Tier I — PublicationIsmaili, not Twelver

The Khojkī Script and the Khoja Communities of Western India: A Sacred Alphabet, and a Twelver Shia Turn Within Its Own Community

Saad Khizar Bosal SSRN — in preparation verification pass complete

Abstract The Khojkī script, developed among the Khoja trading communities of Sindh and Gujarat and traditionally associated with the Ismaili pīr Ṣadr al-Dīn, is one of the genuine paleographic treasures of Islamic South Asia: a Brahmic-derived alphabet adapted from ordinary mercantile shorthand into a vehicle for recording the vernacular Ginān devotional literature of the Satpanth Ismaili tradition, later mechanized in one of the first moveable-type presses for an Indic script associated with a Muslim community, and finally preserved as a permanent Unicode standard. This paper documents that script tradition on its own terms — as Ismaili, not as generically "Alid" or Shia-in-general — and then turns to a separate but genuinely connected fact: in the same Khoja merchant milieu that produced Khojkī, a real and well-documented current turned toward Twelver ("Ithnā ʿAsharī") Shia Islam in the second half of the nineteenth century, at real human cost, and founded a Khoja Twelver Shia community that still exists today. The two stories belong together because they are the same community's history — not because the script or its scripture were themselves ever Twelver.

1. From mercantile shorthand to sacred alphabet

Khoja and other Sindhi and Gujarati merchant communities used Landā — a fast, vowel-light commercial shorthand — for everyday accounting long before Khojkī existed as a distinct script. Tradition holds that Pīr Ṣadr al-Dīn (working among these communities in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries) adapted this commercial base into a fuller phonetic alphabet capable of recording connected vernacular verse — the script that came to be called Khojkī, "the script of the Khojas." The script was written for and largely confined to the Khoja community itself, and functioned for centuries as the medium in which the Ginān corpus — devotional poetry central to Satpanth Ismaili practice — was composed, copied, and transmitted.

2. The Ginān corpus: an Ismaili scripture, not a generic "Alid" one

The theological content Khojkī was built to carry is specifically Satpanth Ismaili: devotional poetry addressed to the living Ismaili Imām (historically the Aga Khan and his predecessors) as the continuing manifestation of the walāya of ʿAlī, structured in places around a daśāvatāra (ten-incarnation) framework distinctive to this tradition's synthesis with regional Hindu religious vocabulary. This is a real and important tradition, but it is a specifically Nizari Ismaili one — a different branch of Shia Islam from the Twelver ("Ithnā ʿAsharī") tradition. Treating Khojkī and the Ginān corpus as generically "Shia" or folding them into a Twelver-coded framework blurs a distinction the tradition itself, and the scholarship on it, takes seriously. This paper keeps the two apart.

3. Print and standardization: two confirmed milestones

Two later developments in the script's history are well documented and independently checkable. In 1903, the Khoja publisher Lalji Devraj established a moveable-type press for Khojkī in Bombay, producing the first mechanically printed editions of the Ginān literature and moving the tradition from a closed manuscript culture into print. Then, in 2014, the Khojkī script was formally encoded as its own Unicode block (U+11200–U+1124F), following a technical proposal authored by Anshuman Pandey — a milestone that secures the script's digital preservation independent of any single archive's holdings.

4. A genuine Twelver opening within the Khoja community

The Ginān corpus and the Khojkī script that carries it remained Ismaili. But the Khoja community that produced both was not doctrinally static, and in the second half of the nineteenth century a real, well-documented, and genuinely costly current opened a path from within Khoja society into Twelver Shia Islam — recovered here from a 2025 peer-reviewed study (K. Rajani, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society) rather than from community tradition alone, since the two differ on some details.

Around 1862, a Twelver Shia scholar from Madras, Mullā Qādir Ḥusayn b. Nāhif, arrived in Bombay while raising funds for a journey to the Shia shrine cities of Karbala and Najaf. He founded a madrasa that drew Khoja students, left for Karbala around 1864, and — carrying a formal license from the senior Twelver marjaʿ Ayatullah Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn al-Māzandarānī authorizing him to lead prayers, perform marriages, and collect religious dues — returned to Bombay in 1873 and remained until 1899, teaching Jaʿfarī (Twelver) doctrine to Khojas drawn to it, with backing from Khoja merchants including Dewji Jamal and Khalfan Ratansi. Bombay's Moghal Masjid (founded 1858–1860) became a center for Khojas exploring this current.

The Ismaili leadership's response was severe and sustained: threatened excommunication for anyone attending Mullā Qādir's teaching, economic pressure on his patrons, and exclusion of converts from communal burial and marriage rites. The conflict also turned violent on both sides — the Khoja convert Lalan Alidina was excommunicated in 1876, survived one attempt on his life, and was assassinated in 1879, while Killu Khatau, in a more tangled episode, first attempted to poison Mullā Qādir, later converted to the Twelver side himself, then fatally stabbed an Ismaili Khoja communal official and was sentenced to death. The boundary between the two communities stayed fluid for decades — they continued sharing jamāʿat-khānas and cemeteries into the 1890s — and Mullā Qādir founded a dedicated madrasa for Ithnā ʿAsharī Khojas only in 1892. A clean, single founding date is not really available: Rajani's account stresses that the split was gradual rather than a single event, and it only became formally irreversible in 1901, when Aga Khan III issued a firmān explicitly banning Shia majlis and prayer within Ismaili jamāʿat-khānas — the act that made separate Twelver Khoja institutions, including the community still known today as the Khoja Shia Ithna Asheri Jamaat, a practical necessity rather than a tolerated internal current.

This is the accurate and well-sourced sense in which the Khoja world that produced the Khojkī script "was open to" Twelver Shiism: not because the script or its scripture became Twelver — they did not — but because the same merchant community that produced them contained, within a few decades of the script's own print revolution, a real internal current toward Twelver Shiism, sustained across four decades, contested at real human cost, and eventually formalized into lasting institutions of its own.

5. A note on interpretation

The account above is, I think, defensible to a specialist as it stands. What follows is my own interpretive framing: I read the Khojkī case, together with the 1862–1901 conversion movement inside the same community, as an unusually clear instance of a Muslim community holding — and eventually dividing along — more than one relationship to sacred authority (Ismaili Imamate on one side, Twelver Jaʿfarī jurisprudence on the other), each expressed through its own institutions, without either side's script, scripture, or communal history being retroactively merged into the other's. I don't think this proves anything about which tradition is doctrinally correct, and I don't think it licenses treating Ismaili Ginān literature as if it were Twelver material — it is not. What it shows, I think, is that the Khoja world was itself a live site of exactly this kind of institutional division, which is a genuinely interesting case for the broader framework this project develops elsewhere.

Bibliography

Anshuman Pandey, "Final Proposal to Encode the Khojki Script in ISO/IEC 10646," ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 (2014).
K. Rajani, "Aga Khan or Ayatullah: the choice for the Khojas in the nineteenth century," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3, 35:4 (2025), pp. 1067–1087.
Khoja Shia Ithna Asheri Jamaat, Mumbai — community historical account (ksijamat.org/history); used only where consistent with Rajani (2025), since the two sources differ on some particulars (notably the Killu Khatau episode).
Sachedina Nanjiani, Khoja Vrittant (Ahmedabad, 1892) — near-contemporary Khoja community history, relevant background on the same period.

Editorial note This draft corrects a framing issue identified in an earlier verification pass — the source material folded the Ismaili Ginān/Khojkī tradition into a generic "Alid Walāya" or Twelver-coded frame, which the Ginān corpus itself does not support. Removed entirely: specific manuscript shelfmarks and a manuscript count that could not be independently verified against any library catalog. The 1862–1901 Twelver-conversion material (§4) was drafted initially from the Khoja Shia Ithna Asheri Jamaat's own historical page, then corrected against Rajani's 2025 peer-reviewed article — the community account's version of the Killu Khatau episode (a straightforward martyrdom) does not match the fuller and more tangled account in Rajani (an attempted poisoning, a conversion, then a fatal stabbing of an Ismaili official); this draft follows Rajani as the more rigorously sourced account. Before SSRN submission: obtain Rajani's full article text directly and confirm all quotations and dates against it in full.