Khojki

Khojki (Urdu: خوجكى‎, Sindhi: خوجڪي‎ (Persian alphabet) खोजकी (Devanagari) ) or Khojiki was a script used almost exclusively by the Khoja community of parts of South Asia such as Sindh. The name "Khojki" is derived from the Persian word khoje, which means 'master', or 'lord'. It was employed primarily to record Isma'ili religious literature, as well as literature for a few secret Twelver sects. It is one of the two Landa scripts used for liturgy, the other being the Gurmukhī alphabet, which is associated with Sikhism.

History

The (Nizari Ismaili) tradition states that Khojki was created by Pir Sadardin (da‘i Pir Sadruddin).^[1] He was sent by the Ismaili Imam of the time to spread the Ismaili Muslim faith in South Asia/Jambudvipa. He did this by singing and teaching Ismaili Muslim Ginans (literally translates to "knowledge", a word for devotional and religious literature). He then wrote them down in Khojki.

Khojki is a Brahmi-based script of the Sindhi branch of the Landa family, which is a class of mercantile scripts related to Sharada. It is considered to be a refined version of the Lohānākī script (Khudabadi script) that was developed as a liturgical script for recording Ismaili literature. Popular Nizari Ismaili tradition states that Khojki was invented and propagated by Pir Sadruddin (Ṣadr al-Dīn), an Ismaili missionary actively working with the Lohānākī community. Khojki is one of two Landa scripts that were developed into formal liturgical scripts for use by religious communities; the other is Gurmukhi, which was developed for writing the sacred literature of the Sikh tradition. Khojki is also called ‘Sindhi’ and ‘Khwajah Sindhi’. The script had been used from the early 16th century through the early 20th century, and it continues to be taught and used by Ismaili communities in India, Pakistan, and diaspora (esp. in East Africa). The script was typeset in 1903 by Laljibhai Devraj at his Khoja Sindhi Printing Press in Bombay. Some script reforms occurred in the 1930s to mirror phonological changes occurring in the language used.

Characters

Traditionally, diphthong vowels were written as a combination of vowel forms, and there were multiple forms of writing some of them. This is also true of the virama. There are also contextual variants of consonant-vowel combinations for some vowels, as is found in the Modi script. For conjuncts, there are a few 'inherent' conjuncts found in most Indic scripts, such as ksa, jna, and tra, and dra is also found in addition. Most consonants are written using the virama pattern, as is found in the Saurashtrian script or in the Tamil script, but some are written with a reduced consonant form on the second consonant in the cluster, typically with ra and ya. Gemination is indicated with the Arabic shadda, while nasalization is indicated with an anusvara that is reminiscent of Devanagari in position but of Telugu, Kannada, or Malayalam in shape. The nukta is composed of three dots, similar to the three dots found in modifying historically Arabic letters in the Persian script, and it is added to certain letters to form Arabic sounds. They can sometimes be ambiguous, with the nukta over the same letter sometimes mapping to multiple Arabic letters, as in ja or as in sa. Punctuation exists for marking word boundaries using colon-like marks, section boundaries using a combination of colon-like marks and double danda-like marks, and other Latin punctuation is also present. Abbreviation marks are represented by a small circle to the side, as is found in Modi and in Goykanadi. Verse numbering is indicated by an overline and digits and number forms typically use those found throughout North India in the region. Some additional letters and forms have been found, are detailed in the Unicode Proposal, and are being researched.

Over time some of the characters represented different sounds, which makes it difficult to read certain texts with the historical phonological values as compared to those with the modern phonological values known to most modern readers of published Ismaili literature. This is particularly true of the implosives, aspirants, and normal forms of ba, da, and ja, which shifted to render the implosive letter as a normal letter phonologically, the normal letter as an aspirant letter phonologically, and rendered the aspirant letter unnecessary. The implosive for ja began to represent za.

Unicode

Khojki script was added to the Unicode Standard in June, 2014 with the release of version 7.0.

The Unicode block for Khojki is U+11200–U+1124F:

Number forms and unit marks used in Khojki documents are located in the Common Indic Number Forms Unicode block (U+A830–U+U+A83F):^[1]

See also

• Khoja
• Ginans
• Sindhi
• Kutchi language

References