Khalisdar
Khalisdar is a rare name. There are perhaps a few dozen of us in the world, divided thinly between America, Europe, and Asia. I am, to my knowledge, one of the only Khalisdars in the UAE. This page exists to make the name legible.
The name is Persianate in origin and Sylheti Muslim in formation. It derives from the late-Mughal title khāliṣa-dār (خالصهدار), the holder of khāliṣa, the crown lands of the Mughal and successor-state revenue systems. Families granted such offices in Sylhet carried the title forward as a surname.
How a Khalisdar ended up in Ras Al Khaimah
My parents met and married in America. My mother brought us to the United Arab Emirates. I was born in Manhattan, raised partly in Queens, and grew up in Ras Al Khaimah. I carry my father's name and my mother's place.
The paternal line
The Khalisdars are a Sylheti Muslim family of the late-colonial administrative gentry, with roots in the khāliṣa-dāri tradition of Mughal and post-Mughal Sylhet. Sylhet sat within the province of Assam under British administration from 1874 until 1947, and is a distinct region with its own language, history, and identity within the wider Bengali Muslim world. The family belonged to the Calcutta-educated Sylheti political class of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of the generation that engaged Lord Curzon over the partition of Bengal and the order that followed.
My father's father was Calcutta-educated, reading law at the University of Calcutta and graduating in 1947, with a prior degree in statistics. My father's maternal grandfather sailed for America in 1939 as a British merchant marine, by the Sylheti route through Cardiff and London that brought the first Bengali Muslim communities to the West. My father's maternal uncles followed to America in the 1960s; my father followed them after his father's passing.
The family was divided over the partition of 1971, with branches on both sides of the question. The Khalisdars are Sylheti by ethnicity and land. The fuller account belongs to a longer work.
The maternal line
My mother is Emirati, of الطابور القرطاسي ال بو خيرابان النعيميAl Taboor al Qirtasi al Bu Khurayban al Nuaimi, of the Bu Khurayban section of the Nuaim, originally from Mizyad in Al Ain. The family arrived in Ras Al Khaimah in the 1830s, first settling at Al Oreibi before making their home on the island of Mahra, and subsequently the Freej Al Mahra of the old town. Counted among the original families of the city, with a long tradition of scholarship and public service in the emirate and the UAE.