Lohana Erotic

The Lohana are a Hindu trading community whose center of gravity has shifted twice in a century, and who have carried their name and their institutions through both moves. The older homeland is Sindh, on the lower Indus, from which they spread east into Kutch, the Halar coast of Saurashtra, and the market towns of Gujarat and Rajasthan. They are merchants by occupation and Kshatriya by claim: tradition traces descent from Lava, son of Rama, which is why "Raghuvanshi" appears on their halls and wedding cards about as often as "Lohana" does. The community has never conceded the argument that a caste of shopkeepers cannot have started as warriors.

Language follows geography rather than caste. Lohanas in Kutch speak Kutchi, which sits close to Sindhi; those in Saurashtra and mainland Gujarat speak Gujarati; the Sindh-born generation spoke Sindhi, and some of their grandchildren in Mumbai still do. Religion is mostly Vaishnav, with Pushtimarg and Swaminarayan houses drawing large followings alongside the household kuldevi each family keeps and returns to for weddings and first haircuts. The Sindhi branch adds Jhulelal, deity of the Indus, and keeps Cheti Chand as its new year.

Two ruptures shaped the modern community. In 1947 the Sindhi Lohanas left Sindh almost entirely, and the Amil and Bhaiband sections that had supplied the province with its clerks and its shopkeepers reassembled in Bombay, Ulhasnagar and Gandhidham. Before that, from the 1860s, Bhaiband firms out of Hyderabad in Sindh ran the Sindwork trade, selling silk, curios and lacquerware from shops in Gibraltar, Cairo, Colombo, Yokohama and Panama, a global retail network staffed by relatives sent out on contract. The second rupture came from East Africa, where Lohana traders had been building duka networks around Zanzibar, Mombasa and Kampala since the nineteenth century. Idi Amin's 1972 expulsion of Uganda's Asians moved thousands of them to Britain within weeks. That is why Leicester, Harrow and Wembley have Lohana community centers, and why a family tree can run Kutch to Jinja to Leicester in three generations.

What holds the whole thing together is unglamorous: the mahajan, the caste hall, the printed directory, the hostels that housed boys sent to town for school, and marriage networks that still work by section and surname. Thakkar, Kotecha, Karia and a few dozen other names read as Lohana anywhere in the world.