Aga Khan III
The Recreation Club Institute, a group established by Aga Khan III to promote the study of Ismaili history and literature, commissioned Chunara to write a Gujarati history of the Ismailis in 1919. Their choice of Gujarati reflected the dominant language of the Khoja community, and marked an important shift away from Arabic and Persian, the traditional languages of Ismaili scholarship. Chunara himself had been a secretary to Aga Khan III, but was probably best known as a journalist and editor of a biweekly journal, The Ismaili. Chunara, together with several colleagues from the journal, spent eight years researching relevant sources in several languages.