Kathiawar Sunni Vohras: Gujarati-speaking community honours its high achievers

The Kathiawar Sunni Vohras, a Gujarati-speaking community, boast of their unity and cohesion.

KARACHI: At their golden jubilee celebrations on Saturday, the Kathiawar Sunni Vohras, a Gujarati-speaking community, boasted of their unity and cohesion. And rightly so.

All members of the community have been getting together every year to not just keep in touch but to also celebrate high achievers — from students in kindergarten up to university graduates. There are around 4,000 community members in the country, mainly settled in Karachi and Hyderabad, and they all know each other.

The day was marked by the distribution of shields and letters of appreciation, dramas and skits by children below the age of 13 years and food stalls. This community hails from an Indian city, Sunni Vohra, and takes pride in speaking Gujarati with a dialect of their own. As the most active and helpful member of the community, Zarina Bai received the lifetime achievement award during the event.

The 50-year-old has helped the sick and poor members of the community for over 35 years. “This is because I want to work for my community. Who knows any one of their prayers might send me to heaven,” she said humbly.

Mohammad Sufyan was also given a shield for completing his BE (Electronics). Not a lot of boys study beyond Intermediate in the community, so Sufyan felt honoured. “This sort of makes us role models for the young ones. I hope they will also strive to achieve what they want,” he said. Sufyan plans to go to Canada for an MA degree.

Every year, the rich and poor members of this community get together to share each others’ agony and glee. “We don’t need anyone else,” said Shireen Ismail, the joint secretary of the community’s women association. “If we send a proposal for a project, it doesn’t take more than a day to get a reply,” another woman said. The community has a proper organisation structure with branches focusing on different departments, such as the women’s association, boys and girls volunteer corps, doctors’ panel and a graveyard committee that arranges space for the deceased.

Open to marrying outsiders

The honorary secretary of the women’s association, Yasmeen Shoukat, said that the community members may seem interlinked and involved but, she insisted, they are not unwelcoming. “We have taken daughters in marriages from other communities and our daughters have also married outside,” she said.

President’s future plans

Kathiawar Sunni Vohra Jamaat president Dr Abdullah Rahman is the youngest one to be appointed in the organisation’s history. He has big plans for the new generation and wants all of them to get educated and be aware of all modern developments.

During his tenure, he has managed to bring some changes to the community and one of them is the fact that a woman was co-hosting the event. “It’s the first time in our jamaat’s history that it has happened,” he said.

Dr Rahman told The Express Tribune that most of their women are excelling in education but the boys usually lag behind. The general trend has been for boys to join their fathers’ businesses after Matric or Intermediate, so most of them do not bother to study, he said. “This is what I want to change, to push boys towards education so that our community improves.”

Published in The Express Tribune, December 26^th, 2010.