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Teena Purohit's The Aga Khan Case: Religion and Identity in Colonial India is a study of the ways in which colonial power transformed religion and religious identity in modern South Asia. The specific focus of this book is on the transformation of Isma‘ili [Isma‘ili] religious identity in nineteenth-century South Asia from the fluid caste based identity of Khojas [Kh¦jahs] to a more defined sectarian identity of “Shi‘i Isma‘ili.” The Aga Khan Case centers on a couple of court cases in Bombay that while seemingly occupied by disputes of inheritance and property, fundamentally altered the conceptual terrain in which the religious identity of the Khoja community was henceforth imagined. Both these cases revolved around complaints by some Khojas of Bombay about what they saw as the undue interference of the Aga Khan [Agha Khan], a Persian nobleman who worked for the British army, in the affairs of their community.
While many Khojas revered the Aga Khan as an Isma‘ili holy figure, their precise relationship was unclear. These court cases, especially one of them in 1866 that had sought to adjudicate a dispute over property ownership, ended up focusing more on resolving the nature of that relationship. And in that attempted resolution, the question of the religious identity of Khojas was also resolved, in favour of a fixed modern identity that allowed no plurality or fuzziness.
Central to the legal operation of presenting the Khojas as Isma‘ili was the manner in which the defendants interpreted a particular text, the Dasavatar (the ten avatars), a Hindi/Gujarati vernacular poem of the ginan genre transmitted and transcribed in the early eighteenth century. Premised on the classical Sanskrit story of the ten avatars of Vishnu, the tenth avatar presented in this text is ‘Ali b. Abi Talib (d. 661 CE). The defense lawyers used this to argue that since the first nine avatars mentioned in this text were Hindu and the last one Muslim, the Dasavatar, which was prominent in Khoja devotional life, represented an Isma‘ili conversion text employed to convert the Khojas from Hinduism to Islam. Through this line of argument, they sought to show that the Aga Khan was the spiritual head of the Khojas and it was thus his right to collect tithes and to control their property.