Secrets of Marwari Businessman: What they don’t teach you at the Harward Business School BY I N N O V A T I O N L A B S ON A U G U S T 1 1 , 2 0 1 2 · L E A V E A C O M M E N T

Known for their business acumen, adaptability and success Marwari business men and

their methods of business are a great source of inspiration and learning for modern as

well as traditional businesses. In history, Marwari entrepreneurs migrated from their

homeland Marwar (a region in Rajasthan) and have spread across India and now world.

They have adapted themselves successfully to the industrial and business environment of

large business centers of India such as Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad.

The emergence of Marwari businessmen and subsequently expansion of their business

form regional to global geographies in the past 20 years establishes that in business,

Marwari school of thought is very much relevant in the modern era as well. Read the book,

Made In America and after first 50 pages you will realize that, Sam Walton’s business and

even life philosophy was quite close to the Marwari school of thought. Sam’s frugality in

business and being a family man are some of his traits which you can find in an average

Marwari businessman too. The only difference was Sam’s business vision was very big

than an average Marwari of today. However this too has started changing in the past

couple of decades. Accomplished Marwari businessmen such as L N Mittal, Rahul Bajaj,

Gautam Singhania, Rakesh Jhunjhunwala have proven their metal not just in India but all

over the world. Their business philosophy and practices have succeeded at all level be it

regional, national or global platform.

It is believed that you do not have to teach business to a Marwari. They get their business

knowledge and acumen not from any business school but it is transferred from one

generation to the next in various forms both practically and theoretically from a very early

stage in life. Let me show this to you with one example in this blog. By now you must have

rightly guessed that I belong to the same Marwari community and have seen the business

world from small town enterprises to global corporate.

My “bauji” (grandfather) left his family business in Rajasthan and migrated to Madhya

Pradesh where he grew his business from a footpath vendor to number one fabric retail

shop of the town. I was born during the era when his business was already at its peak.

During my early ages, he used to teach me his business principals in the simplest and

transparent forms. One of his theories was “if you can learn to purchase best quality of

vegetables at best prices from a vegetable market you would become a real Marwari

businessman”. I used to go with my bauji to the big vegetable market and observe his

whole process of buying vegetables and coming out of the market with the best quality

vegetables at a price very few people in the town could negotiate. Through observation

and practice I also became an expert in purchasing the best vegetables at the best price.

Unknowingly in the process I had developed certain skills and realized why bauji said what

he had said. So what do you think my bauji wanted me to learn from this act of buying

best quality veggies at the best possible price?

I didn’t even realize what I had learnt from that practice until recently when I observed

and analyzed my skills of buying household items from the best seller in the market and at

possibly the best price. Working backwards I realized bauji’s teachings gave me following:

1) Ability to scout the market to see who is selling what

2) Ability to judge the quality of merchandise

3) Ability to identify vendors selling the best quality merchandise

4) Ability to negotiate with vendors/sellers

5) Ability to develop a relationship with vendors so that they can a) impart give category

knowledge and also b) negotiate to a price they would not sell to anyone else usually

6) Skills of clubbing purchases together in order to get more bargain

The more I thought the more I dug out about what I had learnt during my childhood.

During those times I would also not just scout in one market but would travel to more

than one markets located in different parts of the city. I also learnt that there are different

times of arrival of fresh vegetables in various markets and therefore could get fresh

vegetables during any time of the day for home. I had developed relationship with the

best vendors who after a while would reduce the price of the vegetables before I would

negotiate with them. Not only this, they would also keep good quality material for me

separate and would show the new arrivals to me before they would show it to any other

customer. I learnt that advantages of good relationship go beyond just the business. Two

of the vegetable vendors who knew my bauji and because of him me, came for marriage

ceremony as well.

All that I had learnt from my bauji has unknowingly become the way I live and helped me

immensely in my various jobs. I also realized most of the Kotlers, Aakers and Poters which

I had read during my MBA were not all that new to me as they were to most of the other

students in the class. The art of procurement which I had learnt during my childhood from

my bauji in a small is practiced by the large global corporation world around.

So here is the secret of a Marwari businessman: A Marwari learns the tricks of the trade

right from his childhood which therefore, later on when he takes on the business on his

own come very natural to him. This wealth of knowledge is the collective wisdom gathered

over the ages and refined by thousands of Marwaris constantly and precisely falls under

the category of “What they don’t teach you at the Harward Business School”.

Learnings from Marwari Business Family Learning’s from a Marwari business family - For Startups and Family Business

Entrepreneurs

After graduating from B-School and having learnt all the Porter’s Model and trick of trades for

running business, I was all excited to join my family business as I was eager to implement my

leanings in real time. I made my business models and algorithms for processes to be

implemented in my company.

As I joined, everything turned topsy-turvy! My staff looked at me as if I am a dumb alien

creature! My plans and ideas were listened as I was cracking CID or Rajini jokes. The only

person looking at me with high hopes was my Father but more I saw hopes in his eyes the more I

was getting suffocated as I had no clue what to do and from where to start! I can’t just simply go

to him and say: Dad, its not working! That’s like being a loser. Whatever I planned and

implemented on floor was scrapped next day. All my motivation and excitement just simply

went for a Whirlpool ride in an endless ocean.

And that is how I got inaugurated to the learnings of Marwari B-School. In MNCs they call it an

Induction and Training where you will learn only your job profile but as an Entrepreneur you

have to wear several hats in a day, from a CEO to Electrician. My first and biggest lesson in

Marwari family business was to be flexible with work profile and be ready to get my hands

dirty. Which I guess is important for entrepreneurs to learn and understand in this flamboyant era

of entrepreneurship.

Financial Management:

For centuries, Marwari’s have been known for their financial practices. You might require

software to make a balance sheet but a Marwari can do it in 3x4 Inch of paper! Trust me, they

can.

The day I started in business, I was told 100 times that Debt is bad! It’s an evil.

In general an incorporated company has a life span of 30 years (Max) but see the family

businesses in India, they have been running for more than 60 years.From small to big, one thing

is common either No debt or Balanced Debt.

It is important for an entrepreneur to understand that unbalanced and over optimistic debt can kill

your dreams overnight. I am not saying that debt is bad, To grow at a particular level, debt is

required but grow slow and calculated for a sustained living for you and your company. Simply

to put, before talking about making billion dollars at-least make a million.

Gripping your financial decisions is very important. Every rupee saved is rupee earned. Hit hard

on negotiating prices with your suppliers no matter how small is the amount. As entrepreneurs,

we don’t give much importance to small purchases but it helps you cut your overheads and thus

brings financial discipline in your employees too.

Managing HR:

Managing employees seems to be a very difficult task. If it’s an MNC or a small business, it’s

difficult. What I learnt from Marwari family B-school is that treat your employees as if they are a

part of family. Understand their personal problems and remember their names, It makes them

feel special but do remember to draw a line and respect that. After all they are your employees.

As entrepreneurs we often tend to restrict our staff to certain job but personally I think that it’s

not right. Freedom of thought, freedom of creativity and freedom of articulation- is what they

deserve. Let them work as entrepreneurs and not as mere robots. When I joined the business,

none of my employees used to respect me and it’s fair from their end as I have not done anything

for them. Gradually I spent my days in shop floor and spoke to everyone, be it a labor or a

staff. They had problems with some processes, which they told me and were afraid to disclose it

to the constructor of the business- My Father. I did take their feedback associated with the

problems faced by them seriously and did the best for them. That’s how I started growing the

root of my respect within the company from the people of the company. They gained faith in me

as they got, what they wanted- a Vigilant in me.

“Knowledge is power”- a very old saying but still a startling fact useful in any grounds of

business be it securing employees belief or be it convincing clients.When your people know that

you are very well aware of what’s happening in the company and about the future roadmap, they

will look at you with tons of hope spiced with respect.

Cutting Overheads:

During the great Economic turmoil where the Western markets had to experience with the

Horrifying Recessions- leading to national outrages worldwide because MNCs were FIRING as

to cut overheads. If you have to learn how to cut overheads, simply walk into a Marwari’s

office. From interiors to staple pins you will find a cost cut. It takes years of planning for a

Marwari businessman to install an Air Conditioner in his office and with all the planning the

calculations of power consumption no matter how small or medium scale Enterprise it is has

been done erstwhile the installation. What makes a Marwari go through such a long process of

thought before installing an AC? He thinks, can I buy a machinery for 30 Grand’s which can

give an output and ROI! It’s been 35 years to my business and I don’t have an air conditioned

office but surely my machines are adding!

This is an important lesson for an entrepreneur as to put company before self. After all it’s your

Respect, it’s your Existence and it’s your Identity.

MNCs often end up with over hiring employees and then during downfall, many lose their jobs,

hopes and most importantly dreams. What I learnt from a Marwari business is to take 200% from

your employees. My car driver drives for 4 kms. a day and does the entire bank, insurance, postal

jobs and small purchases.The guard sitting inside the plant is packing goods, the labour loading

the goods is trained with computerized weighing machines. While doing multiple jobs the

employees get more connected to the system and working of the company and their loyalty

increases. There exists a special bond between the Owner and employees (bottom and Top line)

They start treating their ‘Babuji’ (Owner) as their god. They know it, if they have no one, their

‘babuji’ is with them. Maybe that is why in Marwari SMEs you can find employees working for

40 years!

As startups and SMEs, when you can’t afford to give high packages, you have to hire right

resource! You require the right attitude and not much of an aptitude in your employees.

Savings and Future Planning:

It is rightly said, a Marwari spends only either on education of his/her child or wedding. What

may seem a thousand buck to people, a Marwari sees its time value of money! Not often you can

find a Marwari living on a credit card, they take it against their pride. They can skip butter from

their meals but not make a living on credit. As a B-School grad, I must say that buying from

credit card is cheaper than paying upfront cash but that’s what Marwari’s are known for,

financial discipline.

For centuries, Marwari’s have been saving for their kids’ education, wedding etc which is now

legally called as ‘Trust’. Even in bad times of business, a Marwari can do a lavish wedding for

his kids or can send him abroad for education. The root of such a practice lies in considering

your bank’s savings account as piggy bank. For every extra rupee earned, he might skip

shopping or a Vegas trip for once but will save it for his family’s future but yes, he will surely

shop and make a Vegas trip with extra 2 rupees earned!

Now a days, life styles have changed if you have a rupee extra you will shop for brand X and if 2

rupees extra, for brand Y and the maze goes on.

For Entrepreneurs, understanding yourself within is important. Consider your future plans and

savings before switching from brand X to Y.

Client Relationship & Market Establishment:

Sitting next to my father in office, I have seen many customers visiting and one thing that I learnt

was how to engage and bond with your customer. As said, the work culture is more like a family

for some customer of young age, my father would say ‘Beta’ and for them, he is their

‘Chachaji’ ! The trust between them is so much that they do not need POs (Purchase Orders) to

place an order. Its done on a call of 20 seconds no matter the size of order. In Marwari they call

it ‘Awaaz’

Talking about this, I do not intend to say that make everyone your beta or chacha as we live in a

global economy but what can be understood is, loop your customers. Talk to them about them

more than what you need. I can assure if you are in price competitive market and you are able to

loop your customer well, he will think twice, thrice, 100 times before buying from someone else.

To get yourself established in market, you have to be straightforward and very honest. You

should have the DARE to say NO! if you cant fulfil the order in a given timeline. These small

things add up for your future portfolio. If you are growing, your company too is growing.

The financial discipline not only includes, how you save and spend money it includes how you

give money to your vendors. To be a known and respectable figure in market, pay your suppliers

on or before time. Never commit a false promise, as you never know he might have promised

someone relying on you.

If your payments are on time, you have an upper hand in negotiating with him for the next

order. Beg, borrow, steal but make payments on time is what I have learnt and adopted and seen

the change in myself. It makes a big difference.

So, a B-School or Marwari B-School?

Simple living and High thinking! That’s what I have learnt after the mixed experiences of

studying in a prestigious B-School and experience from Marwari family business. The learning’s

from a B-School have made me presentable and analytical. It has also helped tremendously in

developing a perspective about business operations and management practices, whereas in

Marwari family Business, I have learnt to be connected with grass root and developing an ethical

approach for a sustaining business which I personally think is needed in today’s young

entrepreneurs.

Wish you all wealth and health.

Siddharth Maheshwari

NM Metal Works

Alumni- IIM Bangalore

Learning Business Basics from

Marwaris Posted on July 16, 2012

It is told that the best business guys are the Jews…and in India we have the Kanjus…viz. Marwaris.

But there are other business communities the Sindhis, the Gujaratis, Kutchi, and Konkani People.

Predominantly most of these guys have migrated for existence or living. But let us learn some

management fundas from Marwaris.

FINANCE AND ACCOUNT ADMINISTRATION:A Marwari would know all the financial and

accounts on the back of his hand. Its like they live with those numbers. Even if they have

conventional PCs used, a Marwari would have a book(chopdi) which has all the manual entries,

which he manages and keeps a parallel record. He would know each and every entry and the balance

sheet…with all the liabilities that he intends to pay.

BUYING LOYALTY

I recall my Marwari friend telling me, that in earlier days when PAN card etc was not a necessary

norm, people used to float companies under the employees name, because they knew these

employees are not going to leave them. Loyalty was very strong in a Marwari set up. The salary or

benefits was not great, but any employee going to the owner/setji…say for his daughter’s marriage,

he would tell…your daughter is like my daughter don’t worry and give him some amount which

would address his emergency. By doing this the employee becomes indebted to the employer, and

forgets that he actually deserved much better. But one could look at it as a forced savings, which the

employee would not have looked at, had it been given as an incremental salary every month.

TEACHING THEM YOUNG

A Marwari family typically would have their succession plan where the children are taught the

business principles very young. They are not given any preferential treatment, in fact it is a phase

where they are told to observe and do all the daily chores. I remember my days when I was a

marketing executive for an Aluminium Extrusion Company and I used to visit Marwari dealers at

Pydhonie. One day I saw the Owner’s son actually sweeping the floor. Also he would sit in the

corner and do all the tasks as directed by his father. They develop the art of patience and not getting

hyper, and learn the art of observing and waiting.

FOCUSING ON BOTTOM LINE:

Marwari even If he is a kabadi wala …understands business so well and money is everything for

them, that doesn’t mean they don’t have values. They have clear understanding that what actually

matters is the ‘Bottom Line’ or net profits that come in the books. So they will not get into any

business where the revenue to effort doesn’t generate enough bottom line. Every investment that goes

into business has to create a specific ROI. So manpower, capital expenditure or any business

investment has to generate that extra profits. They don’t do anything just for the heck of it…nor for

convenience or just to create feel good factors. Even ordering a tea or snacks in office has to generate

that extra profits. Basically the terminology is Profit on Extra Spend. It is like for any

action/initiative that one takes, it has to impact the bottom line, if it is worth taking. So some things

that are allowed would be waste reduction, switching off lights when not in use, special efforts on

account receivables. But at the same time, looking at say having flowers at the reception area etc

would not be allowed.

DROPPING EGOS

When you are trained to do even the daily chores with pride, all your ego massaging definitely is

thrown out of the window. Once I was with a Marwari dealer at a good restaurant way back in 1990s

for a business meeting. After the meal, the finger bowl was ordered. The dealer was so innocent and

humble, to use the same finger bowl that one of us used. But one thing I understood…was that to

succeed one has to leave ego in the backyard and be humble

RISK TAKING APPETITE

Marwaris understanding of risks and risk mitigation strategies are one of its kind. They are very good

in managing risks and also have a proper risk mitigation strategy in place, because of which they are

able to deliver results and gain in in long run. They also are adaptable and you could see examples in

India Infoline(by Nirmal Jain), which started as a information portal, but later got into stock trading

and is a classic case of how perseverance can be rewarding.

TAKING CARE OF COMMUNITY INTEREST

The other beautiful instance, which I recollect with my Jain Marwari dealer, was once when I saw

having him onion and potatoes during a lunch session. When I asked him, whether as a Jain dealer he

was allowed to do so? I also enquired how come, you find most of the restaurants’ offering Jain Food

options? He explained that normally as a community, whenever they go anywhere, they make it a

point to ask for Jain food. By doing so they create the communication flow and a demand for Jain

food…They care for their community. Most of the business they get is from their own community

members.

India: What makes marwaris such prolific and successful businessmen

of the world?

1. A bit of history

Before we attack the question at hand, we need to understand who a Marwari is, and what makes him

tick.

Marwaris, as the name suggests, is a term for people hailing from the (loosely defined) Marwar region in

the desert reaches of Rajasthan, India.

(image: Wikipedia) The shaded area is traditional Marwar.

For all practical purposes today, "Marwari" refers to the

over Rajasthan, although Brahmins

with them. Shudras (lower castes) and

Rajasthan is a desert. The wealth of most of North India has traditionally resulted from the fertility of its

land. Agriculture has been the backbone of the Indian economy, and people of Rajasthan (translates to

'land of the kings', by the way) have been denied this gift (until

Canal project has brought some water and greenery to the region)

The Marwari businessmen were an industrious people who refused to resign themsel

because they were poorly located. Instead, they organized themselves into a community of skilful traders,

who would leave their wives and children in their ancestral villages and travel to distant lands to try their

fortune.

And fortunes they did make.

2. Community Rules

Entrepreneurship is fiercely encouraged to this day by Marwari society. Starting a business will earn you

more respect than a college degree. Financing is readily available to honest young Marwaris, and

The shaded area is traditional Marwar.

For all practical purposes today, "Marwari" refers to the Baniya (Vaishya, or trader caste) people from

Brahmins (the learned, or the priest caste) from the region are often lumped

(lower castes) and Kshatriyas (warrior class aka Rajputs) are excluded, though.

The wealth of most of North India has traditionally resulted from the fertility of its

land. Agriculture has been the backbone of the Indian economy, and people of Rajasthan (translates to

'land of the kings', by the way) have been denied this gift (until recently, when the Indira Gandhi

project has brought some water and greenery to the region)

The Marwari businessmen were an industrious people who refused to resign themselves to poverty just

because they were poorly located. Instead, they organized themselves into a community of skilful traders,

who would leave their wives and children in their ancestral villages and travel to distant lands to try their

Entrepreneurship is fiercely encouraged to this day by Marwari society. Starting a business will earn you

more respect than a college degree. Financing is readily available to honest young Marwaris, and

r trader caste) people from all

(the learned, or the priest caste) from the region are often lumped

(warrior class aka Rajputs) are excluded, though.

The wealth of most of North India has traditionally resulted from the fertility of its

land. Agriculture has been the backbone of the Indian economy, and people of Rajasthan (translates to

Indira Gandhi

ves to poverty just

because they were poorly located. Instead, they organized themselves into a community of skilful traders,

who would leave their wives and children in their ancestral villages and travel to distant lands to try their

Entrepreneurship is fiercely encouraged to this day by Marwari society. Starting a business will earn you

more respect than a college degree. Financing is readily available to honest young Marwaris, and

education often takes a backseat for sons taking over their family businesses. To add to this,

Marwaris are incredibly supportive of members of their community.

There is a strong sense of family and community (down to ancestral village) among Marwaris. A

successful businessman might call unemployed relatives and neighbours from his home village (strong

ties are maintained for generations after migration) .This is a self-perpetuating process, increasing influx

greatly This also led to the formation of a close-knit society where traditional values and rituals are

rigorously preserved.

The Seven Subjects I learnt at Marwari Business School (MBS)

• Alok Kejriwal

On the last day of my ICSE exam (10th standard finals), my Nani (Grand mother) offered me a free

seat into the Marwari Business School.

I was 16 and I had the opportunity to go and sit in my Nana’s (Grand father) office.

I took up the offer.

These are the seven subjects I learnt:

M = Monetization Mentality

For Marwari’s, money pretty much means everything.

It’s the ‘currency’ of success – pun intended. People are sized and measured not by their waist sizes

but by the width of their balance sheet. A Marwari’s religion is making money and they meditate on

it.

What Monetization and its terms means is also unique for Marwari’s.

For instance, I learnt that Revenue was not what you ‘bill’ or ‘pass-thru’ or ‘recognize’. Revenue was

always what you ‘net-net’ earned that came in your coffers.

Revenue is bottom line for a Marwari – not top line.

Also, the facets of revenue became very clear to me. Every capital investment (be it land, or

machine or even cars and computers) had a ‘monetization expectation’ attached to it.

You could spend on things only if they made money. Hence ordering flowers for office tables in a

typical Marwari office would be disallowed (despite the plea that they enhance profitability).

This ‘monetization mentality’ made me create what I believe was the most detailed costing

breakup of any socks factory in the world.

I took 3 years to ‘post mortem’ the cost of everything we incurred (whether real or notional in terms

of interest lost) and link it back to revenues that were being earned.

So, I could tell you that if you ran extra air-conditioning in the office building, then 'X' was the

revenue that needed to be generated to make a PROFIT on that extra spend.

Also, I learnt that revenue was something to be always ‘improved’ – not just by price hikes alone. If

collecting money from debtors were improved by 3 days, then there would ‘X’ reduction on bank

overdrafts and hence extra income to the firm etc.

A = Accounting Archery

All successful Marwaris really know their accounting.

Trial Balances, P&L statements and Balance sheets are the juiciest novels that a Marwari reads.

What they clearly understand is the concept of ‘Capital’ & how Capital gets generated at the lowest

cost and how that same Capital then needs to be exploited to the fullest.

‘Creativity’ in accounting was the highlight of what I learnt.

I remember when I was 17, an uncle sent me to his Chartered Accountant (CA) to finalize and close

my Uncle's books. Like a good student, I prepared the P&L and presented it to Mr. CA, along with

the ‘tax’ liability. He chuckled and then called up my Uncle in my presence on a speakerphone. I

expected Mr. CA to tell my Uncle what I had prepared.

Instead Mr. CA asked my Uncle ‘Babu (Sir), how much tax do you feel like paying this year’?

My Uncle grudgingly muttered a number and that was the end of the call. Then Mr. CA took my P&L

and completely re-crafted the numbers (and believe me legitimately) to perfectly match the tax outgo

my Uncle wanted to pay!

R = Righteous Rigor.

Each month, there would be at least a couple of instances when a very old worker (you know the

ones who look like grand dads) would hang out near the factory cashier with a couple of his

relatives.

At the right opportunity, the worker would gently knock on my father’s cabin door; enter nimbly;

gently walk together my father and then bend down to touch his feet.

The first time this happened I was stunned. I mean it was very demeaning to see such an old man

behaving in such a subservient way. My dad of course would immediately stop the old man from

bending further, do a ‘Namaste’ (fold hands) and greet the man. I would almost always notice the

tears in the old worker’s eyes.

I learnt later that these workers had worked for 30 -35 years in our factory and this was the ‘D’

day they had withdrawn their Provident Fund account (saved in the factory for all those

years) to be used for marrying their daughters or for buying a house etc.

The amount they received was largely disproportionate to their monthly salary (lacs of rupees) and

they solely relied on our Company to safeguard their moneys, banked safely for an important day.

If you have read how corrupt many companies have been with PF accounting and the fact that some

of them have NOT even maintained accurate PF accounts and have squandered what was not their

own money, you will realize how damaging this is . Imagine telling this 60-year-old worker on the eve

of his daughter’s wedding that his fortune of 30 years will be paid ‘later’ (meaning never).

This taught me a lot. It taught me morals, ethics and righteousness and how to actually live

up to others people’s TRUST that they have placed in us.

Most People are naïve and innocent and very trusting. We have to honor their faith in us.

W = Wait, Watch and Win

When I sauntered into my father’s factory on a bright Monday morning on my first day at work, I

thought the world would be at my feet.

In my mind I had a desk to myself, lots of papers and files, a huge telephone on my desk with lots of

blinking lights (remember the EPABAX) and a constant stream of visitors to meet and greet me.

Quite the reverse of that happened.

When I entered my dad’s cabin, he pointed me to a rather uncomfortable looking ‘corner’ chair, and

asked me to SIT.

I remember his words so clearly even today. He said – ‘Alok, learn how to sit. If you can just

master sitting, you will have learnt a lot’.

Grrrr…I was exasperated! I mean I was a rock star supposed to gyrate and prance all over the

stage. Instead I was being locked inside the backstage changing room?

Slowly, the concept of ‘waiting and watching’ began to sink in. For almost one year I sat like a flower

vase on a pedestal in my dad’s cabin just watching him function.

I was not asked for an opinion and was even barely noticed! Being completely ignored became a

normal emotion for me, and I spent the hours just learning.

And how I learnt! From everything about machines to finance to production planning to inventory

management.

I guess the biggest lesson I learnt was that winning comes from waiting.

In the first seven years of starting contests2win.com (my first independent business), this ‘waiting’

training bore rich fruit.

I became the expert at waiting outside client’s offices for hours just to meet them for five minutes.

Never once did I even feel bad or humiliated. I became best friends with these busybody’s personal

assistants and secretaries and learnt a lot about the way their business functioned.

In fact, I even found a long-term partner in Rajiv Hiranandani while waiting for hours in the Shaw

Wallace office in Mumbai! Rajiv was the head of sales of Yahoo at that time and after many ‘sofa’

meetings at Shaw Wallace; he agreed to head mobile2win India – a mobile business that I was just

starting up then.

All good things in life take time. One has to learn to wait, watch and then win.

A = Attitude Adjustments.

Marwaris generally have little ego issues. We are trained to do business and not to pretend to be the

Queen.

In 1994, my father and I traveled to Germany to attend a textile fair. That was one of the busiest fairs

in the world, and all the hotel rooms were fully booked. My father and I were sharing one room.

In the hotel lobby, while eating breakfast we met one of the largest textile Barons of Hong Kong –

who was a Marwari and had emigrated there many years ago. He was hugely successful and very

well known globally.

While all of us were eating together, a rather disoriented looking man in a crumpled shirt and Hawaii

slippers came across and stood next to Mr. Textile Baron.

Mr. Baron smiled at him and excused himself and arranged breakfast etc for the man. Later he came

back and explained that this man was the chief jobber (mechanic) in his Indian factory and had

never traveled in a plane before or ever stayed in a hotel.

He did not know how to operate the bathtub shower. However he was the heart of the factory and

Mr. Baron was sharing his room with him to make sure he was comfortable!

That trip I learnt a lot about attitudes, and how to adjust them to be a very successful entrepreneur.

R = Risk and Reward

About 4 years into having started the export division of my factory and having executed many

successful orders, I was on top of the world. I guess I was enjoying the sweet ‘high’ of success.

Retrospectively put, I think I had become over confident.

As scheduled, I met my buyer from C&A (An erstwhile large European retail clothes store) in my

factory showroom and began discussing new orders.

My buyer winked at me, retrieved a bundle of socks from his bag and laid them on the table. The

yarn color and texture of the socks caught me my surprise. This was that ‘heather mixture/grey

flannel’ type color (like the t-shirts that look like a blended grey).

My buyer said ‘Alok, this new yarn is a rage in the EU. I am happy to give you an order that will be 5

times larger what we have ever done with you - if you can ship your socks in this type of new yarn in

various color tones’.

I asked him what this yarn was and he very casually said ‘oh, it’s a cotton mélange. All global socks

manufacturers are working with the same yarn in their country; I’m sure you will find suppliers for it in

India without a problem’.

I looked at him, and the socks and said ‘yeah, I’m doing it’.

What I never realized was that I had taken the biggest risk of my life. I also think that greed had

blinded me. I could have agreed for a trial order rather than one that was five times the usual size.

But I also learnt that what entrepreneurs do for a living is to leap without looking.

Once I received the order sheets, I began scouting the market for mélange yarn. None of my regular

suppliers made that type of yarn. A couple of the suppliers in Hyderabad (the south of India) were

large producers of Mélange, but their yarn composition was synthetic not cotton.

Quickly I began to panic because I could not find a single yarn supplier of that yarn in India. What

haunted me was that non-fulfillment of the socks orders meant severe penalties and a black listing to

ever work with C&A.

Melange, Melange, Melange!

Added to the problem was that I had accepted the orders in 5 different types of yarns.

The standard colour in Melange was grey and not ‘sky blue’ and ‘camel’. This order was looking like

a train wreck for me.

After an agonizing search and hunt operation, the Hyderabad Company agreed to spin a special

Cotton yarn for me in their regular 2/40’s count. (In cotton, the larger is the count, the finer is the

yarn – so 40’s is good for garments and 200’s is what we wear in shirts. ‘s’ stands for single yarn). I

actually wanted 20’s which is used for socks.

Now, 2/40 meant that 2 yarns of 40’s would be twisted together to make it as thick as 20’s (which is

what I wanted), but the cost was double of what I was paying for 20’s yarn. So buying 2/40’s was a

no go.

Finally, I convinced them to spin the yarn in 20’s (20 single count) and they sent me a few spools to

test.

When I got the yarn and spun the socks, I had a heart attack.

Because the yarn was mélange and a single thread (20’s), it was ‘twisting’ and ‘turning’ like a top

and making the socks look like they were ‘wrung’ to death. The 2/40’s yarn would not have that

problem because a ‘S’ twist and a ‘Y’ twist were spun together giving the combined yarn a ‘neutral’

spin – but as explained earlier, I could not afford that yarn!

When I explained my agony to the mill, they asked me to ‘heat’ the yarn via a specific process to ‘kill’

the spin. I did just that and enjoyed my second heart attack – the color of all the 5 yarns dramatically

changed when ‘heated’.

In the end, I got a ‘duller’ 20’s custom cotton yarn made, got that yarn heated to kill its twist make it

look like the original colour ordered and even ‘washed’ all socks to kill the little spin left behind.

Because the washing was shrinking the socks, I had to redesign all socks specs in a way that after

they were washed and shrunk, they came back to the original size the buyer had ordered!

I made my shipment just on time and that execution paved the way to tripling our exports in the next

few years. Interestingly, most of the orders that came in those next 7 years were mélange yarn

orders.

I had learnt the very difficult lesson by taking on Risk; but more importantly managing risk

carefully and with perseverance to make it rewarding.

In 1999, when I walked out of my factory doors to launch contests2win.com – I had no clue about the

Internet or promotions or marketing. I just thought of my European socks buyer and chuckled.

Intriguingly, that day I was wearing a pair of ‘mélange’ socks!

I = Innovative Ingenuity

When I pitched to my father that there was a massive opportunity to export plain white, navy and

black socks to Europe but at ridiculously cheap prices, he took up the challenge and worked back to

back with his technical team to ‘refit’ Indian knitting machines bought from Punjab to make socks

worthy of European feet.

In essence, he innovated and created a sock that was the same in quality as a European sock, but

knit from a machine that cost 1000$ in India vs. 20,000$ in Italy.

The trick that really mattered was treating the ‘Toe’ portion innovatively.

In Italian socks, the toe was knit ‘within’ the machine and very finely, so that it did not cause

discomfort to the consumer while wearing. In Indian sock machines, the toe portion came out

unstitched; to be manually ‘sown’ over the open ends to close the toe. The process of sewing Indian

socks caused a thick seam that always created discomfort while wearing the socks over the

consumer’s toes.

Sock toes that are 'Granny' finished!

My dad fixed the problem by using an external machine to sew the thread into the Indian sock

almost needle on needle (like granny’s knit sweaters) using a slow manual process that yielded a

finish that was better than the Italian machine. Labour was cheap in India, and the outcome was

perfect!

You can imagine how profitable the business became since we were getting paid for socks priced at

EU costs whilst making them with Indian machines, yarn and labour.

This experience embossed the passion to reinvent in my mind.

I have observed that there is a constant drive in all Marwari companies and entrepreneurs to

‘re-think’ business processes, concepts and change ‘this is how it is done’ to ‘this is how it

can be done profitably’.

In 1998, after spending 7 years in the socks factory, I quit and started contests2win.com. The day I

left the factory premises, I think I had graduated with merit from the Marwari Business School.

****

This post is dedicated to my Dad.

*****

A Marwari Entrepreneur Speaks up ! [Mr.

Marwari, Have you met Mr. Tata?]

[Guest article by Alok Kejriwal, Founder of Games2Win. Alok shares pearls of

wisdom from his ‘marwari’ training!]

In the past 12 years of pavement pounding and boardroom hustling, I have had the honor of doing business with the biggest companies in India. Nothing compares to the experience of dealing with Tata companies. For me personally, coming from a traditional Marwari (trader) family, this is special – it helps me juxtapose my Marwari training vs. how a corporation like Tata thinks and behaves.

Some brain waves:

My Salt tastes better than yours!

The best way to explain this is to narrate a conversation I had with Sam Balsara of Madison Media a few years back. Sam was invited by a Mega Marwari Corporation (MMC) for a chat to help create a Salt Brand. Sam asked the grey haired senior executive, ‘how much money would it cost to build India’s greatest salt brand?’ Sam thought for a moment and said ‘Say 20-30 crores (4-6 million US$) in media spends. Assuming your product is great, that should take you to the top’. Mr. Grey Hair heard this and almost fell off his chair… He said ‘Sam – with that money, I can build 5 more Salt factories!’. Sam pointed in the direction across the street and said ‘Mr. Grey Hair – the folks just opposite your office created Tata Salt. Today, every salt factory in the country goes to them to supply them unbranded salt. The one solo Tata Salt brand is more valuable that 100 plain factories put together. Adding 5 more factories to your collection will not do anything for you’. Mr. Grey Hair looked perplexed.

From the first day of attending my father’s business, I was told ‘advertising is a waste of money’. It gets you mixed up with wrong people. Just invest all the moneys in factories and machines.

How short term is that! Once in a while, I look at a toothpaste tube of Colgate in my bathroom & flip the side and read ‘Made by xyz in abc fatory’. Mr. Grey Hair and his 5 factories come to mind. Just consider the economics – If he were in toothpaste supplies, he would be paid 4 months after supplying his goods to Colgate, while Colgate would have collected money from me in advance even before I opened my toothpaste box.

Its ironical that I left my father’s business to start a digital advertising business. And I have learnt that no matter how great your service or product is, if you can’t brand it and communicate it, it will not create long term value.

What comes first – Reputation or Profits?

If you go to most family owned companies, their core focus is profitability. How much and how soon? Little time or money is spent in building a reputation. When I visit many of the big India business group offices in India, I rarely see a poster in the visitor’s area that communicates:

What are their business practices? What do they stand for? What are their values? What are their views on treating their employees?

In most Tata Companies, I see that Value Statement at eye level while sitting on the sofa at the reception. It makes me feel nice.

By not aggressively creating a positive reputation, Companies stand the risk of being determined by legacy and hearsay. That’s a big risk that can cost you your business.

A few years ago, after buying a new car, the showroom lady called me up and asked me my preference of insurance companies. All the insurance offers were uniformly priced. I asked her to rattle the name of the Insurers and the minute I heard a Tata Company name, I just said ‘buy that one’. Why I made that decision, I still cannot rationally explain.

Building a reputation may be tough and non productive in the beginning, but ignoring it can have serious implications on your business.

White money is more nutritious that black.

After my first round of VC funding, I ran into my uncle at a dinner. He had read about the financing in media and cornered me. ‘So you’re rich! Why are you looking so gloomy?’ he said. ‘Huh’ I asked? ‘My Company’s the one that got funded, not me! No one got rich. The VCs got poorer and a long arduous road lies ahead of me to return the money to the VCs many times over’. He chuckled and said’ ‘What nonsense! The first rule of the funding game is to siphon out 25% of the funds and make yourself-rich. Investors can be dealt with later’. Shucks… hadn’t I heard that story before? Many of my relatives have floated public issues that were nothing short of scams and they still boast about it!

This ‘get rich, siphon out’ philosophy left so many old industrial houses bankrupt. They were never capitalized to take advantage of acquisition opportunities and punished their shareholders so harshly that they could never raise capital again. Think Mafatlal, Dalmia and many more. Even today I meet embarrassed professional managers working in ‘family’ firms who get paid salaries in ‘half white and half black’ to avoid taxes!

It takes a Tata DNA to create a TCS, Tisco, Telco + 100 other Companies with massive cash reserves on their balance sheets. This was especially tough during the Indira Gandhi emergency tax regime when the Income Tax rate was over 90%. Almost everyone gave up and resorted to siphoning off money from the Balance Sheet, but the Tata Companies hung on.

When you build a cash war chest, and deals like Corus or Land Rover come your way, you have the ability to execute.

On a depressing note, look at the state of Hindustan Motors and Fiat India today. Even though they dominated Indian roads for decades, they are bankrupt today. Even the mighty Bajaj could not build a Nano (the natural progression after a scooter). It took the Tata group to do it. Of course, on the flip side there are the Mittals and Ruias who have built massive empires in the past 20 years.

Outsiders stay away. We are the Adam’s family.

12 years ago, I visited a large (100 crore+ topline) textile factory in Gurgaon (Delhi) and met the CEO, COO, CFO, CMO, and CTO. They all had Kumar printed as their last name! On inquiring, it turned out that the family tree right down to the grass roots was involved in running the show. In conversations, all they did was nod at each other for consensus. No one had the guts to tell Grand Dad Dinosaur that he was wrong. It seemed so stifling and stuck. When I asked the young 23-year-old MBA what his

vision for the Company was, he said something that I felt was his father’s vision and definitely not his own! 12 years later, I did a recon – the Company had shrunk to 20% of its market cap.

Companies like these have no future. Their boardroom antique furniture doesn’t think laterally and has no clue of new business lines. They would get a heart attack to pay Accenture Rs 1 crore to suggest a strategy to uplift them. They don’t hire gold standard professionals because they can’t expose their business loopholes to them.

Think of it – most of the old family run companies I know still make steel, cement, ingots, rods and all kinds of cloth, while the Tatas play in Software, Telecom and other value added businesses.

Like the Tata retirement policy, all the granddads need to be sent home and professional CEOs hired across the board to run the Company. Else, most family concerns will cease to exist.

Sometimes an Opera Singer can make the best CEO.

If you go for a live music concert or a dance performance at the NCPA (National Center of Performing Arts) in Mumbai or listen to an Opera at the Jamshed Bhabha auditorium next door, you will marvel at the massive contribution the Tatas have made to the Art scene in India.

Given this background, if I were an Austrian CEO who can run a steel plant as efficiently as I can play the Oboe, I will be far more motivated to join the Tatas as the CEO of TISCO rather than become the CEO of some Industrial House in India whose CEO cannot understand if the Oboe is a wind instrument or a Shoe.

Life and business is being cultivated way beyond the dusty corridors of factories and sheds. I wish that all wannabe entrepreneurs and inheritors of family businesses understand this early on!

'Marwaris losing business acumen' KOLKATA: Marwaris are losing their business acumen. That is what Gita Piramal's research

indicates.

Riding the peak in 1990 when the community controlled nearly 24 per cent business in the

country, their fortunes have nosedived to 2 per cent in 2000.This is lower than 1939 when

the Marwari resurgence began.

Piramal, the author of Business Maharajas, an acclaimed book on industrial families, said

only 13 of the top 25 Marwari-run firms are creating value. Rahul Bajaj's company tops the

value-creation list.

The rest are all cases of value destruction. Incidentally, most business families hit their

highs in Kolkata.

Wedded into the Marwari business family, she has witnessed the rise and fall of Marwari

businesses from close quarters. According to her, the fall is due to the erosion in the value of

assets in the new age.

"As a community, the Marwaris shared network, capital and manpower. But today, you need

a network of like-minded people and not caste-based.Also, the need for specialist is more

than having trusted people around. And capital is easily accessible from various sources,"

she explained.

Plagued by a crisis of courage, complacency and not letting go, most Marwari business

houses refuse to change."They cling on to their inheritance and wealth though they are

nervous that life is getting difficult with competition," Piramal said, adding that the hunger

of Ambanis was sorely missing among the Marwaris.

Analysing the situation, she concluded that a basic honesty was absent among the Marwari

business class. "They lack the western way of thinking that they make money for

themselves.The Marwaris claim to work for their family.That has to change," she said.

With the acceptance that we work for ourselves, Piramal said expectations from others

would decline and allow more freedom for them to perform.This would in turn promote a

better work culture. "You cannot drive your son and grandson to the business unless they

have a passion for it. Success comes only from obsession," she observed.

Citing statistics that have worldwide acceptance, she said 40 per cent family-owned

businesses die within the first five years. Some 66 per cent of the rest die or the founding

family relinquishes control in the first generation itself. Only 17 per cent of the remainder

make it to the third generation of the founding family. Marwari businesses are no exception.

So how can older families go back to the future? Or new families prevent history from

repeating itself? Marwari companies have to shut down, sell out or make the split between

ownership and management, she said. Kumarmangalam Birla and Ajay Piramal are making

changes.

On the Marwari business houses in the city, Piramal warned that they needed to act fast.

"Changes are always painful. But if they do not change, the exit will be more painful than it

was during the Naxalite movement in the '70s," she added.

Marwari businesses at crossroads

A leading Gujarati industrialist recently asked me the reason for the drop in the pecking

order of Marwaris in India's top business groups. We tried to name a few potential next

generation leaders from the community. Except for Kumar Birla, Prashant Ruia, Rajiv Bajaj,

all now above 40 years, none else came to mind.

Rewind to early 20th century. The Marwaris exemplified a feisty and formidable

spirittraders who escaped the barren business landscape of their homes and created trading

outposts in remote areas. Many of them had settled in Kolkata, which emerged as a

commercial hub and offered manifold trading opportunities. Over time, they tried their

hand at manufacturing which, after Independence, was clearly the future. But, as long as the

manufacturing activity involved commodities and the economy was protected, it was fine.

The moment there was a shift in the ruling industry paradigm, the pre-dominant Marwari

business construct seems to have got challenged.

The community is currently exercised by an unavoidable question: Has the spirit of Marwari

enterprise started flagging? The provocation for such introspection stems from the rise of a

new entrepreneurial class in India which comprises very few Marwaris and consists of

primarily Gujaratis, Punjabis and South Indian industrial groups. Over the past few years,

the leaders in emerging industry categories— infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, information

technology, telecom—have been markedly non-Marwaris.

There could be many reasons for this curious turn of events. One possibility could be the

inherent structure of Marwari businesses. Their patriarchal chain of command leading to a

centralized command-and-control architecture with family members occupying key

positions, irrespective of their capability. The new success stories in the emerging industries

are also mostly family-run businesses, but with one major exception, that professionals play

an important role and have been able to cope better than most Marwari family members.

Marwari businessmen thrived in an era of great resource crunch where risk taking was

measured by the extent of leveraging capital. However, new-age industry thrives on a

different set of skill sets. R&D, technology, knowledge, brand building, customer service and

relationships are now as much important drivers as is capital. Culturally too, the community

has a conservative mentality which has been a hurdle to change and adopting newer ways of

doing things. The hangover of traditional trading mentality and short-term returns still

prevails. Exceptions are the Birlas and L N Mittal who remain the beacons of Marwari

business. Among the younger generation there are few like the Piramals, Anil Aggarwal and

Ruias of Essar who have been outstanding.

It is also pertinent to note that in the last two decades, growth has come through several

channels, including political patronage and largesse like capturing natural resources and

licences. The Marwaris have not been as adept at it than some of their more ambitious

counterparts.

Academics specializing in management of family businesses believe that many businesses

peter out by the third generation—the first generation builds the business, the second

consolidates it and the third spends it. This along with family splits and feuds could also be

the cause of Marwari business groups becoming less relevant.

Yet, what's unfortunate is the felt absence of a new generation of Marwari entrepreneurs

displaying the same zeal, hunger or courage to chart the unknown that epitomized Marwari

businessmen earlier—such as the Birlas, Bangurs, Bajajs, Singhanias, among others.

Unarguably, the Marwari business community has now reached a crossroads and has to

decide which of the three roads to take. One, to monetize the value created by earlier

generations and indulge in a life of leisure. Two, to de-risk their future income streams by

turning into professionals and adding value to somebody else's enterprise. Or, finally,

reviving the socalled "animal spirits" that have symbolized the community all these years by

creating organizations of the future.

Marwari community and the brains behind the business

By Ujwal Salokhe

When speaking of communities that are deeply rooted and firmly seated in

folklore, one cannot miss but mention the gregarious Marwari community that is

synonymous with business in India. From starting out as traders and graduating

to a flourishing industrious community, the Marwaris played a pivotal role in

changing the face of independent India. Saluting the contribution of this

traditional yet progressive community, Society lets some of India’s prominent

Marwaris do the talking...

India is a mixed bag of culture. One that not only holds within it a myriad of communities,

but one that has also continually reaped the benefits from its multi-cultural existence. One

community that pays the perfect ode to the business of India—the Marwaris—cannot be

skipped. Geographically, Marwaris are people who belong to the western region of

Rajasthan, particularly the areas in and around Jodhpur (Marwar), Pali and Nagaur and

other adjoining regions of the state. While all Marwaris are Rajasthanis, all Rajasthanis are

not Marwaris. The term ‘Marwar’ dates back to the Sanskrit word ‘Maruwat’ in which ‘Maru’

means desert. Although Marwaris can be baniyas (business community), Brahmins or even

Jains, it’s the Marwari baniyas who travelled to other states and even countries and

developed successful businesses, thus gaining popularity over the other Marwari sects.

HISTORY

The Marwaris have had a long standing association with Bengal. In fact, the term ‘Marwari’

was coined by the Bengalis for these inhabitants of Rajasthan when they were brought into

the state by the Mughal emperor, Akbar. Circa 1564, when, as a part of Akbar’s camp, the

Rajput soldiers were in Bengal, the contract of supplying the essentials lay with the

merchants of Marwar. They often sported a pagri (turban) because of which they were also

referred to as the pagridhari Marwari (turbaned Marwari).

This merchant class commanded a great deal of respect in its hometown. Often, rulers of

different states would vie for their attention and lure them to their own state with fertile

land that these merchants could till, without paying taxes. Under a similar circumstance,

Maharaja Ranjit Singh had then extended an invitation to the Marwaris to settle in Amritsar.

As a response to which, 32 businessmen shifted base to Amritsar and were given one shop

each to form the Batti Hattan, a mini market that exists till date in Guru Bazaar in Amritsar.

Ranjit Singh wanted his city to benefit from the assiduousness and the business skills of the

Marwaris, a trait that has stuck with the community even today. Owing to the economic

support the rulers drew from the Marwaris, their opinion was given due weightage when it

came to the governance of the states. Such was the clout of this emerging trading

community even before the British era. The community in turn would offer extended loans

to rulers and even invest in the various public projects.

Around the same time, the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan was battling a combined force of

war between capitalism and feudalism, where capitalism dominated. The internal strife

amongst the Rajput had weakened them, and the impoverished Thakurs had begun

resorting to looting the caravans of the Marwari traders. As their trade routes became more

and more unsafe, and fear and insecurity gripped the trading community, they needed very

little encouragement to venture out and explore safer terrains in the country. Thus began

the spread of this enterprising community to the different parts of the country, regions that

soon became home grounds to them. Their accepting ways merged them with their new

homes effortlessly. Some more progressive Marwaris like Bhagwandas Bagla, one of the

first known Marwari millionaires, even proceeded to Burma and settled in Rangoon.

By the early 20th century, apart from most domestic trade routes that were in the hands of

the Marwaris, they also had the opium trade, bank

business and selling of clothes in their control. By 1911, Surajmull Nagarmull established

the first jute factory, following suit, the Birlas opened the first Indian jute export office in

London in 1917; while the Sekserias set up textile mills, Ramkrishna Dalmia established

cement factories. Soon, the Marwaris even replaced the Khatris and the Bengalis as brokers.

The Marwaris now worked diligently towards strengthening their hometowns by building

schools, temples, wells, hospitals and colleges—all in the memory of their forefathers,

primarily for the development of its people. Institutions like the Birla Institute of Technical

Training, the IITs, Ruia College, Poddar School are all by-products of their sentiments

towards charity and their acts of generosity.

By 1947, when the British were booted out of the country, the new-found India had already

found its new breed of business tycoons who were set to change the fate of the country.

The rise of independent India saw this peace-loving community, with its water-like property

to fit into any given mould and an astute sense of business, resurrect its own economy and

industries. Families like the Birlas (now Kumar Mangalam Birla of the Aditya Birla Group and

Yash Birla of the Yash Birla Group), the Goenkas (RPG Group), Dalmias, Poddars (Siyaram

Silk Mills) and the Singhanias (Raymond Group) began their lives parallel with India and

continue to form an integral part of our lives even in modern day India.

BUSINESS

As an old saying goes, “Jahan naa pahunche rail gaadi, wahan pahunche bail gaadi, aur

jahan naa pahunche bail gaadi, wahan pahunche Marwari... (Implying that nothing comes in

the way of the Marwaris and their business, not in the least, the inaccessibility of a place…).

The saying stands true to the fact that nothing can shake the grit and determination of a

Marwari. Hailing from the Dhoot family that successfully runs the industrial conglomerate,

Videocon, the scion Anirudh Dhoot says about the Marwari business sense, “The men of our

community were mostly farmers, traders or merchants and they could never compromise

with their business acumen. This unparalleled acumen is passed on to generations and

that’s how our knack for business can be justified.”

Contrarily, Ajay Nahar, Managing Director of Nahar Projects, part of the Nahar Group,

believes that it is not the caste, community or background that makes for a successful

businessman, but a person’s education, IQ, intelligence and upbringing that does. But,

having said that, he also observes, “I also think that most Marwaris that I have come across

are excellent in negotiations while doing business, have the confidence to crack great

business deals and are able to take calculated risks in their projects, thus giving themselves

the business community tag.”

Adding that the children in Marwari households often grow up listening to business talks

between the elders of a family, Nirati Agarwal, Deputy Editor of Marwar magazine says, “It

is no wonder they (Marwari youngsters) excel when they take the helm, after all, they’ve

practised thinking like business owners for at least 10 years more than the average

businessperson from any other community. It’s simply that the Marwaris are very practical

about business and treat it as an important part of day to day life.”

Highlighting Videocon’s remarkable contribution to India’s growth since the industrial

revolution, Anirudh elaborates, “The name Videocon is synonymous with every household in

India. Ranging from consumer durables to digital broadcast, Videocon has enhanced the

growth of the country by actively making innovations with a consumer-centric approach.”

The Nahar Group, founded by Sukhraj Nahar, championed the cause of the growth of their

native place, Bhinmal in Rajasthan. Says Ajay, “I am working towards new ventures such as

developing a 75-bed charitable hospital, spread across one lakh sq ft, while also already

running another set up there for medical needs. In Rajasthan and Mumbai, we have also

built many Jain temples like the famous Sarvodaya Nagar Jain Derasar at Mulund West in

Mumbai, where I am an active trustee.”

It’s not only holding key business houses that has helped the community sail through, but

also their “hard work, perseverance and their undeniable ability to dream and achieve, while

maintaining respect and order that has helped them carve a niche for themselves,” says ace

Marwari fashion designer Raghavendra Rathore. Speaking of the ‘Marwari ways of business’

that have guided them, while Ajay owes his success to being ethical and a man of his

words, and delivering exactly what they promise their buyers, Anirudh says, “Ethics like

leadership, accountability, reputation and morale, abiding by the law, respect for others and

loyalty have helped Videocon sail through. All the individuals in the organisation follow these

ethics, resulting in tremendous success.”

Some of the other prominent names that cannot be missed and have contributed to the

business of India include Lakshmi Mittal of ArcelorMittal, Indian telecom mogul, Sunil Mittal

of Bharti Enterprises, Subhash Chandra (Zee Network), the Lodhas, Piramals, Naresh Goyal

of Jet Airways, the Jindals, Hindujas, Bajajs, Kajarias, Dokanias of Durian, Firodias of

Kinetic, Biyanis of the Future Group, Motilal Oswal of Motilal Oswal Securities, RK Somany of

Hindustan Sanitaryware and Industries Limited (HSIL) and Hindware, Atul Ruia of High

Street Phoenix and the Kasliwals of S Kumars (a business that split in 2008). Not only

businessmen, the corporate world has also seen successful Marwaris like Chanda Kochhar,

CEO of ICICI Bank.

ENTERTAINMENT

While Bollywood isn’t particularly known for being communal or discriminating, the

community seems to have given the industry a miss, what with only a handful of them

making their presence felt over the years. Even if films religiously had Marwari characters

playing the loyal munshis to the umpteen thakurs, the industry itself doesn’t boast of many

Marwaris. A few names that feature on the charter are Bharat Bhushan, yesteryear singer

Hemlata, Anu Agarwal, Rajeev Khandelwal, the Barjatyas, Sachiin Joshi, Ram Gopal Varma’s

protégé Nisha Kothari, late film director Jag Mundhra, and singer Roopkumar Rathod. On

being a Marwari, actor and businessman, Sachiin Joshi, says, “Being a Marwari makes me

feel royal. It brings a lot of cultural values and belief. People feel Marwaris are conservative.

But it is not so. They are very open-minded, but at the same time, value their beliefs and

follow their principles.”

FASHION

Over the years, the community has shed a considerable bit of its image of being traditional

and orthodox and has subscribed to a lifestyle that is chic and modern. Fashion forms an

integral part of this chic life. The fashion industry on the whole has seen a number of

Marwari fashion designers like Surily Goel, the Delhi-based Ravi Bajaj, Sangita Kathiwada,

Hyderabad-based Anand Kabra, Kolkata-based designers Ekta Jaipuria Kandhari, Ruchira

Kandhari and Shantanu Goenka, Shraddha Murarka of Vizyon, Payal Singhal, Divya

Mohta and Anju Modi, among others. Speaking of some of the distinct qualities of being a

Marwari, Raghavendra says, “An inherent characteristic of people from Rajasthan is a deep

sense of connection with their roots, culture and heritage. Somehow, it is reflected in our

work ethics and the relationship that we share with peers. I believe in culture and tradition,

however, I also believe in the need to adapt with changing times.”

Raghavendra also adds that his brand Rathore Jodhpur itself is a reflection of the ethos of

his community. He emphasises, “The genesis of every design idea born in the design studio

draws the heritage of a bygone era.” He also believes that many of the clothing traditions,

old-fashioned motifs and other elements from the community’s rich culture have been

readapted in modern fashion statements. “It is encouraging to see the new generation

resurrecting old techniques not only in clothing, but also in textiles, home furnishing and

furniture,” says the designer with a vision who holds the fond memories of spending Holi

and Diwali with his family closest to his heart.

JOURNALISM

As Nirati likes to put it, “What really distinguishes the Marwaris is that for them, business is

inseparable from life. Whether they view it as a passion or a reality is up to the individual in

question.” Nirati believes that an insatiable appetite for risk, a proclivity with all things

numerical, especially demand and supply, are qualities ingrained in the Marwaris. However,

despite such deep-seated sentiments, when it came to profession, Nirati chose journalism

as her driving force.

Her editorship has made her realise that the Marwaris today are traditional but not stodgy.

they are creative. “I’ve met filmmakers, artists and graphic designers who are Marwaris,

they are open to new ideas, they are generous and they care about social change and want

to make a difference in the lives of others. I’ve also noticed another side to this community:

their love for luxury and art! They are connoisseurs and hold workmanship and exclusivity in

high regard.” Other prominent Marwaris in the field of journalism include Ramnath Goenka

and his son, Viveck Goenka of the Indian Express, Shobhana Bhartia of the Hindustan

Times, Gulab Kothari (and his father Karpoor Chandra Kulish) of Rajasthan Patrika, Kamal

Morarka of the Afternoon Despatch and Courier and the Jains of The Times of India group.

Other Marwaris who have made a mark on the literary front include Himani Dalmia, who

wrote Life is Perfect, Neelima Dalmia Adhar of the bestseller Father Dearest and Ashwin

Sanghi of The Krishna Key.

ART

The Marwaris have also had their fair share in the field of art. Some of the prominent names

in the field are Lekha and Anupam Poddar, the well-known mother-son art collector duo,

Abhishek Poddar of India’s first photogallery, the Tasveer Art Gallery, and art curator

Priyasri Patodia.

Speaking of the Marwaris’ contribution to art, Priyasri speaks of the popularity of miniature

paintings that have continued to fascinate art lovers in India and across the world. She

says, “From 16th century onwards, there flourished different schools of paintings like the

Mewar School, the Bundi-Kota kalam, the Jaipur, Bikaner, Kishengarh and the Marwar

schools. In fact, frescoes were initially introduced by the Shekhawat Rajputs in their forts

and palaces.”

POLITICS AND SPORTS

Since their migration from their hometowns in Rajasthan to the various states across India,

the Marwaris have worked hard

towards making India a stronger nation. Their contribution, therefore, is remarkable even in

politics and top government positions. Some prominent faces in the political sphere include

Arvind Kejriwal, one of the prominent faces of Anna Hazare’s Lokpal campaign and now a

founder of the Aam Aadmi Party, Bimal Jalan—former Governor of the Reserve Bank of

India, Bijoy Singh Nahar—former Deputy Chief Minister of West Bengal and Puranmal

Lahoti, the first member of the Rajya Sabha representing the business community. The

world of sports also boasts of chess champion Abhijeet Gupta and table tennis champion

Niraj Bajaj, besides Lalit Modi, the former head of the Indian Premier Cricket League.

Professions apart, the Marwaris are known to be a community that loves their traditional fill

of mouth-watering delicacies. Ajay, Anirudh and Sachiin in unison name the good old dal-

baati choorma, gatte ki sabzi, kher sangari, papad ki sabzi and bajra roti kadi while

speaking of traditional Marwari delicacies they savour and mention sweet delicacies such as

mawa, besan laddoos, ghewar and moong dal ka halwa, generously topped with desi ghee.

About the communities’ love for its daughters, Priyasri informs, “Girls are thoroughly

pampered by the Marwaris. We have a separate festival called the Sindhara to pamper

them. Mehendi (henna) is applied on the hands of the girls and their favourite cuisine is also

cooked. Brahmin women or the misranis, as they are called, come and sing to the girl while

her mehendi dries. And finally, she is gifted with jewellery and clothes. My fondest memory

of childhood is of the Sindhara festival celebrated at my naani’s (grandmother) in Ajmer.”

Another notion that is synonymous with the community is that they are careful how they

spend their money. While Anirudh believes it is the quality to not spend a penny more than

required that gives people such a notion, Nirati insists, “Marwaris came from Marwar, the

land of ‘death’, located in south-west Jodhpur today. The harsh climate and the lack of

opportunity drove the Marwari migration at the beginning of the 19th century and I think,

‘conservation’ became the key word for the community, and with good cause.” Echoing

similar sentiments, Priyasri adds, “They came from the land of the desert with economic

hardships, accustomed to limited resources. I think this makes them genetically sharp to

acquire the best in the least. The Marwaris learnt to live frugally and can’t be called stingy.”

Despite changing times, the Marwaris have held onto traditions while still progressing with

the generation of today. Nirati says, “A Marwari’s respect for his family and his forefathers

encourages him to respect traditions; after all, those are all he has left—a sort of legacy if

not in gold then in riches far greater. But, they may be traditional in manner and speech,

but they certainly aren’t in terms of thought

and perception.”

Marwaris in Bengaluru

The earliest Marwaris settled in Bengaluru about 60 years ago. Coming mainly from

Rajasthan and Haryana, the Marwari communities are now settled all over the city in areas

like Vijaynagar, Sanjaynagar, JP Nagar, HSR Layout, Basaveshwarnagar, Kumara Park,

Basvangudi, Yeshwantpur and Banasvadi. Explains Ravi Singhania, a businessman, who has

been a Bengaluru resident for the past 17 years, “Marwari is an umbrella term which

includes Agrawals, Sharmas, Jains, Maheshwaris and Oswals, among others. This difference

in surnames is based only on location of origin and the deity they worship.” Bengaluru also

has more than 100 Marwari associations like the Karnataka Marwari Samaj, Marwari Yuva

Manch, Maheshwari Samaj, Agarwal Mahila Mandal, Jagriti Mahila Mandal and above 10,000

Marwari residents.

The Marwari community is known not only for its business acumen, but also for its humble

and charitable nature. The older generations are mostly engaged in family run businesses

and are into trading and manufacturing. The younger generation is taking up jobs in fields

like IT, real estate, law and medicine. “The community, for the past many years, has been

organising various charitable events like donation drives, eye and artificial limb camps for

the underprivileged,” says Vimal Saraogi, who runs a family-owned textile business in

Bengaluru and is also the Programme Director of the Karnataka Marwari Samaj. The Manav

Vidya Kendra, adopted by members of the Marwari community, provides free education to

over 100 underprivileged students.

Being a very traditional and custom-oriented community, festivals and other religious

occasions hold great importance among the community members. Says Manoj Poddar, a

Chartered Accountant living in Bengaluru for the past 11 years, “For the Marwaris, some

customs are deeply attached with the native place. For example, a child’s mundan

ceremony (when the baby’s hair is shorn off for the first time) will only be done at the

family’s native place. This is a custom which every Marwari follows.”

Holi and Diwali are two major festivals celebrated by the Marwaris. While during Holi, the

members of associations gather at their respective associations to celebrate, Diwali sees

families visiting each other’s homes. Besides these, the women of the community celebrate

Karva Chauth, Sawan Jhula Puja and gangor (celebrated only by newly married girls). A

majority of the Marwaris are strict vegetarians.

Marwaris in Chennai

When the first families moved out of the drought hit Marwar state in Rajasthan almost 180

years ago, one would not have imagined the impact they would have in shaping Tamil Nadu.

“There are (Marwari) families living in small villages and towns all over; their forefathers set

up pawn broking businesses. My family came 90 years ago to Madhuranthakam, where I

grew up,” says J Jayantilal Challani of Challani Jewellery Mart and President of the Chennai

Jewellers and Diamond Merchants Association. “With our honest reputation and fair trade,

we have become well-respected and an integral part of Chennai. One thing that sets our

community apart is that many of us speak fluent Tamil and have absorbed Tamil customs.

When in school, my Tamil pundit would scold other boys stating my example—a Marwari

doing better in Tamil than them!”

The Marwaris have also played a big role in the fields of cinema, media, shipping, education

and banking sectors. With a presence already in the Sowcarpet area of the city, there are

now urban Marwaris dotting even the northern parts of the city. Many prominent business

houses and institutions were promoted by famous Rajasthani residents of Chennai. The

Indian Express Group was founded from Chennai by Ramnath Goenka. Rated as the richest

Indians in the world, Shashi and Ravi Ruia of the Essar Group, whose origins are in Chennai,

still nurse a penchant for idlis and dosas. The Marwari community is also known for the

abundant charity it does. “The leaders of charity have been the Chordia family, starting with

Agurchand Manmull, for having set up the AM Jain College 60 years ago,” says Jayantilal

Challani. “We also sponsor free operations, medical treatment, scholarships, etc. But, our

focus is education and we sponsor poor students through books and clothes banks. During

disasters like the tsunami, and even recently when a fire gutted parts of north Chennai, our

people were the first to respond to rally aid. We receive a lot of goodwill from people

because of this.”

Living in Chennai since her marriage a couple of decades ago, Divya Solanki, a legal

journalist, says, “The people of Chennai really embrace us and this is the friendliest city I

have lived in. I don’t feel like an outsider here or that I am Marwari.” Before parting, she

mentions her love for spicy Chennai delicacies. “I love going to south Indian weddings,

especially for the Tamil food and the yummy sambar. We enjoy south Indian food just as all

my friends here wait for our sweets!”

Marwaris in Delhi

Delhi encompasses a lot of India’s prominent Marwaris who have excelled in the fields of

business, art, culture, fashion, politics, sports, writing and medicine. Some of Delhi’s

famous Marwaris are Sameer and Vineet Jain (owners of Times of India), Harshpati

Singhania (MD, JK Paper), Abhishek Manu Singhvi (politician and senior lawyer), Naveen

Jindal (MP from Kurukshetra, Chairman, Jindal Steel and Power Ltd and polo player), Shallu

Jindal (Kuchipudi danseuse), Sunil Mittal (Bharti Telecom), Deepika Jindal (MD, art d’inox),

Rashmi Poddar (artist), Dr Kiran Lohia (Dermatologist) and others.

Hailing from Rajasthan, their close proximity to the capital gave way to a lot of Marwaris in

Delhi decades ago. Also, the arrival of the Delhi-Calcutta railway in the 1860s facilitated

their migration from Calcutta to Delhi. The archetypal Marwari business class of brokers,

traders, financiers and businessmen has a major hold in Delhi. As philanthropy is a

prominent quality of the Marwaris, the well-known Delhi Marwaris are considerably involved

in charity and community service.

Although perceived as conservative in their approach, the Delhi Marwaris are flexible and

progressive. They have not confined themselves to traditional, old-economy businesses and

are joining the new age ones. “They are active in every field, be it art, culture, writing or

entrepreneurship. They have actively contributed to the Indian society right from the

freedom struggle and even after independence,” says Shallu Jindal. She is a Kuchipudi

danseuse and social activist. Fashion designer Anju Modi agrees, “Their root lies in

Shekhawati, an arid part of Rajasthan. Hailing from this hot region, the Marwaris are

persistent and patient. They do not leave anything incomplete. All these qualities make

them the best in every field, especially business.” Jindal insists, “The key ingredient of a

Marwari is hard-work. They are very down-to-earth and grounded. I have seen my family

and my husband Naveen Jindal working hard day and night and being passionate about

what he does. We have been nurtured this way,” she continues, adding, “There are no

boundaries for Marwari women too. If they are passionate about something, they are free to

pursue it.” Modi says, “The Marwaris are progressive people and that is the reason they

have been successful.” They have blended well in the Delhi culture and happily share their

festivals and cuisine with the cosmopolitan culture of the city.

Religion is an essential part of Marwari life. Marwari festivals like teej and chhoti holi are

also celebrated by the other communities in Delhi. Being staunch vegetarians, there are a

number of Marwari restaurants like Rajdhani, Suruchi, Thaal Vaadi and the newly opened

Shraman at The Ashok Hotel that cater to Marwari cuisine. Modi says, “Marwari food is liked

by the Delhiites as it’s different. It’s time consuming to cook Marwari dishes, hence a lot of

people don’t know how to make them.”

Delhi’s old Marwari Library, built in 1915 in Chandni Chowk, is a piece of Marwari history

that stands tall as one of the oldest public libraries in Delhi.

Making a Mark in Hyderabad

No city or town can do without a Marwari grocery shop; but of late, the Marwaris have

moved on to bigger arenas and with a keen business sense, have conquered that too. The

Marwaris came to Hyderabad around 200 years ago. According to Vinita Pittie, a well-known

designer, who belongs to one of the first families that made Hyderabad their home, “They

were mainly five to six families like the Pitties, Ganeriwals, Lahotis, Badruka and Malanis

who decided to make Hyderabad their home. Most of the Marwaris are mainly involved in

trading and finance. Now, their population has risen to around 10 lakhs. The Pitties and

Malanis also had titles bestowed on them by the Nizam of Hyderabad.” The very notable

families in Hyderabad are the Patodias of GTN Textiles, Surekas of Hartex Rubber and

Construction Activities, the Suranas of the Surana Udyog, the Agarwal family of the

Suryalata and Suryalakshmi Mills, MK Agarwal of GATI and Transport Corporation of India

and Prashant Lahoti, one of the well-known businessmen, who also runs an art gallery and

has been honoured by a prestigious French order. The Pittie family too is involved in various

philanthropic activities and is involved in the maintenance of heritage temples.

The Marwari business model-I HARISH DAMODARAN

G.D. Birla and Lakshmi Mittal: Both their grandfathers worked for Tarachand Ghanshyamdas, one of the first

‘great’ Marwari firms

The Marwaris represent the only business community one would truly call pan-Indian.

For a cluster of Bania/Jain merchant castes originally from the Marwar (Jodhpur),

Bikaner and Shekhawati desert tracts of Rajasthan, their sinking roots into the business

landscape covering virtually the whole of the country is a remarkable phenomenon.

Till around the 16th century, the Agarwals, Oswals, Maheshwaris and Khandelwals of

this belt – loosely clubbed under the appellation of ‘Marwari’ – were confined to their

homeland as local traders and money-lenders, if not army provision suppliers and

financiers for various Rajput princely regimes.

The latter role was crucial in expanding their footprints to other lands. As ration

suppliers and paymasters, they often accompanied Rajput units attached to Mughal

armies, which, in turn, opened up avenues for setting up shop all over the Gangetic

plains and the Deccan.

From the 18th century, there were Marwari bankers financing even the assorted

independent, yet cash-strapped, principalities that had arisen from the ruins of the

Mughal Empire. Thus, the Jagat Seths became treasurers to the Nawab of Bengal, just as

the firm of Gopaldas Manohardas bankrolled the Kingdom of Benares, and the

Ganeriwala and Pittie families ingratiated themselves with the Nizam of

Hyderabad. Typically, they lent against the security of ijara or land revenue-farming

rights assigned for a particular region.

Desert diaspora But the real impetus to Marwari outmigration came during British rule. By the early

19th century, they were significantly present across Delhi, the grain markets of Hapur,

Khurja and Hathras in western Uttar Pradesh, and the river ports of Farrukhabad,

Mirzapur, Patna and Bhagalpur along the Ganges.

This process gathered further steam with the coming of the railways, as the community

spread itself to Kolkata and beyond to Bangladesh, and from there, up the Brahmaputra

valley into Assam and across the Bay of Bengal into Burma.Within this overall eastward

direction, there were sideward forays into Jharkhand, Orissa, northern Bihar, Nepal and

the highlands of Jalpaiguri, Darjeeling and Kalimpong. Another large migration stream

was to Central India (especially the princely states of Gwalior, Bhopal and Indore, and

also Chhattisgarh), Vidarbha and the Maratha hinterland. Some of it spilled over to the

Deccan, before trailing off to a trickle at Madras and Mysore.

Towards the middle of the 19th century, a veritable pan-Indian Marwari business

community had emerged – a commercial resource group using thehundi, an indigenous

bill of exchange, to move money and goods across the length and breadth of the

subcontinent.

The hundi made it possible for a grain dealer from Kanpur to sell in Kolkata without

taking cash and risk being waylaid during transit. He could, instead, have the buyer

draw a hundi of equivalent amount in his favour and present it to the latter’s agent or

drawee at Kanpur, who would make the payment in cash.Alternatively, the seller could

transfer the hundi through endorsement to a lender, who would extend the loan at a

discount to its value. The same hundiwas, then, encashed at par by the lender.

The hundi, in other words, served both as a cashless remittance facility enabling long-

distance inland trade and also a source of mobile credit, by virtue of it being freely

transferable through successive endorsements before being finally presented to the

drawee. It was the lubricant that greased the wheels of commerce, by connecting some

1,700 nationwide produce mandis and 12 nodal money markets handling the bulk of

discounting of these bills at the turn of the century.

The first conglomerates

The traditional hundi, alongside the modern-day railways and telegraph, also laid the

ground for the birth of large multi-branch Marwari trading firms such as Tarachand

Ghanshyamdas – which, in 1870, had offices at Kolkata and Mumbai, Amritsar in

Punjab, the Malwa opium belt of Madhya Pradesh and elsewhere, including through

related entities.

These firms were magnets for attracting fellow Rajasthani clansmen, who could join as

clerks, managers, brokers and partners. G.D. Birla’s grandfather, Shivnarayan worked

with Tarachand Ghanshyamdas; so did the grandfather of the global steel czar, Lakshmi

Niwas Mittal. Likewise, there was Sevaram Ramrikhdas that employed, among others,

the RPG Group patriarch, Rama Prasad Goenka’s grandfather’s great-grandfather,

Ramdutt. The Sevaram Ramrikhdas firm’s division resulted in independent offshoots at

Kanpur, Mirzapur, Farrukhabad and Kolkata: The Singhanias are descendents of the

Kanpur line.

The functional utility of such extensive upcountry networks was soon recognised by

British expatriate firms, who started engaging the Marwaris as intermediaries to finance

and forward raw jute for their mills or to redistribute cotton piece goods imported by

them.

But increasing awareness of the power derived from control over the hinterland supply

chain led the community, in due course, to also undermine the operations of the British

agency houses themselves. In this, the practical trading skills and financial ingenuity of

its members, honed over generations, proved most useful.

‘Desi’ futures & options

In 1905, six Marwaris introduced fatka or futures trading in raw jute that registered

meteoric growth at the baras (informal exchanges) of Kolkata’s Burrabazar market.

These contracts – rarely resulting in delivery of the underlying goods, since most

purchases and sales got cancelled against each other before maturity date – weren’t

taken kindly to by entrenched European interests. Used only to spot buying, they saw

their supply-and-demand calculations and produce flows disrupted by the rampant

speculation engendered by such trades, which extended to cotton, opium and grain as

well.

No wonder, one of their representatives claimed fatka to have been “invented” by

Marwaris “deprived of the pleasures of rain gambling”, and only to satisfy “their craving

for the gains of chance in a system of contracts purporting to evidence the purchase and

sale of jute, but [where] in no single instance has jute ever been delivered”!

That view, in a sense, echoes those of many who even today harbour a suspicious

attitude towards futures transactions, which they contrast to ‘legitimate’ business.

Apart from the hundi and fatka, the Marwaris also pioneered trading in indigenous

options (satta), giving the buyers the right, but with no obligation, to buy or sell a

certain commodity at a specified future date and price. These could be teji (call)

or mandi (put), with the premium paid by the buyer of the option known as nazrana.

The success of Marwari enterprise can, in short, be put down to three components:

Pan-India presence, key to the forging of long-distance networks of trade and finance,

extending from the desert towns of Rajasthan to the Brahmaputra valley;

Community resources and connections, which could be leveraged to raise capital or

expand the scope and spread of business operations. A firm could open as many

branches as the number of brothers, nephews, in-laws, cousins or trusted accountants

permitted. Over time, each of these would develop into or further spawn independent

firms, facilitating diffusion of entrepreneurship within the community;

Evolving sophisticated trading and financing mechanisms, complementing their

ostensibly hardwired talents at sourcing/selling of produce and ability to draw on

information or ground-level knowledge not normally accessible to others.

These traditional strengths have revealed themselves even in more recent times – be it

in organised industry, share markets or, for that matter, modern-format retail and e-

commerce (the promoters of Big Bazaar, Flipkart, Snapdeal and Myntra happen to be all

northern Bania/Jains, if not Marwaris).

The Marwari business model-II

HARISH DAMODARAN

Ramkrishna Dalmia, seen with a wire recorder device to improve his English

The second and final part of the article on Marwari enterprise and its present-day relevance.

April 8, 2013:

Having a business presence spanning much of the subcontinent is a feature that has distinguished the Marwaris from other prominent trading communities.

The latter — the Parsis, Sindhis, Gujarati Banias/Jains, Lohanas and Bhatias, Nattukottai Chettiars, Punjabi Khatris/Aroras or Muslim Memons, Khojas and Bohras — have historically had more geographically concentrated inland operations: Some of them had predominantly overseas mercantile or investment interests.

The ability to draw on extensive pan-Indian bazaar connections made a huge difference during the interwar years, more so with the Great Depression. It tilted the balance against foreign trade, in favour of those whose business activity was largely domestic-focused.

The Marwaris were the ones to make the most out of the disruption of normal trading channels during wartime. The speculative profits earned from fatka and teji-mandi transactions — that rose manifold at the numerous commodities exchanges formed in this period — they partly funnelled into industry. That also included buying

out the units of beleaguered European managing agencies, to whom they were previously brokers and financiers.

Dalmia’s exploits

Exemplifying this trajectory was Ramkrishna Dalmia, arguably the greatest Marwari businessman before Independence.

Originally from Chirawa in Jhunjhunu district of Rajasthan’s Shekhawati region, Dalmia went to Kolkata to join his maternal uncle’s bullion business. In no time, the ambitious young man had launched his own operations, starting with gambling on silver prices during World War-I, followed by shares at the Calcutta Stock Exchange and trading in commodities.

Dalmia’s industrial debut was through a sugar mill in 1933 at a site in Bihar’s Rohtas district. Over time, it also housed plants manufacturing cement, asbestos, paper, board, vanaspati, sulphuric acid, chlorine, caustic soda and bleaching powder. These units — besides a foundry, central workshop, power house and a rail feeder line connecting the 3,800-acre complex — became part of a single entity, Rohtas Industries, that may have well anticipated today’s much-touted Special Economic Zones.

But Dalmia did not stop there. In 1937, he challenged the quasi-monopoly of ACC — a combine of 10 cement firms formed only the year before — by commissioning plants at Karachi and Dandot (both now in Pakistan), Charkhi Dadri (Haryana) and Trichy (Tamil Nadu), apart from the Rohtas Industries facility. The ensuing price war lasted till 1941, when the World War boom lifted sentiments.

From speculation, trading and manufacturing, Dalmia’s next port of call was finance. In 1943, he promoted Bharat Bank Ltd. This, along with two insurance ventures (Bharat Insurance and Bharat Fire & General Insurance), provided a captive fund pool, especially for the takeover binge that Dalmia indulged in over the next few years.

The companies he bought — with interests as diverse as flour-milling, sugar, jute and cotton textiles, civil aviation, railways, coal mines, electricity supply and newspapers — belonged mainly to British concerns like Govan Brothers, Andrew Yule and Bennett Coleman, whose owners weren’t too bullish on business prospects in Independent India. By 1948, he also had controlling stakes in Punjab National Bank.

The downside

Ramkrishna Dalmia’s case is illustrative on three counts. The first, of course, is the raw drive and venturous spirit of a first-generation entrepreneur it highlights.

The second is the role of kinship and community ties, a valuable resource pool not available to every aspiring tycoon. Dalmia benefited from learning the ropes under an uncle, well entrenched in Kolkata’s Marwari trading circles. Even his initial foray into sugar was with a big land-owning relative in Bihar. All the subsequent ventures involved his brother, Jaidayal and son-in-law, Sahu Shanti Prasad Jain – under the ‘Dalmia-Sahu Jain’ group banner.

The third element was the extent to which Dalmia’s business operations remained grounded in the bazaar. The ‘speculative’ phase did not end with putting up factories. Rather, the proclivity for playing the market — including diverting public issue proceeds from one company to finance the activities of others, or booking fictitious losses on share transactions between group entities — only rose with time.

The above three facets — inherent risk-taking disposition, ability to leverage community resources, and overwhelmingbazaar orientation even after entry into the ‘modern’ industrial sphere — can be said to apply to Marwari enterprise broadly, with their associated strengths and weaknesses.

In Dalmia’s case, his adroit speculative skills eventually got the better of him. As details emerged of how deposit and premium monies from banks and insurance firms controlled by the group were used to fund acquisitions — of Bennett Coleman, among others — he had to suffer the ignominy of a two-year jail term in 1956, just like Satyam Computers’ Ramalinga Raju some five decades later.

Even before that, the Dalmia-Sahu Jain empire was partitioned among his brother’s and son-in-law’s families, for reasons still shrouded in mystery and intrigue. Many of the erstwhile group’s concerns, including Rohtas Industries, have since folded up, while the surviving ones, save Bennett Coleman, cannot really be considered in the top league.

The route ahead

That links up with two major limitations of Marwari, or even Indian, enterprise in general.

The first has to do with entrepreneurial zeal and ‘animal spirits’, which, in most family-owned businesses, tends to disappear along with the founding patriarchs. The Bangurs, Modis, Singhanias, Shrirams and Dalmias represent this trend in varying degrees.

The same possibly holds for the Birlas as well: Among its various factions today, only the $ 40 billion Aditya Birla Group can measure up to, if not surpass, the vision of G.D. Birla. And that happened because his grandson, Aditya Vikram, chose to tread an independent path. In the seventies — when most others, particularly Marwaris, were happy doing business domestically — he established viscose staple fibre, spun yarn, carbon black and palm oil refining units all across South-East Asia. The latter’s son, Kumar Mangalam, has gone one step further, in aiming for globalleadership in the industries where the group is active: Viscose and acrylic fibre, carbon black, aluminium and cement. That calls for no less ambition and animal spirits, even if more evolved and organised than innately present in first-generation entrepreneurs.

The second limitation flows from an inability to transcend the bazaar that provided the basis for capital accumulation for most Marwari firms (unlike for say, an Infosys or Dr Reddy’s Laboratories). But innovativeness in trading and financing – where there’s probably not much JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs or even Walmart can teach our Banias — is inadequate and certainly cannot substitute for knowledge of the factory floor and production processes.

Weakness on the latter front may not have mattered in a closed domestic economy, where the trader-industrialist’s choice of industry was dictated more by the profits it offered and the availability of licenses at that point of time. It was both theoretically and practically feasible, then, to straddle diverse industries and operate suboptimal capacity plants using borrowed, outdated technologies. These could be ‘managed’ even from a distance, without going too much into the technical details of manufacture.

The purta system of accounting devised by the Marwaris was perfectly suited for this purpose. Under it, every group firm provided informed estimates of how much it cost to manufacture a given quantity of their product. Based on it and the expected profits corresponding to the sale price, the promoters sitting at their gaddis in Kolkata or Mumbai compared the unit’s actual daily earnings to the normative purta cash flows. If substantial deviations occurred, a trouble-shooter was sent to check out the ground situation and report back. In extreme cases — rare in a protected economic environment — it led to a shake-up of the plant team or closure of the business.

The above detached approach has limited relevance in the post-liberalisation era, where the success of Lakshmi Mittal, Kumar Mangalam Birla or Anil Agarwal owes largely to their focusing on particular industries and building global-scale state-of-the-art plants.

While their in-born talents in buying and selling or having connections from relatives already in business will always stand the Marwaris in good stead, that by itself is not enough in today’s world where other things are increasingly mattering more.

What an IIM graduate learned at the Marwari school of business

After graduating from business school and having learned about Porter’s Model and the tricks and trades

of running a business, I was all excited to join my family business and implement my leanings in real time.

I put together business models and algorithms for processes to be rolled out in my company (we

manufacture aluminum consumer goods). But when I joined, everything turned upside down!

The employees looked at me as if I was a dumb alien creature! The only person who looked at me with

high hopes was my father. But the more I saw hope in his eyes, the more suffocated I began to feel because

I had no clue about what to do and from where to start. Anything I planned and implemented on the

shopfloor was scrapped the next day.

This was my initiation into the Marwari school of business. In multinational companies they call this an

induction and training period, where you learn about your job profile and what you are expected to

deliver. But as an entrepreneur, in this case as a second generation entrepreneur, one has to wear several

hats. You can go from CEO to electrician in a single day.

My first and most valuable lesson in a Marwari family business was that one has to be flexible with the

work profile and ready to get one’s hands dirty.

Here are some of the other important lessons I learned on the job:

• You and I may need software to create a balance sheet but a Marwari businessman can do it on 3×4

inch sheet of paper. Trust me!

• The day I started work in the family business, I was told a hundred times, “Debt is bad! it’s an evil.” In

general, an incorporated company has a life span of 30 years. But family businesses in India have been

running for more than 60 years. Whether small or big, they have one thing in common — no debt or

balanced debt. It is important for an entrepreneur to understand that unbalanced and over optimistic

debt can kill your dreams overnight. I’m not saying that debt is bad. To grow at a particular level, debt

is required. But grow slow and calculate a sustainable pace for you and your company. Simply put,

before talking about making a billion dollars at least make a million.

• Every rupee saved is a rupee earned. Hit hard on negotiating prices with your suppliers no matter how

small the amount. As entrepreneurs, we don’t give much importance to small purchases but it helps

you cut your overheads. This inculcates financial discipline in your employees too.

• Speaking of employees, in a Marwari business you have to treat your employees as a part of the family.

Understand their personal problems and remember their names. It makes them feel special. But do

remember to draw a line and respect that. After all, they are your employees.

• As entrepreneurs we often tend to restrict our employees to certain jobs. Personally, I don’t think that

is good for the company. Employees should be encouraged to work as entrepreneurs and not as robots.

• You really have to earn the respect of the employees. When I joined the business, none of my

employees used to respect me and that’s fair because I had not done anything for them. Gradually, as I

started spending my days on the shopfloor and interacting with everyone, things began to change.

They had problems with some processes and said that they were afraid to bring those to the notice to

the owner of the business — my father. I used the feedback to address as many of those problems as

possible.

So what’s better? Business school or Marwari business school?

Studying at IIM taught me how to become more presentable and analytical. It has also helped

tremendously in developing a perspective about business operations and management practices. But at

the Marwari school of family businesses, I learned to connect with the grassroots and developed a

practical approach to sustaining business which I often find lacking in today’s young entrepreneurs.

Author Bio: Siddharth Maheshwari is a second generation entrepreneur and is

currently involved with his family business, NM Metalworks, in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh. Prior to joining

the family business, Maheshwari also started an ecommerce venture called Craftila, an online store for

handcrafted gifts. He is a computer science engineer from Rajasthan Technical University and an

alumnus of IIM Bangalore. Connect with Maheshwari at LinkedIn.

Top of the heap Lakshmi Mittal, one of the world’s richest men and a Marwari, with son Aditya at their London home

MARWARIS

The Watertight Men Iron-clad ways have rooted Marwaris in well-ploughed enterprises

ARINDAM MUKHERJEE

Points To A Marwari

• Will sell anything Ready to get into any business, however small

• Frugal Marwaris’ fabled frugality has often been a subject of jokes

• Conservative Marwaris are sticklers for tradition, their women marry early, seldom given business roles

• Overtly religious Religion is an essential part of Marwari life

• Joint living Most Marwaris still stay in joint families—often three or four generations together

• Vegetarians Marwaris are staunch vegetarians, even new-age Marwari kids stick to this

***

Bachi Karkaria’s Behind The Times serves up a delightful story on the Times Of India’s Samir Jain that highlights a key trait of the Marwari—thrift. The scene: the hotel lobby at an international advertising conference. Karkaria writes: “Once Indira Deish (of Times Response), while taking her room key, instructed the receptionist to give her a wake-up call, and send a pot of bed tea with it. She felt a tap on her shoulder, turned around and saw VC (Samir Jain): ‘He put his hand into his suit pocket, pulled out something, and put it in my palm. It was a couple of tea bags. After that, I always carried a box of these, and ordered only hot water. I learnt the value of thrift’.”

That’s the Marwari for you, India’s archetypal business class of brokers, traders, financiers and businessmen. They have been called traditional, conservative, clannish and parsimonious. Yet, where it matters, in business, they are phenomenally successful and have been so for generations, writing and re-writing Indian business history. Their roots lie in Shekhawati, an arid part of Rajasthan. Outside the state, they got into money-lending, satta and supplying provisions for the army. Later, they transformed into traders, and in the 1920s and 1930s came into manufacturing at Calcutta—the capital of British India and one of the fastest growing cities anywhere in the 19th century, when many Marwaris settled there.

Archana Garodia Gupta, Owner, Touchstone Jewellery Harsh Pati Singhania, MD, JK Paper

Psychologically, it is difficult for most Marwaris to work for others. They have a ferocious work ethic, spawning many workaholics—you get up in the morning and start working and you work till you sleep. The only pastime is charity and community service. “What makes them special, allows them to excel is high internal trust, an understanding of capital and interest, a culture of pragmatism. There’s also a social conservatism that preserves these qualities and passes them along,” says business author Aakar Patel.

Despite their successes, Marwaris continue to be conservative in their approach. They still follow the old system of close financial control over their firms and take daily stock of money matters. Marwaris have confined themselves to traditional brick-and-mortar or old-economy businesses like manufacturing and shied away from new age and internet businesses. Business historians say this is because their unique set of talents are a perfect fit for old-style commerce, while software businesses do not necessarily need the typical skills they have been honing through generations.

Harsh Goenka, Chairman, RPG Enterprises K.M. Birla, Chairman, Aditya Birla Group

Typically, Marwaris lived in joint families and grew up in a business environment. “They live in an atmosphere where there is business all around. All family discussions were related to business. This brought about a commercial thought process and influenced youngsters,” says Harsh Pati Singhania, MD, JK Paper. Marwari progeny were exposed to this influence from early on. Education, as a Marwari said, is often “considered a hobby”. While scions of modern Marwari families are increasingly going overseas for studies, the community remains conservative.

Former IIM Ahmedabad professor and business historian Dwijendra Tripathi says, “Till recently, the tradition of high education did not exist in Marwari families. The thinking was education can wait, business can’t. So they preferred to push youngsters into family business.” Singhania remembers his college days when he’d go to a morning college that got over around 10:30 am and then would have to go to the family business “office”.

But times are obviously changing. Archana Garodia Gupta, owner of Touchstone Jewellery, an ethnic jewellery manufacturing company, could be considered a rebel, for she was the rare Marwari woman who went for higher education. Archana graduated from IIM Ahmedabad and even qualified for IIT. “I was clear that I wanted to do an MBA and thought of going abroad,” she says. She was also the first girl in her family to stay in a hostel, and one of the first in her community to get a professional post-graduate degree. But despite her IIM tag, she never thought of working in a company and didn’t bother to apply to one.

Sachin Taparia, in contrast, is a modern Marwari. Despite having typical Marwari roots, he not only studied engineering but also went to the US for further education and worked as a management consultant and in an aviation components business there before returning. Like a true Marwari, he is launching his own business, but in an area few Marwaris would dare to tread. Sachin’s e-commerce intermediary business will be launched in the next few months.

In modern times, few new businesses are emerging from Marwari families, while traditional Marwari businesses continue to thrive. That, business experts and historians say, is because of the change in the nature of modern business. “The answer lies in the nature of capital formation in a world dominated by the multinational corporation. One needs vast sums to compete and these are available only to a few,” says Patel. At the same time, older Marwari businesses have not faded out, as young blood ensures continuity of business tradition and conservatism—with a success that’s enshrined in Forbes’s ‘world’s richest people’ lists, which come with a fair sprinkling of Marwari names.

But what has ever stopped the formidable Marwaris venturing into uncharted territories if it means good business? We have seen the successes of Marwari-led Patni computers in IT and Polaris in software. The new Harvard/Stanford-educated generation is mixing professional training with family business wisdom and is willing to get into new areas. It’s not for nothing that Marwaris still take pride and believe in their own old adage: “Jahan na jaye gaari, wahan jaaye Marwari”.

Sachin Taparia, Entrepreneur

Everyone Is A Vaishya India’s business communities, ever in the forefront, now see their role evolving

RAMAN MAHADEVAN

Can we discuss Indian entrepreneurship exclusively in terms of caste and community? Can it be claimed that Indian business has broken loose of its traditional social moorings and is much more inclusive? Are caste and community affiliations still of some consequence, despite the transformed economic context? And, can we be dismissive of the weight of history in shaping the social trajectory of entrepreneurial development in contemporary India? These are key concerns we face in trying to make sense of this complex conundrum of business communities. While there are no short answers, laying bare the broader historical context could throw some light.

The rise of an indigenous entrepreneurial class in pre-independence India, despite the overbearing presence of foreign capital, is exceptional and has few parallels in the rest of the Third World. It was a product of colonial commercialisation during the 19th century. As a colonial economy, India was required to absorb the manufactured goods of Britain as well as meet the ever-growing demand for primary products from British and European industry. The development of commodity markets provided the necessary impetus for the Indian merchant class to grow and flourish.

Old-timers Traditional Marwari traders in Sadasukh Katra in Burra Bazaar, Calcutta. (Photograph by Sandipan Chatterjee)

The financing of the export trade in primary products from the hinterland to the ports in principal commodities such as opium, raw cotton and jute, oil seeds, among others—as well as the distribution of the imported manufactured goods from the ports to the hinterland—was almost exclusively in the hands of merchants from distinct business communities, at least as far as the two major nodes of trade—Bombay and Calcutta—were concerned. These communities/ castes included the Parsis, the Gujarati Banias/ Jains, the Marwaris, the Multanis or Shikarpuris of Sindh, Kutchi Bhatias and the Nattukottai Chettiars.

These communities stood out by virtue of the sheer scale of their commercial and financial operations, extending over large tracts within and outside the country. Their presence in the ‘bazaar’ economy was pronounced and critical in lubricating the wheels of commerce. The intra-caste credit and trade networks which were developed by them greatly facilitated the process of wealth generation within the community.

The ability to mobilise capital with relative ease in a situation of underdeveloped capital markets, access to market intelligence on investment opportunities, and a natural propensity for risk-bearing swung things in favour of the merchants from these traditional communities. It enabled them to move into industry with great alacrity when opportunities arose. The flow of some Parsi and Gujarati Bania capital into textiles, and the brash entry of Marwari capital into a range of consumer industries later, is illustrative of this trend.

In contrast, communities like the Chettiars and the Shikarpuris of Sindh were more conservative. They didn’t find the returns on investment in industry sufficiently alluring and chose to remain largely bankers

and traders. The same applies to the Khojas and Memons, the two Muslim business communities from the Gujarat region. Ironically, after some of them shifted to Pakistan following Partition, they had a free run and ended up controlling most of their major industries well till the 1970s. But even among them, it was only a few who could effect the transition from trade to industry.

Business communities, as an organisational structure, were critical in facilitating wealth generation by the family firms in the initial phase of their growth, in a given historical context. But with the growing economic distance between family firms over time, community structures became less relevant. The rise of interest groups in the form of chambers of commerce and trade associations is a manifestation of this trend. Furthermore, these communities were not really similar in their social mores, cultural practices or even business organisations. Yet they seemed to share one common trait: a keen market sensibility.

By 1947, entrepreneurs from across a few traditional business communities were in firm control of the then modern Indian corporate sector. So conspicuous was their control that it even provoked D.R. Gadgil, the noted economist and keen industry watcher, to suggest in 1950 that the uniquely Indian form of entrepreneurship could be best understood only through the prism of business community. Gadgil’s analysis, based on his observations of the more visible nodal centres of commerce and industry, had a pervasive influence on subsequent writings on Indian entrepreneurship. An unfortunate fallout was the exclusion of alternate social routes of entrepreneurship outside the business community frame. The nascent trends of this were discernable as far back as the 1920s. It is

only now, following the remarkable growth story of the south, that there is a growing recognition of inter-regional variations in sources of entrepreneurship.

Outside the Bombay-Ahmedabad-Calcutta axis, the entrepreneurial scenario was distinctly different. South India started its journey towards industrialisation later than western/eastern India and remained a poor cousin well till the 1970s. However, the social basis of private investment was more broad-based. The presence of merchant capitalists was not as pronounced as in the north. By choosing to move to greener pastures in the south and Southeast Asia during the late 19th and early 20th centuries as purveyors of credit, the Chettiars—the traditional business community of Tamil Nadu—ended up creating an economic environment in south India (especially in the Tamil region) that allowed other players from non-ethnic and non-commercial castes to venture into commercial enterprise. In short, there were no strict entry barriers like in north India.

Even within these business communities, only a few could effect the transition from trader to industrialist.

First families Mittal, Premji, Birla, Mallya, India Inc big guns at a global investors meet. (Photograph by AFP, From Outlook 01 October 2012)

Significantly, commencing roughly from the 1920s, and gaining momentum after independence, sections of prosperous agriculturists/landowners (Kammas, Gounders, Reddys, Rajus, Syrian Christians, Tamil Brahmins and Goud Saraswats), upper echelons of artisanal castes (Kaikollars or Senguntha Mudaliars, Devangas) and other occupational castes from the socially marginal sections of south Indian society (Nadars, Ezhavas, Thiyyas) channelised investment into trade, organised finance and industry. Similarly, there was a movement of Patidar capital into industry and other commercial enterprises in Gujarat and of the Khatris in Punjab.

The new opportunities for private investment in the Nehruvian period were mostly seized by business houses from the traditional business communities. By virtue of their sheer size and by using the tough licensing system to their advantage, they created barriers for the entry of new capital, right through the ’70s. The 1980s economic reforms were a game-changer. With the expansion of the market and incomes, the number of claimants seeking licences for setting up industries increased exponentially. Science and technology-driven education and government policy provided a fillip to the new groups who were investing in emerging industries, be it electronics, communications, IT, pharma or biotech. Many of them were first-generation entrepreneurs, though a good number from traditional merchant families have also entered the field. A broadening of the social base of entrepreneurship has been evident from the late 1980s.

The diversified social base has not necessarily resulted in a weakening of caste and community influences. Though it may not have as much meaning as in the past, in myriad new forms it continues to play an important role in shaping the new entrepreneurial initiatives. This is particularly true at the lower and middle levels of enterprise. The recent, exceptional story of the Tiruppur garment cluster and of the ‘Gounder’ enterprise is a good example of the effectiveness of caste as a means for consolidation and

New opportunities for private investment in the Nehruvian period were mostly seized by traditional business families.

weathering competition. The case of the diamond cutting and polishing industry of Surat and of the Palanpuri Jains is broadly illustrative of the same trend.

The recent rise of a nascent entrepreneurial class from the Dalit community, drawn largely from UP, Maharashtra and Punjab, and the promotion of community-based Dalit chambers of commerce reinforces the continuing importance of caste in a certain historical context. The entry of new entrepreneurs from the Marwari and Bania communities (but operating in a globally competitive market) suggests that the caste dimension operates in far more subtle ways than earlier. The benefit of being part of a traditional business community is the immense advantage in terms of networks and information flows and, above all, of the unquantifiable asset of an inherent business sensibility. The ethical dimension of trust, critically integral to any enterprise, also serves to strengthen caste structures in certain situations.

The import of the reassertion of caste in the wider social and political sphere was not lost on business. Business and politics are often intertwined and mediated through caste affiliation, with each sphere reaping not inconsequential gains from this relationship, as cases in Andhra and Tamil Nadu demonstrate so starkly. While caste and community are no longer central to the story involving large corporate houses, they remain critical to enterprises at the regional level, but in ways very different from the past. The success of certain castes in business in the past has become a beacon for others to use the same route.

(The author, a Chennai-based economic historian, can be reached at ramanmahadevan AT gmail.com)

Pushing on A. Vellayan, chairman of the Murugappa Group

CHETTIARS

Chettiar Band, AVM To FM

A money-lending community, once in decline, picks itself up slowly but surely

PUSHPA IYENGAR

Quiet, Pragmatic

• Secrecy: They say Freemasons are more open than Chettiars, highlighting their secretiveness

• Practical: Since the decline of Chettiars in business, many are taking up salaried jobs

• Traditional: Are educated, keep a low profile, have a quiet elegance. Families meet in their huge village mansions for family functions.

• Land all-important: Traumatised by their forefathers’ loss of huge land holdings abroad, they now own lots of land and plantations in India

• Women out: Chettiar women rarely join family businesses but focus on the families’ cultural and philanthropic initiatives

***

V. Nagappan, director of the Madras Stock Exchange, recounts how his father Vellaippan Chettiar, a trader, reacted when he asked him for Rs 25,000—this was in the 1980s—for enrolling in an MBA course. “A course?” his father had said, collapsing with laughter. “Why do you need to enrol in a course to learn business administration?” Nagappan, nevertheless, got himself an MBA. What his father had meant, in all seriousness, was: why a business course for you when business courses through you?

The decades before 1950 were when the Chettiars—also known as the Nagarathars or Nattukottai Chettiars—were at their flourishing peak. They rode risk to Burma, Ceylon, Malaya and other South Asian and African countries to return rich from investments in plantations and estates; the ivory, teak, timber and gemstone trades; and, above all, banking and finance. “Much of their capital was parlayed outside the country. They owned vast tracts of land in Burma and other countries,” says Prof Raman Mahadevan of the Institute of Development Alternatives, Chennai, who has written a book on the Chettiars. Prosperous Chettiar families turned their 70-odd villages near Karaikudi into opulent clusters of mansions, colonnaded with pillars of teak, windowed with stained glass, ornamented with carved-wood roof trimmings. Marble from Italy and foreign objets d’art were common.

M. Thiagarajan, MD, Paramount A.V. Meiyyappan, Founder, AVM

Besides Chettinadu architecture and cuisine, the community has contributed by bringing quiet elegance to doing business. Tradition holds strong. Every Chettiar wedding is held in the family house and is registered at a village temple. In many households, girls are still named after their grandmothers and boys after their grandfathers. Names and initials repeat themselves: Ashwin Chidambaram Muthiah, for instance, heads the global operations of a business founded by his grandfather, Dr M.A. Chidambaram

and inherited by his father A.C. Muthiah. His daughters are called Devaki and Alagu—after his and his wife’s mothers.

The years in which the British and other Europeans left the colonies saw Chettiars returning to India from 58 countries. Many businesses collapsed or were lost to new laws. Some families returned with nothing but the clothes on their backs, some had to foot it to Bengal before getting home. “Since then, it has been a decline of sorts...except in small and medium business ventures, the community yielded space to the Gounders, Naidus, Nadars and even Brahmins, who are a force in the IT sector,” says Prof Raman.

Deborah Thiagarajan, Founder, Madras Craft Foundation M.A.M. Ramaswamy, Rajya Sabha MP

But Chettiars are still an influential presence in business—textiles, pharmaceuticals, films, plantations. AVM Productions, one of the oldest film production houses, started by A.V. Meiyyappan, still remains a family enterprise. Many tea and coffee estates in Kerala, Ooty, Coorg and Chikmagalur are owned by Chettiars. There are Chettiar real estate businesses, and the community has a lot of holdings in the upscale Kotturpuram area of Chennai.

Young Chettiars now hone their business skills at B-schools rather than learn at their father’s work table. But Nagappan recalls how his business instinct sprang up on an opportunity when he was still a teenager without an MBA: his father offered to pay Rs 2 lakh for an MBBS seat in Manipal; Nagappan chose to do BCom but took the Rs 2 lakh to start a cement agency, his first business venture.

These days, it’s not unusual for Chettiar family businesses to be driven by theory and practices learnt at the best B-schools. A. Vellayan, chairman of the Murugappa Group and a fourth-generation Murugappa Chettiar, heads a company run by family members and professionals. It was former chairman M.V. Subbiah who first brought in professionals. Now, the group has 29 businesses—finance, abrasives, fertilisers, bicycles, engineering goods—most of them acquired rather than inherited. Families that tarried in modernising have not fared as well.

Although a political giant like Union finance minister P. Chidambaram has emerged from the community, Chettiars hardly have a high profile in politics. By and large, they have supported the Congress. Independent India’s first finance minister, R.K. Shanmukham Chetty, was from the community. But it’s a small community—about 1.25 lakh families—and Dravida politics has been the dominant force in Tamil Nadu. This may explain why the community’s influence is largely confined to the Sivagangai district. “Chettiars have almost no political heft,” says a community watcher. “They can’t count on votes from the SC/STs because of grudges from a time the community ruled the roost.”

V. Nagappan, Madras Stock Exchange

A veteran journalist says, “The story of the Chettiars is the story of how a business community completely lost the plot.” But the mansions in Devakottai and Kanadukathan near Karaikudi are testimony to how some are moving with the times and embracing new businesses—many of the sprawling houses are now being run as heritage hotels, bringing in the money for the upkeep of the edifices and bringing worldwide fame to Chettiar cuisine and culture.

Being tradition-bound, the community hasn’t been very encouraging of women working or tending business. Says Vellayan, “At the moment, our women are not working in the Murugappa Group—for a good reason: we believe girls, when they marry into another family, will do better to be part of the husband’s family than take pride in the family they came from.” But Chettiar women are prominent in cultural and philanthropic activities, which the community is known well for. There are many educational institutions run by the community and the Tamil Isai Sangham, to promote ancient Tamil music, was founded in 1943 by Raja Sir Annamalai Chettiar.

“We can call ourselves a community of MNCs,” says Nagappan, referring to the travels undertaken by their ancestors to set up money-lending businesses. It was this that gave them the expertise to move into banking and finance—the Indian Overseas Bank, Indian Bank and Bank of Madura were started by Chettiars. There’s an apocryphal story about M.C. Muthiah, whose grandfather founded the Indian Overseas Bank. He employed a British architect to design the staff quarters, in the middle of which was a four-bedroom bungalow for himself. But when banks were nationalised, he had to give up the bungalow—much in the way the community has had to gradually withdraw from banking, its metier.

Busybees Jagjit Singh Kapoor of Doraha (Ludhiana)-based Kashmir Apiaries, with his wife and daughte

PUNJABI KHATRIS

Make Money, Not War Industry, not aggression, is the trademark of this community

CHANDER SUTA DOGRA

When Neil Armstrong reached the moon, he saw some friendly-looking people there, with strange headgear. His conversation with them went something like this:

Armstrong: “Who are you and what are you doing up on the moon?”

Aliens: “We are Sikhs. Assi te Partition de baad hi aithe aa gaye (We came here after the Partition)!”

This is one of the many jokes about the ubiquitous Sikhs, found today in almost all parts of the world, running a variety of businesses, from small food joints to massive manufacturing industries. Nine out of ten businesses run by the Punjabis today are by the Khatri Punjabis (found both among Sikhs and Hindus because of their common ancestry) who really landed on the business map of India after Partition. Arriving as penniless migrants from what was then called West Punjab, their enterprising nature and legendary capacity of hard work, fuelled by adversity, made them the formidable component they are today of the India growth story.

The Khatri Sikhs are the sweet-talking, non-confrontationist businessmen hailing from clans like Bedi, Bhalla, Arora, Ahluwalia, Pahwa and so on—many of whom trace their ancestry to the 10 Sikh gurus. The industrial hubs of Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Yamunanagar and Delhi, of course, grew on the back of Khatri enterprise. The Pahwas of Avon cycles, Kapurs of Atlas cycles and Munjals of Hero Honda pioneered the bicycle industry in Ludhiana; just as the Sondhis, Chadhas and Wassans established the Rs 2,000-crore Jalandhar sports goods industry, which grew around the hundreds of sports goods craftsmen and traders fleeing Sialkot in Pakistan in 1947.

Akshay Bector, Cremica Group Anand Mahindra, Mahindra & Mahindra

Most of them still speak the sweet, west Pakistani dialect of Punjabi that differentiates them from their loud and somewhat brash Jat Sikh brethren. Though the post-Partition years saw several Khatri families growing from small-time traders to big business interests, every decade has spawned absolutely new success stories. Like the Rs 300-crore Doraha (near Ludhiana)-based Kashmir Apiaries, started by Jagjit Singh Kapoor, son of an impoverished school teacher from Mirpur in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. “When my father came here,” Jagjit tells Outlook, “he began inviting other fleeing Punjabis to Doraha, and soon all of us were into small businesses. After graduating in 1971, I also tried my hand at several small ventures, but most failed. In the early ’80s, I did a course in beekeeping, began selling boxes for beehives and soon began buying honey from people who had bee colonies.”

Kashmir Apiaries is today the largest Indian exporter of honey, selling a variety of honey products to 48 countries, and Jagjit is proud of being able to adhere to stringent international standards. Displaying the quintessential Khatri trait for hard work and risk-taking, he says, “I used to travel third-class to find buyers for my honey and saved on hotel bills by sleeping on night trains, and bathing at railway station waiting rooms.”

Deepak Pahwa, Bryair Asia Pawan Munjal. Hero Honda

Unlike the ever-cautious Jains and Banias of north India, taking risks comes naturally to the Khatris, an instinct honed possibly by centuries of survival in the invader-prone northwest. So, in 1953, when nascent Chandigarh was just a cluster of a few houses and government offices, Darshan Singh, originally from Rawalpindi in Pakistan, started Aroma hotel, the city’s first commercial property. “It didn’t make much money initially,” says his son Manmohan, “and the Punjab government made it into a resthouse to enable us to get by.” Over the years, though, Aroma’s become a Chandigarh landmark, and the family has recently added a four-star property, besides interests in the hospitality business in the US and video distribution.

In the same mould is Gautam Kapur, who established Radisson hotel in Jalandhar some eight years ago, at a time when opening a five-star property in the city was considered foolhardy. But the 57-year-old had started his hugely successful hand tools manufacturing business also in adverse conditions, in 1985, when militancy was at its peak. “It was a time,” he recalls, “when businessmen were moving out of Punjab, but my father who was a leading motion picture distributor of north India said we should not leave a town which had given us so many good decades.”

Onkar Pahwa, Avon Cycles Satish Wassan, Wassan Exports

Risk-taking comes naturally to Punjabi Khatris, a trait possibly honed by centuries of survival in invader-prone

Among the Punjabi Khatri enterprises which have ‘arrived’ in recent years is the Rs 700-crore Cremica group of companies started by Ludhiana housewife Rajni Bector in 1989. From making ice-cream and bakery products for friends, the group’s become a household name in

confectionery, condiments and sauces in north India, with an annual growth of almost 30 per cent. Bector, as her son Akshay informs us, is probably a distortion of the subcaste Bakhtiars, hailing from a few villages around Ludhiana. In 1996, when McDonald’s was entering India, the Bectors beat several established players like Britannia and Bakeman’s to get a contract to exclusively supply buns to the American chain’s restaurants in India. The family has been in business since 1880, mainly as commission agents in the mandi town of Ludhiana. But Akshay attributes much of their present success to the opening up of the Indian economy, as their enterprise coincided with the increase in consumption and their products found acceptability in newer geographical areas and rural markets.

Though the Khatris believe they are warrior Kshatriyas who took to trading, there is some ambiguity about their place in the varna system, as they have for centuries been in mercantile occupations. Their children received solid education; many found their way into the army, banking and judiciary. In recent decades, though, many Khatris from service backgrounds have given in to their merchant genes and entered business. Deepak Pahwa of Bryair Asia, for instance, is a first-time entrepreneur. His grandfather was a renowned eye surgeon of Punjab, his father was in insurance while numerous uncles and cousins of his were in the army. Deepak himself began with a small air-conditioning unit some three decades ago to grow into a Rs 500-crore engineering giant with a presence in 40 countries.

northwest.

Sharp hotelier Gautam Kapur in Jalandhar

“Yes, we are a docile community,” he observes, “who will never be found protesting and sitting on dharnas, though we may talk a lot.” Avinash Chopra of the Rs 500-crore Hind Samachar group of newspapers, first established in 1948, is more direct about typical Khatri traits. “We are basically ‘darpok’, not given to taking strong stands, and get a high from making money. Other communities are jealous of our success and influence, but do not see the hard work behind it.” Kishie Singh, a Jat Sikh journalist and keen observer of Punjabi culture, sees Khatris as “the politest people I know, great networkers, though not necessarily very honest in business”.

Despite their financial clout and proximity to New Delhi, the Khatris, oddly, have not made it big in politics. Traditionally landless, the community has

always survived on trade and business, due to which they got marginalised in the agrarian-based politics of north India after Partition. “There is a feeling,” says Avinash, “that it is better to fund political parties and use the influence to prosper rather than join them.” Unlike other media barons, his father Vijay Chopra has refused offers from mainstream parties to join politics. Even those who do join—like Gautam Kapur who flirted with the Amarinder Singh camp in the run-up to the Punjab assembly elections this year—beat a hasty retreat because, as he says, “Politics put me off. We Khatris have never had a helping hand from the polity because of our minimal presence there, but we have still made it.”

Everyone is hugely proud of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, their best known political face, but freely acknowledge he is not a typical politician who can be counted on for “favours”. The Punjabi Jat Sikh, it’s often said, is known for agriculture and litigation (from never-ending disputes over land). The Khatri Sikhs, on the other hand, are not hobbled by either. Their business philosophy is best illustrated by the phrase, ‘sanoo ke lena ji (how does it concern me)’. It means minding one’s business.

Defining Khatri-Ness

• Unfailing politeness: Avoid disputes; if there is one, sort it out cordially with minimum fuss

• Compromise formula: Never, ever, rub a government official the wrong way. Even if one has to do something unethical, clench your teeth and do it.

• No taboos: No enterprise is hands-off. Even take on trades meant for certain castes, if there is money to be made there.

• Show wealth: Love big cars and grand mansions—make sure everybody and their neighbours know when they ‘arrive’.

• Love family: Prefer to operate within joint families, though times are changing. Extremely religious, conservative and god-fearing.

• Stay out of trouble: Will never fight for a cause, opting instead to instigate others to do the same.

SYRIAN CHRISTIANS

The Latters Of Thoma The Nasrani journey to prosperity has a touch of the Damascene about it

MINU ITTYIPE

Spot A Syrian Christian

• Spreading wings: Can be found in every field—hospitality, plantations, jewellery, construction, media.

• Trustworthy and hardworking: He fears a moral authority above. You can trust him with your soul, but don’t expect him to trust you.

• Tall claims: Will claim superiority. Will ‘know’ every high connection.

• Confident: With a partly non-Indian appellation, they have a robust sense of national identity.

• Smart: Stylish and well turned out. She takes pride in her cooking and throws fabulous parties.

***

Vijay Chopra, Hind Samachar Group

It is said, in the grand tradition of apocrypha, that long, long before Christianity wore the vestments of Rome’s official state religion, the Gospel of Christ arrived in Kerala on a Syrian boat and seeped into its being like tea from a teabag (with due credit to Arundhati Roy’s The God Of Small Things). Not entirely canonical legend has it that St Thomas the Apostle, a disciple of Iso Misiha (Jesus the Messiah), with a few Syrian families, docked on the shores of Kodungalloor, Kerala in 52 AD. And therefrom begins one of the most fantastic backstories ever devised by immigrants anywhere, which has—with devotedly persistent retelling—entered popular imagination and even crept into school textbooks. The story goes that St Thomas converted a few Brahmins and established seven churches along the Malabar Coast. Historians are not without doubts about this theory. They point out that Kerala’s Aryanisation probably happened much later: in the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries AD. It follows that there may have been no Brahmins hanging about in an earlier time to be converted.

Interestingly though, if you examine any diligently upkept Syrian Christian family tree, you find its roots are drawn from the Brahmin families of yore. The names are listed with pride, Kalli, Kallyamgal, Sankarapuri etc, and then proceed to articulate which branch they are descended from. Historian M. Gangadharan says, “The original Syrian Christians, like the Arabs and Jews, came to Kerala as traders. Perhaps a few Brahmins did convert to Christianity due to land disputes or other reasons. Kerala had abundant spices and oceanic trading played a crucial role in its economy. All trading was done in exchange for gold and the traders were immensely wealthy.” The secular kings welcomed foreign philosophies and allowed settlers to build places of worship. Syrian Christians were even accorded caste-restricted privileges like the use of the umbrella, the spread cloth to walk upon, or the banana leaf doubling as a plate.

Jose Dominic, MD & CEO, CGH Earth Joy Alukkas, MD, Joyalukkas India Ltd.

At some point in time, Syrian Christians chose not to remain the ‘other’ and positioned themselves as high-caste converts and with great canniness inserted themselves into the deeply caste-embedded society. No small feat given the standing strictures on hierarchy. And having managed to meld into society, they weathered the upheavals that time wrought and tenaciously preserved their position. The conversion story was a handy aid to augment this process. A nativised form of worship evolved, which resembled a fusion of Hindu rites and ancient Syrian liturgy. Says Thiruvananthapuram MP and writer Shashi Tharoor, “Perhaps their greatest contribution has been in infusing the Christian tradition into the Indian socio-religious mosaic in a truly indigenous way, thereby reiterating India’s ability to achieve the highest form of pluralism within a single, holistic working system of human society and thought.”

This high-caste positioning also had considerable influence on their conduct. Says Jose Dominic, MD and CEO of CGH Earth (a Syrian Catholic in the hospitality business), “Syrian Christians take great pride in coming from a ‘good family’ and their behaviour is governed by this. They behave very civilly in society and are good workmen as well.” The Syrians were largely a monolithic church with strong relations to the Oriental Churches of the East till the Portuguese came on the scene and with papal sanction tried to

induct them into the Catholic fold. They succeeded: in splitting the Syrian Christian church into a number of splinters, some of which adopted Catholicism, but many retained their Oriental rites. Says Babu Paul, writer, orator and former IAS officer, “The Syrian Christians underwent different divisions and reunions and now are spread across the total spectrum of church theology from the Syro-Malabar at one end to the Pentecostal at the other.”

Mammen Mathew, Chief editor, Manorama Kochouseph Chittillapilly, MD, V-Guard Industries The caste ladder in Kerala did not have a native Vaishya rung and the Syrians filled the gap. Some took to paddy cultivation and became agriculturists. The introduction of rubber cultivation in the early 1900s had few takers among the Namboodiris and Nairs. In the pre-land reform days, they were sitting pretty. It needed an unfulfilled entrepreneurial streak to go into the forested hills. Today, the rubber belt of Kerala—Pala, Kottayam, Kanjirappally, Pathanamthitta, Koney—has a strong Syrian Christian presence. The larger companies are the A.V. George group and the Malankara plantations, both blessed with wide acreage. But, as Dominic says, “It is a well-known tale, the world over, that it is in its migrant state that a community excels. When the Syrian Christians became a landed

community, the ownership gave them a sense of security and their sense of enterprise was reduced. They weren’t able to live up to their full capabilities during this time. However, the present generation has realised the need to do something besides owning property and are once again making forays in IT, hospitality and jewellery.”

As traders, they amassed considerable amounts of wealth. This lent itself quite naturally to money-lending activities and later to banking practices. “A story goes,” says P.J. Alexander, a former DGP of Kerala, “a Syrian Christian woman enters her husband’s house with 20 eggs and a hen. Her survival instincts are so strong that the eggs will hatch and the hens will soon multiply and she will have a roaring business.” Chicken-egg analogies aside, there are real-life evincements of such success in the finance sector; in particular, they have consistently enjoyed a foothold in the gold loan business.

In the mid-20th century, Syrian Christian-owned banks—like Palai Central Bank, Kottayam Orient Bank, or Quilon Bank—undertook rapid expansion. One banker says, “You could say they were pioneers in agricultural financing. If you look at the old audit books of the State Bank of India (SBI), there are notes from the RBI that attest to agricultural financing being a non-banking activity. Today, they have reversed that policy.” These banks were liquidated in the early 1960s and merged with national banks like SBI, State Bank of Travancore, Indian Bank among others. But banks like Federal Bank and South Indian Bank flourish. Companies like Muthoot Finance and Muthoot Fincorp have carved out a solid presence in the gold loan sector.Forbes Asia magazine had Muthoot Finance chairman M.G. George Muthoot and his three brothers listed among the hundred richest Indians.

The caste ladder in Kerala did not have a native Vaishya rung and the Syrian Christians filled the gap, melding into society.

Vinoo Mammen, Chairman, MRF Verghese Kurien, Pioneer, White Revolution

Malayala Manorama, the third largest circulated newspaper in the country, is run by the Kandathil Mappilai Syrian Christian family and has shaped Malayalee public opinion since its first edition rolled off the press in 1890. Says veteran journalist and writer Kurian Pampadi, “Varghese Mappilai, the founding editor, was a visionary who wrote his first editorial pleading for the upliftment of the untouchable Pulayas. Business acumen, vision and practical wisdom helped the Mappilais build up Malayala Manorama into one of India’s largest media powerhouses. Kerala being divided into Centre-right and Left in political affiliation, the MM gives due coverage to the Left while staying steadfast to its more right-leaning stance.” The daily has a circulation of over two million with 18 units in Kerala, India and the Gulf. The group brings out about a dozen titles from its stable, forays into English, Hindi, Tamil and Bengali and even traverses mediums with radio and television broadcasts.

Minting gold George Alexander Muthoot and M.G. George Muthoot of Muthoot Finance. (Photograph by Fotocorp, From Outlook 01 October 2012)

Admittance into the upper echelons of power came early post-Independence, with John Mathai becoming India’s first railway minister and later taking over, yes, the finance portfolio. He presented two budgets. Defence minister and former chief minister of Kerala A.K. Antony is a Syrian Christian. As is the state’s current CM, Oommen Chandy. Interestingly, all the PMs from the Gandhi family have had Syrian Christian personal assistants or secretaries. Though dutiful in service, there have been visionaries too like Dr Verghese Kurien, the spearhead of India’s white revolution. And John Mathai’s son Ravi J. Mathai was the founder member of the prestigious Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad).

An unsung hero in the Indian sports arena is the late Ravi Mammen of MRF (owned by the Kandathil family), who created the Pace Foundation in 1987 to train and develop young fast bowlers. With out-of-the box strategising in the 1980s—its sponsorship of motorsports in particular—MRF was able to establish itself as a market leader. Yes, as Dominic says, “They have excelled in every sphere. They have even done excellent work as teachers in the field of education.”

Not that there aren’t areas for improvement. Dominic laments, “In the field of arts, theatre, music and letters, we don’t find too many. To do that, perhaps one needs to have rich cultural resources from an ancient environment. But who here now knows the Syriac culture? No Syrian Christian speaks Syriac.” A grievance many in the community acknowledge. The willingness to sacrifice bits of self-identity in order to better assimilate into the whole. As an anti-scriptural pithyism perhaps purports to illustrate: a Syrian will marry a tribal princess and readily shed his clothes to become the chief when she inherits the throne.

SOUTH CANARA’S MOGULS

The Konkan Rail Banks, education, South Canara’s B-people have set the trend

LOLA NAYAR

Santosh Hegde, who took on the might of the Reddy brothers of Bellary mines with his Lokayukta report; Bollywood beauty, talent and enterprise like Aishwarya Rai, Shilpa Shetty and Sunil Shetty; flamboyant (and currently flailing) businessman Vijay Mallya; illustrious writer Arvind Adiga—the list of Mangalore’s icons is endless. Beyond the glamour, what has put Mangalore firmly on India’s economic map is the spirit of enterprise and its reputed educational institutions (though one’s eyes may boggle at the capitation fees charged by some of them).

Yet, despite competition from many replicas the originals stand tall, whether in education or banking, two areas where Mangalore has carved a niche. When India nationalised 20 banks in two phases, four of them—Syndicate, Canara, Vijaya and Corporation—were from south coastal Karnataka. Situated on the west coast, Mangalore, part of the Madras presidency during the British rule, came under Mysore administration post-Independence. It says much about the enterprise of the region that despite neglect by the new administrators, Mangalore became a hub by the 1970s.

The main business communities of south Karnataka region are the Bunts, the Goud Saraswat Brahmins (known simply as GSBs), the Mangalore Catholics and also the Bearys. Bunts, a martial race of Mangalore, are often likened to the Punjabis of the north and GSB to the Patels of Gujarat in their entrepreneurial spirit. “The Bunts have been landowners and traders for centuries. The GSBs were merchants and entrepreneurs in Goa too, and carried that character with them when they migrated (the largest number during Portuguese rule of Goa). They landed in the South Canara districts with little resources, so the GSBs had to start life from scratch,” says Vinutha Mallya, an independent publisher who belongs to the GSB community.

It is difficult to say who led whom in the race to set up new institutions of learning or enterprise. But being highly literate, GSBs soon settled in to build several remarkable enterprises. Among the pioneers in setting up banking institutions in Mangalore were Ammembal Subba Rao Pai, a Goud Saraswat Brahmin,

who started the Canara Bank in 1906. This got the ball rolling with Khan Bahadur Haji Abdullah Haji Kasim Sahib of the Muslim community setting up the Corporation Bank in Udupi, a temple town, which was part of the erstwhile undivided Dakshina Kannada (Mangalore) district of Karnataka.

Other banks followed with Karnataka Bank set up by prominent members of the Brahmin community in 1924, Syndicate Bank in 1925 by a group of GSB community members, while Vijaya Bank was set up in 1931 by A.B. Shetty of the dominant land-holding Bunt community. Over the years, the private sector Karnataka Bank grew with the merger of Sringeri Sharada Bank Ltd, Chitradurga Bank Ltd and Bank of Karnataka. “The foundation of banking is trust and each of these banks came up in competition with each other along caste and religion lines. Each bank is a story of different community efforts—exactly like the Kerala side of the banking story,” says Prof D. Narayana, a business historian and head of the

Thiruvananthapuram-based Gulati Institute of Finance and Taxation.

Community feelings were so strong that till the 1980s top bank officials were from the respective groups. Mallya narrates how people like her mother got a walk-in bank job just because she was a graduate. “It was considered philanthropic. The element of nepotism helped people get jobs but the climb up thereafter was purely on merit,” she says.

B.R. Shetty, New Medical Center, UAE Dr Devi Prasad Shetty, Narayana Hrudayalaya

Vijay Mallya, UB Group K.V. Kamath, ICICI Bank/Infosys

An ability to mobilise small savings is an important usp of the GSB community, which led to the setting up of chit funds, cooperatives and banks, points out business journalist Vivian Fernandes who hails from

“The element of nepotism helped people get bank jobs but the climb up thereafter was purely on merit....”

Mangalore. This concept took shape and assumed various guises in this coastal region, stretching right up to Kochi in Kerala where GSBs have a strong presence. One such was Pigmy banking or daily collection, said to have been started in 1928 by Syndicate bank just three years after it opened operations. “The bank collected as low as 2 annas daily in 1928, today the bank collects around `2 crore per day under the scheme,” reads a brief history of the bank.

Starting self-financing colleges may not have been the original idea when Dr T.M.A. Pai, a practising surgeon, bought 107 acres of barren land on a hilltop near Udupi. But after some failed ventures, when Pai, a prominent GSB industrialist, ventured into education he hit upon a winning formula that’s been replicated across the country. Today, Mangalore and Udupi are the hub of several such ventures by different communities, whether Bunts, other Brahmin groups, Christians or Muslims.

“After two generations, we are witnessing a shift with large numbers moving to IT. There is a sizeable number of IT entrepreneurs in the US now,” says T.V. Mohandas Pai, current CEO of the Manipal Education and Medical Group. Pai points to the fact that undivided South Canara had the highest human development index, and has emerged as the net exporter of talent with 10 per cent of the population, mostly professionals, working overseas.

An intrinsic aspect of the GSBs and the Bunts are their restaurant and liquor business. In the early 1930s-40s, if a Brahmin set up an eating joint, everybody would eat food there. This led to the emergence of Brahmins as hoteliers for the entire south—Udupi, Woodlands, Dasprakash, to name a few.

The Bunts, on the other hand, took their hotel business to the north and many prospered with their eateries serving non-vegetarian food in places like Mumbai and Pune. Similarly, in the liquor business, the takeover of United Breweries Ltd by prominent GSB member Vittal Mallya and later its emergence as the king of domestic spirits under his son Vijay Mallya is a well-charted growth. Of course, Mallya’s foray into aviation with Kingfisher Airlines has hit a bad air-pocket in the past months.

As the government flounders through various models of public-private partnership (PPPs), the GSBs have a takeaway. Narayana says that when T.M.A. Pai set up the Kasturba Medical College in the 1950s he requested then finance minister of Madras state, C. Subramanian, that the college be allowed to use the Vellore district hospital facilities for training for a fee. A perplexed Subramanian is said to have wondered aloud at “this mad man who wants to pay for the use of the district hospital”. Permission was granted and till today the arrangement continues—benefiting both the medical college and the Vellore district hospital.

PARSIS

Straight, Honest Parsimoney The Parsi reputation for diligence and trustworthiness warms their businesses

ARTI SHARMA

Compass Card

• Honest, straightforward Parsis will tell it like it is, whether you want to hear it or even if you don’t

• Shy and reserved By and large, Parsis are non-combative. Are known to be polite and courteous.

• Not show-offs Parsis don’t flaunt their wealth, have an understated style. Believe there is something more important than that —enjoying life to the fullest.

• Content lot Not known to be overly ambitious. Most Parsis are well-to-do enough to feel contented.

• Stubborn, loyal If they believe in something, they’ll stick with it

***

At the annual festival of Wilson College last year, a writer for the Parsi Times, a local community pullout, decided to have a bit of fun. A ‘PRS Bike Race’ was being held as part of the festival, sponsored by the Performance Racing Store. The next edition of the newspaper carried a front-page piece on how the “Parsi Racing Society” had “sponsored” this event and that “full credit should be given to Parsis for organising a racing event”. “If there’s any community that happens to be more jovial, quirky, contrarian and unpredictable, I’ll be extremely surprised,” says a man who enjoys the company of his many Parsi friends.

Mumbai’s history is interwoven with the history of Parsis: a bulk of the minuscule community still lives in this metropolis. Some of the largest plots, real estate and businesses belong to Parsis. In several historical accounts of Parsis, there are references to how the British found Parsis easy to deal with and even a bit like them in manner, education, even eccentricities. Later, the British came to see them as efficient at work, honest and reliable.

Arun Kejriwal, director of Kejriwal Research and Information Services, recalls a Parsi trying to buy a house in Mumbai some years back. The builder refused to sell the property unless part of the payment was made in cash. The Parsi withdrew the required sum from a bank and wrote down the date, the builder’s name and other details on the counterfoil. Later, when the income-tax department questioned him about the transaction, he explained the circumstances and produced the counterfoil in evidence. They readily believed him. “Given the goodwill the community enjoys, they accepted his word and let him off. Later, it was the builder who was questioned,” says Kejriwal.

Ratan Tata, Tata Group Cyrus S. Poonawalla, Poonawalla Group

A senior banker at a public sector bank says one thing has stood out in his dealings with Parsis: they are shrewd, they know how the game is played, and they are uncomfortable about pushing the boundaries. “I am not saying they don’t use the system,” he says, “but doing so goes against their grain and, as far as possible, they would rather not know of any sort of wrongdoing. They might hire somebody else to get their job done. You can call that being an ostrich, but it’s the truth.”

Says Benaifer Shroff, a senior office manager at a leading multinational firm, of her community’s “types”: “I think there are two types of Parsis—the really good ones and the really annoying ones. The really good Parsis will be honest to a fault, friends for life. The annoying ones will be out-and-out rogues. There are no grey areas with Parsis.” Generally, Parsis are honest, almost blunt; non-Parsis who have worked with them say that, even if you are the closest of friends with them, there’ll be a point that cannot be crossed. Most Parsis tend to be reserved and understated, generally happy with life; they maintain a healthy work-life balance. “It’s that thoda hai, thode ki zarurat hai attitude. Most Parsis have a laidback attitude, are happy with life, happy with what they have and manage to have a balanced life,” says Shroff.

They love to laugh at themselves, at life and at their own community. Kejriwal speaks of a Parsi classmate from Campion school in Bombay, who the boys would tease by calling him half-witted; he’d retort that he’s grateful he didn’t turn out witless, for his parents happened to be first cousins. The boy went on to become a top lawyer in the UK.

Shapoorji Pallonji Mistry, Shapoorji Pallonji Anu Aga, Thermax

Strangely, the older generation of Parsi entrepreneurs who set up business houses—the Tatas, Wadias and Godrejes—haven’t found enterprise flowering in the younger generations. Most young Parsis seem content with handling family-owned businesses, expanding them or changing them to suit the times, but rarely venturing to create new businesses. These days, young Parsis are keen to take up professions, like medicine, law, architecture and education.

There are a few exceptions, though, with the new generation showing more ambition. Boman Irani, 43, founder-chairman and managing director of the Rustomjee Group, a real estate firm, says he has benefited from his Parsi lineage. The company’s name—it’s named after his father—marks it out as a Parsi company, and people tend to trust and feel comfortable with it, he says. Irani believes it’s his responsibility to make sure that his customers and employees are well taken care of as long as he heads the business. He recalls an old gentleman reminding him at a Parsi conference that if a business was not conducted the Parsi way, it was not the right way.

One thing Parsis are not is clannish. “A Parsi will not hire another Parsi just because they belong to the same community. He will first weigh the advantages and disadvantages. This is unlike any other business community,” says a Mumbai-based headhunter. In the business sense, when it comes down to it, profit comes up trumps. They are known to be extremely stubborn. “It’s next to impossible to change the mind of a Parsi businessman who has made a decision, unless you present a compelling argument,” says Kejriwal.

As a community, Parsis are viewed to be quite open to change and technology, especially the newer generation. Architect Hafeez Contractor, who grew up with Sindhi and Marwari friends, speaks of this openness to change, “It is the people you meet in your transformative years that determine your approach to life, business and money. We’re no longer insulated and therefore will not necessarily reflect the characteristics of the community. We still draw from our heritage, but outside influences make a key difference.” Indeed. Given the diminishing population size—there are only a few hundred Parsis in Delhi, for instance—the circle of influence would seem to be small. However, Parsi influence in the business world still rules strong. For proof, look no further than the intense media attention around Cyrus P. Mistry, Ratan Tata’s chosen successor. He belongs to the Pallonji family, who are so reclusive, says an insider, that “you need a microscope to find out where they are”. Mistry’s track

Adi Godrej, Godrej Group

record is primarily in Shapoorji Pallonji’s construction business, which he heads. Now he has the chance to be a new-gen flag bearer for an old business community.

PATELS

The Rap Of Enterprise Patels have transformed their hardiness into appetite for risk

R.K. MISRA

Lords Of land

• Believed to be Kurmis from undivided Punjab, Patels have been progressive agriculturists and land-owners in Gujarat

• They were the first to try out cash crops like cotton and tobacco • Known to be hard-working and optimistic, with the guts to take business risks • Highly clannish and bound to tradition but pretty modern in their outlook on life • Great sense of pride in their community, its self-reliance • Great institution-builders, with a keen eye on making money work

***

‘P for P’ is a phrase heard often in Gujarat. First and foremost, a Patel will stand by another Patel, whatever the circumstances. “Patels who earn well make it a point to plough back some wealth to create facilities for the community and for society at large,” says Gordhanbhai Zadaphia, former home minister and a Patel, who broke away from chief minister Narendra Modi and is now one of the prime movers of Keshubhai Patel’s Gujarat Parivartan Party. Zadaphia, it might be said, had to join Keshubhai; they are both Patels, after all.

Of Patel cohesion, instances abound. In Mokasan village, near Kalol, Patels have set up a cooperative to fund youths keen on going to the US but lacking the finances. Loans, often for huge sums, are organised on no more surety than a verbal promise to return the money once the borrower has settled down. In Patel-dominated Unjha town of north Gujarat, the agricultural produce marketing yard has covered all residents of the town and tehsil under a group accident insurance scheme.

Amrita Patel, NDDB Odhavji Raghavji Patel, Orpat Group

How did one-third of the motels in the US come to be owned by Patidars, creating in the process the portmanteau coinage ‘Potel’ (a motel owned by a Patel)? As one who was part of the trade pointed out, the down payment was never a problem thanks to a network of relatives and community members. A place to stay came free and liquidity was never a problem. Additionally, there was a steady supply of helping hands. What more does a Patel need?

The dominant Patel stock has become the front face of Gujarat globally, raising both envy and ire. From politics to business, the list of prominent Patel names can take up reams of paper. “The Patidars are basically of farming stock. They became landowners under the rayatwari system of the Bombay Presidency. They were given land pattas and gradually acquired leadership positions as revenue collectors for the rulers. Thus the honorific Patel,” says Achyut Yagnik, founder secretary of SETU (Centre for Social Knowledge & Action), Ahmedabad, author of The Shaping of Modern Gujarat. “The Patels’ link with the soil makes them hard-working, confronting the vagaries of nature and having to migrate (in search of work as farm hands) has given them optimism and stomach for risk, their role in revenue-gathering has given them leadership qualities, their clannish moorings provide an essential safety belt.”

These factors have enabled the community to claw its way up in industry, trade, business or positions of importance. So many industry-specific initiatives in the state have come from the Patels: the diesel engine manufacturing units of Rajkot, the brass parts industry of Jamnagar, the ceramics industry of Morbi and the rest of Saurashtra. “Other than Agra, Rajkot was the only diesel engine manufacturing centre in India—since the sixties—and it was the result of Patel initiative,” says Vajubhai Mavani, a Patel who was president of the Rajkot Engineering Association for 20 years. “Today, there has been large-scale diversification into castings and automobile ancillaries. There would hardly be an automaker who does not source parts from here.”

In Surat—the business capital of the state—Patels have a fair share in the diamond cutting and polishing industry. Some of the entrepreneurship, much of the skilled labour and the muscle for handling competition come from the Patels of Bhavnagar and adjoining areas. The pharmaceuticals industry is another area into which Patels have made a recent foray: Zydus Cadila comes to mind.

Girish Patel, Paras Pharma Karsanbhai Patel, Nirma Group

The evolution of the Patels makes for an interesting case study. Land reforms introduced by Morarji Desai (then heading the Bombay state) may have made land-owners out of tenant tillers in Saurashtra, but the prosperous Patels of what is now central Gujarat had to part with much of their land. “This, coupled with repeated famines, saw the enterprising Patidars migrate to East Africa and later, in a double migration of sorts, to the UK, the US, the West,” says Yagnik.

Besides business acumen, the Patels are also known to be good institution-builders, especially of cooperatives.

There’s no dearth of Patel pioneers. Tribhovandas Patel of Anand, whom Sardar Patel had asked to organise milk cooperatives, later provided the rock-like backing that helped the late Verghese Kurien bring his dairy revolution to fruition, making India the biggest milk producer in the world.

What Tribhovandas was to Kurien, Indira Gandhi’s commerce minister Manubhai Shah was to V.G. Patel in entrepreneurship. A young economist, fresh from the US after his doctorate, this Patel with ancestral connections to Karamsad gave up a bright future to come back to a disillusioning short stint with the Planning Commission. Shah, quick to see potential, harnessed him to set up the first industrial estate promoted by a state-level public sector corporation, at Aji in Rajkot. Under him, industrial estates promoted by the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC) came up, along the stretch between Vapi and Ahmedabad, laying the foundation for industrialisation.

V.G. Patel, who later became the director of the Entrepreneurship Development Institute (EDI), Ahmedabad, and is now chairman of the Consumer Education and Research Centre (CERC), fondly recollects the early days. “We had industrial estates, we set up an investment corporation to finance projects but the entrepreneurs to take advantage of it all were missing. If nascent Gujarat had to grow industrially, we needed a steady supply of entrepreneurs. So we motivated a group of 45 and conducted an entrepreneurship programme in April 1970. With almost hundred per cent finance being made available, 37 of them turned entrepreneurs and the programme was on,” he says. Thirteen years on, in 1983, the EDI was set up as a national resource institution, with funding from idbi. The idea turned into a movement: in three decades, EDI has trained 2,000 trainers, who in turn have trained some 10,000 entrepreneurs. The movement has been taken to 25 countries.

Because of their close bonding and economic strength, the Patels have wielded decisive political power. They possess the capacity to tilt political fortunes in 80 of Gujarat’s 182 assembly constituencies. The state has had three Patel chief ministers—the late Babubhai Patel, the late Chimanbhai Patel, and Keshubhai Patel—and a host of Patel ministers. The community has a strong hold over cooperative banks, dairies and agricultural marketing ventures—in fact, over much of Gujarat’s strong network of cooperatives.

It is common knowledge that the Patidars had moved away from the Congress in Gujarat after they were ignored during the chief ministership of Madhavsinh Solanki, the author and implementer of the KHAM—Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi, Muslims—formula. This was in 1985, when the Congress bagged a record 148 of the 182 seats. Is it just a coincidence that the Congress has never won in Gujarat in the quarter century thereafter?

Let’s give the last word to Yagnik. “Remember, the clannish approach of the Patidars has helped fuel their growth,” he says. “Patidars are also a step ahead of others, enjoying the first-mover’s advantage even as they take their quota of falls in their stride.”

BOHRA MUSLIMS

Guns And Manners Bohras still excel at trading, but there’re stirrings of conflict within

PRAGYA SINGH

Ways Of The Bohras

• Close-knit Bohras are a close-knit Shia community in Gujarat

• Trading Usually merchants or engaged in self-owned businesses, relatively new to professions

• Impartial Don’t oppose governments in power—a self-preservative instinct that is now leading to isolation

• Educated They’re highly educated, women not discriminated against

• Reform Progressive elements want the priesthood of Bohras to be less interfering in everyday lives

***

“As my name suggests, my family has been traditionally engaged in the arms and ammunition business,” says Arif Bandukwala, who lives in Mumbai and is the managing partner of a packaging and printing unit, The Paper Print and Products. The founding partner is London-based NRI, ‘curry king’ Lord Gulam Noon, a cousin, who established the company in 1969. It clocked a turnover of Rs 25 crore last year, making it one of the bigger firms in an industry dominated by small-scale units. The only member of Bandukwala’s family still engaged in the family’s old arms and ammunition trade is his sister in Mumbai.

As a Bohra Muslim, Bandukwala is part of a small and tightly-knit community tracing its roots to western India—mostly Gujarat—since the 12th century, but which now has a global footprint. Gujarati-speaking and largely engaged in trading and merchant-oriented activities, with a culture that is an amalgam of Yemeni, Egyptian and Indian influence, the Bohras join Gujarat’s two other prominent mercantile communities—the Memons and Khojas—in boasting enormous success over the ages. In turn, the Bohras are further split into Dawoodis, Sulaimanis, Alavis and others.

Being educated, often erudite, and successful in trade, the Bohras have traditionally done better compared with other Muslims in India. The aura of prosperity about the community is fuelled by the handful of well-known, successful Bohra businessmen, such as the scientist Yusuf Hamied, whose father started the generic drugs company Cipla in the 1930s, and Habil Khorakiwala, who founded Wockhardt and merged it with his father’s chemical and pharmaceuticals firm in the 1960s. Wipro chairman Azim Premji is another famous Bohra.

Azim H. Premji, Chairman, Wipro Habil Khorakiwala, Founder, Wockhardt

“Right from the beginning, Bohra Muslims were engaged in business as well as agriculture, but the latter section adopted Sunni Islam; so there was a split in the Bohras,” explains Asghar Ali Engineer, the reformist writer and activist from the community, who leads the Progressive Dawoodi Bohra movement. After the split, the community took on a distinctly mercantile and urban character. “You will find Bohras engaged in all kinds of business, except those proscribed by Islam. There are no peculiar characteristics other than that wine, tobacco and the betel nut business are considered taboo. More often, Bohras are engaged in cloth, iron, glass-works as well as grain-trading,” Engineer adds.

With their metier being in trading, very few Bohras have ventured into manufacturing. “The new trend is for Bohras to join the services sector, like banking, mobile services, or the legal profession. I did work for a while for other companies but very soon decided to join my father’s company,” says Fardeen Bunglowala, creative director at Best Sellers, an embroidery works unit started by his father Shabbir

Bunglowala three decades ago. He is 26 and has two higher academic degrees, in commerce and fashion. “My role has been to modernise the business by introducing technology as also engaging with means of communication so as to boost exports,” Fardeen says.

In the Bohras’ own history lies further clues to their standing out from other Muslim communities. Being a small group of Shias, and surrounded, when among Muslims, by a much larger Sunni community, Bohras developed a strong sense of community consciousness. “Till recently, it was almost impossible to penetrate these societies. Many religious rites were secretive and totally closed to outsiders. To survive, they followed a route similar to that of Jews in Europe and America or Parsis in India. To preserve their distinct identity, marriage and social relations were confined to within the community. But business was encouraged, as a means of financial survival,” explains Juzar S. Bandukwala, a retired professor of physics living in Vadodara, who is now an activist for rights of Dalits, tribals, obcs and Muslims.

Arif Bandukwala, Paper Print & Products Asghar Ali Engineer, Writer, activist

Over the years, Bohras have taken to higher education, giving the community a further leg up. “We Bohras do not discriminate between boys and girls, both get the freedom to study as much as they want,” says Arif Bandukwala. All his relatives are graduates—some business management grads—and are in the legal and other professions. The new generation of Bohra businessmen is atypical, branching out of traditional trading to new professions, as well as manufacturing.

Yet, all may not be well within the community. Both Engineer and Juzar Bandukwala point to how success among the Bohras has come at a price. Domination by their religious leadership (Syedna) has led other Muslims to look askance at Bohras. This was largely due to the position taken by the clergy in the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat riots. The tendency of the religious leaders to hobnob with those in power ensures protection and breeds success, “yet it drives the educated away” from within the community, Juzar Bandukwala points out. “The Bohra priesthood’s closeness to Narendra Modi has been resented by most Bohras. It has also produced bitterness among other Muslims, which may hurt the Bohras in the long run,” he adds.

The Bohras and Khojas of Gujarat are like-minded Shia Ismailis, and are different from Memons, who are Sunnis. Engineer, however, is uncomfortable with some facets: “At times the language used by people of other religions to deride Muslims is used by Bohras against other Muslims. It’s ironic. Bohras are also a very closed group, and jealously guards identity. They are closed to inter-mixing and practise all rites separately from other Muslims—including separate mosques and burial grounds. In Gujarat, vested interests of the high priests have led them to lavish praise on Modi at the risk of alienating all others,” says he.

The story of the Bohras is that of a distinctive culture fuelling business success. But it comes at a high price for any modernising impulse—both Juzar Bandukwala and Engineer have been attacked several

times by different groups for being partial to bringing reform and progressive ideas into the Bohra fold. “Still, except in religion and cultural habits, the Bohras are the same, in every way, as other mercantile communities of India,” says Engineer. What lies unstated is a general fear that the Bohras are moving further towards isolation.

REDDYS

Always On The Reddy Rooted to the soil, Reddys bring the same earthiness to business

MADHAVI TATA

Steady Reddys

• Sons of the soil: Most of Reddy enterprise lies in land, mining, infrastructure and always, at least a minimal amount, of farming.

• Natural leaders: Confident to the point of being arrogant, a Reddy’s body language is never submissive

• Strong women: Whether they are in the family business or minding the home, Reddy women always play a part in decision-making

• Flashy, flamboyant: Reddys love to display their wealth in the form of flashy cars, huge mansions, exotic holidays and yes, also seriously lavish weddings

• Wonderful hosts: Reddys know how to make their guests feel like royalty. Their success in the hospitality sector is a natural corollary.

***

Tell a Reddy there’s a fresh enterprise brewing and chances are he’ll give you not just a patient ear, but also come back with an improvised business model in hand. You can take a Reddy out of industry and put him elsewhere but you can never take the business gene out of a Reddy. The community, which has a history of successful farming and ancestry harking back to the ruler or warrior class, has an affinity for ‘leadership’. It’s no surprise, therefore, that where there’s an infrastructure, construction, real estate, power, irrigation, hospitality, pharma, healthcare, diagnostics, education or IT project, there’s a Reddy.

Credit it to the fact that a Reddy rarely loses his rural-agricultural connect. Regardless of the position he may hold, he (or she) can lecture you endlessly on crops, rainfall and soil fertility. Across the spectrum, Reddys know their paddy from their corn. T. Subbirami Reddy, former MP and founder of Gayatri Group, sums it up best: “The Reddys imbibe their risk-taking nature from their agrarian backgrounds. Since most of them have witnessed windfall gains and losses in farming, they are not given to panic.”

Subbirami Reddy’s was among the first Reddy families from Nellore to enter the construction business—50 years back, with the Nagarjunasagar dam. The family’s business interests now span hotels, films, construction, power, highways, infrastructure, sugar and chemicals. Son Sandeep and son-in-law Sanjay, who hails from the other Reddy powerhouse, the GVK Group, are ably steering the capitalist ship ahead. “We are aggressive by nature and a dominating force both politically and agriculturally. As a natural offshoot, Reddys are successful business barons as well,” says the industrialist-politician, a tad boastful.

K. Anji Reddy, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories K. Anji Reddy, Dr Reddy’s Laboratories

Reddys have dominated Andhra politics for decades. The community has always seen a high number of MLAs and MPs since Independence, disproportionate to its numbers. This is because Reddys are perceived as ‘able’ administrators who can exercise power with flair. In the pre-Mandal era, almost the entire state cabinet would comprise Reddys, be it of Sanjeeva Reddy or of Kasu Brahmananda Reddy. “The Reddys have an ability to harmonise other communities and sustain them,” says Adala Murali Krishna Reddy, chairman of the MAK Group, whose verticals include irrigation projects, hotels, property and power. “Even though I left my village years back, I’d say I learnt the basic concepts of entrepreneurship like management, thrift, conservation and growth on the farm,” says the 58-year-old, extending the same tips now to his children.

The proximity of Nellore to Chennai had led many Reddys to explore industry in the erstwhile Madras presidency during the British rule. “Many Reddys in Nellore and Chittoor explored commercial exports like tobacco and micanite mining even way back in 1944,” says Satyanarayana Adapa, a professor of history at the Osmania University. “Studies reveal that during and after World War II, opportunities for investment in non-agricultural activities such as mining, transport and lift irrigation schemes were on the rise. Much of the surplus rural capital of dominant castes like Reddys flowed into these ventures.”

In the 1950s and ’60s, the Reddys made a foray as PWD (public works department) contractors in dams, canals, bridges, roads and even railways. And in the ’70s, when the government introduced public-private partnerships, they entered the manufacturing industry in a big way, taking baby steps into steel, electrical equipment, hotels, warehouses, detergents and TV sets. That changed after then prime minister Indira Gandhi introduced the Land Ceiling Act, and the Reddys, who had hitherto owned large tracts of land, began educating themselves aggressively. At the same time, they realised that agriculture alone could not secure their future and began scouting for fresh enterprise.

D. Nageshwar Reddy, Asian Inst of Gastroenterology D. Nageshwar Reddy, Asian Inst of Gastroenterology Education, indeed, became crucial to the community’s growth when the steady revenue from agriculture began dwindling, says M. Gautham Reddy, MD of KMC Constructions Ltd. Educated in Manchester, UK, Gautham is among the line of young Reddys who believe that it is not just community background alone but hard work and good education that make a difference. The KMC Group’s primary portfolio comprises roads, highways, bridges, airport runways and power. It has projects lined up in several states, mostly under NHAI, and even abroad in countries like Ethiopia. “The Reddys do have the knack of adapting easily to varied work environs which helps them in bagging several projects,” says Gautham Reddy.

One of their strongest traits is said to be the community’s liberal and people-oriented approach. “It is again to do with our agrarian roots,” emphasises Telugu Desam Party leader from Nellore, Somireddy Chandramohan Reddy. Somireddy, whose family is in the business of power projects besides agriculture, thinks the best part about Reddys is “they know how to get work done”. The solidity of the Reddy stock as big farmers, village headmen, landlords and village representatives creates an almost impeccable line of top-notch industrialists. Evidently, it’s not just their spending capacity but their organisational abilities as well which make Reddys what they are: confident businessmen.

Nellore’s proximity to Chennai had led the Reddys to explore industry in Madras presidency during the British rule.

A place in the sun Dr Prathap Reddy of the Apollo Group. (Photograph by Nilotpal Baruah)

And so, Dr Prathap C. Reddy of the Apollo Group, Rajeev Reddy of Country Club, Anji Reddy of Dr Reddy’s Laboratories or G.V.K. Reddy, industrialists of this community wear their capitalist tag proudly on their sleeve. The Kammas in Andhra Pradesh come from a similar background of farming and landowning class. “But somehow, they’ve not wielded as much power as we have,” says a Reddy hotelier who also runs a successful business in neighbouring Karnataka. An accepted fact about Reddys is that they manage to stay close to the corridors of power, irrespective of the party in power.

Smooth, informal networking is also something the Reddy is adept at. From a distance, this networking may appear a chaotic honeycomb but in fact there is order within the chaos. Standard Reddy sanghams apart, most top industrialists of the community stay in touch, exchanging market tips and earthy business advice. They may compete against each other, but industrialists of the community do not shy from extending a helping hand should a fellow Reddy be in trouble. They also draw reference points of knowledge from each other. A modest Reddy employee who has worked in a cement factory would in no time be picking up the tricks of the trade from his employer and use him as an inspiration to set up his own cement business. What’s more, he will even borrow the initial capital from him. “That’s because we

are an agricultural community which has transformed itself into a business community. Make no mistake. We are not a trader community,” explains Murali Krishna Reddy.

Varaprasad Reddy, Shanta Biotech Y.V. Reddy, Ex-RBI governor

The clannish behaviour reveals itself in the pattern of marriages, mostly within the community. Wealth goes around, multiplies, but stays within the wider Reddy family. The women in the Reddy community are powerhouses in their own right. This is evident right from the village level. The wife of a Reddy farmer knows everything about crops and their marketability. She takes equal part in decisions affecting the farm. And when there is a void caused by incompetence or death of the male, Reddy women take charge with elan. Satish Reddy, who runs the show at Dr Reddy’s Labs as MD and COO, has a successful businessperson in wife Deepthi Reddy. Deepthi runs the widely popular Wow! Hyderabad magazine, of which she is the managing editor.

And even as they temper passions to meet market conditions, the Reddys are not averse to trying out new ventures. The Telugu film industry, busier than any other in the country, might be dominated by the Kammas today, but it was the Reddys who cut their teeth on it first. Prior to Independence, some of them, like B. Nagi Reddy, ventured into movie-making. Nagi Reddy started Vijaya Productions in Chennai and went on to become a famous producer and studio owner.

For that matter, industrialist A. Mahesh Reddy’s company amr India Ltd may be primarily into contract mining, but that hasn’t stopped him from producing actor Nagarjuna’s latest release,Shirdi Sai, his first such foray. “In 1992, our company had a turnover of Rs 30 lakh. Today it stands at Rs 1,500 crore. Even today, I travel 25 days a month and work 15-16 hours a day,” says Mahesh Reddy proudly. The secret of the Reddy’s success, says the newbie film producer, is that he never loses his drive. “Nothing is readymade. Reddys gather all the ingredients and cook the dish of success themselves.” It shows in the aroma.

Marwaris refer to a commercial and industrial community originating from Marwar, an old state of

Jodhpur in Rajasthan. Immigrants from Rajasthan into Eastern India, particularly Bengal, established

their credibility in commercial enterprises and emerged as the leading merchants and traders. Their

friends and relatives, who joined them to help and open new firms, came to be known as Marwaris

irrespective of their original homes, since they were either associated with the Marwaris or

introduced by them. The credibility attached to the Marwari businessmen influenced other Rajasthani

traders and merchants to introduce themselves as Marwaris. In the social and trade parlance of

Calcutta and Dhaka of the British period all traders from North India passed for Marwaris. The

Marwari diaspora to Bengal seems to have begun from the 17th century or even earlier. The pure

Marwaris of Rajasthan belonged to several socio-religious groups, such as Agarwals, Maheshwaris,

Oswals, Khandeshwals and Porwals. During the Nawabi period the Oswals seem to have established

their dominance in Bengal trade and commerce. In some areas of trading, such as banking, grain,

cloth, salt, and moneylending, their presence was very large.

Ever since the time of akbar the Marwaris established their business houses outside Rajasthan,

particularly in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. It is known that some members of the Vaishya class first

came to Bengal in the train of the Mughal Rajput army. Some of them settled here permanently and

participated in local trade and moneylending. murshid quli khan's malguzar system provided for

securities from the revenue farmers, zamindars and taluqdars. Standing as jamin or security to

government for malguzar clients became a great business in the early 18th century and the Marwaris

were its principal beneficiaries. The jamini business reached its peak in the early phase of British

rule.

The landholders, revenue farmers and ijaradars looked to the Marwaris for standing as their jamins to

the government. Hajari Mull, engaged in revenue farming in almost all Bengal districts, was the most

important Marwari house in Murshidabad and Calcutta in the last two decades of the 18th century.

After the permanent settlement he also acquired extensive landed estates. Another great speculator

was Dulalchand Singh (alias Dulsing), a Porwal Marwari, who bought large zamindari estates in

Bengal districts. He lived in Dhaka where he established many markets. Many of his large estates in

Bakarganj, Patuakhali and Comilla districts were co-shared by the Khwajas of Dhaka. Subsequently

the Singh family entered jute trade.

It was banking and bank-related trade in which the Marwaris established their predominance. During

the Nawabi period the Marwaris monopolised the mint and currency business, which were in the

private sector. The famous house of jagat sheth, which had the monopoly of the mint and banking

sectors of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa and which played a crucial role in the politics of Murshidabad

Darbar, belonged to the Oswal group of the Marwaris. So were the great commercial and banking

houses of Gopal Das and Banarasi Das, who were also Oswal Marwaris. They mainly dealt in hundis

(bills of exchange) in long distance trade.

The three great nawabs of Bengal-Murshid Quli Khan, Shujauddin Khan and alivardi khan, depended

consistently on the Marwaris whenever they were in distress. The Marwaris were the main target of

the Maratha maraudars who raided Bengal several times during Alivardi's regime and it is estimated

that from them the Marathas squeezed above three crores of rupees. Nawab mir qasim sought

Marwari help in implementing his plan for rebuilding his army. Unable to get the expected help from

the Jagat Sheths, Mir Qasim captured two chiefs of the House and killed them, declaring them

responsible for the miseries of Bengal.

There was a massive migration of Marwaris in the 19th century and within four to five decades they

gained control over the whole economy of the region. The Marwaris had set up commercial firms in

the towns of East Bengal - Dhaka, Chittagong, Khulna, Naogaon, Mymensingh. They had established

a near complete domination over indigenous finance and trade. The advancing Marwaris pushed the

economic frontier of the hundi to areas where it had never operated-to Assam and to Arakan. In

Akyab they dominated indigenous finance and trade, overshadowing the Nattukottai Chettiars, a

monopoly made possible by the large Arakan trade with East Bengal. For instance, the large Marwari

firm of Lakshminarayan Rambilash, with headquarters in Akyab, had branches in Calcutta, Rangoon,

Khulna, Chittagong and Sandaway where they dealt in hundis and gave loans to traders and private

persons. Six great Marwari bankers and merchants at Barabazar, Calcutta, namely Tarachand

Ghanshyamdas, Bansilal Abirchand, Sadasuk Gambhirchand, Harsukhdas Balkissendas, Kothiwal

Daga and Ramkissen Bagri, dominated the indigenous money market. From Barabazar these great

Kothiwals financed the centres of Marwari banking and trade in East Bengal in Naogaon, Dhaka,

Chittagong, Mymensingh etc.

Most of the shopkeepers of Calcutta and other Bengal towns in the 19th century belonged to the

Shekhavati Agarwal group of Marwaris, who came from Jaipur. The opium and indigo trade in

Bengal was a British monopoly, but its main financiers were the Marwaris. dwarkanath tagore had

opened several indigo concerns with financial support from the Marwari houses of Sevaram Ramrikh

Das and Tarachand Ghansyam Das.

European and Marwari firms dominated the East Bengal jute trade with Calcutta as headquarters.

Dealers, peddlers and cultivators were the subordinate instruments of big Marwari firms that

financed them and collected their produce. For example, Nathuram Ramkishan established Messrs.

Ramkishandas Sivadajal in Calcutta in 1847. This firm dealt in jute, commission agency and rice and

opened agencies in other parts of Bengal during the jute season. By 1900, more than one half of the

jute balers of Calcutta were Marwaris; of the 74 balers on the rolls of the Jute Balers Association in

Calcutta 49 were Marwaris. Gulabchandji established another firm in Calcutta in the 1930s where a

flourishing business in banking, jute bailing and shipping was carried on. Several branches were

opened in Rangpur and Dinajpur. There were also independent jute traders, such as the Lohia, Nag,

Shethia, Tularam and Dugar families.

The exact number of Marwaris in Bengal districts and Calcutta is not known. It has been estimated

that their number never reached above 200 thousand at any stage of their presence in Bengal. Though

they belonged to the Hindu and Jain religions and though they had many castes among themselves,

socially they lived together as a community. Almost all the Jains who settled in Bengal were

shvetambar. Chief deities of the Hindu Marwaris are Ganesha and Laksmi. The social structure of the

Marwaris was quite simple and had grown along the concept of the extended family. At the centre of

the family was the father; he was the head of the family and controlled the family business. The

females of their society had very little freedom. Compared to other Hindu societies the females were

confined to their homes and lagged behind in all aspects of education. The Marwaris maintained the

traditional panchayat (council of elders) system that they brought with them from their native land.

The panchayat used to settle social and religious disputes and its decrees were binding on the part of

the members. Influence of the local culture on the Marwaris is also evident. Amongst their religious

ceremonies the most attractive and most wonderful ones are Holi, Diwali, Rakshi and Karbachut. The

Marwaris of Bengal were bi-lingual; amongst themselves they used the Marwari dialect, while with

people outside their community they used Bangla. All Marwaris loved a rich diet. Both the Hindus

and Jains were vegetarians.

In the early 20th century the Calcutta-based Marwari community was divided into two groups. One

was highly orthodox in religion and largely pro-British and anti-nationalist, and controlled by the

more traditional types of traders and agents (banians) engaged in the British firms. The other was

reformist in religion and often nationalist. GD Birla, founder of the great House of Birla, led the

nationalist group. This reformist group financially supported many Hindu reform movements. The

Arya Samaj movement, for example, is said to have been entirely supported by the Marwari House of

Ghanshyam Das.

The support of the Marwaris to the Congress is well known. MK Gandhi and the Nehrus, who

received donations and hospitality from them, are said to have influenced them to undertake

humanitarian and social welfare activities. Consequently, a series of Marwari-backed schools and

colleges were established in Calcutta and other towns in the 1920s and 1930s. The Marwari Relief

Society played a significant role in relief operations during the Great Famine of 1943. In the 1940s

the Marwaris of Calcutta set up a number of hospitals, vagrant homes and charity houses.

Numerically the conservative Marwaris were in the majority and they controlled the Marwari

Association and Marwari Chamber of Commerce, the two major institutions of the Marwari

community in Bengal. Even GD Birla, backed by the Congress and Hindu elite, was unable to get

elected as chairman of the Marwari Association in 1923. The Marwari nominee for the Central

Legislative Assembly from Calcutta was Keshoram Poddar, a British-backed conservative.

The dominance of the conservatives had one serious ill effect on the Hindu-Muslim relations. In the

1920s the conservative Marwari firms openly refused to maintain co-operative relations with the

Muslims. The Marwari shopkeepers refused to sell goods to Muslim buyers. Marwari landlords

refused to let their houses to Muslim tenants and Marwari traders replaced local Muslim dyers and

tailors and weavers by Hindu upcountrymen. Muslim bandsmen, coachmen and shahises were also

boycotted. In newspaper announcements it was urged that no good Marwari should keep Muslim

employees in their establishments or have any business transactions with them, on religious grounds.

Scholars believe that the Calcutta riot of 1926 was largely the outcome of such a communal outlook

of the Marwaris.

The depression of 1929-30 and Partition of India in 1947 caused an exodus of Marwaris from East

Bengal, but quite a substantial number of them stayed back and continued their business, mainly in

the cloth and jute trade. The communal riot of 1964 and the wars of 1965 and 1971 caused the

departure of the community from Bangladesh. At present there are only 700 Marwaris living in

Bangladesh; the Tularams of Narayanganj and Dugars of Dhaka are the most known.

[Prodip Chand Dugar]

What makes business communities special? The brave business communities went around the world in pursuit of ambition while the rest of us remained

in our caste ghettos

Mumbai’s Zaveri Bazaar is run largely by Gujarati traders

How did the Marwaris come to Calcutta? Krishna Kumar Birla, in his autobiography Brushes With History, gives the story: “The business community was confined to Rajasthan till the sixteenth century. As Akbar’s Commander-in-Chief Man Singh, raja of Amber, conquered and subjugated distant areas of the country, the business community went with him to regions outside its homeland. In course of time it spread throughout the country.” I had not realized this before reading Birla’s book. Man Singh was from Shekhawati, the same area the Birlas were from, and was appointed governor of Bengal in 1594, staying for a dozen years. This means the Marwaris (our slang for all Rajasthani Baniyas, whether Mewari, Marwari or Shekhawati) have been in Bengal for 400 years. Birla says the three main trading communities of north India are Agarwals, Oswals and Maheshwaris. The Maheshwaris, of which the Birlas are a part, are the smallest group. Oswals are Jains, and Murshidabad’s infamous Jagat Sheth, who financed and probably masterminded Clive’s conquest of Bengal in 1757, was an Oswal. Birla says the Maheshwaris were descended from Kshatriyas who “decided to turn Vaishya”. This claim of martial ancestry is a common thread that runs through mercantile communities, including the Khatri/Kshatriya of Punjab and the Lohana of Gujarat and Sindh. The slim book Agrawalon ki Utpatti (Origins of Agrawals) says that these Baniyas descended from the Kshatriya ancestry of Raja Agrasen. Whatever their origin, Marwaris fitted nicely into the fabric of Calcutta, because Bengalis don’t have mercantile castes. How did the Gujaratis come to Bombay? B.R. Ambedkar wrote about this in his lovely 1948 essay, Maharashtra As a Linguistic Province. It was written in response to a resolution passed by the Indian Merchants Chamber demanding that Bombay be made an independent state, rather than a part of a future Maharashtra. Ambedkar noted of the IMC meeting that “with the exception of

one Indian-Christian it was only attended by only Gujarati-speaking merchants and industrialists” (this should give pause to those who think Gujarati industrialists are right when they collectively endorse something or someone). Anyway, Ambedkar then tears into the Gujarati claim on Bombay by showing how they came to dominate the city in the first place. The fact is that the British imported Baniyas from Surat so that the new port of Bombay could take off (since Marathis don’t have mercantile castes either). The Gujaratis made demands of the British before they would agree, of which Ambedkar lists 10. They include: � “Land in South Bombay free of rent to build a house or warehouse” (now you know why Gujjus are all over Malabar Hill, Colaba and Nepean Sea Road). � “That no Englishman, Portuguese, or other Christian nor Muhammadan shall be permitted to live within their compound or offer to kill any living creature there.” � “That in case there falls out any difference or suit in law between him or his vakil or attorneys or the Banias of his caste, and any other persons remaining on the island, the Governor or Deputy Governor shall not suffer him or them to be publicly arrested dishonoured or carried to prison, without first giving him due notice of the cause…” � “That in case of war or any other danger which may succeed, he shall have a warehouse in the castle (today’s Fort area) to secure his goods, treasure, and family.” � The right to carry an umbrella (presumably this added respect to the Baniya’s aura). The Parsis of Surat demanded free land for their Tower of Silence, which they also got from Gerald Aungier, Bombay’s second governor, in 1672. So this is why the Gujaratis dominate south Bombay, and their merit is only one aspect of it. Ambedkar’s essay put paid to any hope the shameless Gujarati merchants had of controlling Bombay. How did the Memons come to South Africa? We know that while he was only 23, Mahatma Gandhi was trusted with their disputes by Gujarati Muslims in Natal, but what were they doing there? In his book The Memons, Mihir Bose recounts the following story: “An Indian trader in Mauritius, Sheth Abubakar Amad, thought of opening a shop in Natal. The English in Natal had then no idea of what Indian traders were capable of.” Soon they found out. Then “the story of his prosperity reached Porbandar, his native place. Other Memons consequently reached Natal. Bohras from Surat followed them. These traders needed accountants and Hindu accountants from Gujarat accompanied them.” The reason that Pakistan has an economy at all is not because of its Punjabis, whose merchant castes were Hindu and Sikh and all left, but its Gujaratis in Karachi, Memons, Khojas and Bohras. What makes our business communities special and different from the rest of us? One is of course that they are brave and went around the world in pursuit of ambition while the rest of us remained in our caste ghettos. In his book India’s New Capitalists: Caste, Business And Industry in a Modern Nation-State, Harish Damodaran writes: “The common thread through all these communities—Hindu, Parsi, or Muslim—is their rigid rules of marriage and commensality and conservative social values...” Commensality is a relationship where one side benefits and the other neither benefits nor loses. An example is the lending of capital by Baniyas to one another at almost no interest. It is quite different from the idea we have of the “kanjoos Marwari”.

PAISO LADHUM PATA TAAN

Secret of Sindhi's Business Sense

It is a natural human trait to think big to travel far in fantasy and reach for the stars. History is replate with instances where ordinary human beings, have risen to built empires, amass wealth and power beyond imagination. Sindhis have a special relationship to riches, a lure of zeroes so deep, that their heart goes boom upon hearing a lucrative proposal, their minds start racing at the mention of a good deal. Theirs is a strong deep rooted faith in the value of wealth. Something basic at the roots of a Sindhi culture is the belief that a good life begins at the wallet. There seems to be an indelible imprint on a Sindhi psyche, a sort of genetic programming to work hard and succeed. As the saying goes, “Paise Bina Prasad, Haroo Na De Hath Mein” , (you don't even get godly blessings without funds). A Sindhi believes in work hard play hard policy. That's the reason a Sindhi beggar is a social rarity, and a Sindhi wealth is a phenomenal fact to reckon with. What exactly is the secret of a Sindhi's success, the factors that make him get what he wants, in short what is the magic behind his millions?

one mantra that a Sindhi chants day `n' night. So its, “Paiso Kamayum Mahhat Saan” as against folk song that says, “Paiso Ladhum Pata Taan” . A typical Sindhi day starts early and goes till late into the night, day after day, week in week out, month to month, for years and years together, a Sindhi family preserves and literally slogs for its money. It is a common sight to encounter a Sindhi man or woman, traveling in hardships in rain or shine, just enough time for food and sleep. A ‘Dhun' or ‘Junoon' is how one can describe this hard struggle to reach somewhere, to achieve the goal and have the best of both the worlds.

Sindhis are well known to possess a business acumen, a set of principles around the business of earning money. One such piece of economic wisdom that seems to have worked wonders for Sindhis is the fact of “low margins with a high rolling”. Another strictly adhered rule is to have clean and honest exchanges without resorting to unethical shortcuts. By and large Sindhi businessmen maintain a friendly public relation enterprise; some one said, a Sindhi businessman scolds with a smile. This ever friendly style of doing business comes in good stead when the business is low, or competition is high; a Sindhi enterprise is preferred by most communities simply because of its largeheartedness coupled with a humble approach to business associates.

A Sindhi's adaptability to strange environment is by now a proverbial fact. A Sindhi has traveled to the length and breadth of the entire globe and commendably has been successful in all environments basically because he possesses the mysterious talent for integrating and adapting himself to any and every cultural situation. From China to Canada, from Gujarat to Gandhidham, east, west, north, south a Sindhi takes on the colours of any culture and makes them his own, effortlessly, beautifully. This important psychic trait of adaptability has made a Sindhi a versatile and global citizen, at ease with language and dealings of most major societies all over the

An underlying ambition of a Sindhi makes him go and explore the moolah wherever it happens to be available. Traditionally, a Sindhwarki made far flying journeys to distant and difficult corners of the earth, with only a small

Daryashah Uderolal. His age old greeting, “Jhulelal, Beda Paar”, springs from a Sindhi's journeys across seven continents. This ambition naturally makes him a willing taker of risks, a sort of dare devil who believes in the motto of ‘no risk, no gain'. In addition to the ambitious adventurer, a Sindhi businessman is also blessed with a far sightedness, which comes in good stead in pioneering new far flung projects that seem to bear little hope from the current moment's point of view. But a true Sindhi player can mysteriously smell future gains much more accurately than any of the other business community. This blessing, or talent or genius to see fruits where other can see a sapling, needs to be appreciated and valued. As Dr. Moti Prakash put it, “Khak Mein Son Banaina Wara Sindhi” (the Sindhis who can create gold from dust).

Today, commendably, Sindhis are truly a world community, with a Sindhi present in over 200 countries all over

the globe. This fact alone makes the Sindhi community available to modern, progressive and free thinking life style. With contacts in high places of business and government, even an ordinary Sindhi back home stands a good chance to be picked up for a right opportunity and offered an international life style. Since Sindhis have a ery clear cut community fellow feeling, a Sindhi would always go out of his way to lend a helping hand for

another Sindhi, thereby sailing together, hand in hand. From marrying a Mangol in Malaysia to attending a Church in London to playing Garba in Gujarat and dancing in Durga Puja in Bengal, a Sindhi has been there, done that.

And of course, a true Sindhi businessman knows no limits to expansion and growth. A Sindhi never says die, the sky is too close for him, and so a Sindhi empire, once created goes on and on to create similar, bigger and better

Thus, the secret of a successful Sindhi business venture is not so mysterious, or it is not as if a Sindhi is more or less fortunate with lady luck hovering around him all the time; its all these above facts that make a Sindhi business tycoon an admired, respectable and welcomed wherever he happens to walk by. That is the mystery and magic of Sindhi money.

A Sindhi proverb says, “Jo Vanje Jaave, So Phir Na Aave, Je Aave, Ta Puta Pota Khave”.