https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20747428

Abstract

Abhilekh 2023 is a documentary compilation of historical books, archival records, community publications, and primary-source materials relating to the religious history of the Kutch Kadva Patidar community. The volume assembles and preserves dispersed historical evidence concerning the community’s transition from the Hindu Sanatan tradition to the Pirana Satpanth tradition and its subsequent re-identification with the Hindu Sanatan fold. By bringing together rare and difficult-to-access documents, the work seeks to provide a consolidated documentary foundation for the study of religious change, community identity, and social reform within western India.

The compilation is particularly significant as a sourcebook rather than a conventional narrative history. It enables researchers to examine historical claims through contemporary records, community resolutions, publications, correspondence, and other archival materials preserved within the collective memory of the community. The volume offers insights into the interaction of religion, caste, kinship networks, and collective identity, while also illuminating the processes through which communities interpret, negotiate, and reconstruct their historical past.

As an archival resource, Abhilekh 2023 contributes to scholarship on religious conversion and reconversion, Satpanth studies, Hindu–Islamic interactions in western India, community historiography, and the social history of the Kutch Kadva Patidar community. The work provides a valuable corpus of primary materials for historians, sociologists, anthropologists, scholars of religion, and researchers investigating the evolution of communal and religious identities in Gujarat and the broader Indian subcontinent.

Reprint of historical books and records of Kutch Kadva Patidar Sanatan community. The records contain the religious history about the community’s initial religious conversion from Hindu Sanatan religion to Pirana Satpanth religion (a branch of Shia Islam) and re-conversion back as Hindu Sanatan religion. 

Keywords: Kutch Kadva Patidar, Satpanth, Pirana, religious conversion, reconversion, community history, Gujarat, archival records, religious identity, social history, Hindu–Islamic interactions, community historiography, imamshah, hanstej.