sūrah-i-Yā-sīn. If the dead man is old and grey-haired the hair after death is dyed with henna. A garland of cakes of Karbala clay is tied round the neck of the corpse. If the body is to be buried locally two small circular patches of silk cloth cut from the covering of Husain’s tomb, called chashmah or spectacles, are laid over the eyes. Those Khojāhs who can afford it have their bodies placed in air-tight coffins and transported to the field of Karbala in Persia to be buried there. The bodies are taken by steamer to Bāghdād, and thence by camel to Karbala.