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Ginan Central: Canon
Efforts to canonize texts of ginans by the Ismaili Muslim community can be traced back to the late 19th century. Mukhi Lalji Devraj (1842-1930) of India is credited for publishing the initial canon of ginans in Khojki as early as 1903. Devraj's Khojki publications were later used by community institutions (such as the Recreation Club Institute as well as various regional Ismailia Associations) to publish official texts of ginans in Gujarati. While this process may have been an exercise in developing a corpus of 'authorized' texts of ginans, "it also effectively amounted to a closure of a centuries-old tradition of ginan compositions, the last official exponent of this genre being a woman, Sayyida Imam Begum, who died in Karachi in 1866" (Asani, 2011). The purpose of this website is to digitally preserve the canon of published texts of ginans in Khojki and Gujarati scripts to facilitate further research, teaching, and learning of ginans. A simplified transliteration scheme was developed and utilized for romanization of ginans and sources. This website is maintained by Karim Tharani, tenured librarian and faculty at the University of Saskatchewan. Visit Ginan Central for more resources on ginans. For more information or questions, please contact |
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Founded in 1903 by Lalji Devraj, the [Khoja] Press, later known as the Ismaili Printing Press
became the official publishing house for Ismaili Khoja literature. It used fonts specially manufactured in
Germany for printing Khojki. In 1922, the publication of ginans was transferred to the Recreation Club Institute [predecessor to the Ismailia Association and ITREB],
founded by Aga Khan III in 1919, to oversee publication of religious materials as well as to engage into research into Ismailism.
