Introduction
Scholars are looking again at banking and mercantile families in India's early modern history, responding to the challenge issued by Claude Markovits in the epilogue of his 2008 volume, Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs, to “return the merchant to South Asian history.”Footnote 1 Some of the underlying assumptions and questions being asked are old and some are new. My own longstanding assumption, upon which this article relies, has been that bankers and merchants played multiple and important roles with respect to states in South Asia, and that their relations with non-kin officials and other political actors determined their success or failure and sometimes the success or failure of a state, most notably, the Mughal state.Footnote 2 Questions are again being raised about “trust,” assumed to be a leading attribute of and asset to financial networks (especially in long-distance trade diasporas), and the notion so commonly put forward by scholars to explain the success of Hindu banking and mercantile communities. Recent work by Francesca Trivellato has found that membership in the Sephardic trade diaspora facilitated but did not guarantee trust or cooperation: the Sephardic merchants relied on non-Jewish as well as Jewish agents and networks of information, and evolving legal norms guided their business activities.Footnote 3
Consideration of legal norms alerts us to claims being made by Timur Kuran and Anantdeep Singh about the advantages of Hindu law over Islamic law (as written in legal texts) for capital accumulation and the continuity of family firms in the South Asian and Middle Eastern economic worlds. Islamic laws of inheritance, they argue, divide and diminish family resources, partitioning at least two-thirds of an estate among children, spouses, parents, and sometimes more distant relatives. While Muslim women receive only half of what men in each category do, legally they should inherit. Hindu Mitakshara law, by contrast, helps consolidate and maintain resources within joint families; Hindu women do not inherit and joint-family enterprises pool capital and discourage partitions of an estate.Footnote 4
Other legal questions concern the interactions between customary or personal law and the evolution of British colonial law in much of South Asia. Sumit Guha, for example, discusses precolonial, eighteenth-century conceptions of rights and legal practices in the Maratha country, “a region of shifting political boundaries, often indefinite jurisdictions, in which several unwritten and written bodies of law and custom could be invoked or set aside as the case might be.”Footnote 5
The present research pertains to Hyderabad, a princely or native state outside British Indian jurisdiction, where the state made no attempt to regulate customary practices with respect to marriage, adoption, and inheritance within each kindred, caste, or community. Legal pluralism prevailed in the native states even as British India codified colonial laws from the 1860s, and, even in British India, attempts to devise laws and impose them on religious and caste communities varied over time and by region. Lauren Benton suggests that Indian litigants helped move a plural legal order toward a state-centered legal order by seeking to “exploit jurisdictional complexity.” Speculating that colonial conditions “intensified the fluidity of the legal order and enhanced the strategic importance of personal law,”Footnote 6 Benton anticipates Ritu Birla's arguments about negotiations between kin-based indigenous commercial networks and market-oriented colonial commercial law from the late nineteenth century; Birla refers to the “extensive negotiability” that characterized vernacular practices governing the symbolic capital of kinship, caste, and lineage, and the capital flows of market exchange and production, a situation that colonial laws sought to restrict.Footnote 7 In Hyderabad by the late nineteenth century, laws evolving in surrounding British India and the establishment of a British Residency in Hyderabad began to affect family firms by providing new legal arenas for cases involving transactions and property holding.
To consider these issues, I look closely at three Hindu and Jain banking and mercantile communities, focusing on adoption, marriage, and inheritance practices among Hindu and Jain family firms in Hyderabad, India. These firms came from three major financial communities: the Gujaratis, Goswamis, and Marwaris. Gujarati merchants and bankers are so named because their homeland is Gujarat, and they have many subdivisions, some of them Hindu (mostly Vaishnavite, worshippers of Vishnu) and some of them Jain.Footnote 8 Marwaris came originally from the Marwar region of Rajasthan.Footnote 9 The three major Marwari castes or subcastes are Agarwals, Maheshwaris, and Oswals, the first two predominantly Vaishnavite and the last predominantly Jain.Footnote 10 The Goswamis in Hyderabad were Shaivite (worshippers of Shiva) sanyasis, celibate mendicants by tradition, whose roots were in northern and central India. Not much has been written about these communities in Hyderabad,Footnote 11 although listings of firms by locality and biographies of individuals appear in various sources.Footnote 12
Historical study of Gujarati, Goswami, and Marwari banking firms in Hyderabad State prior to the state's 1948 incorporation into India suggests several lines of argument, the first concerning adoption. Before the demographic transition, high infant and child mortality made the survival of sons (the heirs under Hindu law) to adulthood problematic.Footnote 13 Perhaps the most famous pre-modern Indian merchant's life history is that of Banarasidas, who wrote in a dialect of Hindi in Agra in 1641. He had nine children by his three successive wives, but none of the children survived him.Footnote 14 With this pattern in mind, I argue that Hindu and Jain encouragement of adoption, in contrast to Islamic constraints on adoption, gave an obvious advantage to Hindu and Jain family firms when it came to the continuity of their firms and financial networks.Footnote 15 Hindu law permits adoption even by widows and of adults as well as children, the purpose being to provide heirs to property and resources rather than to provide for children.Footnote 16 I will present detailed evidence of the prevalence of adoption in Gujarati, Goswami, and Marwari family firms, derived from orally constituted genealogies and also from Hindi family histories of Marwari entrepreneurial families in Hyderabad.
My second argument is that marriage and inheritance practices among these patrilineal mercantile families were actually quite flexible, notably involving affines—relatives by marriage—as major players. Wives and their kin did play roles in mercantile family histories.Footnote 17 Flexible family strategies meant not only continuity for the family firms but also a potentially broad spatial range of financial networks. Gujarati and Marwari Hindu and Jain bankers and financiers practiced caste endogamy but gotra, or subgroup exogamy, so marriage networks could be and often were wide-ranging. In contrast, Indian Muslims in general encouraged and often practiced cousin marriage. This could result in a more limited range of options for marital networks, possibly leading again to an advantage for the Hindu bankers and merchants in terms of access to capital and other resources. (On the other hand, cousin marriage could offset the dispersion of resources caused by Islamic inheritance law: empirical data is needed here.Footnote 18) And although the Goswami sanyasi bankers did not marry, they did keep women and have children. There were no Goswami women before the twentieth century, but the men could choose (in Hyderabad) Rajput, Maharashtrian, or Telugu women, and they could adopt as chelas, or students, boys from a wide range of backgrounds.Footnote 19
Finally, I argue that trust is a mischaracterization or overstatement of the values and practices that helped maintain family firms and their financial networks; at least it seems a less-than-useful concept when analyzing the family firms in Hyderabad. Discussions and debates about trust focus chiefly on long-distance trade diasporas but also raise issues of kinship, caste, and religion that are relevant here, as well as the issue of the degree of merchant reliance on or autonomy from state power.Footnote 20 Claude Markovits writes about trust as a necessary ingredient to the successful conduct of business transactions but dismisses its basis in common religion, ethnicity, and/or caste; he also dismisses idealized “fictive kinship ties of ‘brotherhood.’” While he sees trust as based on shared information about past behavior, Markovits does link it to power relationships within communities, communities based on locality yet also, he writes, on co-residence, kinship, and matrimonial alliances.Footnote 21 Others define business communities by shared dialects, account book scripts, or regional cultures, but shared caste and/or religion are always part of the discussion.Footnote 22
According to most scholars, trust is based on caste or kinship networks.Footnote 23 Kin or caste fellows care for family members in a trader's absence or apply negative sanctions to keep him in line.Footnote 24 Negative sanctions certainly depend upon membership in a kin-based or caste community. For example, asserting that caste-fellows were defending institutionalized trust when they tried to prevent a fellow long-distance trader in Moscow from converting to Christianity in the late seventeenth century, Scott Levi reasoned that the man's wife and other family members were being held accountable back in Multan, that their safety, even the children's access to marriage partners, depended on repayment of the loans taken to finance the man's trading venture to Russia.Footnote 25 Rather than illustrating positive aspects of trust, this stresses negative sanctions such as making transgressions public and denying opportunities for marriage.
However, although the Hindu and Jain family firms in Hyderabad to be discussed here were founded by migrants to the city and marriage partners were frequently brought from outside, the men heading the firms settled in Hyderabad and were not accountable to family members elsewhere. Thus entrepreneurial success on the part of Hyderabad's financial communities was more readily accounted for by close relationships with other political actors in Hyderabad, as I will show with case studies. Trivellato, reviewing scholarly work on trust, proposes instead the phrase “communitarian cosmopolitanism” to characterize the experience of Sephardic merchants who synthesized diverse traditions and mingled with non-Jews in a society of unequal and separate groups, and this conception is a useful one for considering diverse mercantile communities in the context of Hyderabad State.Footnote 26
Hyderabad State: Reviewing the Crucial Role of Bankers
Hyderabad State developed in the Deccan plateau in the course of the eighteenth century as the Mughal Empire in Delhi lost supremacy in the subcontinent. In southern India, Nizam ul Mulk, Mughal governor of the Deccan province, engaged in military battles and diplomatic negotiations with the expanding Marathas in the western Deccan, the new regional powers arising in Mysore and Madras, and the French and English trading companies moving inland from their trading ports. Still professing allegiance to Delhi, the Nizam and his successors established a separate dynasty and administration by the end of the eighteenth century, continuing Mughal administrative practices in a new context and with new sets of participants.Footnote 27
Banking firms, particularly what have been termed “great firms,”Footnote 28 had been important participants in state-building in precolonial India, serving as state treasurers, minters of money, and revenue-collectors as well as maintaining long distance credit and trade networks.Footnote 29 The importance of these firms to state-building and maintenance is being increasingly confirmed,Footnote 30 and scholars are also looking hard at pre-modern merchant and trading networks in South Asia and beyond, reassessing their relationship to the development of capitalism.Footnote 31 Yet there is still no definitive history of banking in India that integrates pre-modern and colonial materials across the subcontinent (including the native or princely states). No authoritative, comprehensive history relates the “great firms” and diasporic trading networks to the agency houses and joint-stock banks that emerged under the East India Company, the British Raj, and postcolonial South Asia.Footnote 32
The communities that participated in banking and trade differed by region within the subcontinent. Some trading networks bridged regions and countries. Diasporic communities of Shikarpuris and Hyderabadis from Sind and Khatris from the Punjab traded in Central Asia.Footnote 33 Gujaratis, both Muslim and Hindu, traded to eastern and southern Africa and Southeast Asia.Footnote 34 Tamil-speaking Chettiars and Muslims also traded in Southeast Asia,Footnote 35 and Afghan moneylenders moved down into India. Other bankers and merchants expanded primarily within the subcontinent. Major groups of Muslims, Hindus, and Jains moved out from Gujarat, Hindus and Jains extended out from Marwar and other parts of Rajasthan, and the Goswamis, sanyasis whose maths, or monasteries, were in northern and western India, also moved and became major traders between north India and the Deccan in the eighteenth century.
Bankers and merchants from these last three communities, of Gujaratis, Goswamis, and Marwaris, arrived in Hyderabad at different times, settled in certain localities, and established close relationships with particular officials and nobles at the Nizam's court. The communities’ adoption, marriage, and inheritance practices varied somewhat, although for the non-sanyasi Hindus the Mitakshara system of Hindu law prevailed, so that all male members were coparceners of the joint family property. In the nineteenth century, the British resident in Hyderabad gave the localities under his jurisdiction some access to laws and precedents developing in British India, probably those from Bombay Presidency to the west,Footnote 36 but both legal pluralism in Hyderabad and the interplay between precolonial and colonial legal systems remain to be explored in Hyderabad State.
The tumultuous period of the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century saw bankers becoming crucial players in Hyderabad state politics. The second Nizam, Nizam Ali Khan (1762–1803), moved the capital from Aurangabad to Hyderabad as the military aristocracy was succeeded by a Mughal-style bureaucracy based on the collection of land revenue. Nizam Ali Khan's successors, Sikander Jah (1803–1829) and Nasiruddaula (1829–1857), made agreements with the British resident establishing the Hyderabad Contingent, a military force that was, by 1813–1814, paid by the Nizam but led by British officers. The Nizam's inability to meet the payments put increasing financial pressure on the state as the East India Company became a creditor of the Nizam's government in 1813, making the Company a rival to the local banking firms that had been supplying loans.Footnote 37 Compelled to pay the Contingent but unable to use it as his own, the Nizam unsurprisingly built up his own forces, and support of these two military forces took a large part of Hyderabad's revenue.
When, in 1814, the payment of the Contingent Forces had to be guaranteed by the Nizam's government, the Diwan or Minister turned to the banking firm of William Palmer and Company, founded in 1810 by Captain William Palmer, Eurasian son of General William Palmer, and an officer in the Nizam's army. This firm, which I consider an indigenous one (see the case study of the Gujarati firm, below), advanced money to the Diwan Raja Chandu Lal at the rate of 2 1/2 lakhs rupees a month (a lakh is 100,000) and was assigned the revenues of certain districts (Berar) as security; the firm took interest at the rate of 25 percent. The firm continued to advance loans to the minister until its claim amounted to about a crore (100 lakhs) of rupees, and when in 1820 it advanced a further 60 lakhs of rupees to Chandu Lal, this became the talk of India. A few months later Sir Charles Metcalfe became British resident in Hyderabad and protested to the governor general, citing a prohibition on British subjects making loans to native princes—but Palmer was Eurasian and not a British subject.Footnote 38 Metcalfe's outrage also clearly stemmed from the Palmers’ immense popularity in Hyderabadi social circles, and his adamant opposition to Palmer and Company's key role in Hyderabad politics eventually led to inquiries in England and the firm's bankruptcy in 1824.Footnote 39
The British resident pressed for the back pay due to the Contingent, a debt that grew in the 1830s and 1840s and led to Hyderabad's financial crisis of the 1840s. Financial arrangements resorted to after the Palmer bankruptcy in 1824 failed to ameliorate the situation, and by 1850 the situation was drastic. Successive Diwans sought funds from bankers and mediated among bankers, revenue contractors, and mercenary troops, all of who became crucial to the state's finances. In the early nineteenth century, the Diwanship was held by the leading Shia nobles Mir Alam (Diwan 1804–1808), his son-in-law Munir ul Mulk (1809–1832), Munir ul Mulk's son Siraj ul Mulk (1846; 1851–1853), and finally, in 1853, Munir ul Mulk's younger son Salar Jung (1853–1883). During much of the early period, effective control was in the hands of Raja Chandu Lal (a Hindu Punjabi Khatri), Peskhar or deputy Diwan (1804–1843) and also Diwan (1832–1843). Then Lala Bahadur (a Hindu North Indian Kayasth, daftardar, or land revenue record keeper, for the eastern half of the state),Footnote 40 played a key role similar to that played earlier by Chandu Lal from the late 1840s until 1853. The challenge was to secure loans from bankers to pay administrative officials and military troops, then to parcel out land from which the bankers and their forces could collect the debts the state could not repay, and finally to fend off the mercenary forces demanding payment for their services from nobles, bankers, and land revenue contractors. Just before the young Salar Jung became Diwan in 1853, the Company forced the Nizam's cession to it of the rich province of Berar, the strategic revenue-rich territory held successively by the banking firms of Palmer and Company, Puran Mal, and Pestonjee.Footnote 41
Hyderabad's Muslim and Hindu Bankers
While the absence or near-absence of Muslim bankers is often attributed to the Islamic prohibition on the taking of interest,Footnote 42 Muslims were bankers and traders in the subcontinent and in Hyderabad. One explanation offered for Muslim under-representation in the management of large Indian firms stresses not just Islamic inheritance laws but enforcement of them under British rule,Footnote 43 but this would not explain the scarcity of Muslim bankers in Hyderabad, a state outside British jurisdiction. Muslim bankers were present and active in Hyderabad in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but they did not establish family firms that lasted.Footnote 44 Afghan or Pathan moneylenders were sometimes mentioned as loaning money to state officials and nobles but were not prominent as bankers.Footnote 45 Khoja and Bohra Muslims, from formerly Hindu caste communities that continued to follow Hindu law and so were important as merchants and bankers in western India,Footnote 46 were not leading bankers in Hyderabad, although there were Bohra families settled in the old city locality of Husaini Alam.
Tantalizingly, it seems that the original “Panch Bhai” (five brothers) bankers of Hyderabad in the late eighteenth century were Muslims, although later these roles were filled by various Hindus. These Muslim Panch Bhai were the four sons (Fatha Ali Khan, Baidar Ali Khan, Shar Ali Khan, and Murad Ali) of one Ghulam Hussain Khan, subahdar of Burhanpur, who came down to Hyderabad with the second Nizam, and a friend of theirs (Jan Ali Khan). This information comes from the commissioner of Wakfs (Muslim trusts) in connection with the Makbarah Panch Bhai (tomb of the five brothers) in the Shahalibanda locality of the old city of Hyderabad. The tomb is set in the midst of Govind Bagh, a garden connected with Raja Chandu Lal's brother Govind Baksh.Footnote 47 There is also an ashurkhana, the Ashurkhana Panch Bhai. (Ashurkhanas are Shia religious buildings housing alams, standards symbolizing the martyrdom of the Prophet's grandson Hussain in 680 CE that are taken out in procession during the annual Muharram commemorations of that martyrdom.) Located in Karwan (the bankers’ locality) and registered as a wakf in 1940 by its Muslim mutawalli, or manager, who lived adjacent to it, this ashurkhana had the Nizam's name substituted as manager in 1958.Footnote 48 Whether these two sites were connected to the same family or families is unclear.
Places in Hyderabad. Adapted from Map 3 in Karen Isaksen Leonard, Social History of an Indian Caste: The Kayasthes of Hyderabad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
Then there was Makhdum Seth, known throughout India as the most famous of Hyderabad's Panch Bhai bankers early in the nineteenth century, and foremost among the bankers and grain merchants living in Begum Bazar. His son, Syed Ahmed, took an interest in military affairs; he dressed as an Afghan and maintained many Afghan, Arab, and other troops as well as seven horses and two elephants, hoping to be appointed a jamadar. Failing in this goal and in business, he disappeared from the banking scene, his kothi (residence/office) taken over by Pestonjee, a Parsi banker from British India, who by the early 1840s was paying Syed Ahmed 100 rupees a month rent for it.Footnote 49 In 1846, Syed Ahmed made a final attempt to collect debts he thought due him from nobles, traders, and bankers: he held a five-day party for young relatives of leading bankers and officials and then locked them up and held them hostage, demanding money for their release. The attempt ended badly for Syed Ahmed, since the Nizam sent troops to join with those of the families of the imprisoned youths and they were freed. Then the Diwan Siraj ul Mulk imprisoned not only Syed Ahmed but also eleven of his relatives, including—unusually, the source notes—his mother, wife, and sister.Footnote 50 This young man seems to have self-identified with the military regime characteristic of Hyderabad's earlier days, when individuals sometimes defied caste or community stereotypes. For example, one Hindu Marwari, Raja Shambu Pershad Agarwal, in fact a military man, had converted to Islam after having founded a Hindu temple.Footnote 51
The Gulzar-i Asafia, a Persian history, describes Hyderabad's evolving banking communities and their localities in the early nineteenth century and highlights non-Muslims. It lists ten bankers, five in Karwan (all Gujaratis), four in Begum Bazar (three Goswamis and a Marwari), and one in Chaderghat, or Residency Bazar (a Parsi): “Side by side in Begum Bazar are the houses of the Marwaris, Gosains, Komatis, Afghans, and other financiers and traders … and in Karwan Sahu, the Gujaratis reside.… The bankers are millionaires, lending millions of rupees to the state and financing the land revenue contractors.… [One of them, a Gosain] associates with the Afghan military leaders and is fond of fighting.… The bankers also loan to the nobles and to the Nizam himself; they have access to the Court.”Footnote 52
The case studies that follow highlight Gujarati, Goswami, and Marwari adoption, marriage, and inheritance patterns in Hyderabad and provide empirical details relevant to the assumptions and questions raised in the introduction. They also highlight a few instances where women played important roles in the family firms—we are interested in practice rather than legal norms. Given the provisions of Hindu Mitakshara law, Claude Markovits, for example, found a surprising incidence of women recognized as heirs in 118 succession cases among Shikarpuri Sindhi merchant court cases in the 1890s.Footnote 53
The first case study is of the Gujarati firm of Benkati Das Bhagwan Das, dating from the 1750s. This firm's fortunes were connected to the well-known Eurasian firm of Palmer and Company, discussed above. The second is of Goswami firms, in particular that of Umrao Gir/Narsingh Girji/Dhanraj Girji, dating from 1801, and the third is of the Marwari Agarwal firm of Mahanand Ram Puran Mal Ganeriwala, dating from 1802. These three firms, like some others from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, are all represented by descendants of one sort or another in Hyderabad today. And that is my point: their longevity.Footnote 54
Gujaratis: Benkati Das Bhagwan Das
The leading Hindu bankers in Hyderabad State were initially Gujaratis settled in Aurangabad and in Karwan (just outside Golconda Fort).Footnote 55 Early members of the Gujarati (Hindu, subcaste Modh Visa) banking family of Benkati Das Bhagwan Das moved from Aurangabad, settled in Karwan, and maintained a garden (bagh) between Begum Bazar and Karwan.Footnote 56 In the Chronology of Modern Hyderabad from 1720 to 1890 A.C., a translated Persian court diary with brief entries about the Nizams’ movements and meetings, Gordhan Das, or Govardhan Das Bagh (known today as the Bhagwan Das Bagh), was an important stopping place between Golconda Fort and the city of Hyderabad founded south of the Musi River.Footnote 57 Salabat Jung, son of the first Nizam and effective ruler from 1750 to 1761, left Hyderabad and stayed in the garden in 1756; he also stayed in the garden and left it for Golconda Fort in 1760. Nizam Ali Khan (the second titled Nizam) left Hyderabad and went to the camp at Gordhan Das’ garden in 1764. (In 1765, Bokhan Das, a Gujarati name and perhaps a mistake for Gordhan Das, was appointed khazanchi or treasurer of the state.) Nizam Ali Khan marched to the garden and camped there in 1776 and 1777, and the army marched and camped near the garden of the math (compound, establishment) of Gordhan Das in 1782. Finally, when Sikander Jah assumed the throne as Nizam III in 1803, his flag was hoisted there.Footnote 58 The Benkati Das Bhagwan Das family also established a Gokulnathji temple in Karwan, and, in the early nineteenth century, an affine of this family functioned as kotwal, or mediator, for all Gujaratis in Karwan. Karwan was dominated by Gujaratis, although others were also settled there.Footnote 59
This Gujarati family firm all by itself illustrates many issues of interest here: adoption, flexible use of kinship ties, mistrust or rivalry among relatives, and, in oral accounts of the firm's affairs, leading roles for women. Oral interviews trace the family from Ahmedabad, Gujarat to Aurangabad and Hyderabad, with marital connections in Varanasi, Burhanpur, and other places. Benkati Das (grandson of Govardhan Das of the garden) was forced from the Aurangabad branch of the firm when it was looted and his father Jagmohan Das died. He and an older brother, unnamed and untraced, moved to Hyderabad's Karwan locality, but Benkati Das went on to Calcutta and supplied goods to Europeans. The story goes that a mutiny took place there in the late eighteenth century, and Benkati Das helped some Europeans escape by ship and gave them provisions.Footnote 60 He then went to Varanasi where he married Gangabai and brought her to Hyderabad in about 1800. There, he started with nothing, but the mother of the British political agent Sir William Rumbold identified him as the man who had saved her life in Calcutta and renewed their acquaintance.Footnote 61 Benkati Das became a partner of Palmer and Company, from about 1810,Footnote 62 and William Rumbold also became a partner of the firm, after 1816.Footnote 63 It is Benkati Das’ descendants who represent this famous firm in Hyderabad today.Footnote 64 They preserve not only an original partnership agreement with Benkati Das’ signature in Hindi script, but also, in their puja room, William Palmer's silver sugar bowl and creamer, which bear his name and the date 1817.Footnote 65
Genealogies provided to me in 1983 for the Benkati Das family and six or seven other families relate leading Gujarati family firms to each other (Hari Das Kishen Das, Lachmi Das Lachman Das, and later permutations of these). These genealogies show the family firms responding to mortality and age structure, passing leadership to sons, cousins, nephews, or relatives through affines to carry on entrepreneurial activities. Whether or not actual adoptions were involved is not always known (only one was explicitly mentioned in interviews), but the flexible family strategies are very clear.Footnote 66
Benkati Das of this Govardhan Das/Bhagwan Das family, establishing himself in Hyderabad in the early nineteenth century, brought his sister's two sons from Burhanpur.Footnote 67 They, Kishen Das and Hari Das, also worked with Palmer and Company, and Kishen Das then started a firm of his own, working briefly with Henry Dighton, an English banker and revenue contractor in Hyderabad. Benkati Das retired to Varanasi in the late 1820s, leaving his two young sons to start over on their own, and his sister's sons Kishen Das and Hari Das assumed leadership roles before Benkati Das’ young sons matured. Hari Das headed the community in Karwan in the 1830s, when it was divided between the residents of the upper and lower bazaars and there were often fights, especially on the occasion of Holi: “Injuries and even deaths were common, and after each year's battles people prepared for the next year. But Hari Das Seth called the inciters from the two sides to his house and gave them shawls; he forbade fighting and got trusted people as mediators. The people were thus saved and protected, and this wonderful Seth, devoted to the welfare of the masses, would soon get to see the Nizam.”Footnote 68
By the 1840s, Benkati Das’ sons had founded their own firm, Lachmi Das Lachman Das, which saved young Salar Jang's struggling Diwanship in 1856.Footnote 69 Lachmi Das had four sons, two by a first wife, and two by a second. Lachman Das had only a daughter, so he brought a son-in-law from Varanasi, along with a daughter-in-law for his brother Lachmi Das and the father of the groom and bride. He thus established another family line in Hyderabad, one of two that were termed Kashiwali (following the culture of Kashi or Varanasi) by Hyderabad relatives. When Benkati Das’ nephew Kishen Das died in the 1860s, Kishen Das’ second wife's brother in Surat filed suit in the British courts (Allahabad or Bombay), allegedly winning the suit in British India but unable to assume control in Hyderabad. There, the Diwan Salar Jung favored the descendants of Lachmi Das (Lachmi Das had saved his Diwanship, while Kishen Das had reportedly sided with his opponent, the daftardar Lala Bahadur). Although the two sons of Hari Das had died, several descendants of the brothers Hari and Kishen Das had married descendants of Lachmi Das, consolidating the assets of the two lines and adding to the Diwan's reluctance to allow alienation of the assets to the contender from British India. Politics based on wives again divided the firm in 1884, setting the two sons of Lachmi Das’ first wife against the two sons of his second, and the elder branch was partitioned yet again in 1894 as the eldest son of the eldest son split from his two cousins, the sons of his father's younger brother.Footnote 70
Oral accounts give considerable agency to the women in these families, and indicate their high status by calling several of them Raja (e.g., Chand Raja) and identifying many wives as sisters of so and so, showing the importance of brothers-in-law. When Lachmi Das and Lachman Das were kidnapped in 1853 (by the military? a Sikh mutiny?), their mother Gangabai was the one who paid the ransom.Footnote 71 All of these twists and turns certainly suggest that trust, so often easily attributed to Hindu family firms, needs to be examined more closely. Many of the men had more than one wife, sometimes at the same time, suggesting that multiple wives as well as adoptions served the strategic end of securing living sons. The material also suggests that both patrilineal and affinal kin competed at times but also continued each other's claims when appropriate.
The British Residency, or Sultan Bazar locality, attracted increasing numbers of bankers from Karwan and Begum Bazar and the old city from the 1820s since the British Residency area offered them protection from the Nizam's desperate requests for more money.Footnote 72 A competing British Indian legal system was developing there, one that enjoyed substantial military backing from nearby Secunderabad and in British India. The Benkati Das cluster of closely related Gujaratis in the banking business shifted residences and temples (their Gokulnath temple and the private Bhagwan Das family Giriraj temple) from Karwan to Sultan Bazar in about 1900. Also in the early twentieth century, part of the family property went under the Court of Wards administration because, although Raja Bhagwan Das’ son Vallabh Das was living, he was a minor at the time of his father's death. We will see this pattern in the Hindi family histories cited below of sons inheriting while still minors, and this reminds us that a possible source for tracing Muslim banking families would be the Court of Wards records.
Goswami Rajas: Umrao Gir/Narsing Girji/Dhanraj Girji
The second case study is of Goswami Rajas, as leading bankers from the Gosain or Goswami sanyasi community were called in Hyderabad, and particularly of one leading Goswami math or establishment. Bernard Cohn suggested in a 1964 article that Gosains might have an advantage over Hindu family firms because their inheritances were not partible—one chela got most of the assets.Footnote 73 What this seems to have meant, at least in Hyderabad, was that contests among chelas for the resources of the mathdars, or heads of maths, were serious affairs. In Hyderabad, there were sixteen or eighteen Goswami maths located east of Karwan in Begum Bazar, Shah Inayat Ganj, and down along the northern bank of the Musi river. These were loosely grouped into at least two factions, with contested rankings and internal divisions as well. Like other bankers, the Goswami Rajas began by the mid-nineteenth century to engage with the British resident and British Indian notions of Hindu law, but they continued to rely on mercenary troops to guard themselves and their interests.
Contemporary accounts of a mid-nineteenth-century inheritance dispute between two Goswami chelas vividly illustrate the political context in which Goswamis and other bankers operated. This dispute was between two chelas, the elder one, Baldevgir, claiming to be sole inheritor of his deceased guru's property, but challenged by the younger one, Bijigir. The sources here, English-language newspapers of the mid-nineteenth century, reflect some British terminology and understandings of the community and the issues involved. These two Gosains quarreled about “a patrimony,” and in the fall of 1849 their armed retainers battled in the midst of Begum Bazar, leaving two killed and six wounded. Bijigir had employed a party of Rohilla mercenaries and promised to pay them from his “share” once it was secured. The Rohillas wounded Baldevgir's “adopted son,” or chela, and carried him off as a prisoner. Then the Rohillas demanded their pay, besieging Bijigir as well as Baldevgir and driving both Goswamis to seek protection in the Residency Bazar. A few months later, in May or June of 1850, the Rohillas held both Baldevgir's chela and Bijigir as hostages for their pay, but the Nizam's government paid some money and got them released. The Minister (Diwan) then confined Baldevgir and Bijigir in his own palace, so the Rohillas besieged that palace and demanded that the Gosains be turned over to them. Failing to achieve this, they seized a “person of note,” namely Jai Gopal, the son of the leading Marwari Agarwal banker Govind Ram, and held him for a ransom equal to the pay they were owed by Bijigir. Jai Gopal was seized within two hundred yards of the Residency Bazar where he resided, leading to calls for the resident to intervene. Finally, Jai Gopal was released in exchange for Bijigir and Baldevgir, but the government sent troops against the Rohillas right in Begum Bazar, assisted by the armed guards long retained by these rich Goswami bankers.Footnote 74 This exciting and ongoing contest shows the growing engagement of both the Nizam's government and the British resident with questions of inheritance and jurisdiction in Hyderabad's urban localities.Footnote 75 Both governments sought to maintain law and order and to retain the allegiance of important bankers in the city, whether they resided in Begum Bazar or the Residency Bazar.
Goswami gurus and chelas were using both customary and British Indian law to claim successions and inheritances by the early twentieth century, and a gradual shift from sanyasi to Hindu family law took place in Hyderabad as a Goswami caste was constituted there in that period. One lineage or banking firm among the Hyderabadi Goswamis, that of Umraogir/Narsing Girji/Dhanraj Girji, illustrates these changing community practices. Moving from Gandheri in northern India to Pune under the early Peshwas, and then to Hyderabad in 1801, the line of Dhanraj Girji and his older brother Pratap Girji testifies to the community's transition in the early twentieth century from guru-chela lineages to biological lineages, from mathdaris, or ascetics to grihasthas, or householders. Shejras, or genealogies, for this and other Goswami maths trace guru-chela relationships over time, but dates are rarely given and it is difficult to calculate the rate of turnover, of mortality, for these mathdars. Three shejras with nine-to-thirteen generations, and some indication of dates, suggest that gurus presided over their maths for about fifteen years. Conflict and deaths saw the lineages dividing again and again. In the late nineteenth century, Hyderabad's Goswamis were grouped into two dhadas, or factions: those of Umrao Gir/Narsing Girji/Dhanraj Girji and Narpat Girji/Lal Girji/Birbhan Girji.Footnote 76 These sanyasis were supposed to be celibate and unmarried, but women were present as “keeps” or “garlanded wives,” not as “real” wives. The custom was for the mathdars or gurus to appoint each other's real sons as chelas to each other, providing for both biological and “spiritual” heirs as best they could. Women associated with the Goswamis sued for inheritance, too, much as they did in British India.Footnote 77 The garlanded wives generally lost in Hyderabad, as the mathdaris gave way to the grihasthas, the latter drawing “real” Goswami women from northern and central India where the trend to householdership had taken hold earlier.
Again the issue of trust comes up, as my Goswami informants traced the guru-chela lineages on shejras against the real biological lineages on other shejras and discussed past inheritance conflicts. Choices had to be made, and Dhanraj Girji became the head of his math (and one of the richest men in Hyderabad and Bombay in the twentieth century) only because his elder brother Pratap Girji married according to Hindu law early in the century. Dhanraj Girji had garlanded wives and children but did not marry them under Hindu law, so Pratap Girji lost his claim to the math because succession was still decided according to sanyasi customary law. Moving to Hindu law was preferable, I was told, because “the marriage system was better than the shishya [chela] system; there were fewer disputes under Hindu law.” Fewer disputes perhaps, but there were still disputes among Goswami family members.
Marwari Agarwals: Mahanand Ram Puran Mal
The third case is that of the Marwari Agarwal firm of Mahanand Ram Puran Mal. Mahanand Ram, the banking firm founder in Hyderabad, migrated from Ganeri and Lakshmangadh, Rajasthan, in 1791, settling in Hyderabad's Begum Bazar in 1802. (Most Marwaris came to Hyderabad only in the nineteenth century.) A Hindi history of the Agarwal jati, or caste, claims that Mahanand Ram represented the twenty-third generation of a Rajasthani family, and seven generations descend from him in Hyderabad, one of the lines continued by adopting a younger brother of an issueless older one.Footnote 78 Begum Bazar was described in the 1830s and 1840s as a suburb with many kinds of people living there, in contrast to Gujarati-dominated Karwan Sahu, and during that period, just as the Gujarati banker Hari Das had mediated among factions in Karwan, the banker Puran Mal did the same among members of his community in Begum Bazar.
Mahanand Ram and his son Puran Mal were close to the Nizam's court. Mahanand Sahu stopped a beggars’ riot near Char Minar in 1811 by giving out alms, and Puran Mal Seth sent gifts in 1839 for the marriage of the daughter of Jahanparwar Begum, a consort of Sikandar Jah, Asaf Jah III (and gifts were also sent by leading Gujarati bankers).Footnote 79 Puran Mal established Sitaram Bagh Temple in Begum Bazar in Hyderabad in 1825, funded by jagirs granted as inam by the government.Footnote 80 The temple's grounds included a mosque from an earlier period, older than the temple and sharing a stepwell with it.Footnote 81 An 1894 newspaper article about a controversy over who should manage the mosque says the Nizam himself attended the laying of the temple's foundation, but the Agarwal Hindi history makes no mention of this.Footnote 82 The family lived within the temple compound, and two impressive samadhis, or tombs, of Mahanand Ram and Puran Mal were erected on the temple grounds.Footnote 83
In this Marwari genealogy, I found only the one legal adoption (and it worked against the adopted son, who later tried to claim the jagirs but had been adopted out of the “natural” line of descent).Footnote 84 However, the men often had more than one wife—two or three each—the women coming from Hyderabad's old city localities of Char Minar and High Court and also from Nagpur, Ajmere, Calcutta, and Gaya Bihar. Again, having multiple wives was another way of securing heirs and increasing one's marital and financial networks. One can make the obvious point that this option was even more available to Muslims, if they did practice polygyny.
While the Hindi history of this Ganeriwal family mentions no women, family oral tradition credits women from the Mali (gardener) community as having helped connect Puran Mal to the Nizam directly. The story is that a Mali woman and her descendants worked for the Ganeriwal family, and the Nizam had a “keep” who was the daughter of a Mali woman working for the Ganeriwals. The latter came to visit her mother in the Ganeriwal home and reported back to the Nizam that she had seen her grandfather (Puran Mal or perhaps Mahanand Ram) and that he was “good with money.” Therefore, the Nizam appointed Puran Mal Treasurer in Berar, and Puran Mal's son Prem Sukh Das collected revenue there in the midst of Nizam/Maratha conflicts. This case again suggests that wives and women could have significant roles, serving to relate bankers to potential partners or clients and, in this case, to the Nizam himself.
What Hyderabad's Marwari Family Histories Tell Us
We turn now to Hindi histories of Marwari family firms that by the early twentieth century had ended up in the Nizam's dominions in Hyderabad State. They allow us to measure the timing of migrations and the incidence of adoption as leadership passed from one generation to the next.Footnote 85 The Marwaris came later than the other groups to Hyderabad, many of them possibly in reaction to the 1857 Mutiny and the decisive shift of power to the British from the Mughals and related courts. Most family histories of the Oswals, Agarwals, and Maheshwaris covered only the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Maheshwaris and Oswals, the latter mostly Jains whose inheritance laws are like those of Hindus, arrived in the Deccan first: half of the forty-two Maheshwari families had come to the Nizam's state by 1850, while half of the sixteen Oswal and thirty-two Agarwal families were there by 1860. The four Maheshwari families that arrived before 1800 settled in Hyderabad, Khandesh, and Jalna.Footnote 86 Two Oswal families settled in Bijapur and Aurangabad in the 1750s and 1790s, respectively. More of the Maheshwaris settled in Hyderabad's old city (three of the twelve in Hyderabad specified Purana Kabuter Khana and Nur Khan Bazar), while ten families of Oswals settled in the British areas, Residency Bazar, Secunderabad, and Trimulgherry. Two Agarwal families came in the 1780s and 1790s, and Agarwals seem to have settled mostly in Begum Bazar and Hyderabad's old walled city.
No matter how brief the histories, again and again only one son of two or three survived, and many fathers died leaving a very young son or sons. Adoptions were plentiful,Footnote 87 usually of relatives but not always. Of the sixteen Oswal Jain family histories, ranging in generations from one to eleven,Footnote 88 eight mention no adoptions, and the other eight record sixteen. Of the forty-two Maheshwari family histories, of from one to eleven generations, twenty mention no adoptions, and twenty-two mention a total of thirty-five. Of the thirty-two Agarwal family histories (including a few Digamber Jains), ranging from two to nine generations, there were thirty-seven adoptions in nineteen families. In sum, forty-nine of these ninety Marwari families migrating to the Nizam's state give histories that include adoptions, eighty-nine in all. In some families there were as many as four or five adoptions, most of them being a second or younger son of a younger brother given to an older brother or cousin brother.
Other relevant features of these histories concern age at marriage, age of becoming head of a firm, and divisions within family firms. Sometimes mentions are made that a man married at or before puberty (perhaps because this was unusual), and of boys taking on business responsibilities at the ages of nine to twelve (again, perhaps since it was unusual).Footnote 89 The histories routinely specify the year of division for family firms, usually between or among brothers. No reasons are given for these divisions, although they seem to be associated with the number of surviving males in the family and with expansion into new territories or enterprises. Scholars sometimes state or imply that trust required keeping family firms undivided across generations, reading divisions among brothers or other descendants as negative indications of a family firm's healthiness.Footnote 90 But in these texts such divisions were not viewed as negative events or breaches of trust. This raises questions about whether non-partibility was necessary for the continuity and prosperity of family firms.
Only eight women appeared in these family histories. In one Oswal family, a nineteenth-century widow, whose son was only two at her husband's death, carried on the business until she herself died.Footnote 91 Women are mentioned in five Maheshwari family histories. In the first case, “the ladies of the family” went to Khandesh and worked successfully to raise money to free their ancestor, whom the ruler Mewat had imprisoned after the firm had been looted. In another case, the mother of a leading banker was famous for her charity, reportedly rivaling Hyderabad's Diwan Chandu Lal in her openness and generosity. In the other cases, a nineteenth-century widow saved the firm by carrying on the business while her son studied, and two early-twentieth-century educated women became community and political activists.Footnote 92 In one Agarwal family, a nineteenth-century widow raised her young adopted son with the advice of the firm's accountant. In the same family, a second wife, widowed in the early twentieth century at age twenty-nine, took over the business and ran it efficiently; she directed factories and cotton mills and managed the accounts and books, while educating her three daughters and marrying them well.Footnote 93 Most of these Oswal, Maheshwari, and Agarwal family histories feature, for early-twentieth-century members, activities linked to community welfare and even Indian nationalism, and educated women were beginning to participate in those activities.
Conclusion
Patterns of adoption, marriage, and inheritance among the predominantly Hindu and Jain banking communities in Hyderabad State show family histories interacting with changing political and legal regimes. Recent work by Kuran and Singh relates normative Islamic and Hindu inheritance lawsFootnote 94 to the relative continuity of Muslim and Hindu family firms. While the possibilities of such links are promising (particularly with respect to adoption, not considered by Kuran and Singh), much more study is needed. Their work rests on several assumptions: first, that both Hindu and Muslim financial firms actually followed Hindu and Islamic inheritance law when it came to succession; second, that the common Muslim practice of cousin marriages did not effectively counteract the divisive effects of Islamic inheritance law; and third, that the striking success of the Khoja and Bohra Muslim communities was due chiefly to the continued adherence of these endogamous communities (once Hindu castes) to Hindu law with respect to inheritance.Footnote 95 Further, while the Hyderabad evidence testifies to the frequency of adoption in Hindu and Jain financial communities, it also shows that multiple wives and the flexible incorporation of at least some affines into family businesses helped supply male heirs to the family firms. For Muslims, multiple wives would be even more probable, and while this would have supplied heirs, as adoption did for Hindus and Jains in the days before the demographic transition, it would also have increased the partibility of estates according to Islamic law. Conflict between or among family members (or chelas in the case of Goswamis) contributed to some divisions of Hindu and Jain firms, but divisions also occurred because of the numbers of surviving males and/or the expansion of the business into new territories or enterprises. Finally, oral and written evidence revealed a small number of women achieving public recognition for one reason or another in the Hindu and Jain communities; research on women in Muslim mercantile communities is needed.
Scholars continue to compare European and Asian economic histories,Footnote 96 and family firms are central to these histories. Claude Markovits argues that Asian merchants were “some kind of capitalists” and writes that the South Asian merchants were able “to maintain significant areas of independent international operations throughout the period of European economic and political domination in Asia.”Footnote 97 Jack Goody contends that in both South Asia and Europe kinship groups and extended domestic units often played critical roles in commercial and industrial activities both before and after the development of capitalism.Footnote 98 Francesca Trivellato in her work on the early modern Sephardic Jewish trade diaspora relates Jewish and Christian marriage, dowry, and inheritance laws and practices to evolving legal norms,Footnote 99 and frequent marriages between close relatives are credited with insuring the continuity of the famous Rothschilds family banking firm.Footnote 100
As scholars look again at South Asian banking and mercantile families and firms, the material presented here highlights the significance of marriage, adoption, and inheritance practices within communities, and whether or not such practices were regulated by the state in any way. Trivellato's phrase “communitarian cosmopolitanism” well describes the operation of Hyderabad's banking and mercantile firms, people of diverse traditions engaging with each other in a plural society organized around the Nizam's court in precolonial times. Hyderabad's bankers and merchants relied upon state power and responded to the constraints and opportunities offered by the state and its officials.Footnote 101 By the late nineteenth century, however, new legal arenas and practices offered by the British Residency and British India beyond the state's boundaries competed with those available through the Nizam's administration.Footnote 102 Indian litigants in colonial India took advantage of new resources and participated in shaping new legal regimes rather than being dominated by them, in processes that were complex and multi-layered.Footnote 103 How mercantile families and communities were actually constituted, transmitted their resources, and participated in changing legal regimes still needs far more historical study, in both British India and leading native states like Hyderabad.
