The ginans were made by missionaries working a long way from the centres of Islamic learning. From roughly the fourteenth century, pirs and sayyids sent into Sindh, Gujarat and the Punjab taught a form of Nizari Ismailism known as Satpanth, the true path, and they taught it in the languages and the poetic conventions their listeners already had. The result is a body of hymns that uses the vocabulary of Indic devotion, its imagery of the beloved and the guide, its cosmology, its narrative furniture, to carry Ismaili doctrine about the imam and about the interpretation of revelation.
Scholarship has spent a good deal of effort deciding what to call that. Older accounts, both colonial and confessional, described it as syncretism or as a disguise adopted under pressure. More recent work, Ali Asani's in particular, argues that the framing is wrong: the ginans are not Islam wearing Indian dress, they are what Islam looked like when it was taught by people who thought in these languages, and the distinction between the content and the idiom is one the tradition itself does not draw.
The corpus is attributed rather than authored in the ordinary sense. Ginans carry the names of pirs, Shams, Sadardin, Hasan Kabirdin and others, and the attributions function as claims about authority and lineage as much as about composition. Establishing which texts a named pir actually wrote is a genuinely open problem, because the manuscript tradition is later than the attributions and because the corpus went on growing after the pirs it names had died.