The history of Muslim communities in colonial India is marked by insufficient imagination of Muslims as economic players. It has been dominated by the more numerous Sunni and Shia groups of north India, Bengal and Punjab. The Khoja, Bohra and Memon Gujarati Muslim communities came from trading castes and were dominant and important representatives of Muslim capitalism. These groups were the reason the Khilafat movement was headquartered in Bombay, and why M. A. Jinnah, who hailed from among them, could become the undisputed leader of the Muslim League. In the cosmopolitan milieu of Bombay, the Khojas, Bohras and Memon were representatives of Muslim capitalism, much in the same way as the Bhatias, Jains and Marwaris were of Hindu capitalism. The latter, however, benefitted from legal devices like the Hindu Undivided Family (HUF) and juridical status of the family deity, incorporating regional variations, which bound Hindu trading castes into a compact mass and facilitated exemptions and tax benefits from the state. This book seeks to answer why and how Muslim capitalists were left behind in this aspect during a period which was marked by a rising consciousness of parity between Hindus and Muslims.

I invert the usual template of a transnational narrative involving Gujarati Muslims, which is done by mapping their disparate presence across the Indian Ocean region as migrant communities, to instead tell a national story grounded in colonial Bombay while acknowledging their heavy presence in external trade. This book uses case law extensively to dislodge the dominant understanding that as the ancestors of these three communities were converted from Hinduism, they followed HUF norms. This is not only misleading but also provides an incomplete picture of the development of vernacular capitalism in colonial India. Using archival records, family histories, court judgments and newspaper reports, I describe why Muslim capitalism was so diverse ethnically and politically.