1. General notice.

Cutchi or Meman, Kachhi, Muamin.—A class of Muhammadan merchants who come every year from Gujarāt and Cutch to trade in the towns of the Central Provinces, where they reside for eight months, returning to their houses during the four months of the rainy season. In 1911 they numbered about 2000 persons, of whom five-sixths were men, this fact indicating the temporary nature of their settlements. Nevertheless a large proportion of the trade of the Province is in their hands. The caste is fully and excellently described by Khān Bahādur Fazalullah Lutfullah Farīdi, Assistant Collector of Customs, Bombay, in the Bombay Gazetteer.1 He remarks of them: “As shopkeepers and miscellaneous dealers Cutchis are considered to be the most successful of Muhammadans. They owe their success in commerce to their freedom from display and their close and personal attention to and keen interest in business. The richest Meman merchant does not disdain to do what a Pārsi in his position would leave to his clerks. Their hope and courage are also excellent endowments. They engage without fear in any promising new branch of trade and are daring in their ventures, a trait partly inherited from their Lohāna ancestors, and partly due to their faith in the luck which the favour of their saints secures them.” Another great advantage arises from their method of trading in small corporations or companies of a number of persons either relations or friends. Some of these will have shops in the great centres of trade, Bombay and Calcutta, and others in different places in the interior. Each member then acts as correspondent and agent for all the others, and puts what business he can in their way. Many are also employed as assistants and servants in the shops; but at the end of the season, when all return to their native Gujarāt, the profits from the different shops are pooled and divided among the members in varying proportion. By this method they obtain all the advantages which are recognised as attaching to co-operative trading.

2. Origin of the caste.

According to Mr. Farīdi, from whose description the remainder of this article is mainly taken, the Memans or more correctly Muamins or ‘Believers’ are converts from the Hindu caste of Lohānas of Sind. They venerate especially Maulāna Abdul Kādir Gīlāni who died at Baghdād in A.D. 1165. His sixth descendant, Syed Yūsufuddīn Kordiri, was in 1421 instructed in a dream to proceed to Sind and guide its people into the way of Islām. On his arrival he was received with honour by the local king, who was converted, and the ruler’s example was followed by one Mānikji, the head of one of the nukhs or clans of the Lohāna community. He with his three sons and seven hundred families of the caste embraced Islām, and on their conversion the title of Muamin or ‘Believer’ was conferred on them by the saint. It may be noted that Colonel Tod derives the Lohānas from the Rājpūts, remarking of them:2 “This tribe is numerous both in Dhāt and Talpūra; formerly they were Rājpūts, but betaking themselves to commerce have fallen into the third class. They are scribes and shopkeepers, and object to no occupation that will bring a subsistence; and as to food, to use the expressive idiom of this region where hunger spurns at law, ‘Excepting their cats and their cows they will eat anything.’” In his account of Sind, Postans says of the Lohānas: “The Hindu merchants and bankers have agents in the most remote parts of Central Asia and could negotiate bills upon Candahār, Khelāt, Cābul, Khiva, Herāt, Bokhāra or any other marts of that country. These agents, in the pursuit of their calling, leave Sind for many years, quitting their families to locate themselves among the most savage and intolerant tribes.” This account could equally apply to the Khatris, who also travel over Central Asia, as shown in the article on that caste; and if, as seems not improbable, the Lohānas and Khatris are connected, the hypothesis that the former, like the latter, are derived from Rājpūts would receive some support.

The present Pīr or head of the community is Sayyid Jāfir Shāh, who is nineteenth in descent from Yūsufuddīn and lives partly in Bombay and partly in Mundra of South Cutch. “At an uncertain date,” Mr. Farīdi continues, “the Lohāna or Cutchi Memans passed from Cutch south through Kāthiāwār to Gujarāt. They are said to have been strong and wealthy in Surat during the period of its prosperity (1580–1680). As Surat sank the Cutchi Memans moved to Bombay. Outside Cutch and Kāthiāwār, which may be considered their homes, the Memans are scattered over the cities of north and south Gujarāt and other Districts of Bombay. Beyond that Presidency they have spread as traders and merchants and formed settlements in Calcutta, Madras, the Malabar Coast, South Burma, Siam, Singapore and Java; in the ports of the Arabian Peninsula, except Muscat, where they have been ousted by the Khojas; and in Mozambique, Zanzibar and the East African Coast.”3 They have two divisions in Bombay, known as Cutchi or Kachhi and Halai.

3. Social customs.

Cutchis and Memans retain some non-Muhammadan usages. The principal of these is that they do not allow their daughters and widows to inherit according to the rule of Muhammadan law.4 They conduct their weddings by the Nikāh form and the mehar or dowry is always the same sum of a hundred and twenty-five rupees, whatever may be the position of the parties and in the case of widows also. They say that either party may be divorced by the other for conjugal infidelity, but the mehar or dowry must always be paid to the wife in the case of a divorce. The caste eat flesh and fowls and abstain from liquor. Most of them also decline to eat beef as a consequence of their Hindu ancestry and they will not take food from Hindus of low caste.