Maloney says Gujarat, with its indented coastline and its proximity to the old navigation routes of the Mesopotamian and Indus civilisations, has apparently maintained a tradition of navigation over the past 4000 years. Certainly the earliest Buddhist literature indicates active seafaring from its ports. It was from Gujarat that North Indian civilisation impinged upon the Maldives and Sri Lanka. From Gujarat, North Indian civilisation also expanded to Java and other parts of South-east Asia. The export of this civilisation to all coasts of South Asia and South-east Asia began about 500 B.C., but during the Mauryan period and the diffusion of Buddhism, sea traffic in the Bay of Bengal supplemented and, to some extent, surpassed that originating along the coasts of Western India. The long story of the cultural and economic expansion of North Indian civilisation by sea cannot be told here. Three Jataka tales cited above seem to refer to the Maldives, particularly the comment that exiles from Bharukaccha went to a thousand islands [Laccadive and Maldive islands] where they found standing room, and that these were near an island named for coconuts [Kerala]. This suggests that not only did seafarers emanating from Bharukaccha and Suppara visit the Maldives, but Gujaratis actually settled there in pre-Buddhist times. The other Jataka tales suggest that ships from Gujarat going to South-east Asia stopped in the Maldives, and that merchants in search of treasures sailed in several seas called - maala (or maara). The Maldives might well have been settled parallel with the arrival of Indo-Aryan speakers in Sri Lanka, as suggested in the above interpretations of the Sri Lanka myths and the Koimala story. Mariners from the north-western coasts of the peninsula, from the time they commenced sailing to southern India, must have on occasion been blown over to the Maldives--unmanned canoes and rafts from Kerala even now get wafted there from time to time - and the dangers of shipwreck vividly described in several of the Jatakas might have arisen from contact with some of the thousands of reefs in the Maldives, which sailors have long dreaded. It may be, therefore, that shipwrecked Gujaratis, as well as exiles, were early settlers on the islands of the Laccadive-Maldives archipelago.

Answer this question "what region are the Gujaratis from?" by extracting the answer from the text above.
Maloney says Gujarat, with its indented coastline and its proximity to the old navigation routes of the Mesopotamian and Indus civilisations,