By Salil Tripathi,
Each week at a church-run school in the rural south of the United States, the teacher asks a quiz question, and the student with the right answer gets ten dollars as a prize.
One Friday, she asked: ‘Who is the greatest man who ever lived?’
A cheerful girl raised her hand and said, ‘I think George Washington was the greatest man ever because he is the Father of our Nation.’
‘That is a very good answer,’ the teacher said, ‘but that’s not what I am looking for.’
A boy’s hand shot up: ‘Abraham Lincoln, who saved the union and freed the slaves.’
‘That is also a very good answer,’ the teacher replied, ‘but I am thinking of someone even greater.’
Sleepy-eyed Jignesh Patel on the last bench slowly raised his hand.
‘Miss, I think Jesus Christ was the greatest man ever,’ he said.
The teacher’s eyes widened. She beamed and said, ‘Yes, that’s what I was looking for! Girls and boys, look at Jignesh, he was not even born in America, and yet he knows the answer.’
She walked up to him, patted him on his back, and gave him a crisp note of $10.
‘Tell me, Jignesh, you are not a Christian, right? And yet you knew that Jesus Christ is the greatest? How did you know that?’ she asked.
Jignesh looked down, grinned, and said: ‘Actually, you know miss, I know that Krishna is the greatest, but my father has taught me, beta Jignes, bijness is bijness.’
******************************
A lame joke may not be the best way to talk about the practical compromises we routinely make to earn money. But we are like that only. You want to call your God greatest? Fine, we’ll agree. We will pretend and outwardly compromise with our core beliefs to make you happy, but we don’t mean it. Money matters, money talks. Money isn’t everything, but it helps. Go with the flow, don’t stand out, don’t insist on being right, abide by the rules, and keep your customs and thoughts to yourselves. Please the powerful. Take the shortcut when nobody is looking. Be pragmatic, yield, and quietly count the notes and coins.
In many Gujarati shops you might find a board behind the cashier, with a statement attributed to Mohandas Gandhi: ‘A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work—he is the purpose of it.’
We take that to heart. The customer is right because they pay. We travel around the world and set up a shop where there are no rivals. We buy low from sources which we keep secret, squeeze costs by getting everyone in the family to work, and sell high, blaming the inflation.
Napoleon called England a nation of shopkeepers only because he hadn’t met Gujaratis.
Bhavnagar’s legendary bookseller Jayant Meghani, who died in 2020, ran a shop called Prasar. He was the son of poet Jhaverchand Meghani. When we met one evening in 2016 in his booklined study, he told me, ‘Being a trader, or vepari, is only a small part of our identity. Most Gujaratis are shopkeepers, not entrepreneurs or industrialists. And we are transactional, in business and in society.’
The shopkeeper, Meghani said, calculates. He is close to the market, and he understands the customer. Sizing up the customer is the key. If the customer seems slippery, the shopkeeper will insist on cash and not offer credit. There is the famous song of the renowned musician Avinash Vyas, ‘Charar charar maru chakdol chale (My ferris wheel turns)’ which has this important verse, ‘aaje rokda ne udhaar kale (cash today, credit tomorrow)’.
In the remotest corners of the world, you’d find a Gujarati trader’s shop, selling turmeric and cumin, chocolates and milk, frozen fish, and toilet paper rolls. The shop becomes the one-stop almanac of the area, and the shopkeeper is the search engine for the community from the time before Google. He puts up customers’ notices: landlords who want to rent out a room, new arrivals who want to buy a used washing machine, car owners who want to sell their car, even parents seeking a spouse for their daughter. He may not charge for that service; he will make up for it by making those people his lifelong customers. Women from the neighbourhood bring homemade theplas sealed in plastic bags, and the shopkeeper sells them to unmarried men working in other shops and desperate for home-cooked meals. He’d pocket a third of the price as his profit. He will stock Indian newspapers and magazines, rent out cassettes and videotapes of Bollywood films, and look the other way when teenagers are sheepishly buying cigarettes or condoms. He wouldn’t squeal, because if he did, they’d stop coming.
He knows that he can’t always get what he wants, and so he negotiates. Giving does not mean giving in or surrendering, for there are no zero-sum games. Business is a sport, not war. Compromise is important. Edward Simpson, an expert on Gujarati society and culture at SOAS University in London, told me that one trait common across Gujarati communities is the ability to compromise. We stoop to conquer.
The vegetarian teetotaller Gujarati shopkeeper has no qualms about selling canned meat and alcohol in his shop; the fundamentalist Hindu Gujarati trader may anonymously curse Muslims on social media, but he will have a cordial business relationship with a Sunni Arab businessman in Dubai, who’d have no idea what the Gujarati has been saying online.
We compartmentalise. Life is life, but business is business.
******************************
Early in 2024, the Hurun list of world’s billionaires came out, in which of the 3,279 billionaires, 271 were Indian. Mumbai became Asia’s billionaire capital, and Mukesh Ambani, the wealthiest Gujarati, became the richest Asian, at $115 billion. Gautam Adani, also Gujarati, at $86 billion, was the fifteenth richest in the world. Five of the richest ten Indians in the Forbes list of 2023 are Gujarati, and of the top 100, and nineteen more Gujaratis add to a total of twenty-four in the top 100. Other similar lists vary because family-owned businesses have fiendishly complicated cross-holding patterns. But the larger point remains valid—Gujaratis form a disproportionately large part of India’s wealthiest.
******************************
We want to build our fortune, and not help others building their fortunes, a point many Gujaratis in business told me. ‘You have to seize the opportunity and take your destiny in your hands,’ Russell Mehta, managing director of Rosy Blue, the leading diamond exporter, said over a delicious vegetarian thali at his office in the diamond bourse in Mumbai. ‘You identify the opportunity that others haven’t seen,’ he added. Sometimes it is hiding in plain sight. Renowned author Harish Damodaran told a journalist in 2014 how Gautam Adani went into ports when nobody was looking at the sector, since everyone believed that ports have strategic significance and so the government simply won’t permit private sector to have a majority stake.
Excerpted with permission from Aleph Book Company.
Title: The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community
Author: Salil Tripathi
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Number of pages: 744
Price: Rs 1,499