India has often confounded social scientists with extreme contrasts in many facets of its functioning and yet gives the impression of a society that is not just a functioning entity but one that appears to be making progress as well. Images of poverty existing cheek by jowl with opulence (shrunken, shrivelled old man seeking alms beside a Rolls Royce on the street) are, of course, the stuff of BBC and other Western media documentaries on India.

But Indian industry and business presents a far subtler amalgam of this blend of tradition and modernity. It is home to the most sophisticated crude petroleum refinery and can also lay claim to extracting edible oil from seeds crushed in old-fashioned chakkis running on belt-driven motors.

Is it possible then for Indian businessmen to simultaneously present a modern scientific approach to the management of their businesses and yet remain rooted strongly to their old-fashioned caste identities? If so, does it also translate into incumbent members of a particular caste lending a helping hand to a budding entrepreneur in securing a better foothold in whatever he sets out to do because they both belong to the same caste? More specifically, do caste affiliations help in networking among business associates in much the same way as affiliation to Doon School and St. Stephens is thought to contribute to success in one’s career and business?

While these are no doubt important questions, Harish Damodaran has steered clear of any attempt at answering them. He has, of course, hinted at such possibilities while recounting the growth of the traditional business communities in the decades immediately before and the later years of Independent India. For instance, he has described how communities engaged in traditional money lending and financing agriculture, could effortlessly make the transition to manufacturing thanks to the vast network of relatives and other members of the same community making up the back-end of a chain link of financing arrangement starting from crop loans to farmers to providing post-shipment credit to British merchant exporters in the pre-Independence era. Such linkages provided a natural institutional arrangement for sourcing raw material and other essential supplies when manufacturing units were set up in the cities.

Damodaran has confined himself to chronicling the caste origins of the innumerable business families that dot India’s industrial landscape. For instance, he has documented in great detail, the emergence of communities from the South who have achieved significant success in industry. The Kammas, Reddys and Rajus of present-day Andhra Pradesh is one such. Then, there are the Gounders and Naidus of Kongunadu or what is now West/North-West Tamil Nadu. As indeed, are the achievements of the Nadars and Ezhavas of the deep South or the Marathas and the Patidars of Gujarat which too have been chronicled.

Barring a few exceptions of an inspirational business idea leading to fame and fortune, the seed capital for the initial industrial foray came from agricultural surpluses or profits from executing public works contracts. That sets the tone for the author to reflect on an odd feature of entrepreneurship, namely, the absence of a significant presence of the Northern farming community. They were no less successful in generating agricultural surpluses compared to their counterparts in the South or the West. Indeed, some might say, they were far more successful, with greater natural endowments. The success of the Green Revolution in the late 1960s and 1970s owed a great deal to the efforts put in by the Jat farming community in Punjab, Haryana and Western UP. Yet, they have not been able to convert their agricultural surpluses into meaningful contribution to industrial investments.

The author advances the proposition that this, perhaps, had something to do with the stranglehold that the traditional merchant communities exercised on trade and commerce in the region. They were in a better position to create backward linkages with manufacture, marginalising thereby the tentative efforts of rich landlords with agricultural surpluses, in industry. There were, perhaps, other socio-cultural factors that might have been at work, he avers.

The idea of ‘caste’ has elicited strong reactions among the public. Some view it as an obnoxious feature of Hinduism, especially given its associated feature of classification of ‘dalits’ as casteless, implying that they are beneath even the dignity of being accorded a caste label. On the other hand, there are those who credit it with maintaining a modicum of cohesion in a society that is already sharply divided along religious fault lines.

If sub-religious (caste) affiliations are so strong as to dilute the core affiliations based on religion, it surely must help moderate fears among religious minorities of domination by a monolithic religious majority, as the argument goes. Whatever be the truth, this much can be said. Harish Damodaran’s efforts at chronicling the caste affiliations of present day Indian entrepreneurs is a praiseworthy exercise extending, as it does, the scope of subaltern studies (the broad area of research that focuses not on kings and nobles but on the masses) in Indian history.

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