Arabs in India

Communities

The earliest immigrants from the Arab world arrived as merchants to the Malabar coastal region of South West India, today consisting of the state of Kerala. Many of these Arab merchants married local women. Concentrations of these mixed-race descendants of Arab merchants can be found especially in the Kozhikode and Malappuram districts of Kerala. There also have been historic and close links between the Orthodox churches of South-West India and the Christian Arab orthodox churches in the middle east for several centuries, especially among the Orthodox Christians in India and Syria, which they maintain until this day and many of the Christians from these communities have claimed their ancestors are Arabs and the DNA results support this claim with Haplogroup G-M201 and Haplogroup J-M304 being prominent.

Descendants of Arabs also live in the villages of Variav and Rander in Gujarat. In Hyderabad, Chaush are an Arab community of Hadhrami descent whose ancestors were recruited as soldiers by Nizam of Hyderabad. Some Konkani Muslims trace their ancestry to traders from Hadhramaut (in Yemen or South Arabia). In coastal Karnataka, a group of Persian speaking Sunni Muslims from Iraq having Assadi surname arrived in Mangalore during the reign of Tipu Sultan. They claim their ancestry from Banu Assad. These population migrations may have been favoured by both the Nizam of Hyderabad and Tipu Sultan of Mysore because both had their ancestral linkages to these populations. In Kerala, Syed Thangals of Hadhrami descent settled around the 17th century as missionaries to propagate Islam.

There are also Shia Sayyids in the Northern region of the country who claim descent from Wasit, Iraq like Zaidis.