[alephnerd]

Ah you're Bohra/Vohra. That makes sense! I think a significant subset of the community traces their origin to Arab communities in Oman and Hadhramaut. Also I do think a fair amount of Arabs Muslims did end up settling in Sindh and Gujarat during the expansion of Islam in the 700-1100 time period. Like I said, due to my cultural biases, I sadly don't have much experience with Arab or Gujarati Muslim communities.

A good introductory book might be "Al-Hind, the Making of the Indo-Islamic World: Early Medieval India and the Expansion of Islam 7Th-11th Centuries" by Andre Wink. He has a strong reputation in the Indologist world, so that might be a good starting position. That said, ethnographic research in most South Asian communities is kind of weak due to lack of funding and the disjointed mess of the social sciences academic world between South Asia and the US+Western Europe. That said, I'm sure there are some solid PhD theses or research papers published by academics at JNU or Jamia Millia - those two are the ones of the handful institutions in India I'd trust for anything social sciences related.

>The history books claimed we were "unquestionably of Hindu descent" based on our social practices, but the genetics disagreed. It was a shocking surprise

Oof yea I'm not surprised by that. That wording sounds like something sourced from early-to-mid 20th century British Academica. While a plurality of Muslims in South Asia are of indigenous descent, I wouldn't interpret that as being "Hindu" persay (also begets the larger question of who is a "Hindu" or indigenous - eg. should Pakhtun Hindus from Tirah be treated the same as Hindus from Bhojpur? And what even defines "Hinduism". Are indigenous pagan beliefs like Devta worship in Himachal and Chitral "Hindu" in the modern terminology or an indigenous belief system). Like I said above, Anthropological and Ethnic research within South Asian ethnic groups is severely lacking - let alone for those from regions that saw significant cross-cultural relations with Western and Central Asia. On a separate note, generally most South Asian ethnographic research has been devoted to those in Central India due to the larger British academic/political needs to understand communities there in the aftermath of the 1857 rebellion.