The Polyester Prince (3 page)
A few times a week, a turboprop flies into the simple airstrip at Keshod, unloading people from Bombay or the Gujarati diaspora overseas coming to visit their relatives and make offerings to family gods at local temples. In the town itself, clusters of 1940s Ford Mercury taxis wait for groups of passengers or for hire at weddings. The railway network was built to connect each of the several former principalities of Kathiawar to the outside world rather than with each other. Once you are in Kathiawar, all now part of Gujarat state, travelling between towns often means one or more changes of line and extensive doglegs and backtracking in the journey. The last steam engine on regular service in India, apart from scenic mountain railways, puffed between Junagadh and the Gir sanctuary for the last Asiatic lions until 1996.
The land itself is dry, open and stony. The monsoon rains quickly run off down the short rivers and nuilahs that radiate from the central rocky hinterland out to the sea. The roads are lined with stunted pipul (fig) trees, and the stony fields are fenced with straggling rows of cactus. The standard building material is a porous dun-coloured stone cut by saws into ready-made blocks from pits near the seashore. There are few of the modern ferro-cement extravagances built by the newly rich, hardly any of the industrial plants and their residential ‘colonies’ seen extending out into farrnland in other Indian regions, and only a few private cars.
But if the landscape is monotonous, Kathiawar’s people compensate for it with riotous colour where they can. The women drape themselves with cotton scarves tie-dyed in red and orange. The local scooter-taxi is the Enfield motorcycle grafted to a flat tray resting on two wheels at the back, with the handlebars decked with coloured lights, electric horns and whirling windmills. The homes of wealthy merchants are decorated with mouldings of swans, peacocks, flamingos, parrots, elephants, lions and tigers. Massive double doors, twelve-panelled, with heavy iron studs, open tantalisingly on to huge inner courtyards.
A blood-drenched history and complicated mythology are attached to the landmarks and constructions of Kathiawar. On the coast to its west, at Dwarka, is the place where Lord Krishna died. To the south, the temple of the moon at Somnath is a centre for Hindu pilgrims from all over India. In the steep Girnar hills above the city of junagadh, long staircases take pilgrims to Jain temples dating back to the 3rd century BC.
Looming over Junagadh city, the fortified rock-citadel of Uparkot has inscriptions and cave-sculptures from the time of the 3rd century BC ruler Ashoka. The city was an important centre for Hindu rulers of Gujarat in the first millennium. Then, starting with the Afghan warlord Mahmud of Ghazni, who invaded in 1024 AD and pillaged Somnath, Junagadh suffered four centuries of sackings. Mughal rule gave it some stability with Muslim rulers controlling its largely Hindu population. Both its rulers and its people were passive onlookers in the contest for India’s trade among the English, Dutch and Portuguese, whose galleons fought vicious battles off the Gujarat coast. A five-metre long cannon broods over the town from the ramparts, a relic of an unsuccessful attack on the Portuguese trading post at Dlu, on the coast southeast of Junagadh, by the fleet of Sultan Sulaiman the Magnificent of Turkey in the 15th century At night, seen from the coastline at the south of Junagadh, processions of navigation lights travel left and right along the horizon. The seaborne traffic between the west coast of India and the Arabian ports goes on as it has for millennia, ever more intense.
Gujarat was the trading hub of ancient India, where Indian cottons and silks were traded to Arabs and later the first English East India Company in return for silver, gold, incense and coffee from the Red Sea port of Mocca. Up until the early 15th century, Chinese junks had also come to western India. Later India and India-based European traders became the trade intermediaries between the Arab and Chinese spheres. The Gujaratis were prominent in this pre-colonial Indian Ocean trading network, with the wealth of India in its cloths, indigo, opium and spices merchandise.
The small ports of Kathiawar took part in this trade. Dlu handled much of Gujarat’s trade with Aden in the west and Malacca in the cast. Gold, silver, quicksilver, vermilion, copper and woollen cloth would be exchanged for Indian gold and silver embroideries and brocades and for cotton muslins of a fineness expressed by trade terms such as abrawan (running water), baft hava (woven air) or shab-nam (evening dew).
Later of course the East India Company grabbed its monopolies in opium, tea, indigo and spices in a three-way trade equation between China, India and Europe, topped up later by the British Empire with gold bullion from Britain’s new colonies in South Africa and Australia at the southern corners of the Indian Ocean. Indian entrepreneurs-in Calcutta the Marwari traders and moneylenders originally from Raiasthan, in Bombay the Parsis (Zoroastrians originally from Persia)-began moving into large-scale industrial production late in the 19th century
Smaller traders also took advantage of Pax Britannica by taking steamer passages to all corners of the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia-no passports were needed-and opening small stores and service stations. Most were from Gujarat; a large proportion of these from Kathiawar. Two of the biggest commercial families in Uganda, the Mehtas and the Madwhals, came from Porbander, and the thriving Chandarlas of Kenya came from Jamnagar. Until 1938, the free port of Aden was part of the Bombay administration. The East African shilling, the currency of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade, was virtually pegged to the Indian rupee in value.
The Guiaratis were stingy with their customers and stingy with themselves. Bhaskar Bhattarcharya, a television broadcaster in New Delhi, spent his childhood years in Uganda where his father was a British colonial official. The epicurean ways of the Bhattarcharyas from Bengal contrasted sharply with those of the Patels or Shahs from Gujarat. ‘When we first arrived, the women took my mother aside and said: this is the way you do things,’ he remembers. ‘If you were invited for dinner, you got a couple of vegetable dishes and rice. My parents liked to splash out, and serve meat and fish to their guests. Of course, by the time we left, the Guiarati peon in my father’s office had probably saved more than he had.’
The wealth was the result of rigorous saving, abstemious living, and endless hours of work by unpaid family members-a migrant’s success story in many parts of the world. In East Africa, it created a resentment that led to the expulsion of the Indian traders and appropriation of their assets after the colonies became independent in the 1960s. The effect was to fling the Gujarati diaspora worldwide, to start the process of capital accumulation again.
Among the Gujaratis, the people of Kathiawar are renowned for their exuberance of speech, inventiveness and commercial drive. ‘This is a place of have-nots,’ notes Shecia Bhatt, a former editor of the magazine India Today’s Gujarati-language edition. ‘It is a barren land, but out of stone they somehow draw out water. The people are so colourful because the landscape is so colourless. They fill their heads with colour. Amongst Gujaratis, the best language is among Kathiawaris: so many words. Even the trading class will have extraordinary expressions. Kathiawari traders have more vibrant terminology than other traders. They were the first to go out of India for better prospects. Adventure is second nature to them. They have less hypocrisy. All of the other business communities affect modesty to the point of hypocrisy. Dhirubhai Ambani is part of that culture.’
In one sense, Ambani was born to be a trader, as his family belongs to a Bania caste, a section of the Vaisya category (varna) in the traditional Hindu social order whose roles are those of merchants and bankers. This instantly provided a whole network of relationships, a community and social expectations that made commerce-taking a profit from buying and selling in markets, the accumulation of capital-an entirely natural and honourable lifetime’s occupation.
Although socially below the Brahmins (priests and scholars) or the Kshatriya (warriors and landowners) and rarely part of aristocratic clites, the Vaisya castes came to exercise enormous power across India. They marshalled huge amounts of capital, which funded the campaigns of maharajas and nawabs and at times the British trade and military expansion when the budget from London ran short of operational needs. Centuries before the modern banking system, Vaisya shroffs or bankers were the conduits of a highly rnonetised Indian economy, rernitting vast sums around India at short notice through a sophisticated trust system based on hundi (promissory notes).
The commercial instincts of Gujarat’s Vaisya were encouraged by a convenient interpretation of Hinduism preached by the holy man Vallabhacharya in his wanderings around the region early in the 16th century Another widely followed religious school known as Shaivism (from the god of creativity and destruction, Shiva) had preached that the world was unreal and an impersonal abstract essence was the absolute reality and truth. The Jain and Buddhist religions, which had sprung from Hinduism, also preached privation, renunciation and destruction of the self. Vallabhacharya saw a personal god who created and sustained life, for whom living life to the full was a form of devotion.
His school became known as Vaishnavism, as the focus of devotion was the god Vishnu’s playful avatar (incarnation) Krishna, perhaps the most widely adored and human face of the divine among Hindus.
In his classic text on the Vaishnavas of Gujarat, the scholar N. A. Thoothi pointed out that this naturally appealed to the people of a land richly endowed with opportunity like the central parts of Gujarat. It was a philosophy that justified their way of life and gave a divine purpose to their roles as providers and family members. It also fitted the rising social status of the Banias in Gujarat, overriding the formal varna hierarchy.
As Vaishnavism grows, the Vamas decline. We have noticed, for example, how the Vanias [Banias] have reached a social status as high as that of the Brahmins themselves.
This upsetting of the balance of the Varnas has been greatly due to economic causes. The merchant and the financier and the capitalist have, by sheer force of wealth and power, for a while become dictators over all, even over the priestly class.
A justification of their way of living, a theory of life and a pathway suited and helpful to the living of a life engrossed in work and duty as a man, husband, father, citizen and so on, a hope that such a mode of life as they live is acceptable to the highest deity-the Gujaratis naturally sought for all these.
Ambani’s particular caste is called the Modh Bania, from their original home in the town of Modasa north of Ahmedabad before a migration many centuries ago to Saurashstra.
The Modh are one of three Bania castes in this part of Gujarat, who might eat meals together but who would each marry within their own caste. They are strict vegetarians, and only the men take alcohol. Their practice of Hinduism follows the Vaishnavite path.
But the main object of their pilgrimages, on marriage or the start of a new business venture, is a black-faced idol with a diamond in his chin located in a temple at Nathdwara, a small town in the barren hills behind the lake city of Udaipur in Rajastban.
This idol represents Srinath, an avatar or incarnation of Lord Krishna, and was brought to Nathdwara from Mathura (Krishna’s birthplace) by a holy man to escape the depredations of the fierce anti-Hindu Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. For reasons that are not clear, Srinath has become the familiar god of the Modh and other Banias. Portraits based on the Nathdwara idol are often seen in the offices of Bania businessmen.
In later years, Ambani and his family made frequent visits to the temple of Srinath, flying into Udaipur airport in his company’s executive jet and driving straight up to Nathdwara.
In 1994, Ambani built a large ashrarn (pilgrim’s rest-house) in Nathdwara for the use of visitors. The three-storey building, faced in a pink granite, is dedicated to the memory of his parents.
If the Modh Bania practise piety in the temple, and abstemious ways in their homes, they are known as fiercely competitive and canny traders in the marketplace, with no cornpunctions about taking advantage of opportunities for profit. A saying in Gujarat goes: ‘Kapale hojo kadh, pan angane na hojo Modh’-rneaning: ‘It is better to have a leucoderrna [a disfiguring skin pigment disorder] on your forehead than a Modh as guest in your house.’
Like other Bania castes of the region, the Modh Bania looked far beyond their immediate patch. For centuries it has been a custom for young men to make trading voyages to Arabian ports, building up personal capital over nine or ten years hard work and modest living before returning to marry and take over the family business. Sons inherited family property in equal proportions, with the oldest son assuming the authority of family head.
But all this was a nebulous heritage for Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani, born on 28 December 1932. His home-town was Chorwad, literally meaning ‘Settlement of Thieves’ though no one seems to remark on that. It is set a mile or so back from the flat Arabian Sea coastline where the Nawab had a two-storey summer palace built of the dun-coloured stone quarried from pits nearby. The railway from junagadh bypassed the town to the cast, looping towards the old port of Veraval and Somnath.
His father, Hirachand Ambani, seems to have been a diffident trader when he tried his hand at petty conunerce, as a wholesaler in ghee (clarified butter, a cooking medium in India). He is recalled by many acquaintances as a ‘man of principle’-meaning perhaps that he was too good-willed to be good at making money. He is better remembered as a village schoolmaster in the administration of the Nawab of Junagadh. From 1934-36, Arnbani senior was headmaster of the Chorwad primary school, whose classrooms with their battered furniture remain little changed around a tree-lined yard across the road from the town’s bus stand.
The industrialist and parliamentarian Viren Shah, whose family also comes from Chorwad, remembers Ambani senior as a stocky man with a dark-brown skin, normally dressed in a white turban, long coat and dhoti (a piece of cloth draped into a rough pantaloon). The village schoolmaster was private tutor for several years for another member of the same family, Jayan Shah, who remembers him as a good teacher and ‘very strict’.