The forgotten Hathiwalas of Surat

A few years ago, while I was trying to piece together my extended Surati Bohra (Dawoodi Bohras from Surat, Gujarat) family tree, I chanced upon a few photographs that had lain forgotten between photo album sheets for over a century. Photographed circa 1904, this picture could very well be one of the oldest family treasures we have, and it took me some time to ascertain who the people in these photographs were. That little girl in the photograph is my paternal grandmother Kulsum Bengaliwala (née Hathiwala), and the adults are her parents – my great-grandparents. But we didn’t know their names, and even my father’s sister, my aunt, couldn’t remember.

The gods expected him to make a temple

This is a picture of my paternal ancestor, Seth Ram Gopal Malani, most likely taken in the late 1890s. We conjecture that this photograph was taken by the Raja Deendayal and Sons studio like most of the pictures within our family from this time.