By the beginning of the eighteenth century, families of Hadrami sayyids like the ªAydarñses had established wide reputations in the region. They were no longer solely tied to individual patrons such as nobles, or sub-ject to the vagaries of sultanic favor—struggling as individual immigrants abroad without supporters, dying from poison alone like Baâraq. In eighteenth-century Surat, the primary port of Mughal India, the ªAydarñs sayyids were quite at home. Predecessors had established prestigious lin-eages locally, which were constantly reinvigorated by relatives from Hadramawt and the Hejaz. During this century, Surat went into decline, to be supplanted by English Bombay nearby.
Surat’s fall to provincial status was part of the general decline in Mughal fortunes and was punctuated by a series of crises in which ªAydarñs sayyids featured as authenticators of public opinion. The retreat of imperial power cut cities oª from the surrounding countryside and from each other. The governors of Surat lost their rural incomes to resurgent local Maratha chiefs and increasingly lived out of the pockets of the urban merchants, by turns through compulsion and debt. Merchants themselves were un-able to obtain supplies of cloth from looms in the surrounding countryside for their main business, export to the Red Sea Yemeni port of Mocha;13 carts transporting goods between towns were heavily taxed by local war-lords; and the flow of pilgrims from the north Indian interior, headed for Mecca on Surat ships, dried up. Gubernatorial excesses provoked revolt by merchants, while financial crises moved those with control over the
13. By the seventeenth century, Gujarati merchants had abandoned the great exchange between Indian cloth and the Indonesian “fine” spices, having been edged out by armed Dutch monopoly. Instead, they concentrated on Red Sea trade, the erstwhile “right arm”
of Cambay (Das Gupta 1967). Yemeni exports of coªee were a key source of specie into Mocha, which buoyed the markets for Gujarati products. These coªee exports dried up through the eighteenth century, as Dutch coªee plantations in Java, started with trees smug-gled out of Yemen around 1699, began undermining the Yemeni product. The compromises of those early days can be tasted today in the continued existence of the first blended coªee, Mocha-Java.
means of violence, such as the Ethiopian-commanded Mughal navy and English and Dutch Company traders, to blockade the port as a means of exacting dues.
In these maneuvers, rival blocs of merchants and military units—
normally at odds with each other—temporarily formed coalitions to counter a common imperative or threat. They needed help in holding to-gether. Wavering parties had to be convinced that public opinion stood behind them, to prevent their breaking ranks. At such moments, per-sonalities from the ªAydarñs family were conspicuous in giving their bless-ings to plans and in giving voice to public opinion. The fractious city had common, generalizable interests at certain rare moments but had few non-partisan figures in a position to express them.
In 1732, the merchants of Surat, even those who were bitter rivals, came together to overthrow the governor, Sohrab Khán, who had squeezed them once too often. They carried with them the Ethiopian slave-commanders of the Mughal navy, the English traders, and eventually the Dutch as well.
To dissuade participants from changing their minds, the organizers ob-tained a public pronouncement from the Hadrami sayyid Zayn al-ªAydarñs that their cause was just. Sayyid Zayn gave his blessings to the venture, pronouncing the governor worthy of punishment, and brought the qadi and mufti over to their side as well (Das Gupta 1979: 224). The armed standoª between governor and merchants lasted almost a month; it ended with the governor’s defeat when Maratha commanders from outside the city gave their support to the urban merchants. Muâammad ªAlô, an eminent Bohra merchant and prime instigator of the revolt, raised and maintained two thousand fighting men for the duration of the hostilities.
Three years later, in 1735, the Mughal navy itself threatened to block-ade the port just as the ships of the Surat merchants were fully loblock-aded with goods for the annual convoy to the Red Sea, and a thousand pilgrims were gathered for passage to Mecca. Maritime aªairs had never been a priority of the rulers of the subcontinent, and the Mughal navy was manned by Ethiopian slaves who had been brought over by Turkish war-ships sent to repel the Portuguese in Gujarat in the early sixteenth cen-tury.14They remained the core personnel even as the navy evolved into a standing force, paid out of Surat customs revenue by the governor. The
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14. Pearson argues that the Portuguese were able to control the Indian coasts because maritime aªairs were insignificant to the overlords of the subcontinent; customs contributed only 6 percent of the state revenues of Gujarat (Pearson 1976: 24). Such trifling matters
blockade in 1735 was born out of the desperation of the Ethiopian sea-men, whose wages were long in arrears. The Ethiopians were further im-pelled by English plans to take over their role as the Mughal navy.
The blockade threatened the economic life of the city as a whole, and normal activity within it came to a standstill. Messengers hurried between the merchants, the navy, the governor, the English factory, the Dutch lodge, and the principal ªAydarñs sayyid. The merchants pressed the gov-ernor to accept English arbitration in his dispute with the navy, and when public anger against the governor became critical after six days, the latter relented and agreed to arbitration by Sayyid Zayn al-ªAydarñs, the prin-cipal Surat merchants, and the English factor. “Once this agreement had been reached, Sayyid Zayn led the whole city to prayer and it seemed the crisis had blown over” (Das Gupta 1979: 267).
Why were the ªAydarñs sayyids able to play such mediating roles? One reason is that they were the only party in all these negotiations that never overtly posed a threat to any other. The governors milked the merchants;
the merchants had deposed a governor (and maintained correspondence with o‹cials in Delhi, through whom they could pressure and undermine governors); the navy had threatened both governor and merchants; and English and Dutch traders had on occasion called in their Company war-ships against all the above, in pursuit of sometimes private interests. The traders were Company representatives who traded on their own account, and they could get away with using coercive force at Company expense to juggle personal debts, dues, and profits if they did so in moderation.
The sayyids, in contrast, had a history of cooperative relations with most of these groups. With rulers they had served as counselors and adminis-trators; with slave elites such as the Ethiopians, they had been Muslim cultural mentors; with the merchants, they were familiar as judges and arbitrators in commercial disputes. Europeans often found that the sayyids could help or hinder their dealings, whether they involved obtain-ing houses or blockadobtain-ing the city (Das Gupta 1979: 35–36, 257).
Furthermore, reputation was a significant factor. We have seen some-thing of the sayyids’ peregrinations in courts and major textile-producing towns on the west coast of India: in Surat, Aâmad Abád, Bijapur, and
were left to the maritime merchants to sort out under their own lights. The Mughal navy’s slaves were booty captured in the war in Ethiopia between Imam Aâmad Granye’s Mus-lim forces and Christian Ethiopia led by the emperor Galawdewos, with assistance from Portuguese artillery. Abir (1980) clearly lays out the geostrategic dimensions of this war.
Dawlat Abád; Hadrami sayyids were also present in Broach, Randir, Aâ-mad Nagar, Malabar, and elsewhere. At the Red Sea destinations of the Gujarati ships—in Aden, Mocha, and Jedda—they were well known as judges, scholars, Sufis, and saints. A single lineage, that of the ªAydarñses, for example, could be prominent in most of these places. Through corres-pondence and travel, persons were familiar with distant conditions and personalities throughout the diaspora. Indeed, internal sources indicate that most of these cities housed tombs of family members that were the objects of regular cult pilgrimages. A common family name, across this space and through generations of immigrants and local-born creoles, eªec-tively made the Hadrami sayyids a known quantity.
Perhaps most important was their development of sophisticated tech-niques in handling their names. These names in combination comprise their genealogies. We can think of the genealogies as accumulative projects that folded within themselves multiple generations, familiar geographies, and known histories. While as onomastica they harbored a restrictive set of names, their serialization contained rich possibilities for narrative elab-oration and engagement. The genealogies provided multiple points of contact that articulated with the experiences of other peoples, and in that sense, were public documents whose inscription and spheres of circula-tion embodied a whole multicultural diaspora. Their contents were copied and reemerged in historical and biographical compilations by non-Hadramis in Arabic and in other languages such as Swahili, Urdu, and Malay, in India (R. M. Eaton 1978; Mulkapuri 1912–13), East Africa, the Hejaz, Syria (al-Muâibbô 1966), and Southeast Asia (Raja Haji Ahmad and Raja Ali Haji 1997). The next chapter retraces the distance we have covered in this one, but through the window of evolving genealogical texts.
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