Since antiquity, the Konkan coast has had mercantile relations with major ports on the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. Konkani Muslims can trace their ancestry to traders from Hadhramaut (in Yemen or South Arabia),[11] the North of Indian (Haryana/Punjab) and other parts of Arabia and the Middle East,[12] who visited the Konkan coast between the seventh and eighth centuries AD and fled persecution in North India, during the rule of the Chalukya and Rashtrakuta dynasties.[citation needed] In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Konkani Muslims became influential sailors, merchants, and government employees as the port city of Bombay (present Mumbai) began developing.[13]
Ancestry formed the basis for social stratification: Konkani people are direct descendants of Arab traders formed an elite class over those who had indirect descent through intermarriages with local women converts to Islam. The Konkani people have a varied ethnic background as most Muslims within the region[14][15][16] are descendants of people who migrated from the Delhi region, Hadhramaut (in Yemen or South Arabia),[11] Iran and other parts of Arabia and the Middle East.[17]
The cuisine of Konkani Muslims is meat and seafood. Its staple food is rice and bread made of rice (preferred at dinners) with meat/fish and lentils or vegetables. It is mainly influenced by Kashmiri people who settled in the late 1800s fleeing tensions in the North of India.[20]
^Deshmukh, Cynthia (1979). "The People Of Bombay 1850-1914 (An approach paper)". Proceedings of the Indian History Congress. 40: 836–840. JSTOR44142034.
^Gogate, Sudha (1991). "Impact of migration to the middle east on Ratnagiri". In Rao, M. S. A.; Bhat, Chandrashekar; Kadekar, Laxmi Narayan (eds.). A Reader in Urban Sociology. New Delhi: Orient Longman. pp. 371–388. ISBN978-0-8631-1151-8.
^ abNasiri, Md. Jalis Akhtar (2010). Indian Muslims: Their Customs and Traditions during Last Fifty Years (Ph.D.). New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru University.
^Dandekar, Deepra (2017). "Margins or Center? Konkani Sufis, India and "Arabastan"". In Mielke, Katja; Hornidge, Anna-Katharina (eds.). Area Studies at the Crossroads: Knowledge Production after the Mobility Turn. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 141–156.