The Reliance public relations office continued to be attentive, supplying advance notice of newsworthy events. But the company’s history of political and corporate activity had put a sinister shadow across the gleaming success. All through the government changes of 1990 and 1991, the press carried references to a certain ‘large industrial house’ supporting this or that party or being behind certain politicians. Scores of party leaders, ex-ministers, senior bureaucrats and heads of the big government-owned banks and corporations were said to be ‘Ambani friends’ or ‘Ambani critics’. Mostly it was the friends, it seemed, who got the jobs. At a meeting of shareholders in a big Bombay engineering firm named Larsen & Toubro late in 1991, convened to approve a takeover by the Ambanis, this undercurrent of hostility welled up into a physical mêlée. In the shouting and jostling, the two Ambani sons Mukesh and Anil had to flee the stage. The controversies kept continuing right through the 1990s.
Dhirubhai Ambani attracted adulation or distrust. To his millions of investors, who had seen their share prices multiply, he was a business messiah. To one writer, he was a ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’ created by India’s experiments with close government control of the economy. ‘There are three Dhirubhai Ambanis,’ one of his fellow Gujaratis told me. ‘One is unique, larger than life, a brand name. He is one of the most talked-about industrialists, and for Gujarati people he has tremendous emotional and sentimental appeal. He is their ultimate man and has inspired many emulators. The second Dhirubhai Ambani is a schemer, a first-class liar who regrets nothing and has no values in life. Then there is the third Dhirubhai Ambani, who has a more sophisticated political brain, a dreamer and a visionary, almost Napoleonic. People are always getting the three personalities mistaken.’
In a legal chamber lined with vellum-bound case references, a senior lawyer took an equally stark view. ‘Today the fact is that Ambani is bigger than government,’ said the lawyer in all seriousness. ‘He can make or break prime ministers. In the United States you can build up a super-corporation but the political system is still bigger than you. In India the system is weak. If the stock exchange dares to expose Ambani, he tells it: “I will pull my company shares out and make you collapse. I am bigger than your exchange.” If the newspapers criticise, he can point out they are dependent on his advertising and he has his journalists in every one of their departments. If the political parties take a stand against him, he has his men in every party who can pull down or embarrass the leaders. He is a threat to the system. Today he is undefeatable.’
Phiroz Vakil, another senior advocate at the Mumbai bar, paused in his tiny chambers in Bombay’s old Fort district, stuffing Erinmore Flake tobacco into his pipe, before looking up intently and warning me that people would suspect that writers asking for stories and opinions about Ambani were being used as a stalking horse by the Ambanis themselves to draw out information. For some others, favourable write-ups of the Ambaris in the business media still rankled. ‘I suppose you think he’s a hero,’ said the retired Finance Ministry official and Cabinet Secretary Vinod Pande, down the phone.
Others just seemed too battle-weary. When I telephone the Orkay Silk Mills chairman Kapal Mehra and asked to meet him, there was a long pause. ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible,’ Mehra said. The former prime minister Viswanath Pratap Singh did not reply to a letter and giggled nervously when I cornered him at a cocktail party in New Delhi. No, he could not possibly talk about any one company, Singh said, easing away quickly into the crowd. Those who did agree to talk for the most part insisted on anonymity: they had to live in India, they explained.
Reliance and Dhirubhai Ambani meanwhile went on to greater fame and fortune – and more controversies. After his death in 2002, the subsequent split of the Reliance group between his sons and their continuing rivalry make the story of this man and his methods pertinent to understanding the return of India to eminence in the world economy.
2
A persuasive young bania
Among all the 550-odd princely rulers left to run their domains in the last years of the British Raj, few were more eccentric than Mahabatkhan, the Nawab of Junagadh. The Nawab’s family had run this fiefdom, one of several on the Saurashtra peninsula in Gujarat, since the Mughal warrior Sher Khan Babi founded his own subordinate dynasty in 1690. Two and a half centuries later, this warrior’s descendant, best known for his love of dogs, Mahabatkhan had 150 of them, with an equal number of dog-handlers on his payroll and individual quarters for all the canine retinue. The Nawab was the first political target to come into the sights of Dhirubhai Ambani. It was during a movement aimed at overthrowing the Nawab’s rule and securing Junagadh’s accession to India during the Partition of British India in 1947 that Ambani, then a teenage high school student, had his first experience of political organisation and his first brushes with authority.
It was the only moment in modern times that Junagadh has figured in the calculations of statesmen. Even today, Junagadh and its surrounds, a region known as Kathiawar, remain one of the quietest, most traditional regions of India and until the end of the twentieth century one of the least accessible in the otherwise busy north-west coastal area of the country.
The land itself is dry, open, arid and stony. The monsoon rains quickly run off down the short rivers and nullahs that radiate from the rocky hinterland and out to the Arabian Sea. The roads are lined with stunted pipul (fig) trees; 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 ferroconcrete extravagances built by the newly rich, or the industrial plants and their residential ‘colonies’ extending into farmland in other Indian regions.
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, the handlebars decked with coloured lights, electric horns and whirling windmills. The homes of wealthy merchants are adorned with mouldings of swans, peacocks, flamingos, parrots, elephants, lions and tigers. Massive double doors, twelve-panelled and 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 the deity Lord Krishna is said to have died. To the south, the temple of the moon at Somnath is a destination for Hindu pilgrims from all over India. In the steep Girnar hills above the city of Junagadh, long staircases take pilgrims to Jain temples that date back to the third century BC. The city was an important centre for Hindu rulers of Gujarat in the first millennium. Then Junagadh suffered four centuries of sackings until Mughal rule gave it some stability, with Muslim rulers controlling its largely Hindu population. Both its rulers and its people were onlookers in the contest for India’s trade among the English, Dutch and Portuguese, whose galleons fought vicious battles off the Gujarat coast. 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 sold to Arabs and later the East India Company in return for silver, gold, incense and coffee from the Red Sea port of Mocha. Gujaratis were prominent in this pre-colonial Indian Ocean trading network, to which India contributed its wealth of cloth, indigo, opium and spices. The small ports of Kathiawar took part in this trade. Diu handled much of Gujarat’s trade with Aden in the west and Malacca in the east. 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 such trade terms as abrawan (running wa
ter), baft hava (woven air) or shab-nam (evening dew).
Indian entrepreneurs – in Calcutta the Mawari traders and moneylenders originally from Rajasthan, in Bombay the Parsis (Zoroastrians originally from Persia) – began moving into large-scale industrial production late in the nineteenth century. Smaller traders also took advantage of the peace and stability brought about by the British Empire by taking steamer passages to all corners of the Indian Ocean and South-East Asia and opening small stores and service stations. Most were from Gujarat; a large proportion of them being from Kathiawar, and many of them thus accumulated considerable wealth, the result of rigorous saving, abstemious living and endless hours of work by unpaid family members – an immigrant’s success story in many parts of the world. In East Africa, it created a resentment that led to the expulsion of 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,’ noted Sheela Bhatt, a former editor of the magazine India Today. ‘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. Among 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, Dhirubhai 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 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 elites, 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 monetised Indian economy, remitting 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 sixteenth 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 that 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 Krishna, perhaps the most widely adored and human face of the divine among Hindus.
Such a belief 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 Varnas 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.1
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 Saurashtra. 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, upon 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 Udaipur in Rajasthan. This idol represents Srinath, an incarnation of Lord Krishna, which 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 ashram (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 compunction about taking advantage of opportunities for profit. A saying in Gujarat goes: ‘Kapale hojo kodh, pan angane na hojo Modh’, meaning: ‘It is better to have a leucoderma [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– or Dhirubhai, as his diminutive became – Hirachand Ambani, born on 28 December 1932. His home town was Chorwad, literally meaning ‘Settlement of Thieves’, although 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. His father, Hirachand Ambani, seems to have been a diffident trader when he tried his hand at petty commerce, 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 goodwilled to be good at making money. He is better remembered as a village schoolmaster in the Nawab’s administration. From 1934 to 1936 Ambani senior, a stocky man with dark-brown skin, normally dressed in a white turban, long coat and dhoti, was headmaster of the Chorwad primary school. The industrialist and parliamentarian Viren Shah and his brother Jayan Shah, who also grew up in Chorwad, remember him as a devoted, ‘very strict’ teacher.
Hirachand Ambani made little money and lived in austere circumstances. The family home still stands in a hamlet called Kukaswada, two or three miles outside the main part of Chorwad. It is a two-roomed stone dwelling with a stamped earthern floor, entered b
y a low doorway and dimly lit by openings under the eaves. Ambani was married twice, having a son from his first marriage (named Samadasbhai) before being widowed. His second marriage gave him five more children, with Dhirubhai in the middle.
The family’s poverty did not keep the Ambanis from contact with better-off members of their social peer group. The Bania occasionally got together for meals or picnics. The Ambani children mixed freely with the Shahs, who were already prospering from a move to the then hub of British commerce in Calcutta, where they set up India’s first factory making aluminium cooking pots.
The two houses of the Shah family in Chorwad, Shanti Sadan and Anand Bhavan, were big and rambling in the traditional style. As well as learning all the ways of business, the children were expected to learn various sports, including horse-riding, swimming and athletics, and to take their turn milking the twenty cows and ten buffaloes kept in the gardens. The Shah family had become early followers of Mahatma Gandhi – also a Bania from Kathiawar – and often gave him accommodation in Calcutta. Jayan Shah remembered Dhirubhai, who was about seven years younger than him, coming to Anand Bhavan. Jayan Shah’s father took an interest in other people’s children, lending them books to read and asking them to do odd jobs around the house. Dhirubhai was welcomed with great affection and returned it with respect. Later, when he had gone away to work overseas, Shah remembered him dropping by to pay his respects during a vacation back in Chorwad, arriving with ‘great gusto and a feeling of an old relationship’.
Mahabharata in Polyester Page 2
