Cutchi Memon Digest
Kerala
ﮐﮁﻲ ﻤﻴﻤﻦ ﮢ ﺍﯿﺠﺴﭧ - ﮐﻴﺮﻻ
Luis Fischer, the author of “The Life of Mahatma Gandhi”, one of the well known biographies of Gandhiji, writes that when Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi returned from England after doing his law in London, he started practice in Rajkot with the help of his elder brother.
“But Mohandas was a complete failure as a lawyer in Rajkot as well as in Bombay when he could not utter a word during petty cases in court”. At this junction, a Memon from Porbandar, Ghandhiji’s home town, Dada Abdullah Seth, who had settled in South Africa offered him retainer-ship on an annual stipend of Pound Sterling 105.00 for looking after his court cases in Durban. Gandhiji left for South Africa in April 1893. He spent a full year in the service of Dada Abdullah Seth who did his best to groom him as a good lawyer. Gandhiji himself wrote that he was much inspired by ‘the simple intelligence, honest and non-violent preacher Seth Haji Abdullah Zaveri”. Gandhiji lived with Dada. During this period Gandhiji witnessed the atrocities of whites against Indians and other coloured people and started participating in agitation against these atrocities. Meetings of the Indian Patriots were initially held at Dada’s office premises, until the Congress House was established. Dada also contributed immensely for the expenses of the movement in Durban and Natal.
CUTCHI MEMON CLANS
Following the trade or profession in which the Cutchi Memons were engaged they were recognized as different households or families known as ‘Nukh’ in Cutchi or class. Thus families who were primarily providing services in the mosques were designated Zikriya; professionals in tailoring as Sui, masons as Selat, carpenters as Vaaddow; traders in grains as Peediya, ghee as Ghet, potatoes as Bhatda, vegeta-bles as Bakalo and so on. Some Cutchi Memons in Mumbai adopted their professional titles following th Parsi tradition. For example : Engineer, Banatwala etc. We also have Japanwala, Kolkatawala, Rangoo-nwala according to the place of their first migration or trade affiliation. Curiouly enough there were no butchers, Qasayis, among the known Memon families.
Memons used to carry their surname according to the name of the father or a prominent ancestor also: Noorani, Sobhani, Hashimani etc. The ‘ani’ with which these family names end follow the Sindhi tradition still found in the names like Asrani, Advani, etc. Some carried the name of their Nukh or customary profes-sion even when they went for some other type of work and the class name continued as an a perpetual appendage. Thus a member of the Sui family was still a Sui (Tailor) irrespective of whether he is now a medicine man or a car driver.
[Dr. Ismail Sui is a well known physician in Dindigul. I met one Ibrahim Sui, a taxi driver, in Abdasa, a village in the rural Cutch. His mother, Aisam Bai Suiyani, who runs a cattle farm, recalled that some of her ancestors had migrated to Malabar! Incidentally, most of the Cutchi Memon families in Kerala have their roots in Bhuj or Abdasa. The Selatenji Deli, a vast complex of houses near Sangdi Masjid in Bhuj stands, in records, in the name of one Abu Selat who migrated to Malabar long ago. The complex is occupied by Hindu families after it was declared evacuee property after the last known Memon occupant left for Pakistan.- Editor]
TID BITS
GANDHIJI AND DADA ABDULLA SETH
This oil painting of Gandhiji with Dada Abdulla Seth (a.k.a. Haji Abdulla Haji Adam Jhaveri) was made by Kishorebhai Thanki, a famous artist of Porbander and was unveiled by the committee members of the Victoria Jubilee Madrassa and English Medium High School in Porbander, founded by Dada Abdulla Seth to provide Education up to Std. 12 for Muslim Students without getting govt. aids.The portrait has been moved to Gandhi Smruti Kirti Mandal, Porbander and was unveiled there by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat, on 2nd October 2003.
VICTORIA JUBILEE MADRASSA AND ENLISH MEDIUM HIGH SCHOOL, PORBANDER
Note:- The Dada family was well known to the last generation of Memons in Alleppey and Kochi. Hussain Cassum Dada had rice mills in Thiruvarur in Tamil-nadu where many Cutchi Memons worked as manag-ers and technical hands. Dadas dealt in foodgrains all over India. I had the good fortune to be associated with a grand son of Dada Abdulla Seth while in Chitta-gong, Bangladesh. (The Editor)
EVOLUTION OF A NAMING STYLE
Cutchi Memons migrated from Cutch at the beginning of the 19th century and settled down as traders mainly in port towns. Some even went to other places in Africa and the Middle East. Their honesty, hard work and charitable nature resulted in enormous prosperity in business. They became so well known in main trading centers of coastal India that the words “Cutchi Memon” meant “businessman”. The local people were so impressed by their generous nature that almost every Cutchi Memon was greeted by the local populations as “Seth” meaning a rich man or rich businessman, according to the prevailing custom among the people of Mumbai and north Indian states as a mark of respect. “Seth” in the Gujarati language and the Cutchi dialect means a male of great power and control, usually the headman of the clan or tribe. Gandhiji refers, inhis autobiography, to the Seth of his community who countermanded him from going abroad for studies.
When some of the Cutchi Memons migrated to the South Indian cities, particularly to the then Travancore, they were similarly addressed with the appellation of “Sett” as people of most of the southern states and Punjab would not pronounce the word as accurately as the north Indians, particularly by the Tamil oriented Travancoreans. The title got further skewed, phonetically, by the Turkish oriented Pathans then in administration to Sait (one can find Saits in Turkey). Sait then became a surname for them and their children. Cutchi Memons spread from Travan-core to other States, though a few families joined them directly from Kutchch in the meantime. After independence many Cutchi families migrated to Pakistan; but migration from South India was very very insignificant, and whoever migrated retained the title Sait (Eg. Haji Abdul Sathar Sait, who was the first Pak Ambassador to the United Arab Republic) and are understood to be migrants via South. At some stage the family name and the class name disappeared and Father’s name shrank to initials, the title “Sait” assuming their place and thus creating a new style of naming.
While Cutchi Memon men have this unique surname SAIT and women are invariably addressed as BAI, Bai being a common appellation in northern India for women in high position e.g. Rani Lakshmi Bai.
A Maritime Adventure Retold
An adventure story related to the migration to Arattupuzha was narrated by Rabia Bai (d. 1951 aged 90) wife of Abdul Sathar Omar Hashmani. Rabia Bai’s father and uncles were good navigators and she was also familiar with the sea. She, with her father set out from Mandvi in Cutch in a sail boat towards what they called, Malabar. For them the entire Arabian Sea coast from Beckal (Kannur) down to Kolachal (Kanya Kumari) was Malabar.
The boat had a few other passengers and she had with her a Sindhi calf and some beautiful Cutchi furniture and a large wooden box containing ‘Karachi Halwa’ made by one of her uncles for their relatives in Malabar. The boat was supposed to lay anchor at Kollam or Arattupuzha after a three months long voyage. The wind was favourable all along and they were expecting to lay anchor in the next few hours or a day or two. Suddenly came a strong storm and the furious waves broke the vessel into pieces. The halwa box also broke into planks and, Allahu A’lam, the waves parked her on one of the planks. She swam for a day and night and then lost consciousness. She and a couple of others were picked up by the fishermen when the sea calmed after, she guessed, some two or three days. They brought her and the plank she was floating on to the Arattupuzha shore. She was just seven at that time. According to her one of the reasons that prompted many subsequent migrations from Cutch was the floods which submerged the wet lands and consequent impossibility of cultivation which led to acute famine.
(Rabia Bai was the editor’s paternal grand mother and mother of Abdul Rahman Abdul Sathar Sait)
