The Indian Business Communities and the Evolution of an Industrialist Class

IN ITS POINT of departure, India is sharply differentiated from many agricultural countries which have undertaken to accelerate their economic growth. As the Minister of Commerce and Industry, T. T. Krishnamachari, has observed, certain underdeveloped nations are able to elaborate programs for their industrialization as if they were writing on a clean slate as presumably they did in Soviet Russia and to some extent they now do in China. By contrast, he continued, that position does not now obtain in India. A great deal of development has taken place in the private sphere though there are very large gaps to be filled.'1 Not only has private initiative thus made a beginning in the industrial field, but the ownership and control of most of these modern plants is in the hands of Indian entrepreneurs. This is a unique phenomenon in Southeast Asia, where business-whether modern banks, mines and plantations or traditional moneylending and trade-has usually been the preserve of foreigners. How did this distinctive Indian pattern evolve? In the broad spectrum of Indian social structure how are the industrialists to be identified ? What organizational forms do they use? Most of them are linked with communities, but how is an Indian business community constituted, and which ones have promoted industrial expansion? Have the industrial developments in turn affected the communities themselves? Written at a distance, this brief account can do little more than raise the broad and often baffling questions whose solution demands intensive research and suggests some lines for further investigation.2 While the business element in many societies is composed of