The migration of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s family from Gujarat to Karachi was not a political migration – it was a story of trade, ambition, and the rise of Karachi as a port city in the late 19th century.
Jinnah’s ancestors belonged to the Lohana community of Paneli village in Gondal State, Kathiawar, Gujarat. The Lohanas were traditionally Hindu merchants who centuries ago had converted to Islam and became known as Khojas, followers of the Nizari Isma’ili branch of Shia Islam.
His father, Jinnahbhai Poonja, was born in Paneli. He married Mithibai, a girl from the nearby village of Dhaffa, also from a Khoja merchant family. They left Gujarat in the 1860s and early 1870s. Kathiawar was facing severe economic hardship.
Gondal was a small princely state with limited opportunities. The textile handloom business was collapsing due to cheap British mill-made cloth flooding India. At the same time, the British were developing Karachi as a major new port.
When the Suez Canal opened, Karachi suddenly became 200 nautical miles closer to Europe for shipping than Bombay. The British declared Karachi the chief port of Sindh and the Punjab. During the American Civil War, Britain could not get cotton from America, so it turned to India.
Karachi became the centre for exporting cotton and importing British goods. It was called the “Boom Town” of British India at that time. For an ambitious young merchant like Jinnahbhai Poonja, staying in Paneli meant poverty.
The Move in 1875. Around 1875, shortly after his marriage, Jinnahbhai Poonja decided to take the risk. He left his family home in Gondal and migrated with his wife Mithibai to Karachi. He started as a small dealer in the Kharadar area of old Karachi. He dealt in hides, skins, cotton, and British cloth. Karachi had a large community of Gujarati Khoja merchants already settled there, so he had a social and business network to support him.
Within a few years, Jinnahbhai became a very successful and respected merchant in the Karachi wholesale cloth market. He became a partner in a well-known firm and built his own house. He was wealthy enough to rent a spacious second-floor apartment in Wazir Mansion, in the Kharadar area, where his eldest child, Muhammad Ali, was born on December 25, 1876.
So the family did not migrate because of religious persecution or politics. They migrated exactly like millions of Gujarati trading families have done for centuries – in search of a bigger market, a better port, and a better future. That business decision in 1875 is what made Karachi, not Gujarat, the birthplace of the founder of Pakistan.
In 1892, Sir Frederick Leigh Croft, a business associate of Jinnahbhai Poonja, offered young Jinnah a London apprenticeship with his firm, Graham’s Shipping and Trading Company. He accepted the position despite the opposition of his mother. Jinnah’s mother and first wife both died during his absence in England.
Although the apprenticeship in London was considered a great opportunity for Jinnah, one reason for sending him overseas was a legal proceeding against his father, which placed the family’s property at risk of being sequestered by the court. In 1893, the Jinnahbhai family moved to Bombay.
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