een
interest in business. The richest Meman merchant does not disdain to
do what a Parsi in his position would leave to his clerks. Their hope
and courage are also excellent endowments. They engage without fear in
any promising new branch of trade and are daring in their ventures,
a trait partly inherited from their Lohana ancestors, and partly due
to their faith in the luck which the favour of their saints secures
them." Another great advantage arises from their method of trading
in small corporations or companies of a number of persons either
relations or friends. Some of these will have shops in the great
centres of trade, Bombay and Calcutta, and others in different places
in the interior. Each member then acts as correspondent and agent for
all the others, and puts what business he can in their way. Many are
also employed as assistants and servants in the shops; but at the end
of the season, when all return to their native Gujarat, the profits
from the different shops are pooled and divided among the members
in varying proportion. By this method they obtain all the advantages
which are recognised as attaching to co-operative trading.

2. Origin of the caste.

According to Mr. Faridi, from whose description the remainder of
this article is mainly taken, the Memans or more correctly Muamins or
'Believers' are converts from the Hindu caste of Lohanas of Sind. They
venerate especially Maulana Abdul Kadir Gilani who died at Baghdad in
A.D. 1165. His sixth descendant, Syed Yusufuddin Kordiri, was in 1421
instructed in a dream to proceed to Sind and guide its people into
the way of Islam. On his arrival he was received with honour by the
local king, who was converted, and the ruler's example was followed
by one Manikji, the head of one of the _nukhs_ or clans of the Lohana
community. He with his three sons and seven hundred families of the
caste embraced Islam, and on their conversion the title of Muamin or
'Believer' was conferred on them by the saint. It may be noted that
Colonel Tod derives the Lohanas from the Rajputs, remarking of them:
[484] "This tribe is numerous both in Dhat and Talpura; formerly
they were Rajputs, but betaking themselves to commerce have fallen
into the third class. They are scribes and shopkeepers, and object
to no occupation that will bring a subsistence; and as to food, to
use the expressive idiom of this region where hunger spurns at law,
'Excepting their cats and their cows they wil