In UP village, forgotten Indian roots of Ayatollah Khomeini
Only five Shia families remain in Kintoor, once a thriving centre of Shia scholarship under Oudh.
Among them, the Kazmis speak of a bloodline that runs from the lanes of eastern UP's Barabanki to the heart of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution.
"My great-great-great-grandfather Mufti Mohammad Quli Musavi and Syed Ahmad Musavi were cousins," said septuagenarian Syed Nihal Kazmi, seated beneath a fading portrait of Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini - Iran's first supreme leader until his death in 1989.
Syed Ahmad Musavi Hindi - grandfather of Ayatollah Khomeini - was born in Kintoor in the early 1800s. In 1830, he left British India on a pilgrimage to Najaf in Iraq, where he befriended Yusef Khan Kamarchi, a landowner from Farahan in Iran. By 1839, Ahmad had settled in Khomeyn, purchased a big house with a garden, and married Yusef's sister Sakineh.
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