ધર્મજ
The Global Village
Dharmaj is India’s celebrated “Model NRI Village” — a small Charotar town of about 11,000 residents whose families span the globe, whose main street holds more than a dozen banks, and whose story is told wherever Gujaratis gather abroad.
Dharmaj’s founding is written into the name of its oldest quarter. In Vikram Samvat 1212 — 1155 CE — Narshibhai Patel came from the village of Jargal (also recorded as Jargam) and settled here, raising the first Patidar hearths of Dharmaj. His settlement became Juni Khadki — literally the Old Khadki — and it bears that name for the simplest of reasons: it was first. Every other khadki in Dharmaj is younger, and measured against it. Some 870 years on, the site of Juni Khadki beats at the heart of the village as today’s Sardar Chowk.
Five centuries later, in 1675 CE (Samvat 1732), Rangaji Patel of Virol, near Sojitra — a son of Chha Gam soil already — settled in Dharmaj. His descendants flourished beyond all telling: more than 1,400 households trace to his line, which in time divided into four khadkis of its own — Vachli Khadki (the middle), Kadujini Khadki, Kakani Khadki and Athamni Khadki (the western). Old Khadki and the four young ones: the whole social map of Patidar Dharmaj in five names.
The village grew on the fertile goradu soil of the Charotar, the tobacco-and-banana belt between the Mahi and Shedhi rivers. Its name is popularly linked to dharma — righteousness — and its people have spent centuries living up to it, building schools, hospitals and temples at home with wealth earned across the world.
Narshibhai Patel of Jargal founds Dharmaj’s first settlement in Vikram Samvat 1212. It will be known forever as Juni Khadki — the Old Khadki — first of them all, on the ground of today’s Sardar Chowk. Dharmaj is thus among the earliest-founded of the six villages.
Rangaji Patel arrives from Virol (Sojitra) in Samvat 1732. From his line — over 1,400 households today — grow the four younger khadkis: Vachli, Kadujini, Kakani and Athamni. Together with Juni Khadki they form the enduring quarters of Patidar Dharmaj.
Under the Baroda State’s Petlad district, Dharmaj’s farmers grow wealthy on tobacco, the Charotar’s gold. The khadkis, temples and the village panch hone the self-governing instincts that later make Dharmaj’s civic projects famous.
Two sons of the soil — Jotaram Kashiram Patel and Chaturbhai Patel — sail for Uganda in the era of the East African railway. They are the first links in a migration chain that will carry Dharmaj’s name across the world.
The Chhappaniyo famine of Samvat 1956 devastates the Charotar. For many families the calamity settles the question: sons are sent abroad to trade, and the great outward wave begins in earnest.
Dharmaj men open shops, cotton ginneries and trading houses across Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika. Remittances flow home — funding schools, wells, temples and the village’s first modern institutions, decades before “NRI” was a word.
At Independence, Dharmaj’s H.M. Patel — then one of India’s most senior civil servants — helps oversee the monumental division of the army and administration during Partition.
The village’s own bank receives its RBI licence on 16 January, with H.M. Patel as founding chairman — the seed of Dharmaj’s extraordinary banking street.
Idi Amin expels Uganda’s Asians. Dharmaj families who built East Africa arrive in Britain with almost nothing — and within a generation build again, in Leicester, London, and beyond. Others push on to the United States and Canada after the 1965 immigration reforms.
H.M. Patel serves as Finance Minister of India, and later Home Minister — a Dharmaj farmer’s son signing the nation’s budget.
The first modern Dharmaj Day is celebrated on 12 January — a global homecoming that has filled the village with returning families every January since.
Some 1,700 Dharmaj families live in Britain, 800 in the United States, 300 in Canada and more across Africa and Australasia. At home: 13 bank branches, NRI deposits above ₹1,000 crore, solar rooftops and streets that make national headlines.
The towering figure is H.M. Patel (1904–1993) — a member of the elite Indian Civil Service who served as Defence Secretary during Partition, and later as India’s Finance Minister (1977–79) and Home Minister. He chose to pour his later life into Dharmaj and nearby Vallabh Vidyanagar, chairing the village bank and championing rural education.
Beyond any single name, Dharmaj’s real legacy is collective: roughly 1,700 families in Britain, 800 in the United States, 300 in Canada and more across Africa, Australia and New Zealand — nearly every household in the village has kin abroad.
Dharmaj is routinely profiled as one of rural India’s wealthiest villages: 13 bank branches serving a population of about 11,300, with NRI deposits reported above ₹1,000 crore. Solar panels line its rooftops, its roads are planned and clean, and its schools, hospital and civic amenities rival small cities — nearly all of it funded by its own diaspora.
Every 12th of January the village swells for Dharmaj Day, when families fly home from London, Chicago, Toronto and Nairobi to celebrate the place that raised them.
The six villages of Chha Gam — Dharmaj, Karamsad, Vaso, Nadiad, Bhadran and Sojitra — were settled by Patidar families between the 12th and 16th centuries and rose to become the most prosperous and respected Leuva Patidar villages of the Charotar. In 1869 the villages began formalising their gol (marriage circle), binding their families together through generations of marriage, trust and shared enterprise. That bond is why a community founded in these six villages still gathers as one family today — in Gujarat, in Britain, in East Africa, and here in Chicago.