Recasting India (3 page)

As a child, I heard stories of the great wealth of Prince Dwarkanath Tagore. Some of these were especially incredible because I am a child of Communist Bengal. By the time I was ten, the eastern Indian state had already seen more than a decade of elected Communist governments. From that world of load-shedding—as we called power cuts—for many hours each day, one story has remained. Invited to a musical soiree, a
jalsa
full of princes in their jewels in honor of the Queen of England herself, Dwarkanath chose to wear merely the finest white cotton with not an ornament in sight. But on his feet, each of the curling
nagra
shoes had a solitary diamond, as large as a marble, attached to the front lobe. He knew that he would have to leave his shoes outside the hall, as was the custom, and he did so, leaving the diamonds with utter nonchalance when he entered.

But in the Bengal I knew, such unostentatious elegance was already dying out, and the city was being slowly eaten from within by political thuggery so bitter and omnipotent that generations of Bengalis dreamed of escaping, as if from Cuba or North Korea. The Bengalis had long given up on enterprise, leaving most businesses to be taken over by the Marwaris from the northern desert state of Rajasthan and the Gujaratis from the west. The Bengalis had embraced glorified clerkdom like a badge and covered sloth with a sneer of intellectual pretension that has, even today, kept the state and its people primitive, in denial and clinging to the iconography of Rabindranath, the soulful poet-philosopher, but willfully forgetting Dwarkanath.

But Dwarkanath was far from being a soulless capitalist. With Raja Rammohun Roy, he was the founder of the Brahmo Samaj, the new community of breakaway Hindus fighting against the worst Hindu superstitions and rituals and turning the faith toward its core Vedantic monotheistic roots. One of the biggest battles Rammohun fought, with the vociferous support of Dwarkanath, was against sati, the horrifying ritual of women committing suicide by burning themselves on the pyres of their dead husbands.

Both Rammohun and Dwarkanath were Anglophiles. At a time when the renaissance was sweeping into Bengal, who can blame them for looking to the West for modern ideas far from the caste- and superstition-ridden, and often illiterate, environment at home?

As a result of their persistent and vocal campaigning and in the face of virulent resistance from Hindu orthodoxy, the duo got Lord William Bentinck to abolish sati in 1829 and make it a criminal offence.

It is almost impossible to conjure up today how big a victory this was in nineteenth-century Bengal. Suffice it to say that it has been consistently mentioned by historians as one of the triggers of the First War of Indian Independence, or The Sepoy Mutiny as the British describe it, less than three decades later in 1857.

“The abolition of sati, the abolition of infanticide, the introduction of vaccination, the law to legalise the remarriage of Hindu widows … were pressed upon the attention of the army and the masses as so many deliberate attacks on the outworks of Mahommedanism and Hinduism,” wrote Sir William Lee-Warner in
Life of the Marquis of Dalhousie
(1904).
²

“And the simple, superstitious, credulous sepoys were told that the time was rapidly approaching when by some piece of jadu (magic) the Christians would … uncaste the whole Hindu population and outrage all their traditions and feelings.”

The second part of the quotation is mostly the figment of colonial imagination that sees colonial rule as the advancement of the natives and the “white man's burden,” but the abolition of sati caused a tectonic shift in the power structure of conservative, and at that time as now, majority Hindu society.

But India's merchants, traders and entrepreneurs were forcing societal change even long before Dwarkanath. In 1669, Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb was at the height of his proselytizing reign. By his orders, numerous Hindu and Jain temples were being destroyed. Faced with the destruction of their places of worship in Surat, and perhaps even their own forced conversion to Islam, Bhimji Parekh, one of the city's wealthiest merchants, took charge.

He complained to the local British trade representative, Gerald Aungier, who was president of the Surat factory—he would in 1672 become the third governor of Bombay—that unless their faith and places of worship were protected, most of the merchants, the backbone of trade in Surat, would leave en masse for Bombay.

Makrand Mehta writes in his 1991 book
Indian Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Historical Perspective
that this left the Englishman torn. He sympathized with Bhimji, but letting the merchants go would mostly likely result in the eruption of the military wrath of the Mughals against the British. He couldn't risk that.

But he didn't want to offend the powerful merchant clans, so he told Bhimji that Bombay was not yet fortified enough to guard the merchants and their families. He suggested that “hereafter as occasion offered, they with more ease and security convey their estates and families to Bombay by degrees where they might assure themselves of all favour, friendship and freedom in their religion and encouragement in their trade as they could in reason [expect] from us.”
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This was no time for, in Mehta's words, a “post-dated cheque.” So on September 23 and 24, 1669, more than 8,000 merchant families left Surat for Bharaoch in Bombay.

“The general strike followed by the merchants' flight created such a tense atmosphere in Surat that the political authorities were forced to change their stand. The
banias
returned to Surat on December 20, 1669 only after the state assured the safety of their religion.”

As Mehta notes, this was not only the first-ever mercantile strike in India, it was also entirely nonviolent.

Not content to fight only the social ill of religious prejudice, 30 years later Surat's merchants gathered to fight corrupt governance. In 1702, the governor of Surat and his partner in crime, a trader called Ahmad Chelaby, took Rs 85,000 from the
banias
, ostensibly to help defend the city against Maratha marauders. When they realized that they had been cheated, the merchants went on strike, lowering their shutters and forcing the administration to imprison Chelaby and return at least Rs 37,000.

The idea that entrepreneurs—business people—can collaborate and push forward social reform is now lost in the venal crony capitalism of large portions of big business of India. Indian entrepreneurs seek tax benefits and reach out to manipulate laws to make windfall gains on land deals, but social reform does not, for the most part, keep them awake.

Some of this disconnect comes from the late years of the independence movement against the British Raj. Even though Mahatma Gandhi had deep and enduring friendships with top entrepreneurs like the Birla family, the overall ties of the Congress Party, which led the independence movement, with entrepreneurs never went very deep.

The historian Claude Markovits makes this point in his excellent book
Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs: Indian Business in the Colonial Era.
He points out that Indian Marxist historical writing, often the dominant point of view, “stresses the limitations of the Indian bourgeoisie without treating it as compradore.”
⁴

He writes:

Markovits says there are two problems with this reasoning. First, the Indian bourgeoisie barely existed as a defined class in pre-1947 (before independence) India, and the relationship between economics and politics in Italy was very different from the relationship between economics and politics in India.

It is this kind of loose nonchalance and lack of engagement that has, in some sense, led to the disconnect that exists today, so much so that in the 2014 elections, prominent political leaders regularly bashed the country's top businessmen as corrupt and venal (sometimes quite correctly).

Markovits points out that this pre-independence unease still echoes 60 years later. “Is it not possible to see in institutionalized corruption, the financing of political parties, especially the ruling party, by business houses, and state financial support to private ‘monopolies,' the modern equivalents of the farming of tax revenue or of the granting of state monopolies to private firms?”

This is why, in a sense, enterprise and social change so diverged in modern India. The tale of enterprise has been divorced from the larger sociopolitical tale of India—this is partly because some of the most successful entrepreneurial tales of the liberalization period that began in 1991, like the information technology (IT) companies such as Infosys, happened far away from the usual shenanigan-filled world of India Inc. (the term used to describe the aggregation of business houses in India). In fact, one prominent government minister even used to joke that the IT companies could grow swiftly because the government didn't know much about them in their early years of the 1990s and 2000s.

This is the story of that enterprise of the
aam aadmi.
India is unlikely to have a cohesive spring of revolt. How can we, in a country where land area under Maoist rebel control and shopping malls often rise simultaneously? What we are having is a daily climatic noon, somewhere in this vast nation, the total of V. S. Naipaul's “million mutinies.” Except that it might not always be a mutiny but—that curious reality TV term—a makeover.

But who are these mutineers? Consider this: India's 7,000 biggest companies employ only around 7 percent of its workforce. The remaining 93 percent come from what is called the “unorganized sector,” a euphemism that straddles all the worlds from a roadside tea shop to a small diamond-polishing unit. There are about 30 million such units in India, each employing an average of seven people. This is the backbone of the Indian economy—reflected not in the stock markets but in the kitchens and keenness of aspiration in millions of homes.

There are those who still hope for a China-style mass-manufacturing revolution in India. That is unlikely for many reasons—from disjointed, disparate landownership in India to family-run firms that lack capital or manpower to scale up. But something else is happening in India. Its village economy, which is home to 68 percent of the population and which brings in 50 percent of the GDP, is transforming. What was an income pyramid in 2010—with 50 million people earning more than $5 a day at the pointed tip, 350 million making between $1 and $5, and 400 million scraping by on less than $1 a day—is estimated to chisel itself into a diamond shape by 2020. This means 150 million people earning more than $5 a day, a fat rhombus middle of 500 million people making between $1 and $5 a day and 250 million taking in less than $1 a day.

This means 150 million first-time consumers of everything from more nutritious food to better soaps. This means 150 million first-time consumers of “brands” in a country where most of the poor and especially the rural poor buy “loose” unpackaged goods.

Already most people working in village or small-town India do not get their income from agriculture—only 40 percent do. The rest have found work in everything from local retail to local banking and small-scale manufacturing. In a sense, millions of people have found, and are finding, new enterprises. The best definition I have heard of an entrepreneur in my ten years as a business journalist came from a village teacher in the dusty district of Alwar in India's western desert state of Rajasthan. I met him about two years ago during a stop at a tea stall in the middle of nowhere on the road from Alwar to Delhi. I am ashamed to say that I do not remember his name, but what he said has echoed in me ever since. “An entrepreneur is not only a businessman as all you town people think,” said the school teacher. “Anyone who makes his life and the place, the world around him better is an entrepreneur. We have millions of women in the villages of India who keep the villages going. Each one of them is an entrepreneur. It is because of them that nothing collapses. They hold things up.”
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It is because of them that nothing collapses. They hold things up.
I had never heard a better description of the ideal entrepreneur. Back in Delhi, I went to meet Pradeep Kashyap, who has built India's finest rural research organization, MART. When we met one September morning at his quiet office in the middle of Noida's industrial zone, amid factories and ferries just on the outskirts of the Indian capital, he seemed angry. “There is an explosion in work and consumer demand in rural India and yet at the same time there is a raging Maoist revolution that runs through almost a third of the country—doesn't that sound crazy?” said Kashyap.

It is that odd truth about India—ostensibly the same demographic, a broad swath of rural India, is revolting and retailing at the same time. In fact, some of the Indian states most affected by Communist rebel violence are also some of the fastest-growing economies in India. This is a war for, and not against, prosperity.