Khojah.1—A small Muhammadan sect of traders belonging to Gujarat, who retain some Hindu practices. They reside in Wardha, Nagpur and the Berar Districts, and numbered about 500 persons in 1911 as against 300 in 1901. The Khojahs are Muhammadans of the Shia sect, and their ancestors were converted Hindus of the Lohana 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 Lohanas. The name Khojah is a corruption of the Turkish Khwajah, Lord, and this is supposed to be a Muhammadan equivalent for the title Thakur or Thakkar applied to the Lohanas. The Khojahs belong to the Nazarian branch of the Egyptian Ismailia sect, and the founder of this sect in Persia was Hasan Sabah, 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 Imam and preached that no action of a believer in him could be a sin. It is through this Hasan that His Highness the Aga Khan traces his descent from Ali. Subsequently emissaries of the sect came to India, and one Pir Sadr-ud-din converted the Lohanas. According to one account this man was a Hindu slave of Imam Hasan. Sadr-ud-din 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 Imams of Ismailia with the five Pandava brothers. By this means the new faith was made more acceptable to the Lohanas. In 1845 Aga Shah Hasan Ali, the Ismailia unrevealed Imam, came and settled in India, and his successor is His Highness the Aga Khan.

The Khojahs 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 Khana. They repeat the names of their Pirs 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 Khan. “A remarkable feature at a Khojah’s death,” Mr. Faridi states, “is the samarchhanta or Holy Drop. The Jama’at officer asks the dying Khojah 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 Koran known as the Surah-i-Ya-sin. 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 Khojahs 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 Baghdad, and thence by camel to Karbala.

“The Khojahs are keen and enterprising traders, and are great travellers by land and sea, visiting and settling in distant countries for purposes of trade. They have business connections with Ceylon, Burma, Singapore, China and Japan, and with ports of the Persian Gulf, Arabia and East Africa. Khojah boys go as apprentices in foreign Khojah firms on salaries of Rs. 200 to Rs. 2000 a year with board and lodging.”