parts of the nation and integrated itself with the local communities throughout including large populations in all the major trading centres including Surat, and Mumbai. Currently the official centre of administration of the Daudi Bohra State is in Mumbai in India with its two centres for religious study being based in Surat and Karachi respectively. The official language of the Moghul courts was Persian. Thus the new Bohra migrants didnt really have a cultural, religious or language integration problem The Moghuls, like other residents who lived to the west of the Indian sub-continent named India Hind or Hindustan, after the river Indus which flows in the present day Pakistan. The language spoken in Hind they called Hindi or Hindustani. This language and its script were based on an ancient Indian language called Sanskrit and its script called Devanagiri. Some of the Moghul family members were great patrons of poetry and music and slowly there developed a Hindustani poetry, based on Hindustani language, which used words from Arabic and Persian and was written in Perso-Arabic script. This language was called Urdu, which replaced Persian as the language of the Moghul courtyards. Thus, there developed two languages with different writings but were actually one language when spoken except for their higher vocabularies. After the collapse of the Moghuls the British became the rulers of north India introducing English to the nation while continuing to use Urdu for official purposes. The use of English dates from the trading 'factories' started by the East India Company: Surat (1612), Madras (1639 - 40), Bombay (1674), Calcutta (1690). European traders at that time used a form of Portuguese, current since Portugal had acquired Goa in 1510. (McArthur, 1992.) With the British Imperialist rule, the Daudi Bohra community, which was a community by tradition of traders and merchants became exposed to English in this case British Engli...
