Family, Caste, and Beyond: the Business History of Salt Merchants in Bengal, C

Chapter 4 Family, Caste, and Beyond: the Business History of Salt Merchants in Bengal, c. 1780–1840

Sayako Kanda

During the early decades of the period under the English East India Company (henceforth, the Company) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centu- ries, newly wealthy families in Calcutta formed a new indigenous elite class, known as the bhadralok. Many of them first made their fortunes by acting as agents [banians] of the British and other foreign merchants and later became large landholders [zamindars]. Partnership between indigenous and foreign merchants characterized this period of flourishing commerce and vigorous entrepreneurship. The business ventures of Dwarkanath Tagore, Motilal Seal (Sil), Ramdulal De, and Rustomjee Cawasjee, a Parsi, deserve special mention (Sinha 1984, 118–121). Moreover, many of the bhadralok families were engaged in the salt business in various ways during the early decades of Company rule. Notable among them were the Nandys (the Kasimbazar raj), the Tagores, the Ghosals, the Motilals of Bowbazar, the Mitras of Bagbazar, and the Malliks of Barabazar. The formation of new elites in Calcutta and their investment in salt during the early decades of Company rule were thus closely related. The story of the Singhas, who ap- pear in Sunil Gangopadhyay’s award-winning novel Those Days, was typical of the wealthy bhadralok families that settled in Calcutta, succeeded in the salt business, and finally became a zamindar family (Gangopadhyay 1981–1982). Despite such examples of prominent commercial successes among Bengali merchants in Calcutta, their ways of managing businesses have not been fully understood, except for the detailed examination of the Nandys (Nandy 1978) and the Tagores (Kling 1976). Research on up-country [mofussil] merchants is extremely limited, although their dynamic activities in the eighteenth century have been examined in detail by several scholars since the publication of C.A. Bayly’s (1983) pioneering work, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars.1 It can be said that a wide gap exists in business history studies between the micro-level anal- yses of Calcutta-based large families focusing on the early nineteenth century

1 For instance, Chatterjee (1996), Datta (2000), and Mukherjee (2013).

Family, Caste, and Beyond 105 and the macro-level studies on collective mercantile activities in eighteenth- century mofussil Bengal. One of the major problems in carrying out research on business history in Bengal is the lack of and poor access to primary sources, such as account books and other internal company documents. This problem also applies to India in general, as many business historians lament (Tripathi 2004, 6–7). Under such data availability constraints, scholars have nonetheless gathered as many documents as possible to conduct research.2 This chapter tries to overcome this problem by using the Company’s papers on its salt monopoly and the court papers preserved in the Calcutta High Court, which are full of information about indigenous merchants and their family businesses.3 Using these documents, it reconstructs their dynamic activities collectively and compiles a business history of Bengali salt merchants. The research framework of the business history of Bengal presents a problem. Because by the mid-nineteenth century Bengalis had withdrawn from commercial, banking, and entrepreneurial activities and moved into land- holding, and simultaneously the Marwaris who had migrated from Rajasthan began to dominate trade and banking in Bengal, scholarly attention to any kind of business activities by Bengalis withered away. Some have explained their withdrawal in terms of behavior such as extravagance and unproductive spending that made them unfit for business, mainly in comparison with the frugal Marwaris and other “professional” successful mercantile communities. Others blamed their withdrawal on the close ties with the British (Sinha 1984, 93–111, 124–125). In contrast, by examining how the Bengali family firms managed their businesses and other operations, this chapter sees their withdrawal as a practical decision by the Bengali families to save their families from total ruin during a changeable period of economic, social, and political transition. It also fo- cuses on the contrasting fates of the Calcutta-settled merchant families and the mofussil families in the mid-1820s and 1830s and shows that the emergence of the latter in the market was one factor that influenced the decision-making of Calcutta families. Whereas most of the wealthy families in Calcutta men- tioned above belonged either to high castes (Brahmans and Kayasthas) or to

2 For instance, Timberg (1978), to reveal the activities of the Marwaris, has examined the his- tories of families, jatis [social groups], and firms; the autobiographies and biographies of businessmen; and various other pieces of information on families, communities, and firms (Kudaisya 2011, xii–xiv). Bayly also wrote a business history of North Indian merchants using various types of written and oral documents (1992, 369–426). 3 Court papers have been effectively used to examine mercantile activities. For example, Smith (2006).