Table Of ContentMerchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs
Also by Claude Markovits:
INDIAN BUSINESS AND NATIONALIST POLITICS
THE GLOBAL WORLD OF INDIAN MERCHANTS
THE UN-GANDHIAN GANDHI
A HISTORY OF MODERN INDIA 1480–1950 (editor)
Merchants, Traders,
Entrepreneurs
Indian Business in the Colonial Era
Claude Markovits
© Claude Markovits 2008
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-20598-7
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South Asian edition first published 2008 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-30234-5 ISBN 978-0-230-59486-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230594869
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data
Markovits Claude.
Merchants, traders, entrepreneurs: Indian business in the Colonial Era
p.m.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Business and politics–India–History–20th century.
2. Businesspeople–India–Social conditions–20th century. 3. India
Commerce–20th century. 4. India–Foreign economic relations. I.Title
HC435.M3263 2008
381.0954–dc22 2008025123
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08
To the memory of
ALICE THORNER
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Part I: Business and Politics 1
1 Congress Policy Towards Business in the
Pre-Independence Era 3
2 Indian Business and the Congress Provincial
Governments 1937–1939 26
3 Businessmen and the Partition of India 75
Part II: Entrepreneurship and Society 103
4 Muslim Businessmen in South Asia, c. 1900–1950 105
5 Bombay as a Business Centre in the Colonial Period:
A Comparison with Calcutta 128
6 The Tata Paradox 152
7 Merchants, Entrepreneurs, and the Middle Classes in
Twentieth-Century India 167
Part III: Merchant Networks 185
8 Merchant Circulation in South Asia (Eighteenth to
Twentieth Centuries): The Rise of Pan-Indian Merchant
Networks 187
viii CONTENTS
9 Indian Merchant Networks Outside India in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries:
A Preliminary Survey 220
10 Epilogue: Returning the Merchant to
South Asian History? 253
Index 271
PREFACE
T
HE MERCHANT WORLD REPRESENTS A RELATIVELY NEG-
lected area in South Asian history. Merchants were, however,
important actors in the economic, political, social, and even
cultural life of India, and they deserve more attention than they have
been given. This book aims at bridging a gap by bringing together a
number of articles written between 1981 and 2003 which deal with
the Indian mercantile world in colonial India, and its relationship
with politics and the broader society. The book is divided into three
parts. Part I, under the heading ‘Business and Politics’, looks at the
relationship between the business world and the world of politics
in the late colonial era, with special emphasis on the links between
business interests and political nationalism. Part II, entitled ‘Entrepre-
neurship and Society’, looks at the position of merchants and big
businessmen in relation to society and the economy. It focuses on
particular groups, such as Muslim businessmen, particular locations
(Bombay), and specific firms (Tatas). Part III, ‘Merchant Networks’,
introduces a new dimension, that of circulation, and looks at the way
in which specific trading networks with a regional base extended the
range of their operations, during the colonial period, across the entire
subcontinent as well as across different regions of the wider world.
My original interest in the topic of Indian capitalism, in the early
1970s, owed a lot to the influence of a book by Charles Bettelheim, a
French Marxist economist who had been seconded to P.C. Mahala-
nobis at the Indian Planning Commission: l’Inde Indépendante, an
x PREFACE
analysis of India’s political economy in which the capitalist bourgeoisie
figured in an important place. That is where I first heard about the
Tatas and the Birlas, and, when I started doing research in Indian
history at Cambridge, I immediately connected what I was reading
about India’s independence struggle with what I had learned from
Bettelheim about Indian capitalists, and found that there was a gap
in the scholarly literature, as, with the exception of A.R. Desai’s very
general treatment of the question in his Social Background of Indian
Nationalism, no study had been done of the relationship between
Indian capital and Indian nationalism. Little did I know then that
one of D.A. Low’s students, A.D.D. Gordon, was engaged in a study
of the relationship between Congress and business in Bombay, which
came out in the form of a book in 1978. My supervisor at Cambridge,
Anil Seal, was encouraging when I sounded him out on the possibility
of choosing such a topic for a Ph.D.
Research on this subject, however, proved, to be a rather tricky
proposition, as I started realizing how little was actually known about
the history of the Indian business world, and how difficult it was to
get access to private archives of business families. The existence of the
important collection of private papers left to the Nehru Memorial
Library by the heirs of prominent Bombay businessman Sir Purshot-
tamdas Thakurdas, to which my attention was drawn by the then
Deputy Director of the Library, Shri V.C. Joshi, proved to be a god-
send. Added to the use of official archives in Delhi and London, it
allowed me to acquire a decent grasp of the documentation then avail-
able which helped the writing of a Cambridge Ph.D. which served as
a base for a book published in 1985. The first two chapters in the
present book embody aspects of this work. Chapter 1, reprinted from
the volume of a conference held in 1984 at the University of California
at Los Angeles, under the stewardship of Richard Sisson and Stanley
Wolpert, puts forward a general interpretation of the relationship be-
tween the Congress Party and the Indian business class during the
period from 1885 to 1947, while Chapter 2 , reprinted from a special
issue of Modern Asian Studies, focuses more specifically on the period
of the Congress provincial governments, 1937–9, which was a defining
