‘We are not a unidimensional cardboard cutout’

Salil Tripathi’s magisterial account, covering the Gujarati community worldwide, questions existing views about a people who ought to be known for qualities beyond business acumen

This is not meant to be an encyclopaedia, clarifies Salil Tripathi at the start. “I am Gujarati, and mine is an individual interpretation of who we are and why we are the way we are.” 

Crafting his new book, The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community, in an engrossing yet enlightening manner which few writers manage, Tripathi presents 730 pages of a lifetime’s observation of the community he was born into, seven extended visits to Gujarat and mined memories of conversations with Gujaratis in 60 countries where his work has taken him over the years.

Known for sharp entrepreneurship and the profitable deal, Gujaratis should be equally celebrated for a multitude of other qualities. In Tripathi’s words, paying tribute to his parents, “They exposed me to the best that Gujarati culture has to offer—poetry, integrity, honesty, a commitment to non-violence, and humility, and shielded me from the uglier manifestations of Gujarati society—the ostentation, the increasing bigotry, and arrogance.”  

Salil Tripathi, author of Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community. Pic/Sworup Nhasiju

So, readers will meet Gujaratis including Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Jains, Buddhists, Dalits, Christians, “those identifying with other ethnicities and may be of no faith”. Positing expansionist definitions (Sardar Patel and MA Jinnah) and paradoxical juxtapositions (the Mahatma and Modi), Tripathi says, “A Gujarati is one who speaks the language, possibly counts in it, dreams in it and thinks in it; the one who has moved to the land where Gujarati is spoken by the majority; the ones who may speak other languages but have made Gujarat their home and preserve their minority identities; and the ones who may live anywhere else in the world, but are of Gujarati heritage.” 

Excerpts from the interview:

The Gujarati-medium New Era School in Bombay is credited for its formative stamp on you: born Gujarati but at ease as a citizen of the world. Has this outlook influenced your wider-encompassing inclusion of people counted as “the Gujaratis”?
Indeed, New Era was a very special place. It gave you Gandhi’s rootedness to the Indian ethos and Tagore’s expansiveness in embracing the world. I knew as much about Indian artists like [MF] Husain as about western artists like [Salvador] Dali, as much about Sanskrit epics as about well-loved English poetry. I’ve always known Gujarati to be a language, not a faith. In an early encounter, one columnist was surprised I’d include Tatas among prominent Gujaratis and not only Ambanis. I said, well, there’s also Azim Premji—for what are Premjis and Tatas, or Khorakiwalas and Godrejs, if not Gujaratis too? We all have multiple identities, Gujaratis as well. We are not a monolithic, unidimensional cardboard cutout. We must not let languages be confused with religions or other forms of identities. 

Still from the song, Ame Mumbai na Rahewasi, from the 1949 film, Mangal Fera. The song charmingly presented the life of freedom for the Gujarati immigrant in Bombay in a nuclear family, independent of prying in-laws

What were some challenges faced in meticulously documenting such a complex community?
One, there is a lot of material. The other, that a lot of remembered history is based on myths, beliefs and songs of troubadours. What is history, and what is belief, is a challenge that applies everywhere. Sifting through contested facts and competing claims is always a problem and I’m not a trained historian. I attempt making sense of the history, including learning nuances which cast heroes in unflattering light sometimes, and people considered to be villains as being more complex, not so unsavoury. If it makes readers question their assumptions, the book will have served its purpose.

A 1990 stamp commemorating Ardeshir Godrej and Pirojsha Godrej

The last sub-section in the book, The Way We Kill, is a boldly honest narrative thread. Have you caught yourself stopping short?
It is never an easy time to speak about uncomfortable topics. The fact that we Gujaratis announce our commitment to non-violence and vegetarianism, while having an appalling record of riots and communal and caste-based violence shows the narrative is not as simple as it is made out. I decided to let survivors describe what happened, without using alarmist language. I’ve also attempted to understand—not approve—what led to the thinking of those who felt that “they” had the violence coming. At the same time, I show examples giving me hope. I’ve learned that generalisations are bad, no narrative is straightforward.   

Jamsetji Tata. Pic/Getty Images

You work with a sprawling canvas but the Bombay chapter leaves one wanting more. 
Bombay is an extremely important city for Gujaratis. As the 19th century showed, some of the finest, modernist thinking came from Gujarati writers in the city. Even if they went to Nadiad and Surat to write later, as Govardhanram Tripathi and Narmadashankar Dave did, their minds were shaped by their urban Bombay experience. And Gujarati theatre is one of the few forms of commercially viable theatre. Gujaratis in Gujarat feel they “own” the language and its aesthetics. Those of us who consider Bombay to be their home disagree. But there has been some decline too.

Azim Premji

So, while I do spend time talking about the status of Bombay State and its bifurcation of Maharashtra and Gujarat, and there are many Bombay experts in the book as well as a chapter on communities that helped build Bombay, I did not want that to be the dominant story. Friends in Gujarat reading early drafts told me they had no idea about some of the things I’ve discovered. It vindicates what I set out to do—be an outsider looking in and an insider looking out.

Author-publisher Meher Marfatia writes fortnightly on everything that makes her love Mumbai and adore Bombay. You can reach her at meher.marfatia@mid-day.com/www.meher marfatia.com

‘We see nothing wrong with our contradictions’

Prologue
You probably have strong opinions about us: that we are vegetarian and supposed to be clever at making money. Many of us piously say we are vegetarian and, late evening, when our family is glued to Arnab Goswami on television, we tiptoe out and visit the hawker’s cart down the alley to eat omelettes; the more adventurous among us even develop a taste for kebabs…

You may not know our poets and writers because you think the only book we care about is the ledger. We are obsessed with success, which we feel can be measured objectively only through money. Paiso bole chhe, money talks. Even at funerals you might find men discussing stock market prices while looking suitably gloomy, randomly doing namaste when someone passes by… 

You find it hilarious that we wave the tricolour vigorously but rarely join the army. (Actually, some of us do.) If you call us cowards, we point at the man whose photograph is on all currency notes in India (except the old one-rupee note), Mohandas Gandhi, and claim we are non-violent. As with all such unjustified insults, we will see that there is more than enough valour among Gujaratis…

We have run motels in America, fought apartheid in South Africa, been expelled from Uganda, formed trade unions in London, sold opium to China, and financed Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army in Southeast Asia. We dominate the list of India’s wealthiest, yet our poor break ships and clean drains. Hospitable yet calculating, mercantile and pragmatic, pious and yet tolerating violence, worldly-wise while claiming to be spiritual, cheerful and transactional. We see nothing wrong with our contradictions.

‘Ame Mumbai na Rahewasi (We are Residents of Bombay)’
Among the first outsiders to grasp the hand the East India Company extended were Gujaratis, who left Kathiawad and Gujarat’s squabbling princely states with arbitrary rules and corrupt practices, to move to this city which became urbs prima in Indis, to trade and explore the wider world, under the benign system of rule of law that the British promised. 

Trading Gujaratis—Kapols, Bhatias, Parsis, Bohras, Memons, Khojas, Jains—came to earn; academically inclined Gujaratis came to learn and became writers, lawyers, and teachers. Poor Gujaratis came too, from Kathiawad, and made clay pots; from many other parts, the Dalits came, doing the menial tasks others would not do… 
With the need for capital growing, the first stock exchange emerged under a banyan tree at Horniman Circle in Bombay in the 1830s, where about a dozen sharebrokers met to trade. By 1860, there were sixty share brokers, almost all Gujarati. 

Textiles were now imported from Lancashire, and Parsis joined the fray, setting up mills. The British had experimented with the cotton grown in Gujarat, but they preferred the long-staple variety found in the American South. By the 1850s, spinning and weaving mills were being set up in England… 

Today, Gujaratis are largely found in four areas of Bombay—old money is located in the city’s south, near Malabar Hill and Walkeshwar, where diamond merchants, professionals and industrialists live; the older parts of the city’s south, such as Bhuleshwar and Kalbadevi, are where you find many working in the city’s wholesale trade; the western suburb of Vile Parle and its colleges set up by Gujarati trusts is home to the professional working class and academics; and the distant suburbs of Kandivli and Ghatkopar, is where many other families, including professionals, live. You also find Gujaratis in the slums of Dharavi and in congested parts of Mohammed Ali Road. Street signs in many parts of the city are written in Gujarati, as are the names of some stations of the city’s lifeline, the suburban train network. Even as the city’s Gujarati-medium schools dwindle, Gujarati power continues to assert itself, just try ordering chicken biryani from Zomato at any address in Walkeshwar.

Excerpted with permission from The Gujaratis: A Portrait of a Community by Salil Tripathi,  Aleph Book Company

"Exciting news! Mid-day is now on WhatsApp Channels Subscribe today by clicking the link and stay updated with the latest news!" Click here!