Ginans

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.

The ginans were written in Khojki, a script of the Landa family developed for the use of the Khoja communities and used for almost nothing else. That is unusual and consequential. A tradition with its own script is a tradition that can be read by its own members and by nobody else, and the Khojki manuscripts sat outside both the Persian and Arabic manuscript worlds and the Sanskritic one. The great collections of them were assembled and catalogued only in the twentieth century, and the script is now read by specialists rather than by the communities that produced it.

In use the ginans are sung rather than read. Each carries an assigned melody, and the melodies are held by ear rather than notated. Recitation belongs to the jamatkhana, the Ismaili place of gathering and prayer, characteristically in the period before the congregational supplication, and it is done by members of the congregation rather than by an ordained class. Someone recognised as a good reciter acquires a standing that is real but informal.

The corpus occupies a particular place in the community rather than in the wider world. It is not published as a hymnal is published, and its circulation is understood as belonging to the jamat. The atlas therefore describes the tradition, its languages, its manuscripts and its use, and does not reproduce ginan texts, which are the community's to circulate. What can be said about them as history and as literature is said in the scholarship cited here, all of it produced with the community's own institutions.