Tai (caste)

The Tai are a Muslim community found in the state of Gujarat in India. There is also a large diaspora in the city of Karachi in Pakistan.[1]

Tai
Regions with significant populations
• India • Pakistan
Languages
• Gujarati • Sindhi • Urdu
Religion
• Islam 100% •
Related ethnic groups
• Momnas • Gujarati Shaikh • Memon

History and origin

The word tai in Persian means a basket weaver, which was the traditional occupation of the Tai community. According to some traditions, the community originated in Sindh, and their dialect of Kutchi still includes substantial Sindhi loanwords. There ancestral home was the city of Thatta in Sindh, which was the historic capital of medieval Sindh. They were invited by Sultan Ahmad Shah of Gujarat to settle in Ahmadabad, the city he had founded. There are three groups among the Tai, the Vankar distributed in Viramgam, Dhrangadhra and Ahmadabad, the Ahmadabadi Tai and the Mahdevi Tai. The last group are members of the Mehdawi sect, who are followers of Syed Mohamed Jaunpuri, whom they consider to be the Mahdi. The other Tai communities are Sunni Muslims. They use two surnames, Paggi and Kattar.[1]

Present circumstances

The Tai are landless community, whose traditional occupation is weaving. Many members of the community have diversified, and are now traders.[1]

The Tai are divided by their sectarian affiliation, the Sunni Tai have their own cultural and communal organizations, and the Mehdawi Tai are members of All Gujarat Mahodiya Conference, a sectarian association.

gollark: It's just... why would you do it this way? I'm not very good at programming stuff, but sometimes I see something and think "seriously, why did they do this, I could probably do a better job".
gollark: It does a ton of requests to http://192.168.1.1/cgi/json-req containing (no joke) HTML-form-encoded JSON which appears to be encoding some sort of RPC messages which do stuff to "XPath" objects.
gollark: I think mine has some horrible Angular-based UI with an utterly eldritch API.
gollark: If you are uncool and IPv6 less, eternal suffering for you.
gollark: > I guess gollark just wants your IPWhy would I want that?

See also

References
  1. People of India Gujarat, Volume XXI Part Three, edited by R.B Lal, P.B.S.V Padmanabham, G Krishnan & M Azeez Mohideen, pp. 1352–1357.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.