Baniya-a derivative of the Sanskrit word Vanij, is a term synonymous with India's trader class. Over the decades, these capitalists spread their footprint across vast sectors of the economy from steel and mining to telecom and retail. And now even e-tail.
Nikhil Inamdar's Rokda features the stories of a few pioneering men from this mercantile community-Radheshyam Agarwal and Radheshyam Goenka, founders of the cosmetic major Emami; Rohit Bansal, co-founder of Snapdeal; Neeraj Gupta, founder of Meru Cabs; and V.K. Bansal, a humble mathematics tutor whose genius spawned a massive coaching industry in Kota-amongst others.
Through the triumphs and tribulations of these men in the epoch marking India's entire post independence struggle with entrepreneurship-from the License Raj to the opening up of the floodgates in 1991, and the dawn of the digital era-Rokda seeks to uncover the indomitable spirit of the Baniya.
Nikhil Inamdar is a Mumbai-based financial journalist. He was a prime time news presenter with NDTV Profit and worked for several years as a television correspondent at other reputed news channels after completing a postgraduate degree in broadcast journalism from the UK. He is currently consultant columnist at Business Standard Online. This is his first book.
Nikhil can be reached on email at nikhil385@gmail.com and his Twitter handle: @nik_inamdar.
The 'Baniya' is a loosely used expression in India, employed interchangeably to refer to the corner shop kiranawallah, the calculating money lender or the quintessential Marwari businessman next door. The connotation is often negative, but the etymology of the word is found in the Sanskrit term, vanij, which simply means trader or merchant. Originating primarily in the northern and western parts of India, the Baniyas have historically been engaged in professions ranging from money lending, commodities trading, stock broking, and shop keeping. In the present day however, they straddle sectors of the modern economy as varied as internet enabled retail, mobile telephony, and oil and gas exploration.
They are a separate Indian caste with specific sub-castes-Maheshwaris, Agarwalas etc, religious affiliations-Hindu and Jain, distinctive social customs, also have typical surnames on the basis of the clan to which they belong-Bansal, Mittal, Singhal, Goel, Garg and so on. In a wider context, the term Baniya is also used in parts of the country to refer to a conglomeration of people from diverse geographical and religious backgrounds, engaged broadly in commerce.
When I was approached to do this book that would feature the growth stories of five Baniya entrepreneurs, the first thought that crossed my mind was whether entrepreneurship could be dissected from the prism of caste alone. Could I possibly use old social segregations and hierarchies as a basis to pick a group of entrepreneurs and tell their stories? Wouldn't that only restate community stereotypes that may or may not hold true any longer?
As I began approaching people I was interested in featuring in the book, one young whiz kid-whose online restaurant-discovery portal had just received millions of dollars in private equity funding-banged the phone down on me asking never to call again. 'Baniyas in business?! Why would you want to categorize me in that manner?' he almost shrieked, evidently annoyed at my appeal to let his new-age success story be identified by the caste to which he was born.
If for a moment that incident made me circumspect about this project, all my doubts subsided once I began the interviews. For every person that was dismissive of the role their community may have played in influencing the choices they made in life, I met five others who reiterated the conscious and imperceptible weight that caste-based idiosyncrasies had on their psyche. That is not to say that those featured in this book are solely or even primarily defined by their Baniya identity.
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