Product Code Database
Muhajir (also spelled "Mahajir" and "Mohajir") (, مهاجر) is an Arabic language-origin term used in Pakistan in some regions to describe Muslim immigrants and their descendants of multi-ethnic origin who migrated from regions of India and settled in the newly formed state of Pakistan after the Partition of India during the Independence of India and Pakistan from British Raj in 1947.
Most of those migrants who settled in Punjab, Pakistan came from the neighbouring Indian regions of Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, and Delhi while others were from Jammu and Kashmir, Rajasthan and the Uttar Pradesh. Migrants who moved to Sindh, Pakistan migrated from what then were the British Indian provinces of Bombay, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Berar Province, and the Uttar Pradesh, as well as the princely states of Hyderabad State, Baroda, Kutch and the Rajputana Agency became commonly known as Muhajirs. Most of these Migrants settled in the towns and cities of Sindh, such as Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur and Mirpurkhas. Many spoke Urdu language, or dialects of the language such as Dakhani, Khari boli, Awadhi language, Bhojpuri, Mewati language, Sadri language and Marwari language and Haryanvi. Over a period of a few decades, these disparate groups sharing the common experience of migration, and political opposition to the military regime of Ayub Khan and his civilian successor Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto evolved or assimilated into a distinct ethnic grouping.Oskar Verkaaik, A people of migrants: ethnicity, state, and religion in Karachi, Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994
In the riots which preceded the partition in the Punjab region, between 200,000 and 2 000,000 people were killed in the retributive genocide. UNHCR estimates 14 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims were displaced during the partition; it was the largest mass migration in human history.
Research has found that there were three predominant stages of Muslim migration from India to West Pakistan. The first stage lasted from August–November 1947. In this stage of migration the Musim immigrants originated from East Punjab, Delhi, the four adjacent districts of U.P. and the princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur which are now part of the present state of Rajasthan. The violence affecting these areas during partition precipitated an exodus of Muslims from these areas to Pakistan.
The second stage (December 1947-December 1971) of the migration was from what is U.P., Delhi, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
The third stage which lasted between 1973 and the 1990s was when migration levels of Indian Muslims to Pakistan was reduced to its lowest levels since 1947.
In 1959 the International Labour Organisation (ILO) published a report stating that between the period of 1951-1956, a number of 650,000 Muslims from India relocated to West Pakistan. However, Visaria (1969) raised doubts about the authenticity of the claims about Indian Muslim migration to Pakistan, since the 1961 Census of Pakistan did not corroborate these figures. However, the 1961 Census of Pakistan did incorporate a statement suggesting that there had been a migration of 800,000 people from India to Pakistan throughout the previous decade.http://www.lse.ac.uk/asiaResearchCentre/_files/ARCWP04-Karim.pdf Of those who had left for Pakistan, most never came back. The Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru conveyed distress about the continued migration of Indian Muslims to West Pakistan:
''There has...since 1950 been a movement of some Muslims from India to Western Pakistan through the Jodhpur-Sindh via Khokhropar. Normallly, traffic between India and West Pakistan was controlled by the permit system. But these Muslims going via Khokhropar went without permits to West Pakistan. From January 1952 to the end of September, 53,209 Muslim emigrants went via Khokhropar....Most of these probably came from the U.P. In October 1952, up to the 14th, 6,808 went by this route. After that Pakistan became much stricter on allowing entry on the introduction of the passport system. From the 15th of October to the end of October, 1,247 went by this route. From the 1st November, 1,203 went via Khokhropar.''Indian Muslim migration to West Pakistan continued unabated despite the cessation of the permit system between the two countries and the introduction of the passport system between the two countries. The Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru once again expressed concern at the continued migration of Indian Muslims to West Pakistan in a communication to one of his chief ministers (dated 1, December 1953):
''A fair number of Muslims cross over to Pakistan from India, via Rajasthan and Sindh daily. Why do these Muslims cross over to Pakistan at the rate of three to four thousand a month? This is worth enquiring into, because it is not to our credit that this should be so. Mostly they come from Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan or Delhi. It is evident that they do not go there unless there is some fear or pressure on them. Some may go in the hope of employment there. But most of them appear to feel that there is no great future for them in India. I have already drawn your attention to difficulties in the way of Government service. Another reason, I think, is the fear of Evacuee Property Laws EPL. I have always considered these laws both in India and Pakistan as most iniquitous. In trying to punish a few guilty persons, we punish or injure large numbers of perfectly innocent people...the pressure of the Evacuee Property Laws applies to almost all Muslims in certain areas of India. They cannot easily dispose of their property or carry on trade for fear that the long arm of this law might hold them down in its grip. It is this continuing fear that comes in the way of normal functioning and normal business and exercises a powerful pressure on large numbers of Muslims in India, especially in the North and the West.''In 1952 the passport system was introduced for travel purposes between the two countries. This made it possible for Indian Muslims to legally move to Pakistan. Pakistan still required educated and skill workers to absorb into its economy at the time, due to relatively low levels of education in the regions which became part of Pakistan. As late as December 1971, the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi was authorized to issue documents to educationally qualified Indians to migrate to Pakistan. The legal route was taken by unemployed but educated Indian Muslims seeking better fortunes, however poorer Muslims from India continued to go illegally via the Rajasthan-Sindh border until the 1965 India-Pakistan war when that route was shut. After the conclusion of the 1965 war, most Muslims who wanted to go to Pakistan had to go there via the India-East Pakistani border. Once reaching Dhaka, most made their way to the final destination-Karachi. However, not all managed to reach West Pakistan from East Pakistan.
The 1951 census in Pakistan recorded 671,000 refugees in East Pakistan, the majority of which came from West Bengal. The rest were from Bihar. Hill et al, page 13 By 1961 the numbers reached 850,000. In the aftermath of the riots in Ranchi and Jamshedpur, Biharis continued to migrate to East Pakistan well into the late sixties and added up to around a million.Ben Whitaker, The Biharis in Bangladesh, Minority Rights Group, London, 1971, p.7. Crude estimates suggest that about 1.5 million Muslims migrated from West Bengal and Bihar to East Bengal in the two decades after partition.Chatterji – Spoils of partition. Page 166
Over on the India-West Pakistan border, in the aftermath of the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, 3,500 Muslim families migrated from the Indian part of the Thar Desert to the Pakistani section of the Thar Desert.Hasan, Arif; Mansoor, Raza (2009). Migration and Small Towns in Pakistan; Volume 15 of Rural-urban interactions and livelihood strategies working paper. IIED. p. 16. ISBN 978-1-84369-734-3. 400 families were settled in Nagar after the 1965 war and an additional 3000 settled in the Chachro taluka in Sind province of West Pakistan.Hasan, Arif (December 30, 1987). "Comprehensive assessment of drought and famine in Sind arid ones leading to a realistic short and long-term emergency intervention plan" (PDF). p. 25. Retrieved 2016-01-12. The government of Pakistan provided each family with 12 acres of land. According to government records this land totalled 42,000 acres.
Indian Muslim migration to Pakistan declined drastically in the 1970s, a trend noticed by the Pakistani authorities. On June 1995, Pakistan's interior minister, Naseerullah Babar, informed the National Assembly that between the period of 1973-1994, as many as 800,000 visitors came from India on valid travel documents. Of these only 3,393 stayed back. In a related trend, intermarriages between Indian and Pakistani Muslims have declined sharply. According to a November 1995 statement of Riaz Khokhar, the Pakistani High Commissioner in New Delhi, the number of cross-border marriages has declined from 40,000 a year in the 1950s and 1960s to barely 300 annually.
The Muslims had launched the movement under the banner of the All India Muslim League and Delhi was its main centre. The headquarters of All India Muslim League (the founding party of Pakistan) was based here since its creation in 1906 in Dhaka (present day Bangladesh) and up to August 1947. The participation in the movement on ideological grounds and supporting its Muslim cause with approximately half of the entire mandate in 1945–46 elections.Prof. M. Azam Chaudhary, The History of the Pakistan Movement, p. 368. Abdullah Brothers, Urdu Bazar Lahore.
The independence of Pakistan in 1947 saw the settlement of Muslim refugees fleeing from anti-Muslim from India. In Karachi, the Urdu language-speaking Muhajirs form the majority of the population and give the city its North Indian atmosphere." Karachi violence stokes renewed ethnic tension". IRIN Asia. Retrieved 2007-05-17. The Muslim refugees lost all their land and properties in India when they fled and some were partly compensated by properties left by Hindus that migrated to India. The Muslim Gujarati people, Konkani Muslims, Hyderabadis, Marathi people, Rajasthani, Punjabi people fled India and settled in Karachi. There is also a sizable community of Malayali people Muslims in Karachi (the Mappila), originally from Kerala in South India. Where Malayalees once held sway, DNA India
Most of the Muhajirs now live in Karachi which was the first capital of Pakistan. After the independence of Pakistan in 1947, the minority and Human migration to India while the Muslim refugees from India settled in Karachi.
Sub-groups also includes the Hyderabadi Muslims, Memon people, Bihari Muslims etc. who keep many of their unique cultural traditions.Karen Isaksen Leonard, Locating home: India's Hyderabadis abroad Muslims from what are now the states of Delhi, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh were themselves of heterogeneous origin.
The Kayastha community has historically been involved in the occupations of land record keeping and accounting. Many Hindu Kayasth found favour with Muslim rulers for whom they acted as Qanungoh Shaikh. This close association led to the conversion of many members of the Kayastha community to Islam. The Muslim Kayasths speak Urdu languagePeople of India Uttar Pradesh page 1047 while they also speak Sindhi language in Pakistan. The Kayasth sometime use Siddiqui, Khan, Shaikh, Usmani and Farooqi as their surnames, and consider themselves as belonging to the Shaikh community.Endogamy and Status Mobility among Siddiqui Shaikh in Social Stratication edited by Dipankar Gupta
The independence of Pakistan in 1947 saw the migration of Urdu language-speaking refugees from India fleeing from the anti-Muslim pogroms. The majority of the Urdu language-speaking and other non-Punjabi people Muslim refugees that fled from various Indian states settled in Karachi.
What defines a Muhajir now is education, urbanism and the Urdu language. Gujarati people, Burmese, Memon people, Bohra people, Ismaili people, Bengali people, Rajasthani Muslims, Marathi Muslims, Marwari Muslims, Konkani Muslims, people from Goa, people from Bombay State, who were in India were counted as Muhajirs in Pakistan as they migrated to Pakistan after or during independence.
In northwest India, in the Punjab, Sikhs developed themselves into a powerful force under the authority of twelve Misls. By 1801, Ranjit Singh captured Lahore and ended Afghan rule in North West India. ξ3 In Afghanistan, Zaman Shah Durrani was defeated by powerful Barakzai chief Fateh Khan, who appointed Mahmud Shah Durrani as the new ruler of Afghanistan and appointed himself as Wazir of Afghanistan. ξ4 The Sikhs, however, were now stronger than the Afghans and started to annex Afghan provinces. The biggest victory of the Sikh Empire over the Durrani Empire came in the Battle of Attock, fought in 1813 between the Sikhs and the Wazir of Afghanistan Fateh Khan and his younger brother Dost Mohammad Khan. The Afghans were routed by the Sikh army and the Afghans lost over 9,000 soldiers in this battle. Dost Mohammad was seriously injured, whereas his brother Wazir Fateh Khan fled back to Kabul fearing that his brother was dead. ξ5 In 1818 they slaughtered Afghans and Muslims in the trading city of Multan, killing Afghan governor Nawab Muzzafar Khan and five of his sons in the Siege of Multan. ξ6 In 1819 the last Indian Province of Kashmir was conquered by Sikhs who registered another victory over weak Afghan General Jabbar Khan. ξ7 The Koh-i-Noor diamond was also taken by Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1814. In 1823, a Sikh Army routed Dost Mohammad Khan, the Sultan of Afghanistan, and his brother Azim Khan at Naushera (near Peshawar). By 1834, the Sikh Empire extended up to the Khyber Pass. Hari Singh Nalwa, a Sikh general, remained the governor of Khyber Agency till his death in 1837. He consolidated Sikh control in tribal provinces. The northernmost Indian territories of Gilgit, Baltistan and Ladakh was annexed between 1831–1840. ξ8
| Census History of Urdu Speakers in Pakistan
|
| 2,378,681 |
| 3,246,044 |
| 4,963,509 |
| 6,369,575 |
| 9,939,656 |
| 13,349,335 |
| Provinces of Pakistan by Urdu speakers (1998)
|
| 07.57% |
| 21.05% |
| 04.07% |
| 00.95% |
| 10.11% |
| 00.96% |
| 00.18% |
Regions with significant populations of Urdu Speaking
Many Urdu-speaking people had higher education, Aligarh Muslim University, and civil service experience working for the British Raj and Princely state. From 1947 to 1958, Urdu-speaking Muhajirs held many more jobs in the Government of Pakistan than their ratio of only 3.3 percent of the country's population. In 1951, of the 95 senior civil services jobs, 33 were held by the Urdu-speaking people and 40 by the Punjabi people.
Four years later on 24 March 1969, President Ayub Khan directed a letter to Yahya Khan, inviting him to deal with the tense political situation in Pakistan. On 26 March 1969, General Yahya appeared on national television and proclaimed martial law over the country. Yahya subsequently abrogated the 1962 Constitution, dissolved parliament, and dismissed President Ayub's civilian officials. ξ10
Mr. Zain Noorani a prominent member of the Memon community was appointed as Minister of State for Foreign affairs with status of a Federal Minister in 1985.
Mohajirs had decisively lost their place in the ruling elite, but they were still an economic force to reckon with (especially in urban Sindh). When a Sindhi, Z.A. Bhutto, became the country’s head of state (and then government) in December 1971, the Mohajirs feared that they would be further side-lined, this time by the economic and political resurgence of Sindhis under Bhutto. In response the Mohajirs enthusiastically participated in the 1977 right-wing movement against the Bhutto regime (that was largely led by the religious parties). The movement was particularly strong among Karachi’s middle and lower-middle-classes (and aggressively backed by industrialists, traders and the shopkeepers). This was also the first time when the Mohajirs compromised their social liberalism to supplement their backing for a movement based on populist religious dispositions. But the success of the PNA (Pakistan National Alliance) movement did not see the Mohajirs finding their way back into the ruling elite, even though the Jamaat-i-Islami became an important player in the first cabinet of Gen Zia regime that came to power through a military coup in July 1977. Disillusioned, some young Mohajir politicians came to the conclusion that their community had been exploited by religious parties, and that these parties had used the shoulders of the Mohajirs to climb into the corridors of power. This galvanised the formation of the All Pakistan Mohajir Students Organisation (in 1978) and then the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM) in 1984. Its founders, Altaf Hussain and Azeem Ahmed Tariq, decided to organise the Mohajir community into a cohesive ethnic whole. For this, they found the need to break away from the community’s tradition of being politically allied to the religious parties, and politicise the Mohajirs’ more liberal social dynamics and character. The Mohajir dichotomy between social liberalism and political conservatism was dissolved and replaced with a new identity-narrative concentrating on the formation of Mohajir ethnic nationalism that was socially and politically liberal but fiscally conservative and provincial in outlook. The project was a success; first expressed in the manner the MQM broke the electoral hold of the religious parties in Karachi and the subsequent invention of the Mohajirs of Sindh as a distinct ethnic group. By 1992, the MQM had become Sindh’s second largest political party (second to the PPP). But as the city’s economics and resources continued to come under stress due to the increasing migration to the city from within Sindh, KP and the Punjab, corruption in the police and other government institutions operating in Karachi grew two-fold. The need to use muscle to tilt the political and economic facets of the city towards a community’s interests became prominent. Thus emerged the so-called militant wings in the city’s prominent political groups. These cleavages saw the MQM ghettoising large swaths of the city’s Mohajirs in areas where it ruled supreme. The results were disastrous. It replaced the pluralistic and enterprising disposition of the Mohajirs with a besieged mentality that expressed itself in an awkwardly violent manner attracting the concern and then the wrath of the state and two governments (in the 1990s).
In 2002 MQM began to regenerate itself after the crises of the preceding decade when it decided to end hostilities with the state by allying itself with the Pervez Musharraf dictatorship (1999–2008). The party had already weaned away the Mohajir community from the concept of Pakistani nationhood propagated by the religious parties. Now it added two more dimensions to Mohajir nationalism. It began to explain the Mohajirs as ‘Urdu-speaking Sindhis’ who were connected to the Sindhi-speakers of the province in a spiritual bond emerging from the teachings of Sindh’s ‘patron saint’, Shah Abdul Latif. This was MQM’s way of resolving the Mohajirs’ early failures to fully integrate Sindhi culture. The other dimension that emerged during this period among the Mohajir community (through the MQM), was to address the disposition of Mohajir identity in the (urban) Mohajir-majority areas of Sindh. This dimension explains Mohajir nationalism in the context of Pakistan’s status of being a Muslim-majority state. It expresses Mohajir nationalism through a version of socio-political liberalism based on the modern reworking of 19th century ‘rational and progressive Islam’ (of the likes of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan). It sees spiritual growth as a consequence of material growth (derived from modern free enterprise, science, the arts and the consensual de-politicisation of faith).
Urdu has been the medium of the literature, history and journalism of Muslims in the area during the last 400 years. Most of the work was complemented by ancestors of native Urdu speakers in the region. The Persian language, which was the official language during and after the Mughal emperors, was slowly starting to lose ground to Urdu during the reign of Aali Gohar Shah Alam II. Subsequently, Urdu developed rapidly as the medium of literature, history and journalism of South Asian Muslims. Most of the literary and poetic work was complemented by various historic poets of mughal and subsequent era, among which Mir Taqi Mir, Khwaja Mir Dard, Mir Amman Dehalvi, Mirza Ghalib, Bahadur Shah II Sir Syed Khan and Maulana Hali are the most notable ones. The Persian language, which had its roots during the time of Moguls, was then replaced later by Urdu. Mogul kings like Shah Jahan rendered patronage as well as support. Many poets in Pakistan such as Zafar Iqbal, Sir Mohammed Iqbal, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Munir Niazi and Saifuddin Saif contributed their efforts for the Urdu language.
The Urdu language spoken in Karachi has become gradually more divergent from the Indian dialects and structure of Urdu, since it has engrossed many words, proverbs and phonetics from the regional languages likePunjabi language Sindhi language, Pashto language, and Balochi language. The pronunciation pattern of Urdu language also differs in Pakistan and the cadence and lilt are informal compared with corresponding Indian dialects. The Urdu speakers in Karachi consider their accent as the standard dialect of the Urdu language.
The initial business elites of Pakistan were Muhajirs. Prominents example of businesses started by them include Habib Bank Limited, Hyesons, M. M. Ispahani Limited, Schon group etc. Nationalization proved to be catastrphpic for Muhajir-owned businesses, and the final blow was delivered as a result of discriminatory policies during the dictatorship of Gen. Zia-ul-Haq. In recent years, many Muhajirs have established their businesses in Pakistan, with a focus on textile, garment, leather, food prodcts, cosmetics and personal goods industries. Many of Pakistan's largest financial institutions were founded or headed by Muhajirs, including the State Bank of Pakistan, EOBI, Pakistan Industrial Development Corporation, United Bank Limited Pakistan, First Women Bank et cetera.
|
|
