Review of Fortune Seekers by Raman Mahadevan

The Hindu

2 days ago

Reading Raman Mahadevan's deft and definitive profile of Tamil Nadu's business community, the Nattukottai Chettiars of Chettinad, led to what can only be termed a past life regression moment in my mind. I hope I will be forgiven for describing it.
In the glory days of Khushwant Singh's determination to highlight various different Indian communities in the Illustrated Weekly of the mid-1970s in Bombay as it was known then, I was asked to seek out and explore the Nattukottai Chettiars of Tamil Nadu. I had as a companion a Gujarati husband who would accompany me to what seemed then a very distant place in South India. This was a sensible ploy for when I reached there as the honoured guest of the Raja of Chettinad whom I had met earlier in what was then Madras, none of the persons I met were willing to talk to me directly. I would ask my questions. They would answer them looking instead at my husband. In the process, I met many of the leading persons who are named in the book.
Empire within an empire
Mahadevan's great achievement is in retracing the trajectory of the Nattukottai Chettiar presence in what could be described as an empire within an empire of Greater India as it existed under colonial rule. It's come at an opportune moment. There's been an extraordinary renaissance in the corridors and interior courtyards of the grand old Chettiar mansions that have given the community its moniker—people who live in country forts as a tourist destination of multiple interests. The golden age of the Chettiars in the late 19th century often meant the menfolk returning with amazing amounts of Western artefacts, clocks, mirrors, bentwood furniture, hanging glass lamps, floor tiles and suchlike. These have now become a veritable museum of their travels into time.
Recreating the ambience of their glory days are the small coterie of Chettiar women who have led the revival. They have simultaneously created a boost for the local crafts of basketry, textiles and dry legumes and fruits traditionally garnered from their regions. Oddly enough, Mahadevan barely mentions the role played by the Chettiar women, the Achis, as the older ladies are called, who stayed back and maintained their individual strongholds during the long absences of the men.
Monopolies in trade
As Gurcharan Das, the pundit on matters pertaining to corporate India in our times tells us in the preface, the study is part of an on-going Penguin series 'The Story of Indian Business'. Or as he puts it: 'Each slender volume offers an enduring perspective on enterprise, meant to promote a longer-term sensibility regarding artha, the material base of our civilization.'
To that extent Mahadevan sticks to the formula: 'Follow the money' as indeed the tagline tells us. What makes the Chettiars different is not just their forays into Southeast Asia where they made their fortunes both as traders and merchant bankers, but their very resilient intra-caste module. The clans grouped around the nine temple towns of the Ramnad district over 78 villages. One of the earliest donors was a salt merchant who had made a promise to donate a tithe to a famous temple in the salt-starved Palani region of the Madurai district. Interestingly, a monopoly in salt became a feature of the Chettiar trade in basic domestic consumption needs.
We hear, for instance, that they traded paddy and rice from Bengal to Burma and Ceylon. Other items, such as cotton, were from closer home in Tinnevelly. Their willingness to cross the seas brings to mind the Parsi community, who were also shipbuilders in their time. Like the Parsis, some of the Chettiar trade to Southeast Asia consisted of opium and raw spirits, such as arrack. Unlike the Parsis, who went on to create an industrial base for textiles early in the mid-19th century, the Chettiars preferred to concentrate on their banking skills in Burma and Malaya. The Burma teak was valuable for the use of railway sleepers. The rubber from Malaya was needed for the newly evolving automobile sector, as also tin, though these were primarily in the hands of the local Chinese.
Mahadevan tracks the heyday with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 all the way up to the Great Depression of the 1920s. The Second World War brought in its wake the Japanese occupation of the happy hunting grounds of the Chettiars. By that time, the Chettiars owned large tracts of Burma. The retreat of colonial powers brought an end to the Nattukottai hegemony. This is where Mahadevan poses the most crucial questions about whether the failure was also due to the intra-caste bonds of the community.
By his meticulous tracking of the legendary figures that made up the Nattukottai Chettiars, Mahadevan has provided an invaluable dossier of a South Indian community that still remains uniquely different.
The reviewer is a Chennai-based critic and commentator