Recasting India Read Online Free

attention of the army and the masses as so many deliberate attacks on the outworks of Mahommedanism and Hinduism,” wrote Sir William Lee-Warner in
Life of the Marquis of Dalhousie
(1904). 2
    â€œAnd the simple, superstitious, credulous sepoys were told that the time was rapidly approaching when by some piece of jadu (magic) the Christians would … uncaste the whole Hindu population and outrage all their traditions and feelings.”
    The second part of the quotation is mostly the figment of colonial imagination that sees colonial rule as the advancement of the natives and the “white man’s burden,” but the abolition of sati caused a tectonic shift in the power structure of conservative, and at that time as now, majority Hindu society.
    But India’s merchants, traders and entrepreneurs were forcing societal change even long before Dwarkanath. In 1669, Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb was at the height of his proselytizing reign. By his orders, numerous Hindu and Jain temples were being destroyed. Faced with the destruction of their places of worship in Surat, and perhaps even their own forced conversion to Islam, Bhimji Parekh, one of the city’s wealthiest merchants, took charge.
    He complained to the local British trade representative, Gerald Aungier, who was president of the Surat factory—he would in 1672 become the third governor of Bombay—that unless their faith and places of worship were protected, most of the merchants, the backbone of trade in Surat, would leave en masse for Bombay.
    Makrand Mehta writes in his 1991 book
Indian Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Historical Perspective
that this left the Englishman torn. He sympathized with Bhimji, but letting the merchants go would mostly likely result in the eruption of the military wrath of the Mughals against the British. He couldn’t risk that.
    But he didn’t want to offend the powerful merchant clans, so he told Bhimji that Bombay was not yet fortified enough to guard the merchants and their families. He suggested that “hereafter as occasion offered, they with more ease and security convey their estates and families to Bombay by degrees where they might assure themselves of all favour, friendship and freedom in their religion and encouragement in their trade as they could in reason [expect] from us.” 3
    This was no time for, in Mehta’s words, a “post-dated cheque.” So on September 23 and 24, 1669, more than 8,000 merchant families left Surat for Bharaoch in Bombay.
    â€œThe general strike followed by the merchants’ flight created such a tense atmosphere in Surat that the political authorities were forced to change their stand. The
banias
returned to Surat on December 20, 1669 only after the state assured the safety of their religion.”
    As Mehta notes, this was not only the first-ever mercantile strike in India, it was also entirely nonviolent.
    Not content to fight only the social ill of religious prejudice, 30 years later Surat’s merchants gathered to fight corrupt governance. In 1702, the governor of Surat and his partner in crime, a trader called Ahmad Chelaby, took Rs 85,000 from the
banias
, ostensibly to help defend the city against Maratha marauders. When they realized that they had been cheated, the merchants went on strike, lowering their shutters and forcing the administration to imprison Chelaby and return at least Rs 37,000.
    The idea that entrepreneurs—business people—can collaborate and push forward social reform is now lost in the venal crony capitalism of large portions of big business of India. Indian entrepreneurs seek tax benefits and reach out to manipulate laws to make windfall gains on land deals, but social reform does not, for the most part, keep them awake.
    Some of this disconnect comes from the late years of the independence movement against the British Raj. Even though Mahatma Gandhi had deep and enduring friendships with top entrepreneurs like