Book Extract | The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community

Salil Tripathi The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community Aleph Book Company, New Delhi, 2024. Hb. Pp. 744 Rs.1499

Gujaratis are an uncommonly industrious and resourceful people. In India alone, there are some 55 million people who consider Gujarati to be their mother tongue, and possibly 6 million more of them abroad, on every continent, if not in every country. They are known for their entrepreneurial spirit, and their love of business and the profitable deal. After all, paiso bole chhe—money talks. No wonder then, that some of India’s greatest industrial houses—Tata, Reliance, Wipro, and scores of others—owe their existence to brilliant Gujarati businessmen. Beyond business, Gujaratis have made their mark in politics (Mahatma Gandhi was Gujarati as was Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel; there have also been two Gujarati prime ministers, Morarji Desai and Narendra Modi— three, if Rajiv Gandhi, whose father was Gujarati, is counted), science, culture, cricket, and many other fields of endeavour. Gujaratis are renowned for their delicious vegetarian snacks (often mispronounced as ‘snakes’), stringent dietary restrictions, and love for the garba, natak nights, and sugam sangeet.

But beyond these stereotypical representations of the community, who are the Gujaratis, really? Where do they come from? Why are they the way they are? No study of the Gujarati people has yet attempted to answer all these questions and more. Until now. In The Gujaratis, through wideranging scholarship, original research, and a lifetime of observing the community he was born into, and is proud of belonging to, distinguished journalist and writer Salil Tripathi crafts an engrossing account of the community.

From the holy town of Somnath, steeped in incense and distorted histories, to the high-octane corporate boardrooms of Mumbai, down the bustling avenue of Hovenierstraat, the heart of Belgium’s diamond trade, to lonely American highways dotted with Patel-owned motels, Tripathi dissects the Gujarati presence in India and across the world and observes the strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies of the community with acuity and wit. We learn about asmita, the essence of being Gujarati, and understand what it means to be ‘Gujarati’ as the author traces the epic story of his people through centuries of social, political, and cultural upheavals.

Salil Tripathi was born in the city once known as Bombay and studied at New Era School and Sydenham College, and later, at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in the United States. He is an award-winning journalist and has written three works of non-fiction, including The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy. He has been a foreign correspondent in Southeast Asia, and a human rights researcher in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. He chaired PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee and is now a member of its board. He is also on the panel of the Vaclav Havel Center Disturbing the Peace Award. He lives in New York.

The Gujaratis is a long overdue book. Salil Tripathi has spent a few years writing it. It has involved tremendous research, verification of information gathered, and of course, putting it together in this doorstopper of a valuable account of a valuable community. To put it in perspective: the Gujaratis within India and the diaspora are approximately 61 million which is more than the population of Italy (approx. 59 million +) and nudging close to that of the United Kingdom (approx. 69 million +).

The following book excerpt has been taken with permission from the publishers.

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MONEY ISN’T EVERYTHING, BUT IT HELPS

Money is important to our lives but it does not consume us. Money acts as a spur, but its absence does not cause unhappiness. Paisa e hath no mel chhe (money is the dirt on our palms), goes one saying. You have to get rid of it and make it work.

Gujarati is the language of commerce. The lingua franca of the premier stock exchanges of both India and Pakistan—Mumbai and Karachi—is Gujarati. Four of the ten richest Indians on Forbes list of wealthy Indians at the time this book was being written were Gujarati. The highest-ranked Indian is the Gujarati tycoon, Mukesh Ambani, at $116 billion, ranked ninth in the global list. At $84 billion, Gautam Adani is seventeenth. Eleven of the top forty Indian billionaires are Gujarati, and out of the 100 richest, there are 24 Gujaratis. Coincidentally, the currency notes of India and Pakistan have portraits of Gujarati men, the Hindu Bania Mohandas Gandhi on one side and the Khoja Muslim Mohammed Ali Jinnah on the other. Paradoxically, even as communalism has penetrated deeply in Gujarat, we feel a peculiar pride in the fact that Pakistan’s founder was a Gujarati. A popular video of Sairam Dave’s assertive poem, ‘Hun Gujarati (I am a Gujarati)’, notes how Gujarat has ‘gifted’ two nations with their founding fathers. Conflicting ideas coexist easily in our minds. Many of us say we hate Pakistan, and there is pride in Jinnah being Gujarati.
And yet, the dominant politics in Gujarat today abhors both Gandhi and Jinnah. Nationalist-minded Gujaratis today (like nationalist-minded Indians) hate Jinnah for breaking up India, and hate Gandhi for enabling the break-up.

Hospitable yet calculating, mercantile and pragmatic, outwardly pious and yet tolerating violence, practical and transactional, cheerful and constantly looking out for opportunities to benefit from, we live at ease with our contradictions. Landlords love us as tenants because we pay rent on time, but sales managers cringe when they have Gujarati buyers because even after the deal is struck and we are about to pay, we might try to get an additional discount.

We understand virtue in piety but we also know the virtue in selfishness. Zakia Soman is a social activist who has led movements for Muslim women’s rights across India, including opposing the triple talaq, and for access for women to the dargah at Haji Ali in Mumbai. She had worked with the Muslim women in the relief camps in Ahmedabad after the 2002 pogrom, and seeing their courage convinced her to tackle other abuses. ‘Muslim voices in India are by definition male and patriarchal; they are conservative and feminist views are ignored. Our fight was not with Islam; it was with the clergy,’ she told me one afternoon at her well-appointed home in Ahmedabad. She recalled her Hindu friends asking her why she spent so much time fighting for the rights of Muslim women. She herself had not suffered from want, nor were her rights at risk, were they? Why would she bother?

They need help, Soman told them. ‘Yes, yes, we understand that, but what do you get in return,’ one of them asked her innocently. Soman’s experience is not unique. In 2018 I travelled from Ahmedabad to Surendranagar with Mittal Patel, who works for the rights of communities India neglects and criminalizes as ‘nomadic’ and ‘denotified’. As we reached shanty towns along Gujarat’s highways, within moments men and women circled around her, telling her their tales of woe. She often filmed those interactions and uploaded them to social media, forcing district officials to act promptly and issue identification papers or grant food rations.
Patel recalled some of her wealthy friends asking her, ‘Ben (sister), you are doing all this for these people. Pan ema tamne sho faaydo. What do you get out of it?’

She kept shaking her head as she spoke.

The prospect of faaydo—call it gain, profit, benefit—is what makes us get out of bed every morning. We haggle over prices not only because we want to spend less and get more, but because we like that sport; we want to understand the true worth of whatever it is that we are buying. Radhecka Roy, a market researcher based in Singapore, who observes cultures and has studied Gujarati attitudes, told me: ‘They size up their rival and try to figure out what he really wants, offering him the deal that he can live with, while making sure they spend less.’ There is no loss of face in a compromise because getting ‘something’ is better than getting ‘nothing’, and giving less is better than giving more. We don’t let emotions dictate business, and we know when to cut our losses.

There is no zero-sum game for us; we always seek a way out of any conundrum so that everyone benefits (but we certainly do). That trait influenced Gujarati industrialists and their approach in dealing with unions and competitors. Unions in Gujarat too believe that compromise is better than confrontation—they don’t want mills to close down. Jobs are important, and vanquishing capitalists might gladden revolutionaries, but that pleasure doesn’t feed bellies. The jobs must remain, and trade must continue. And so, we are driven by solutions and in our pursuit of solutions we want to remove obstacles. The ends matter, the means are useful, but the ends justify the means.

The obstacle the Gujarati businessman finds most annoying is the government. Not the government that provides loans, subsidies, contracts, or favours, but the government that taxes, regulates, and controls. Figuring a way out of that the maze is the Gujarati industrialist’s favourite pastime. All accountants know how to reduce tax liability, but Gujarati accountants are particularly adept. When Nani Palkhivala, the distinguished Parsi lawyer, offered his forensic analysis of the tax implications of the union budget each year, he could literally fill a stadium. His listeners, many of them Gujarati accountants, made immediate notes and offered advice to their clients.

When a businessman wanted to hire an accountant, he advertised and then shortlisted three candidates. The first was a Tamil auditor, top-scorer in mathematics. What is 2 + 2, the businessman asked him. Four, the man said with some disdain. The next candidate was a Bengali statistician. What is 2 + 2, he was asked. Twenty-two, the statistician replied, smugly thinking laterally.

The third candidate, a Gujarati accountant, got the job.

What is 2 + 2?

What do you want it to be, the Gujarati asked.

We aim to please.