The guild-like support of his merchant caste helped Dhirubhai continue his education after finishing at his father’s old primary school. In 1945 he moved up to Junagadh and enrolled at Bahadur Kanji High School, which shared with a university college a large yellow stucco edifice on the outskirts of the city built in 1902 by the nawab of the time and named after him. Because of his family’s poverty Dhirubhai was admitted as a free student. He found accommodation in a boarding house funded by the Modh Bania for children of their caste.
The Second World War had largely passed by Kathiawar save for overflights by military transports and the occasional visit of the new army Jeeps. The movement for Indian independence had not. On returning from South Africa, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, also a Bania from Kathiawar, had established his ashram in Ahmedabad, the main city of Gujarat, and carried out much of his agitation against British rule in the same region, including the famous ‘salt march’ to the sea to protest against the government monopoly of salt in 1930.
His activities were financed by Indian industrialists from the Hindu trading castes, foremost among them the Calcutta-based Marwari jute-miller G.D. Birla. His abstemious lifestyle was an extension of their own ideals, more familiar to them than the Anglicised manners of the Nehru family. But a real self-interest was also involved. The industrialists also saw in the Bania-born Gandhi a counterforce within the Indian National Congress – the main secular vehicle of the independence movement – to the socialist and communist ideas that had taken a strong grip on the thinking of educated Indians. Although also far from friendly to big capital, Gandhi’s ideas of industrial devolution to the villages were intrinsically opposed to the proposals for state capitalism and central planning of investment then being promoted by the Left in India as elsewhere in the world.
In Junagadh, the ideas of Gandhi and Sardar Patel, the Hindu nationalist lieutenant of Nehru who was also a Gujarati, cast a strong influence. The Nawab, with a British Resident, Mr Monteith, at his side, was automatically put in defence of the status quo. His police force and its detective branch kept a close watch on the independence movement and arrested many agitators throughout the 1940s.
At the Bahadur Kanji school, Dhirubhai was quickly infected by the independence mood. Krishnakant Vakharia, later a leading lawyer in Ahmedabad, was two years ahead of Dhirubhai at the school and met him soon after his arrival in Junagadh. The two took part in a gathering of students to discuss the freedom movement. Vakharia recalled that all were inspired by the nationalist ideals of Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel and, most of all, the socialist Jayaprakash Narayan, then still in the Congress Party.
The Modh boarding house where Dhirubhai was staying became the headquarters of a new group to push these ideals, which they called the Junagadh Vidyarti Sangh (Junagadh Students’ League). The objective was to take part in the national independence movement and Gandhi’s swadeshi (self-reliant) economic program, which involved boycotting imported factory-made goods in favour of village craftwares, such as homespun cotton (khadi). Activities were to include meetings to salute the proposed national flag of India – the saffron, white and green tricolour with the ox-wagon wheel in the middle, which was then the Congress flag – as well as motivation sessions and sports meetings for the other students.
Vakharia became the president of the Sangli, with Dhirubhai and another student called Praful Nanavati serving as secretaries. ‘We organised a lot of functions, like saluting the national flag and took a lot of risks,’ said Vakharia. ‘At one time we printed pamphlets with a photo of Gandhi and with that we approached some leading citizens to be our sponsors – but no one agreed. In Junagadh at that time no one was allowed to even utter “Jai Hind” or “Vande Mataram”, or sing national songs. Even wearing khadi made you a suspect in the eyes of the Nawab’s CID.’
In 1946 the students learned that Kaniala Munsi, a lawyer and later a leading Congress Party politican and a minister in Nehru’s first home-rule government, would be visiting Junagadh. They decided to invite him to address their members in the compound of a boarding house for Jain students. The Nawab’s police summoned Vakharia, Dhirubhai and Nanavati and threatened the three with arrest, expulsion from school and trouble from their parents unless they gave an undertaking that no political speech would be given.
Here Dhirubhai showed a spark of his later genius at bringing apparently irreconcilable demands to an accommodation, if through a dubious intellectualism. ‘We had said that a literary figure would deliver a speech,’ said Vakharia. ‘Dhirubhai whispered that there was nothing wrong in giving this undertaking. “We are not going to give the speech. If there is any breach in the undertaking, it’s a problem between Munsi and the police.”‘ Munsi came and delivered a rousing speech in favour of early independence.
As 1947 wore on and partition of British India along Hindu/Muslim communal lines became more likely, the political position of the princely states came under great scrutiny. By August, when the transfer of British power was due, all the rulers came under pressure to accede to either India or Pakistan. In most of the more than 550 states, the decision was clearcut because of geographical position, the religion of the ruling family and the predominant religion of the population.
Three difficult cases stood out after ‘freedom at midnight’ on 15 August: Kashmir, Hyderabad and Junagadh, what the historian H.V. Hodson called ‘the joker in the pack’.2 Junagadh was close to the western side of Pakistan and had a Muslim ruler. But its fragmented territory was interlocked with that of neighbouring Hindu-ruled states and its people were mostly Hindu. Moreover, it contained the great Hindu pilgrimage sites of Somnath and Dwarka. In May 1947 the acting Diwan (the Nawab’s prime minister and closest adviser) was Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto, a politician from Sindh. Bhutto was active in the Muslim League of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, and was himself the father and grandfather of two prime ministers of Pakistan, Zulfikir Ali Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto.
Bhutto kept in close touch with Jinnah and had the Nawab obey his advice to ‘keep out under all circumstances until 15th August’. Then, on the day of the transfer of British power, the government of Junagadh announced its accession to Pakistan. Jinnah never actually thought Junagadh would be allowed to join Pakistan. The object of the exercise was to set uncomfortable precedents for Nehru in the more pressing contest for Kashmir and perhaps Hyderabad. If Nehru agreed to a plebiscite in Junagadh, which he eventually did, it would help Pakistan’s case for a popular vote in Muslim-majority Kashmir. If the Junagadh ruler’s decision was accepted, over the wishes of his people, the same could apply in Hyderabad. If the Indians simply marched into Junagadh, protests against a similar Pakistani use of force in Kashmir would be greatly weakened. Nehru adopted the course of negotiation while throwing a military noose around Junagadh in the neighbouring Hindu-ruled states, which had all acceded to India. Two subordinate territories of Junagadh, the enclaves of Babariawad and Mangrol, were taken by Indian troops on 1 November 1947 without bloodshed.
Meanwhile, Indian nationalists began agitating within and without Junagadh for the overthrow of the Nawab. In Bombay on 25 September they declared an ‘Arazi Hakumat’ or Parallel Government under the presidency of Samaldas Gandhi, a relative of Gandhi who was editor of the newspaper Vande Mataram. From a temporary base in Rajkot, Gandhi kept in touch with supporters inside Junagadh by human couriers simply walking across the open frontiers of the isolated state. Other nationalist journalists called for volunteers to gather in Bhavnagar and other cities close to Junagadh for a non-violent invasion.
The students in the Junagadh Vidyarti Sangh threw their limited weight against the Nawab also. ‘We were too scared to carry out physical sabotage like attacking power stations,’ said Vakharia. ‘So our sabotage consisted of spreading false rumours to cause panic and supplying information back to the provisional government. We used to send someone to Jetalsur or Jedpur in the Indian union to pass on the information.’
In Junagadh, as in many ot
her parts of India, the partition steadily developed a murderous communal nature. Two Muslim communities, called the Sodhana and Vadhana, had taken a militant position in support of accession to Pakistan and mounted big processions through Junagadh, threatening Hindus with retribution if they opposed it. As it became clear that Pakistan was in no position to support the Nawab, Hindus turned on the Muslim minority and massacred whole communities in some outlying villages. Food shortages developed and the Nawab’s revenues dried up. As his administration lost its grip, the Nawab decided the game was up and made a hasty departure for Karachi. On 8 November, after an earlier meeting of the State Council, Bhutto asked the Indian Government to take over the state to avoid a complete administrative breakdown, pending an honourable settlement of the accession issues.
The Indian Army moved into Junagadh without incident on 9 November and the communal tension quickly settled down. However, Vakharia recalls a small communal riot breaking out in Junagadh soon after independence, when some shoe shops belonging to Muslims were looted by Hindus. The students of the Junagadh Vidyarti Sangh went to the area to protect the Muslim shops, but their presence was misunderstood by the police. One of the students was a fellow Modh Bania and boarding-house companion of Dhirubhai named Krishna Kant Shah, who had been born in Kenya and sent back to Junagadh for his education. He was arrested by the police as one of the looters and taken to the lock-up early in the evening. The leaders of the Sangh went to police headquarters and met the police commissioner, named Lahiri, to argue Shah’s innocence.
‘Dhirubhai [who was then 16] showed a lot of courage in arguing with the police commissioner to defend Shah,’ Vakharia said. ‘The arguments went on for two or three hours and all of us were threatened with arrest for obstruction of justice. But we were determined we would not go until our colleagues were released. Eventually they decided to let Shah go at midnight.’ It was a debt Dhirubhai was to collect from Shah in controversial circumstances more than thirty years later.
The people of Junagadh voted overwhelmingly to join India when a plebiscite was held in February 1948, although Pakistan never recognised it. Dhirubhai returned to his studies and took his matriculation in 1949. Vakharia studied law and continued with his political activity, following Narayan out of the Congress Party into the new Socialist Party in 1948. On graduating in 1951 he moved to practise in Rajkot, then Ahmedabad and eventually returned to the Congress later in an active legal and political career.
With his family still extremely poor, Dhirubhai had no such option. On finishing high school, he had to look for work. At the age of 16, Dhirubhai was physically strong and already possessed of the persuasiveness that was to mark his later business career.
It is tempting to look into the culture of the Modh Bania for an explanation of what his critics see as his ruthless business ethics and ‘shamelessness’. But many other entrepreneurs have also sprung from the same background in Kathiawar: most would shrink from the manipulation of the government that became part and parcel of the Ambani operation, even at the cost of less success. The answer lies probably in the deep poverty that his family endured as the cost of his father’s devotion to a teaching career. While he also learned that life is a web of relationships and obligations, Dhirubhai was fired with an ambition never to become dependent on anyone or to stay long in somebody else’s service.
3
Lessons from the souk
Early in the 1950s officials in the treasury of the Arabian kingdom of Yemen noticed something funny happening to their country’s currency. The main unit of money, a silver coin called the rial, was disappearing from circulation. They traced the disappearing coins south to the trading port of Aden, then a British colony and military bastion commanding the entrance to the Red Sea and southern approaches to the Suez Canal.
Inquiries found that an Indian clerk named Dhirubhai Ambani, then barely into his twenties, had an open order out in the souk of Aden for as many rials as were available. Ambani had noted that the value of the rial’s silver content was higher than its exchange value against the British pound and other foreign currencies. So he began buying rials, melting them down and selling the silver ingots to bullion dealers in London. ‘The margins were small, but it was money for jam,’ Dhirubhai later reminisced. ‘After three months it was stopped, but I made a few lakhs of rupees. I don’t believe in not taking opportunities.’1
Dhirubhai had gone to Aden soon after finishing his studies in Junagadh at the age of 16, following the long tradition of boys from Bania families in Kathiawar heading for the Arabian trading ports or the market towns of East Africa to gain commercial experience and accumulate capital. A network of personal contacts kept jobs within the same community. Dhirubhai’s elder brother Ramniklal, known as Ramnikbhai, had gone to Aden two years before and was working in the car sales division of A. Besse & Co. Founded by a Frenchman named Antonin Besse, the company had developed from trading in animal hides and incense, between the world wars, into the biggest commercial house in the Red Sea area.
Another Gujarati, Maganbhai Patel, from the Porda district, had joined Besse as a junior accountant at the age of 18 in 1931 and was made a director in 1948. He estimates that the company controlled about 80 per cent of the region’s commerce soon after the Second World War. It had thirty branches and six to eight ships of its own. It was indeed successful: shortly before his death at the age of 72 in 1948, Antonin Besse made a donation of a million pounds to endow St Anthony’s College, Oxford. Thereafter, the company was run by two of his sons, Tony and Peter. It employed more than 10 000 people, of whom about 3000 were Gujaratis hired as clerks, salesmen and middle managers. Susheel Kothari went to work for Besse in 1952 from Wallibhipur in Saurashtra, in a group of fourteen recruits hired after interviews in Rajkot. Besse trusted Indians as honest and loyal, he recalled. While not paid nearly as much as European expatriates, they enjoyed a standard of living that periodically drew complaints from the British colonial administration for forcing up wages generally. On one occasion, Tony Besse had told the Governor to his face that it was ‘none of your business what I pay’.
When Dhirubhai left school, his brother Ramnikbhai put in a word for him with Maganbhai Patel. On his next leave in Porda, Patel invited Dhirubhai to come over for an interview. ‘My first impression was his way of walking,’ recalled Patel, imitating a heavy decisive footstep. ‘It was as if time was short and he had to get ahead, to reach a goal.’ Patel asked him to read from the Times of India, then write a summary in English, a test Dhirubhai passed satisfactorily. He was hired and soon after arrived by steamer in Aden.
As Susheel Kothari noted: ‘The first sight of Aden is always a shock.’ The oil-filmed blue waters of the port are backed by ominous steep crags of dark-brown rock, remnants of an old volcano, with no sign of vegetation.
Aden had flourished in Roman times as a way station on trading routes between Egypt and India. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 revived its importance, and it became a major coaling port for European shipping to Asia and Australasia. From its occupation by a detachment of Indian sepoys sent by the East India Company in 1839, Aden had been an important link in the ties of Britain to its Indian empire. Until 1937, when it was put under the Colonial Office in London, the territory was administered from India. The Indian rupee circulated as its currency until it was replaced by the East African shilling in 1951.
The outpost had been a punishment station for British regiments deemed to have shown cowardice or other offences against discipline while in India. As one of its last governors, Charles Johnston, noted in a memoir, it had been ‘the dumping ground, even as late as between the wars, to which regiments sent officers who had got themselves into matrimonial difficulties’.2 The colony also became the entrepôt for the Red Sea and Horn of Africa, where deepwater ports were few. Between the world wars, the biplanes of the Royal Air Force kept the hinterland quiet by machine-gunning the villages of any unruly Yemeni tribes. Behind this shield of bullets, the middle-man tr
ade flourished. The definitive historian of British rule in Aden, R.J. Gavin, noted:
Men indeed consisted of a hierarchy of brokers from the heads of foreign firms to the lowest workman or child who offered his labour or hawked in the street … Speculators, hoarders and price rings frequently sent commodity and foodstuff prices rocketing up and down, while moneylenders and dealers dampened the effect of this for the rest of the population at a price which included a claim to social leadership. Acquisitive individualism was mitigated only by ethnic and other local solidarities formed outside rather than within the town.3
Aden’s economy developed rapidly after the Second World War, but its business milieu still had some of this character when Dhirubhai learnt his basic techniques there in the 1950s.
The spur to Aden’s growth was the decision of British Petroleum to build a new oil refinery in Little Aden, another crater jutting into the sea across the bay from the main town. BP’s existing refinery in the Gulf port of Abadan had been nationalised by a new Iranian government. The refinery employed up to 11 000 workers at any time during its construction in 1952–54, then had a permanent staff of 2500 housed in a comfortable village. This sparked off a construction boom that saw Aden extend beyond the wastes and saltpans of its causeway, which had been kept clear for defensive reasons in earlier times. Later in the 1950s the British began concentrating strategic reserve forces in Aden from other bases in the Gulf and East Africa. By 1964 Aden had 8000 British military personnel plus dependants – and their demand for housing kept the construction activity going. Aden’s population grew from 80 000 in 1946 to 138 000 in 1955.
It became a more modern economy, and air-conditioning ameliorated the hot humid weather in the midsummer months. Just before mass air travel arrived with the first passenger jets, Aden overtook New York in 1958 to become the biggest ship-bunkering port in the world. As well as for cargo shipping and tankers, it was a refuelling stop for elegant liners of the P&O and Orient lines as well as crowded immigrant ships taking Italians and Greeks out to Australia.
Mahabharata in Polyester Page 3
