The American Exception: Manila's Sindhi Empire

Manila does not.

The Philippines was, as historian Ajit Singh Rye noted in his 1981 profile at UP Diliman, “the only country where there was no settled Indian community in the mid-19th century” — a consequence of Spanish colonial policy that kept the archipelago deliberately isolated from British-connected trade. Sindhi merchants who had reached Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Gold Coast by the 1880s could not extend their network to Manila. The colonial door was closed.

Then the United States opened it.

When American forces took the Philippines from Spain in 1898, they broke three centuries of commercial isolation. The archipelago entered British-connected Asian trade networks for the first time. Sindhi merchants in Singapore and Hong Kong — who had been mapping commercial opportunities across Southeast Asia for decades — recognised the opening quickly. By circa 1900, the Sindhi firm Pohumals had established a chain of retail stores across the Philippines and Hong Kong. The pattern was characteristically Sindwork: a headquarters-and-branch structure, personnel rotated from established nodes, goods sourced from the same Bombay networks that supplied every other Sindhi operation along the eastern circuit.

This is the founding fact of Manila’s Sindhi community. It did not form through British colonial channels. It formed through American ones, reached via the Singapore–Hong Kong network that Sindhis had already built. The vessel was different. The logic was the same. (For the broader story of the Sindhi commercial diaspora — the Sindwork trade network, the hundi credit system, and the Partition that made the diaspora permanent — see the companion piece The Sindhi Diaspora’s Invisible Empire.)

Escolta and the eastern circuit

By the 1950s, the Sindhis owned the biggest stores in Escolta.

By the 1930s, Manila’s premier shopping street — the Escolta — had become a Sindhi commercial address. The Persian Carpet House operated at number 49; Assandas Department Store, run by Jethmal and Sons with a branch in Baguio, stood nearby; Bombay Silk Supply, B.I. Sehwani, and the Gem Gift Shop at 67 Escolta completed the cluster. These were not marginal presences. They were among the street’s most prominent establishments.

Fatehchand “Gopal” Khanchandani’s story is the closest this era has to a primary account. He arrived in Manila in 1931, a young man in his early twenties, to work at the Persian Carpet House. Within years he had opened an import-export office in the Crystal Arcade and was traveling regularly to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Bangkok for trade. His personal circuit, documented by Lou Gopal from family records, maps the eastern Sindwork route onto a node that the canonical literature does not include: Manila as a secondary extension of Singapore and Hong Kong, joined by kinship and commerce rather than colonial administration.

The community was already institutionalising before Partition made that permanence compulsory. In 1937, Sindhi businessmen founded the Bombay Merchants Association and established The Indian Club on Polo Road in Pasay City — an exclusively Sindhi institution, membership limited to Sindhi store owners and managers, equipped with a swimming pool, tennis court, bowling alley, and bar. The Indian Club predates the more famous Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce Philippines (FICCI) by fourteen years. Institutional ambition at this scale, this early, in a node outside the canonical routes, is not the expected pattern. It happened anyway.

Post-Partition (1947), a second wave arrived. Sindh had gone entirely to Pakistan, and those who had been operating trans-locally — spending years in Manila, rotating home, cycling back — no longer had a home to return to. Many made the choice that Sindhi merchants made at every node: adopt the new city permanently. In Manila, many married Filipinas, learned Tagalog as a working language, and applied for Philippine citizenship. Roopa Dewan’s 1989 study in the Philippine Journal of Linguistics documented the linguistic consequence: a community engaged in what she called “deethnicisation,” trading heritage markers for functional assimilation without surrendering commercial identity.

By the early 1950s, Ajit Singh Rye recorded what the community itself knew: “the Sindhis owned the biggest stores in Escolta.”

The law that rewrote everything

Republic Act 1180 — the Retail Trade Nationalization Act — was passed by the Philippine Congress in 1954. Its intent was to transfer retail commerce from alien residents to Filipino citizens. Its mechanism was direct: non-Filipino citizens were prohibited from engaging in retail trade.

No other major Sindhi diaspora node faced legislation this blunt. Hong Kong’s colonial framework protected commercial freedom. Singapore’s laws favoured trade. West Africa offered no equivalent exclusion. Manila alone presented Sindhi merchants with a binary: naturalise or exit retail entirely.

The community response was neither exodus nor collapse. It was adaptation — the same trait that had allowed Sindhi merchants to rebuild after Partition, navigate hundi networks across multiple jurisdictions, and turn wartime Hong Kong into a commercial base. Many families naturalised. Many pivoted their business model from retail to manufacturing and distribution. Many did both simultaneously.

This is the defining moment of Manila’s Sindhi commercial story. It is an adaptation narrative that exists nowhere else in the global Sindhi diaspora.

Making the pivot

The Dargani family’s trajectory illustrates the pivot at its sharpest. Jiwanlal Dargani had built an optical retail business in the 1960s — a conventional Escolta-era model, selling directly to consumers. Under RA 1180, direct retail by non-citizens was no longer viable. The family pivoted to hosiery manufacturing, repositioning from consumer-facing to production-facing. Jiwanlal’s son Ramesh continued the transformation: from hosiery manufacturing to international brand distribution, becoming the exclusive Philippine distributor for Oakley and Sunglass Hut. Ramesh Dargani later served as FICCI president. The arc — optical retailer to hosiery manufacturer to international franchise holder — spans a lifetime and a law.

The Genomal family’s pivot came faster and scaled further than any other. Genomal Topandas Verhomal had built V. Lilaram & Company in Angeles, Pampanga, as a wholesale and import business in 1925. When RA 1180 closed the retail door in 1954, the family secured the exclusive Philippine manufacturing and distribution license for Jockey International in 1958. The backstory is telling: V. Lilaram had been importing Jockey innerwear to supply US military personnel stationed in the Philippines; when the product gained local popularity, Jockey offered the Genomals an exclusive manufacturing license rather than a retail arrangement. A factory was operational in Manila by 1959. GTVL Manufacturing Industries — named for the patronymic chain Genomal, Topandas, Verhomal, Lilaram — still holds the sole Jockey license for the Philippines today, distributing through more than 300 retail doors with vertically integrated manufacturing, from knitting to packaging.

The Hiranand family followed a different adaptation path to comparable scale. Bhojraj Hiranand, another of the nine FICCI founders, had established the family in Manila before 1951. His descendants did not pivot to manufacturing. They pivoted to franchising — and chose their partner with extraordinary timing. In 1978, as Jollibee Foods Corporation was incorporating, the Hiranand Group became its first franchisee. Four independent sources confirm the claim; the company’s own employer profile states it plainly: “Established in 1978, Hiranand Group of Companies is the first and largest franchise group of Jollibee Foods Corporation.” Today JFC operates ~6,800 stores worldwide across Jollibee, Chowking, Mang Inasal, and Greenwich — and the Hiranands franchise across that portfolio. The arc from FICCI co-founder’s family to the largest franchise group of one of Asia’s biggest restaurant companies is the Sindhi pivot logic operating at Philippine national scale.

The Mirchandani family traces a parallel generational journey. Hakoomal Mirchandani migrated in the 1930s and built Regent Merchandising. His son Haresh continued the business. Hiren, the third generation, became the youngest member of FICCI’s board of directors. Ramesh Trading Corp., now dealing in houseware and home products, is three generations removed from Hakoomal’s original retail model and shows no sign of stopping. Anita Raina Thapan’s landmark comparative study Sindhi Diaspora in Manila, Hong Kong, and Jakarta (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2002) documented these family trajectories in detail, noting that assimilation into Filipino society — through language, intermarriage, and citizenship — did not correspond to commercial retreat. The two processes ran in parallel.

The Gem Gift Shop has been continuous. Established at 67 Escolta through the Khanchandani–Chulani connection — Choithram Chulani taking over management — it has outlasted every address it has occupied. The shop moved from Escolta to the Manila Hotel, then the Bayview Hotel, Mabini, Cubao, and eventually to Greenhills Shopping Centre, where Kumar Chulani runs it today. A Sindhi retail business that survived RA 1180 not through manufacturing but through citizenship and continuous adaptation — following the shopping centre rather than the colonial street.

Kewalram Philippines, Inc. represents the largest industrial footprint. The Kewalram Chanrai Group — whose Singapore headquarters anchor the companion piece — operates a Philippine subsidiary manufacturing synthetic blended yarns for weaving and knitting. In Marilao, Bulacan, Indo-Phil Textile Mills employs ~1,800 workers in textile manufacturing. These are not boutique operations. They are industrial-scale enterprises that the RA 1180 pivot made possible by redirecting Sindhi capital from consumer retail into production.

Nine names on a document

The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce Philippines Inc. (FICCI) was founded in 1951 — three years before RA 1180, at the moment of the community’s institutional coming-of-age. Nine Sindhi businessmen put their names on the founding document: Navalrai Jethmal, Genomal T. Verhomal, Hashumal Gianchand, Hemandas Vaswani, Gagoomal Assanmal, Chandumal Mirani, Bhojraj Hiranand, Ramchand Gopaldas, and Kotumal Chelaram. Every surname is characteristically Sindhi.

The nine names are not merely historical record. They represent a deliberate act of institutional confidence at a moment when the community already sensed the legal changes ahead. FICCI was founded to give Sindhi merchants — who could trace their Manila presence to the 1890s and their Escolta dominance to the 1930s — the organisational infrastructure to navigate whatever came next. What came next, within three years, was RA 1180.

Genomal Topandas Verhomal, the most active of the nine, went on to serve five terms as FICCI president between 1953 and 1971 — more than any other individual in the chamber’s history. Historical photographs on the FICCI website show him alongside President Diosdado Macapagal and Vice President Fernando Lopez. His grandson Ramesh Genomal continued the family’s institutional role, serving as FICCI president from 2014 to 2016. The institutional and commercial threads have never separated.

Today FICCI Philippines counts twenty-two member companies over fifty years old. That figure, understated in FICCI’s own materials, is remarkable: more than two dozen enterprises that survived Partition, a retail ban, the loss of their street, and multiple generational transitions, and are still operating in the Philippine economy. It is one of the oldest Indian chambers of commerce outside India.

Navalrai Jethmal, one of the nine founders, also operated Assandas Department Store — the Escolta institution with its Baguio branch. The institutional and commercial functions were inseparable from the beginning, as they are throughout Sindhi diaspora history.

Roots deep enough to hold

The Melwani connection illuminates how Manila fits into the broader Sindhi commercial web. The Melwani family operated department stores in Cebu until the 1960s, when they relocated to Hong Kong. Sam’s Tailor (सैम्स टेलर) in Tsim Sha Tsui, founded in 1957 by Naraindas “Sam” Melwani, became a Hong Kong institution that dressed US presidents and rock stars. Three generations of Melwanis have run it since. Whether the Cebu Melwanis and the Sam’s Tailor Melwanis belong to the same extended family is not confirmed, but the shared surname and inter-node migration pattern are consistent with how Sindhi commercial dynasties have historically repositioned: following capital from one city to another without severing the kinship web.

The assimilation that Dewan documented in 1989 has deepened. Sindhis who arrived in the 1930s have Filipino-Sindhi grandchildren who speak Tagalog as their first language. Matthew A. Cook’s 2021 synthesis in Modern Asian Studies shows Manila as among the most thoroughly assimilated Sindhi communities in Southeast Asia — a consequence of naturalisation under RA 1180, intermarriage, and three generations of Philippine education. Thapan’s comparative study, examining Manila alongside Hong Kong and Jakarta, found Manila’s integration the most complete. The commercial identity survived. The ethnic separation did not — and deliberately so.

What remains is the institutional infrastructure that survived the assimilation: FICCI as the commercial anchor, the Sadhu Vaswani Center as the spiritual one, and a Hindu Temple on Mahatma Gandhi Street in Paco serving the broader Hindu community including Sindhis.

What the American exception proves

In October 2025, the Sindhi Philippine Community Foundation hosted “Mast Manila 2025” — the International Sindhi Sammelan — at Shangri-La Makati. The three-day gathering, held October 31–November 2 in association with the Alliance of Global Sindhi Associations, brought Sindhis from across the world to Manila. Malaysia had hosted the Sammelan in 2014. That the Philippines hosted it in 2025 — its first time — signals a community confident in its local roots and ready to welcome its global counterparts.

The American exception proves something about commercial diaspora resilience that the British-circuit nodes do not demonstrate as sharply. Every Sindhi node that formed within imperial British structures had a degree of legal and institutional continuity — colonial courts, consistent commercial law, the familiar grammar of empire. When those frameworks ended, the communities adapted under conditions at least partially familiar.

Manila offered no such continuity. The Spanish colonial system that Sindhi merchants had missed was replaced by American sovereignty, then Japanese occupation, then Philippine independence, then RA 1180. Each transition demanded fresh adaptation. The community that survived all of them — naturalising, learning Tagalog, pivoting from retail to manufacturing, building a chamber of commerce that outlasted the street where it started — did so without the structural advantages other nodes enjoyed.

The result is a community more deeply embedded in its host society than almost any other Sindhi node outside India. The Harilelas of Hong Kong still live together in a Kowloon Tong mansion. Dubai’s Sindhis maintain distinct community networks alongside the broader Emirati economy. Manila’s Sindhis married into Filipino families, educated their children in Philippine schools, took citizenship, and built institutions designed to survive not by staying separate but by becoming, in every practical sense, Filipino. The commercial DNA remained Sindhi. The roots went Philippine.

The Genomal family’s trajectory is the most dramatic proof of what that DNA can produce when launched from a Philippine base. In the summer of 1993, Jockey International’s president offered Sunder Genomal — Genomal Topandas Verhomal’s son, running the Manila operation — the exclusive India license. Several large Indian business houses had expressed interest, but Jockey preferred a family it had worked with for thirty-five years. Sunder chose Bangalore over Mumbai for lower real estate, skilled textile labour, and — as he told Forbes India — “the lovely Bangalore weather.” Page Industries, incorporated in November 1994, lost money for two years before turning profitable. The company name is itself a tribute to Manila: a portmanteau of Parpati Genomal, the matriarch. Page listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange in 2007 at ₹360 per share; it trades above ₹33,000 today. Three Genomal brothers — all Philippine citizens — debuted on the Forbes World’s Billionaires list in 2022 at approximately $1 billion each. A Sindhi family that arrived in the Philippines in 1889, survived RA 1180 by pivoting to licensed manufacturing, and then exported that manufacturing logic to India to build a ~$4 billion company. The Manila pivot did not merely preserve the family business. It created the platform for a continental expansion that no one — except perhaps Jockey’s president — saw coming.

That combination — commercial continuity without social separation — is precisely what RA 1180 forced onto a timeline no other Sindhi node matched. The law designed to expel them instead produced the most thoroughly integrated Sindhi community in Southeast Asia. What looked like an existential threat in 1954 became, across two generations, the mechanism for an unusually durable form of belonging: commercial identity preserved, ethnic exclusivity abandoned.

The biggest stores on Escolta Street were built by people who arrived through an American colonial anomaly, survived a law designed to remove them, and ended up hosting the global Sindhi Sammelan in the lobby of a Shangri-La hotel.

That is not a paradox. It is the Sindhi commercial logic at its most compressed: find the opening, build the network, adapt when the rules change, and stay.

Last updated: April 10, 2026