Books
PEASANT PASTS: History and Memory in Western India by Vinayak Chaturvedi. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2007.
Peasant Pasts is one of the best instances of the contemporary historian’s craft. Empirically rich and methodologically nuanced, the book is also remarkably transparent about what goes into the writing of history. It makes explicit all that is usually disguised in history in its final, readable form – archival contingencies, narrative dead-ends, political predilections, even the relationships of desire and/or perplexity that the historian may grow with the subject of her work. So while Peasant Pasts is about the agrarian social history of Gujarat, it is also simultaneously a history of history-writing itself.
Vinayak Chaturvedi writes about the Dharalas, an underclass of peasants in the Kheda district of Gujarat. Dharalas were subject to regulation as ‘criminal tribe’ by the colonial state. They were also the target of exploitation by the more well-to-do Patidar peasants of the region. The Patidars, we know, were the first peasants to be mobilised by Gandhi in his Kheda satyagraha, and were immortalised by nationalist history as the vanguard moment of India’s anti-colonial mass movement. And yet, as Vinayak shows, Patidar peasants used the colonial Criminal Tribes Act in order to forcibly extract labour from the Dharalas, a fact that Gandhi himself was aware of. Vinayak sets this up as the defining contest of the time, involving the colonial state, peasants led by Gandhi in a declared anti-colonial struggle and poorer peasants, labourers and menials who actively resisted the emergent nationalism of Gandhi and his peasant followers even as they continued to fight colonial legal and revenue apparatus. The book unfolds around this triangular political contest and demonstrates the hegemonic and repressive drives not only of colonialism but also of nationalism.
This, however, is not the main argument of the book – for this is an argument that has already been made effectively by earlier Marxist and subaltern historians. Peasant Pasts goes further. It argues that available critiques of the nationalist paradigm, including radical work by Ranajit Guha and Partha Chatterjee, have stopped short of admitting fully the political being of the peasant. In other words, this is a work that is decidedly post-subaltern studies in its intent, in the sense that it acknowledges having traversed the trajectory of subaltern rethinking of history even as it critiques and seeks to move aside of it. (Vinayak Chaturvedi had edited in 2000 the volume Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, which vouches for his having closely engaged with two decades of the SS project.)
Vinayak differs with the generally accepted argument (a la Partha Chatterjee) that while anti-colonial nationalisms were imagined differently from Euro-American nationalisms, in imagining the state, anti-colonialism surrendered to a universal (read classical western) language of politics. Vinayak argues that this was not so; that there indeed were alternative imaginations of rule and regime, like that of the Dharalas, operating on the ground. These alternatives, however, could never quite be acknowledged, because history as discipline could neither engage a political imagination that resisted both colonialism and nationalism in the same breath nor break with the standard narrative form of history as a genre of writing. In other words, Vinayak makes a political as well as a strongly theoretical point about the making of history, in the two-fold sense of acting and writing, and both in the very same gesture of invoking the Dharalas.
Peasant Pasts does not quite see itself as narrative history but as a history of narratives. Fragments from colonial archives, Dharala memories, oral and written, the historian’s own story of researching and writing – all constitute the main body of the text, without any claim of chronological smoothness or narrative resolution. The book is laid out in three parts, each made up of many small chapters that dwell on a particular theme. Sometimes one chapter leads to the next, sometimes a chapter is a stand-alone. The author offers narratives that are brief, heterogeneous, fragmentary, even staccato at times – stories that start but often lead nowhere. It is only by way of such broken, multiple narratives that the Dharalas could be admitted into the historian’s text, for that precisely was the nature of the Dharala presence in the archives. After all, Dharalas, like other marginal peoples, appear in colonial records and nationalist narratives as minor figures, emptied of politics and subjectivity, scattered in footnotes, asides, caricatures and accidental mentions. The argument is that in order to democratise history, we must abandon our fetish for narrative closure and continuity. We must open up our text to so-called incomplete and disruptive evidence.
The first part of the book invokes Ranchod, Dharala rebel and prophet of the late nineteenth century. Instead of making Ranchod into a generic peasant insurgent, Vinayak reconstructs in detail Ranchod’s own political imagination. Twenty-five chapters talk variously of the place in Ranchod’s imagination of books, writing, weaponry, state-officials, forests, cutting of trees, battle-narratives, symbols of legitimacy and so on. All this do not, Vinayak shows, add up to a comprehensive picture of Dharala political ideas. However, they allow the Dharala’s political being to intermittently flash through the cracks of the dominant narratives of colonialism and nationalism, law and community. Ranchod declared himself king, inaugurated his own calendar, fixed a royal tax, and mobilised brahmins to legitimise him. While this would conventionally be seen as proof of the archaic mentality of the typical peasant, Vinayak shows how kingliness for the Dharala was a very contemporary assertion of difference with both the colonial state and nationalist re-workings of it. Indeed, this is a critical argument in the book – this call to take seriously political ideas of kingly rule and justice that, in modern times, are too easily dismissed as the obsolete other of democracy. In this section, Vinayak argues that imaginations of peasant-kingship must be admitted into history in their full political significance. In fact, this question of kingship appears in all three parts of the book as a kind of running thread and works to destabilise our understanding of modern politics.
The next part of the book is about Daduram, a bhagat who appeared in 1901 in famine-stricken Gujarat. Daduram, to begin with, did not appear in the eyes of the colonial state as an obviously political being. Yet he would soon become the centre of a vibrant, and often threatening, peasant ‘public sphere’ in the region. While Daduram was indeed a popular religious leader of sorts and performed as such, he also undertook what might appear as strongly political, kingly practices. The chapters beautifully detail Daduram serving food to the poor, arguing against educated Dharalas’ claim to kshatriya-dom, protesting the nationalist politics of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Dadu’s successors resisting Gandhi’s political initiatives in the area. Here was a form of public life, very different from the bourgeois public sphere, which pre-existed the rise of nationalism in this area and which reinvented itself in early twentieth century, in order to refute the political future that nationalism, and Gandhi, had put on offer.
Part three of the book is an account of the author’s historical fieldwork –archival searches as well as his search for intellectual descendants of Daduram and Ranchod, who could throw light on the postcolonial aftermath of their rebellious political ideas. It is a fascinating story of encounters and contingencies, often full of irony. One finds that Daduram now goes by the name of Bapu, despite his erstwhile role as a critic of Gandhi. One also discovers that Dharala identity has by now been swamped by claims of kshatriya-dom. One also finds evocative moments when the historian’s text gets embroiled in battles of sectarian genealogy amongst Daduram’s successors. But above all, one finds that with the abolition of kingship in post-independence India, Daduram – erstwhile peasant-king, worldly and spiritual leader – now reappeared in the much attenuated and ineffectual image of a purely religious guru!
To me, this is what, above all, makes the book important – this question of the future of the past, so to speak. It is not a historical question, properly speaking, but it is question that forever haunts history and makes every historical narrative vulnerable to imminent falsification, as new futures and thus new presents get instituted. Peasant Pasts moves with great facility between contemporary times and moments in early-twentieth and late-nineteenth centuries – the movement made possible by rendering visible the historian’s labour as he engages past and present simultaneously. And yet, one wonders why it is in the last part of the book, in the account of the author’s fieldwork that is also an account of the present, that the historian is most visible. If one admits that the historian is the central protagonist of any text of history, and therefore, in all honesty, must be exposed, made visible rather than hidden, should not accounts of the past, i.e. the first two parts of the book, be also written up as a story of the historian’s travels and travails. Or to say the same thing differently, could we not seek to reconstruct the present anew as we did the nineteenth century, bit by bit, as we allow a certain past – that of the Dharalas – to agitate the apparently self-evident, contemporary and national present?
Prathama Banerjee
MERCHANTS, TRADERS, ENTREPRENEURS: Indian Business in the Colonial Era by Claude Markovits. Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2008.
THE businessman is an obscure figure in much of history writing on India. Partly, this may reflect the background of the historians themselves, drawn largely from the ranks of Brahmins, Kayasthas and other so-called scribal communities. For this overwhelmingly English-educated stratum, looking down upon the Vaishya or Bania comes naturally the way it was for the ancient master of statecraft, Kautilya, who, in his Arthashastra, derided them as ‘thieves, in effect, if not in name’. Moreover, in the classical chaturvarna (four-order) scheme, the Vaishya was the lowest of the dwijas or ‘twice born’ elite – below the Brahmin (priest) and the Kshatriya (warrior). That placed him just a notch above the Shudra (cultivator-labourer), who could occasionally (with the Brahmin’s blessings) lay claim to more exalted Kshatriya status.
Ergo, from the times of the early Company Bahadur chroniclers, the mundane functions discharged by merchants attracted less attention compared to the valour and grandeur of the Rajas or the polymath abilities of the Pundits. The indifference got reinforced during the nationalist movement, when the Bania began to be viewed as a usurer – an intrinsic part of the colonial framework of exploitation and immiserisation of the peasantry. The anti-capitalist ethos opportunistically nurtured by the post-independence Nehruvian state went hand in hand with traditional perceptions of social hierarchy to produce a negative stereotype of the businessman, perhaps not fully undeserved.
As a result, the men of the bazaar have been marginal to mainstream historical scholarship. This, notwithstanding merchants being more than incidental players not only in the economic, but even the overall social, political and cultural landscape going back to at least the late medieval period. In a predominantly agrarian society, they were the vital thread connecting the farmer and the village artisan to the rulers, soldiery, service gentry and other townsmen. As Christopher Bayly and others have shown, it was mainly through their agency that agrarian surpluses were recycled into luxury consumption and military expenditures. With the centralized Mughal empire giving way to sundry cash-strapped independent principalities from the eighteenth century, the importance of these intermediary groups in the circulation and monetization of goods and the farming of revenues for the state grew all the more. Even without wielding the sword and commanding armies, they bankrolled, buttressed, undermined and even deposed regimes (the way the Jagat Seths engineered Nawab Sirajuddaula’s defeat by Robert Clive’s men in 1757).
In spite of all this, the mercantile world – not simply its internal workings but its larger organic links to the polity and the state; the moral economy and hegemonic tools employed by businessmen; their role vis-à-vis social movements from Arya Samaj and cow protection to cataclysmic events like the Partition and communal riots – represents a relatively neglected area of historical enquiry. While economic history’s pre-occupation has been with analysis of broad trends in industry, agriculture, foreign trade and government policy – how these have evolved and been shaped in pre- or post-colonial settings – what passes off as business history is often commissioned hagiography (Dwijendra Tripathi and Raman Mahadevan are honourable exceptions to this trend). In addition, there is some work on the relationship of Indian capitalism to the nationalist movement and the post-independence state, mostly by scholars of Marxist persuasion or those of the moderate-Left Bipan Chandra school. But even they disproportionately emphasize big business while assuming a monolithic, undifferentiated ‘national bourgeoisie’ invariably Bania-Marwari or Parsi by origin. The lower echelons of business and the dynamics of regional capital, including the emergence of entrepreneurs from outside the traditional Bania-fold, are generally ignored.
‘Returning the Merchant to South Asian History’ is the central theme of Claude Markovits’ new book. Homo economicus indicus, he rightly points out, did not descend with Manmohan Singh’s economic reforms of 1991 that at long last gave a stamp of respectability to business. The bazaar was always integral to Indian society and continued to flourish in the interstices of the post-Nehruvian dirigisme state. If it has received scant attention, the fault lies in a certain flawed construction of India’s history, creating an artificial disjunction between the past and the present. Markovits specifically targets ‘the de facto complicity between the elision of the market in post-colonial history and the elision of history in the present-day discourse on the market.’ Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs is essentially a compilation of 10 articles and papers written between 1981 and 2006 by arguably one of the finest historians of colonial India’s mercantile world.
The opening two chapters deal with the complex relationship between the Congress Party and big business. From Markovits’ analysis, one can roughly divide this into four stages. The first one, stretching from the party’s founding in 1885 to the First World War, saw very limited interaction between the two sides. While businessmen chose to be cautiously apolitical, the Congress remained an exclusive club of the liberal professional salariat. Neither was it a mass movement nor did its annual sessions seriously take up economic issues. Things changed with the War, which enabled Indian businessmen to accumulate surpluses from speculative activities and emboldened them to foray into manufacturing, external trade and banking. When their pleas for a proactive tariff and industrial policy environment failed to evoke the desired response from the colonial government, they turned receptive to the Congress’ nationalistic message. Key to this was Mahatma Gandhi, whose ‘saintly’ style of politics (and probably his Gujarati Bania origins too) appealed to pious Hindu and Jain merchants. His exhortations to industry to act as ‘trustees’ rather than merely as ‘owners’ of their enterprise was also taken in the right spirit – being consistent with the capitalist’s self-image of a paternal benefactor and not a rapacious exploiter of workers.
The Mahatma’s successful co-option of the business class was manifested in the raising of contributions for the Tilak Swaraj Fund in 1920, which for the first time gave the Congress a sound financial base and facilitated its transformation into a mass party. The honeymoon ended in the mid-thirties with the growth of labour unions backed by Congressmen like Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose, who sought to link workers’ struggles to the broader national freedom movement. The increasing influence of its socialist wing caused a straining of relations between the party and business. This was also a period when Gandhi kept himself aloof from active politics and leaders of the Congress Right, notably Sardar Patel, could fill the ensuing void only as ‘brokers’ and not ‘guru’.
The final rapprochement phase came with the advent of Congress governments in a majority of provinces – first in 1937-9 and again in 1946-47 – which was the forerunner to the party’s eventual transition from a national liberation movement to a ruling power. Confronted with the realities of governance even before enjoying full power, the Congress was progressively led to adopt a ‘pragmatic’ approach to business and accommodate worker demands within limits objectively favouring capitalist interests. Big business, on its part, was shrewd enough not to frontally oppose the idea of an interventionist state (‘socialist mixed economy’) so long as it did not entail surrendering the essential features of capitalism. By unveiling their own scheme of a planned economy for Independent India – the Bombay Plan of 1944 – the Indian capitalists, to quote Markovits, ‘pre-empted any attempt at imposing a radical programme of national economic transformation.’
The subsequent two articles examine the Muslim bourgeoisie and the not-so-well documented role of businessmen in Partition. In the areas of Punjab and Bengal that went on to form Pakistan, Muslims, despite being a numerical majority, were not the dominant players in business. Of the 17 major Muslim business families in pre-1947 India that Markovits identifies, 10 hailed from Gujarat (Memons, Khojas and Bohras), three were of Iranian or Afghan descent, and one an Urdu-speaking North Indian based in Madras. There were just three belonging to Punjab and none from Bengal. So, what was this demand for Pakistan? It was fundamentally about rural Muslim landholders of the two provinces, motivated by their hostility to overwhelmingly Hindu urban interests.
Markovits argues that these rural bosses were ‘regionalists’ more than ‘communalists’, and as later events proved, they did not relish the idea of the influx of Muslims, businessmen or otherwise, from the Indian Union. This was something Mohammad Ali Jinnah, a Khoja, was aware of: indeed, his Muslim League had more support from the commercial Muslim communities of Bombay than among their predominantly agrarian counterparts in Punjab and Bengal. In fact, the League never advocated separatism until well into the late thirties. What Jinnah was, instead, pushing for was a united India with a strong Centre in which Muslims had parity of representation with Hindus. In other words, a guarantee that the traditional Muslim business elite would not be swamped by Marwari-Bania capital in the new independent state.
This was obviously not acceptable to the Birlas and Shrirams or even the likes of Patel and Rajendra Prasad. The latter were also not favourably inclined to a loose federal regime bestowing limited financial and economic powers to the Centre – which is what the provincial Muslim gentry of Punjab and Bengal wanted. Partition ultimately turned out to be a second-best option for all. It combined the attractions of a strong unitary structure suited to non-Muslim big business with providing Muslim capitalists an autonomous Bania-free haven for accumulation.
Chapters 5-7 are stand alone essays. The first one looks at historical explanations for Calcutta losing out to Bombay as the country’s business capital. Among other reasons Markovits identifies for Bombay’s rise is the ethnic diversity of its capitalists: there were Parsis, British, Gujarati Banias/Jains, Lohanas, Bhatias, Memons, Khojas, Bohras, Sindhis, Marwaris, and even Baghdadi Jews (the Sassoons) and non-British Europeans. In Calcutta, the only ones who mattered were the Scots and Marwaris; and theirs was a racially polarized and unequal principal-broker relation. As the Marwaris made inroads into industry, the Scots reacted not through any concrete entrepreneurial initiatives but by leveraging their clout with the authorities. All it did was engender unhealthy speculation, price wars and high-cost purchases of mills with obsolete machinery. A lot of energy and money was wasted in the bargain, unlike in Bombay, where ‘less racial and communal strife meant a more rational use of capital resources’ and space for genuine entrepreneurship.
Bombay businessmen proved more adept at adjusting to changing market conditions. When the opium trade declined from the 1850s, they moved to cotton exports. When that faltered, they diversified into textile manufacturing and yarn shipments to China, and then to supplying cloth to Indian consumers taking advantage of the Swadeshi movement. The Bombay companies were also trailblazers in introducing new processes (ring spindle by the Tatas), products (Portland cement by Khatau) and industries (automobiles and aeronautics by Walchand). By contrast, Calcutta’s magnates were stuck in jute, tea and coal and faced no structural compulsions to innovate. The second essay is on the Tata Paradox: the unique case of a ‘loyalist’ house enjoying a privileged relationship with the colonial state, and yet pioneering some of the most ‘nationalistic’ industrial ventures from steel-making to hydro-electricity (a far cry from simplistic ‘comprador bourgeoisie’ formulations).
The final stand alone piece seeks to locate merchants within the ‘middle class’, focusing on those not forming part of the big bourgeoisie. Markovits shows how this section has evolved separately from the world of the English-educated middle class, which exercises greater cultural and political influence via its presence in the bureaucracy and other ‘learned professions’. The commercial middle class is steeped in vernacular regional cultures and its members tend to be inward looking and less cosmopolitan in outlook. It is only with liberalization and the growth of consumerism as a dominant value system that a fusion of the two worlds is seemingly taking place, lending credence to the notion of a unified Great Indian Middle Class. A meeting of the goddesses of wealth (Lakshmi) and learning (Saraswati), so to speak.
The penultimate chapters of the book centre around the author’s more recent research on merchant networks that had, over the course of the colonial period, covered almost the entire subcontinent and even overseas territories. Markovits estimates that by 1930, there were a quarter of a million Indians engaged in trading and finance outside the country – from between the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Malacca, and extending to the African continent, the Far East, and the Caribbean. The remarkable thing about these pan-Indian and global networks was that their members belonged to a limited number of ethnic communities from particular regions – that too, the most ‘dry zones’ of Rajasthan (Marwaris), Kutch-Kathiawar (Gujarati Banias/Jains, Lohanas, Bhatias, Memons, Khojas, Bohras), Sind (Shikarpuri Lohanas and Sindworkies) and Tamil Nadu (Chettiars). How did these groups, largely from northwest India and peninsular Gujarat, manage to establish a virtual stranglehold on business across the subcontinent and beyond?
A staple answer relies on ecological factors: the uncertainties of agriculture in areas of weak and irregular precipitation were apparently conducive to the honing of speculative skills and development of indigenous commodity futures mechanisms such as the fatka. The ‘dry zones’ also had the advantage of lying astride the main land and sea routes linking Central Asia and the Middle East with the northern hinterland – routes through which a significant share of India’s foreign trade was carried on till the 19th century. It is partly the profits accumulated from this trade that the ‘dry zone’ merchants deployed to expand their footprint to other lands.
But there is a more interesting hypothesis suggested by Markovits, springing from the close ties maintained by Marwari traders and bankers, for example, with the Rajput kings of Rajasthan since early medieval times. This pre-existing link with Rajputana principalities proved useful in forging connections with the Mughal polity and its successor states as well. Quite a few Hindu and Jain merchants from the northwest went as commissary officers to Rajput units attached to Mughal armies, which then opened up avenues for spreading their operations all over the Gangetic plain and the Deccan. The British, too, recognized the functional utility of these diasporic networks, while choosing Marwaris as their privileged intermediaries over other ‘indigenous’ trading groups.
Related to this is another observation. The Marwaris, the Chettiars and the various commercial castes of Kutch-Kathiawar were legally domiciled in princely states, whose rulers retained a semblance of autonomy from British interference in their domestic affairs. Not only did it give that extra leeway for independent businesses – as was shown in the Company’s failure to control the trade in Malwa opium technically outside its jurisdiction – but regimes like Kutch even systematically supported their traders. Further, merchants could repatriate the profits made in British India to their native states, which charged no income tax (a la Mauritius and Cayman Islands of today).
As a collection, Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs provides a holistic and nuanced picture of Indian business in the colonial era. What is required now to carry forward the analysis to the post-independence period and address some of the serious deficiencies of the extant literature – the cursory treatment given to South India and not taking cognizance of the growth of businessmen recruited from agrarian and other non-mercantile backgrounds. It is a curious irony that the noticeable decline of interest in economic history since around the last decade has taken place precisely when the Indian entrepreneur is said to have finally come of age. Reconciling the fading of the merchant from the historian’s horizon with all the breathless media discourse on India Inc today is necessary in order to re-establish a minimum of continuity between the past and the present. But whether in these times of postmodernist and multiculturalist historiographies this will happen is anyone’s guess.
Harish Damodaran
INDIA’S NEW CAPITALISTS: Caste, Business and Industry in a Modern Nation by Harish Damodaran. Permanent Black in association with the New India Foundation, Ranikhet, 2008.
TO call this work a fascinating collage of business biographies would best describe the experience of reading it, though perhaps at the risk of undermining the rigour with which its material has been assembled. Quite in contrast to the unfettered subjectivity of a collage, Harish Damodaran has written this book with rigorous attention to the dimension of caste (or more precisely, jati) as a central determinant of entrepreneurial behaviour and business success in India.
Entrepreneurs have been viewed as the dynamic element in economic processes, as the rebels against conformity, who (as Joseph Schumpeter puts it) break the dull rhythms of the ‘circular flow’ of the economy – or the reproduction from day-to-day of stagnant human horizons – and open up limitlessly expanding possibilities. Missing perhaps in this view of the entrepreneur as an epic hero is a vision of the individual innovator within a larger network of social and cultural ties.
Caste in India, though often considered a residue of the pre-modern economy, has proved an inescapable part of all business histories, indeed, even perhaps a decisive element in modern entrepreneurial success. Social networks are key, simply because business is all about building and sustaining commodity exchange networks and industry is all about establishing productivity enhancing techniques at vital nodes in these networks. To put it in terms of the basic vocabulary of the economist, caste networks aid entrepreneurship by reducing ‘transaction costs’.
Yet approaches to business history have suffered from certain serious deficiencies which Damodaran cites as the principal motivation for his work. There has, for one, been a tendency to remain confined to ‘traditional’ business communities without an understanding of how these traditions are continually being invented and reinvented. This in turn leads to a lack of contemporary focus. Several traditional merchant families, having made the transition to industry and riches beyond imagination, have since fallen away into obscurity. And despite all the continuing prominence of older trading communities in the Indian entrepreneurial landscape, there are new entrants of no recognisable business pedigree who are leading the charge into new frontiers. In terms of geographical focus, the south of the country again, has tended to fall outside the gaze of the conventional business historian.
For these reasons, Damodaran does not dwell at length on the so-called ‘old merchant communities’, which he identifies as the Banias and Jains of Gujarat and North India, the Marwaris, Parsis, Nattukottai Chettiars, and the Lohanas and Bhatias of the Kutch-Kathiawar-Sindh belt. After a quick consideration of the ‘general trajectories’ of entrepreneurial growth within these communities, which brings the narrative right up to contemporary times, Damodaran turns his attention to the communities less studied: Brahmins and Khatris, Kammas and Reddys, Naidus and Gounders, Nadars and Ezhavas, Patidars and Marathas. He documents the presence of entrepreneurial energy in all these quarters and then turns his attention to explaining an absence. The northern farming communities – in particular, the Jats – he points out, have yet to manifest any tendency to make the transition from agrarian dynamism to industry. Damodaran concludes, a little implausibly since his entire treatment has dealt with ‘minorities’, with a ‘note on the minorities’, unable to resist the temptation of using a politicised euphemism in referring to the Muslims. Here again, he is dealing with an absence – or rather, a marginal presence – that was splintered and scattered with the partition of 1947.
Damodaran shows how extended kinship networks have concretely worked in ensuring business success. The Nadars of southern Tamilnadu promoted a bank entirely through small capital subscriptions from their caste folk, providing their business ventures with an effective bulwark against the uncertainties of finance; a Gounder family of Coimbatore, newly arrived in the sugar industry, overcame a stiff working capital bottleneck by effectively persuading clansmen to part with sugarcane on an extended line of credit, a business deal that would have been unthinkable outside of strong and deep community bonds. Then again, Damodaran also demonstrates with a number of illustrations, how globalization and the stock market, which have given a fresh impetus to the mobility of capital and loosened its anchorage in specific social and cultural milieus, has led to a weakening of these kinship ties in business.
Summing up the experiences of these diverse social aggregates, Damodaran identifies three kinds of trajectories of business success. ‘bazaar to factory’ sums up the path taken by the traditional merchant communities, who are really not the primary focus of this book. Rather, what this book is more concerned with is the ‘office to factory’ route, which brought the service-oriented and ‘scribal’ castes – Brahmins, Khatris, Kayasths, the Bengali bhadralok – into the portals of industry; and the ‘farm to factory’ trajectory represented by the Naidus, Gounders, Patidars, Marathas and Nadars.
Considering the mutability of tradition, it could also be argued that these perhaps are not three distinct trajectories, but three variants of the same trajectory, though displaced in time. That argument perhaps is especially apt when it comes to the ‘office to factory’ trajectory, since many of the traditional merchant communities identified by Damodaran began their industrial empires as minor functionaries in the early colonial trade in opium, raw cotton and indigo. As these networks of commodity exchange spread out through the South Asian landmass and gradually acquired diversity and depth, greater numbers were drawn into it, both as movers and shakers, and as hapless victims. New identities were forged, such as capitalist and worker, even as several old identities, such as craftsman and subsistence peasant, were undone.
India’s industrial growth was derivative of the dynamics of colonialism, rather than autonomous. The national bourgeoisie that grew out of the process remained segmented, divided into numerous endogamous groups. This book ends with an affirmation of the value of diversity. When democratic political contestation and spontaneous economic change contribute towards a socially diverse middle class, the likely further outcome is a socially diverse entrepreneurial class. Diversity in turn, becomes an assurance of solidarity. Though the country has in its southern and western regions achieved a semblance of social diversity, large sections still remain excluded. And in the vast Hindi heartland and the east, even the semblance has not been achieved.
The last two decades of economic liberalization have seemingly created conditions for those lower in the hierarchy of business and industry to migrate upwards into the interstices of the capitalist system and acquire leadership positions. Yet there has also been in this time, a vast increase of inequalities of income and wealth.
There is currently underway, an impassioned debate among the Dalits – a heterogeneous social group that shares the common attribute of exclusion under the ritual order – on globalization as a possible antidote to all their inherited debilities. That argument remains inconclusive. And while the jury remains out, material realities are ensuring that the answer is not left to spontaneous forces of entrepreneurship and economic change. Politics, it is increasingly recognised, will now drive the agenda.
Sukumar Muralidharan
