Concept
Khojkī, Khojakī, or Khwājā Sindhī (خوجڪي (Arabic script) खोजकी (Devanagari)), is a script used formerly and almost exclusively by the Khoja community of parts of the Indian subcontinent, including Sindh, Gujarat, and Punjab. However, this script also had a further reach and was used by members of Ismaili communities from Burma to East and South Africa. The name "Khojki" is likely derived from the Persian word khoja, which means "master", or "lord". As a scholarly article from 2022 has demonstrated, referring to the script as “Khojki” is a relatively new phenomenon, coined by the Russian scholar Wladimir Ivanow., This neologism began to replace the original terms used by Ismailis such as Sindhi and (when necessary to distinguish it from other forms of Sindhi script) Khwajah Sindhi. By this, they did not necessarily mean the Sindhi language, but rather the script utilized by their community, known as the Khwajahs or Khojas. To avoid confusion, the British administrative bureaucracy added the term Khwajah, referring to the script as “Khwajah Sindhi” The Ismailis sometimes did the same to distinguish the script from the language, as well as from other scripts used in Sindh. The Khwajah Ismaili community continued using the traditional term ‘Sindhi’ alongside the neologism ‘Khojki.’ However, many scholars writing in English and other Western languages dropped the traditional term ‘Sindhi’ was adopting the invented term ‘Khojki.’ The script was employed primarily to record Ismaili religious and devotional literature; most notably in the form of poetry called gināns (a term derived from the Sanskrit jnāna meaning contemplative knowledge). Khojkī belongs to a family of scripts classified as landā or ‘clipped’ alphabets primarily employed as commercial and mercantile scripts by various Hindu communities of Sind and Punjab. It is one of the two Landā scripts used for liturgy, the other being the Gurmukhī alphabet, which is associated with Sikhism. According to the Nizari Ismaili tradition Pīr Ṣadr al-Dīn, the 15th-century dā’ī (preacher), invented the Khojkī script.
