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The Hindu
4 days ago
- General
- The Hindu
Review of Fortune Seekers by Raman Mahadevan
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
Time of India
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Remembering Frederick Forsyth
This is not an obituary of Frederick Forsyth, just a fan's recollection. Obituaries will be many (if the team at The Economist becomes a little 'pop' and less woke perhaps it will do it). Forsyth's demise is passing of an era, a genre of writing that was an intersection of espionage, wars, racy thrillers with pop heroism, crime intertwined in the history and the geo-politics of world war II, Cold war and post-colonial era. All these themes churned well into a large and rich corpus of best sellers that Frederick Forsyth produced over five decades, with remarkable success- Day of the Jackal, Odessa File, Devil's Alternative, Dogs of War, The Shepherd, Fourth Protocol, Phantom of Manhattan, The Afghan, Kill List- among others. Eminently readable, the racy novels interspersed with superb short stories collections: No Comebacks, The Veteran, The Deceiver. Quite a few of these were made into movies- successful ones. For the Gen X types (me included), these books were the closest we could come to the thrills, the intrigues and complexities of the post-colonial, cold war era. The 70s and 80s, the pre-globalization era, when India was a distant spectator to the bipolar world and when our windows to the world was confined to the papers, Illustrated Weekly, Archies, Commandos- Frederick Forsyth, Alistair Maclean, Leon Uris, Robert Ludlum were our windows to the world of espionage, global politics and statecraft. And in this genre Forsyth was in a class of his own. Alistair Maclean was too World War II British type. Ludlum too racy and too American, Leon Uris was too historical (and boringly voluminous to many). Forsyth was the perfect mix of the setting, context, events and of course a good story. The humanness of his characters, their strivings, success and failures, was endearing. None were superheroes, at best a phantom like Johnny Kravanagh in The Shepherd (made into a short film starring Ben Radcliffe and John Travolta (available on Disney Hotstar). The stories, actors were so close to reality that to an impressionable mind growing up in the 1980s, it all seemed real. That Forsyth was a trained Royal Air Force Pilot who saw action in the 1960s, an intelligence operative, BBC correspondent (when BBC was credible and respected) helped imparting that sense of realism to his racy scripts. Meticulous research, delving deep in history, and immaculate detailing made his writing so vivid that one did not need a motion picture adaptation- be it the murky world of the mercenaries in the 1960s Africa (Calo 'Cat' Shannon and his bunch in The Dogs of War) or the sordid saga of a concentration camp in Riga and the hunt for a Nazis war criminal in The Odessa File (the movie was so damn underwhelming). From the point of recall value, Day of the Jackal remains Forsyth's number one- again it was the detailing- whether forgery of documents, the ballistics and the taut plot woven so intricately around historical events that it all seemed real. His canvas stretched wider with cold war thrillers like Devil's Alternative which perhaps for the first time revealed Ukrainian subnationalism to the English-speaking world which had hitherto seen USSR as a Russian megalith, and the Fourth Protocol. In the 1990s and the subsequent decades after the cold war, his works centered around the themes of international terrorism, narcotics, and theaters in West Asia and Afghanistan in the works like The Afghan, The Veteran. These books may have lacked the nostalgia, the appeal and the readership of his earlier works, but they held their own against the forces of new mass media and information overload, which had somewhat demystified the arcane world of global geo-politics, espionage, crime syndicates and all. The last book of Forsyth that I read was the Kill List, it had all the attributes of a good Frederick Forsyth novel. It was to be made into a film and I just hope with so many OTT platforms and the popularity of the genre someone will take up that work. A writer's impressionability is to a great extent determined by the reader's age and sensibility. Like today, in my 50s, it is more of Pico Iyer or the right of center Political Economists and historians and scientists turned philosophers. But even to an ageing mind, the knowledge of these scholars and their wisdom is absolutely no match for the taut plot, storytelling and attention to detail and research of Frederick Forsyth- especially for the generation that grew up in the 70s and the 80s. Though sorry for his demise- even at 86 he had some juice left in the tank- it was a life well lived. It was disciplined, organized, successful and fulfilling. Thank you, Frederick for enriching ours. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
