to be continued.....

A PERSUASIVE YOUNG BANIA

Among all the 550-odd princely rulers left, with British Residents at their shoulders, to run their domains in the last years of the Raj, few were more eccentric than Mahabatkhan, the Nawab of Junagadh.

The Nawab's family had run this fiefdom, one of several in a political jigsaw covering the Saurashtra peninsula in Gujarat, since a faujdar or military commander of the Mughal Empire named Sher Khan Babi founded his own subordinate dynasty in 1690. Two and a half centuries later, this warrior's descendant was best known for his love of dogs. Mahabatkhan had 150 of them, with an equal number of dog-handlers on his payroll and individual quarters for all the canine retinue. To celebrate the 1wedding' of one canine pair, the Nawab was reputed to have spent two million rupees (then worth about £150 000 sterling) and to have given his 700 000 subjects a public holiday.

The Nawab was the first political target to come into the sights of Dhirubhai Ambani, although it is unlikely that he was ever specifically aware of it. It was during a movement aimed at overthrowing the Nawab's rule and securing Junagadh's accession to India during the Partition of British India in 1947 that Ambani, then a teenage high school student, had his first experience of political organisation and his first brushes with authority.

It was the only moment in modern times that junagadh has figured in the calculations of nations and statesmen. Even in the 1990s, Junagadh and its surrounds, known as the Kathiawar region, remains one of the quietest, most traditional regions of India, and one of the least accessible in the otherwise busy northwest coastal area of the country.

A few times a week, a turboprop flies into the simple airstrip at Keshod, unloading people from Bombay or the Gujarati diaspora overseas coming to visit their relatives and make offerings to family gods at local temples. In the town itself, clusters of 1940s Ford Mercury taxis wait for groups of passengers or for hire at weddings. The railway network was built to connect each of the several former principalities of Kathiawar to the outside world rather than with each other. Once you are in Kathiawar, all now part of Gujarat state, travelling between towns often means one or more changes of line and extensive doglegs and backtracking in the journey. The last steam engine on regular service in India, apart from scenic mountain railways, puffed between Junagadh and the Gir sanctuary for the last Asiatic lions until 1996.

The land itself is dry, open and stony. The monsoon rains quickly run off down the short rivers and nuilahs that radiate from the central rocky hinterland out to the sea. The roads are lined with stunted pipul (fig) trees, and the stony fields are fenced with straggling rows of cactus. The standard building material is a porous dun-coloured stone cut by saws into ready-made blocks from pits near the seashore. There are few of the modern ferro-cement extravagances built by the newly rich, hardly any of the industrial plants and their residential 'colonies' seen extending out into farrnland in other Indian regions, and only a few private cars.

But if the landscape is monotonous, Kathiawar's people com- pensate for it with riotous colour where they can. The women drape themselves with cotton scarves tie-dyed in red and orange. The local scooter-taxi is the Enfield motorcycle grafted to a flat tray resting on two wheels at the back, with the handlebars decked with coloured lights, electric horns and whirling windmills. The homes of wealthy merchants are decorated with mouldings of swans, peacocks, flamingos, parrots, elephants, lions and tigers. Massive double doors, twelve-panelled, with heavy iron studs, open tantalisingly on to huge inner courtyards.

A blood-drenched history and complicated mythology are attached to the landmarks and constructions of Kathiawar. On the coast to its west, at Dwarka, is the place where Lord Krishna died. To the south, the temple of the moon at Somnath is a centre for Hindu pilgrims from all over India. In the steep Girnar hills above the city of junagadh, long staircases take pilgrims to Jain temples dating back to the 3rd century BC.

Looming over Junagadh city, the fortified rock-citadel of Uparkot has inscriptions and cave-sculptures from the time of the 3rd century BC ruler Ashoka. The city was an important centre for Hindu rulers of Gujarat in the first millennium. Then, starting with the Afghan warlord Mahmud of Ghazni, who invaded in 1024 AD and pillaged Somnath, Junagadh suffered four centuries of sackings. Mughal rule gave it some stability with Muslim rulers controlling its largely Hindu population. Both its rulers and its people were passive onlookers in the contest for India's trade among the English, Dutch and Portuguese, whose galleons fought vicious battles off the Gujarat coast. A five-metre long cannon broods over the town from the ramparts, a relic of an unsuccessful attack on the Portuguese trading post at Dlu, on the coast southeast of Junagadh, by the fleet of Sultan Sulaiman the Magnificent of Turkey in the 15th century

At night, seen from the coastline at the south of Junagadh, processions of navigation lights travel left and right along the horizon. The seaborne traffic between the west coast of India and the Arabian ports goes on as it has for millennia, ever more intense.

Gujarat was the trading hub of ancient India, where Indian cottons and silks were traded to Arabs and later the first English East India Company in return for silver, gold, incense and coffee from the Red Sea port of Mocca. Up until the early 15th century, Chinese junks had also come to western India. Later India and India-based European traders became the trade intermediaries between the Arab and Chinese spheres. The Gujaratis were prominent in this pre-colonial Indian Ocean trading network, with the wealth of India in its cloths, indigo, opium and spices merchandise.

The small ports of Kathiawar took part in this trade. Dlu handled much of Gujarat's trade with Aden in the west and Malacca in the cast. Gold, silver, quicksilver, vermilion, copper and woollen cloth would be exchanged for Indian gold and silver embroideries and brocades and for cotton muslins of a fineness expressed by trade terms such as abrawan (running water), baft hava (woven air) or shab-nam (evening dew).

Later of course the East India Company grabbed its monopolies in opium, tea, indigo and spices in a three-way trade equation between China, India and Europe, topped up later by the British Empire with gold bullion from Britain's new colonies in South Africa and Australia at the southern corners of the Indian Ocean. Indian entrepreneurs-in Calcutta the Marwari traders and moneylenders originally from Raiasthan, in Bombay the Parsis (Zoroastrians originally from Persia)-began moving into large-scale industrial production late in the 19th century

Smaller traders also took advantage of Pax Britannica by taking steamer passages to all corners of the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia-no passports were needed-and opening small stores and service stations. Most were from Gujarat; a large proportion of these from Kathiawar. Two of the biggest commercial families in Uganda, the Mehtas and the Madwhals, came from Porbander, and the thriving Chandarlas of Kenya came from Jamnagar. Until 1938, the free port of Aden was part of the Bombay administration. The East African shilling, the currency of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade, was virtually pegged to the Indian rupee in value.

The Guiaratis were stingy with their customers and stingy with themselves. Bhaskar Bhattarcharya, a television broadcaster in New Delhi, spent his childhood years in Uganda where his father was a British colonial official. The epicurean ways of the Bhattarcharyas from Bengal contrasted sharply with those of the Patels or Shahs from Gujarat. 'When we first arrived, the women took my mother aside and said: this is the way you do things,' he remembers. 'If you were invited for dinner, you got a couple of vegetable dishes and rice. My parents liked to splash out, and serve meat and fish to their guests. Of course, by the time we left, the Guiarati peon in my father's office had probably saved more than he had.'

The wealth was the result of rigorous saving, abstemious living, and endless hours of work by unpaid family members-a migrant's success story in many parts of the world. In East Africa, it created a resentment that led to the expulsion of the Indian traders and appropriation of their assets after the colonies became independent in the 1960s. The effect was to fling the Gujarati diaspora worldwide, to start the process of capital accumulation again.

Among the Gujaratis, the people of Kathiawar are renowned for their exuberance of speech, inventiveness and commercial drive. 'This is a place of have-nots,' notes Shecia Bhatt, a former editor of the magazine India Today's Gujarati-language edition. 'It is a barren land, but out of stone they somehow draw out water. The people are so colourful because the landscape is so colourless. They fill their heads with colour. Amongst Gujaratis, the best language is among Kathiawaris: so many words. Even the trading class will have extraordinary expressions. Kathiawari traders have more vibrant terminology than other traders. They were the first to go out of India for better prospects. Adventure is second nature to them. They have less hypocrisy. All of the other business communities affect modesty to the point of hypocrisy. Dhirubhai Ambani is part of that culture.'

In one sense, Ambani was born to be a trader, as his family belongs to a Bania caste, a section of the Vaisya category (varna) in the traditional Hindu social order whose roles are those of merchants and bankers. This instantly provided a whole network of relationships, a community and social expectations that made commerce-taking a profit from buying and selling in markets, the accumulation of capital-an entirely natural and honourable lifetime's occupation.

Although socially below the Brahmins (priests and scholars) or the Kshatriya (warriors and landowners) and rarely part of aristocratic clites, the Vaisya castes came to exercise enormous power across India. They marshalled huge amounts of capital, which funded the campaigns of maharajas and nawabs and at times the British trade and military expansion when the budget from London ran short of operational needs. Centuries before the modern banking system, Vaisya shroffs or bankers were the conduits of a highly rnonetised Indian economy, rernitting vast sums around India at short notice through a sophisticated trust system based on hundi (promissory notes).

The commercial instincts of Gujarat's Vaisya were encouraged by a convenient interpretation of Hinduism preached by the holy man Vallabhacharya in his wanderings around the region early in the 16th century Another widely followed religious school known as Shaivism (from the god of creativity and destruction, Shiva) had preached that the world was unreal and an impersonal abstract essence was the absolute reality and truth. The Jain and Buddhist religions, which had sprung from Hinduism, also preached privation, renunciation and destruction of the self. Vallabhacharya saw a personal god who created and sustained life, for whom living life to the full was a form of devotion. His school became known as Vaishnavism, as the focus of devotion was the god Vishnu's playful avatar (incarnation) Krishna, per- haps the most widely adored and human face of the divine among Hindus.

In his classic text on the Vaishnavas of Gujarat, the scholar N. A. Thoothi pointed out that this naturally appealed to the people of a land richly endowed with opportunity like the central parts of Gujarat. It was a philosophy that justified their way of life and gave a divine purpose to their roles as providers and family members. It also fitted the rising social status of the Banias in Gujarat, overriding the formal varna hierarchy.

As Vaishnavism grows, the Vamas decline. We have noticed, for example, how the Vanias [Banias] have reached a social status as high as that of the Brahmins themselves. This upsetting of the balance of the Varnas has been greatly due to economic causes. The merchant and the financier and the capitalist have, by sheer force of wealth and power, for a while become dictators over all, even over the priestly class.

A justification of their way of living, a theory of life and a pathway suited and helpful to the living of a life engrossed in work and duty as a man, husband, father, citizen and so on, a hope that such a mode of life as they live is acceptable to the highest deity-the Gujaratis naturally sought for all these.

Ambani's particular caste is called the Modh Bania, from their original home in the town of Modasa north of Ahmedabad before a migration many centuries ago to Saurashstra. The Modh are one of three Bania castes in this part of Gujarat, who might eat meals together but who would each marry within their own caste. They are strict vegetarians, and only the men take alcohol. Their practice of Hinduism follows the Vaishnavite path. But the main object of their pilgrimages, on marriage or the start of a new business venture, is a black-faced idol with a diamond in his chin located in a temple at Nathdwara, a small town in the barren hills behind the lake city of Udaipur in Rajastban. This idol represents Srinath, an avatar or incarnation of Lord Krishna, and was brought to Nathdwara from Mathura (Krishna's birthplace) by a holy man to escape the depredations of the fierce anti-Hindu Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. For reasons that are not clear, Srinath has become the familiar god of the Modh and other Banias. Portraits based on the Nathdwara idol are often seen in the offices of Bania businessmen.

In later years, Ambani and his family made frequent visits to the temple of Srinath, flying into Udaipur airport in his company's executive jet and driving straight up to Nathdwara. In 1994, Ambani built a large ashrarn (pilgrim's rest-house) in Nathdwara for the use of visitors. The three-storey building, faced in a pink granite, is dedicated to the memory of his parents.

If the Modh Bania practise piety in the temple, and abstemi- ous ways in their homes, they are known as fiercely competitive and canny traders in the marketplace, with no cornpunctions about taking advantage of opportunities for profit. A saying in Gujarat goes: 'Kapale hojo kadh, pan angane na hojo Modh'-rneaning: 'It is better to have a leucoderrna [a disfiguring skin pigment disorder] on your forehead than a Modh as guest in your house.'

Like other Bania castes of the region, the Modh Bania looked far beyond their immediate patch. For centuries it has been a custom for young men to make trading voyages to Arabian ports, building up personal capital over nine or ten years hard work and modest living before returning to marry and take over the family business. Sons inherited family property in equal proportions, with the oldest son assuming the authority of family head.

But all this was a nebulous heritage for Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani, born on 28 December 1932. His home-town was Chorwad, literally meaning 'Settlement of Thieves' though no one seems to remark on that. It is set a mile or so back from the flat Arabian Sea coastline where the Nawab had a two-storey summer palace built of the dun-coloured stone quarried from pits nearby. The railway from junagadh bypassed the town to the cast, looping towards the old port of Veraval and Somnath.

His father, Hirachand Ambani, seems to have been a diffident trader when he tried his hand at petty conunerce, as a wholesaler in ghee (clarified butter, a cooking medium in India). He is recalled by many acquaintances as a 'man of principle'-meaning perhaps that he was too good-willed to be good at making money. He is better remembered as a village schoolmaster in the administration of the Nawab of Junagadh. From 1934-36, Arnbani senior was headmaster of the Chorwad primary school, whose classrooms with their battered furniture remain little changed around a tree-lined yard across the road from the town's bus stand.

The industrialist and parliamentarian Viren Shah, whose family also comes from Chorwad, remembers Ambani senior as a stocky man with a dark-brown skin, normally dressed in a white turban, long coat and dhoti (a piece of cloth draped into a rough pantaloon). The village schoolmaster was private tutor for several years for another member of the same family, Jayan Shah, who remembers him as a good teacher and 'very strict'.

Hirachand Ambani made little money, and lived in extremely austere circumstances. The family home still stands in a hamlet called Kukaswada, two or three miles outside the main part of Chorwad. It is a two-roomed stone dwelling with a stamped carthern floor, entered by a low doorway and dimly lit by openings under the caves. Ambani was married twice, having a son from his first marriage (named Samadasbhai) before being widowed. His second marriage gave him five more children, with Dhirajlal-or Dhirubhai as his diminutive became-in the middle.

The family's poverty did not keep the Ambanis from contact with better-off members of their social peer group. The Bania occasionally got together for meals or picnics. The Ambani children mixed freely with the Shahs, who were already prospering from a move to the then hub of British commerce in Calcutta, where they set up India's first factory making aluminium cooking pots.

The two houses of the Shah family in Chorwad, Shanti Sadan and Anand Bhavan, were big and rambling in the traditional style. As well as learning all the ways of business, the children were expected to learn various sports including horse riding, swimming and athletics, and to take their turn milking the 20 cows and 10 buffaloes kept in the gardens. The Shah family had become early followers of Mahatma Gandhi-also a Bania from Kathiawar-and often gave him accommodation in Calcutta. An uncle of Viren Shah and Jayan Shah had even retired from business and become a Gandhian social activist in Chorwad, carrying out upliftment work among its Harijans (the former Untouchables) and running a fitness camp for youth.

Jayan Shah remembers Dhirubhai, who was about seven years younger than him, coming to Anand Bhavan. Jayan Shah's father took an interest in'other people's children, lending them books to read and asking them to do odd jobs around the house. Dhirubhai was welcomed with great affection, and returned it with respect. Later, when he had gone away to work overseas, Shah remembers him dropping by to pay his respects during a vacation back in Chorwad, arriving with 'great gusto and a feeling of an old relationship'.

The guild-like support of his merchant caste helped Dhirubhai continue his education after finishing at his father's old primary school. In 1945, he moved up to Junagadh and enrolled at the Bahadur Kanji High School. This shared with a university college a large yellow stucco edifice on the outskirts of the city that had been built in 1902 by the nawab of the time and named after him. Because of his family's poverty, Dhirubhai was admitted as a free student. He found accommodation in a boarding house funded by the Modh Bania for children of their caste.

The Second World War had largely passed by Kathiawar, save for overflights by military transports and the occasional visit of the new army jeeps. The movement for Indian independence had not. On returning from South Africa, Gandhi had established his ashram in Ahmedabad, the main city of Gujarat, and carried out many of his agitations against British rule in the same region, including the famous 'salt march' to the sea to protest against the government monopoly of salt in 1930.

His activities were financed by Indian industrialists from the Hindu trading castes, foremost among them the Calcutta-based Marwari jute-miller G. D. Birla. His abstemious lifestyle was an extension of their own ideals, more familiar to them than the Anglicised manners of the Nehru family. But a real self-interest was also involved. The industrialists also saw in the Bania-born Gandhi a counterforce within the Indian National Congress-the main secular vehicle of the independence movement-to the socialist and communist ideas that had taken a strong grip on the thinking of educated Indians. Gandhi's ideas of industrial devolution to the villages were intrinsically opposed to the pro- posals for state capitalism and central planning of investment then being promoted by the Left in India as elsewhere in the world.

In Junagadh, the ideas of Gandhi and Sardar Patel, the Hindu nationalist lieutenant of Nehru who was also a Gujarati, cast a strong influence. The Nawab, with his Indian Political Service Resident Mr Monteith at his side, was automatically put in defence of the status quo. His police force and its detective branch kept a close watch on the independence movement, and carried out many arrests of agitators throughout the 1940s.

At the Bahadur Kanji school, Dhirubhai was quickly infected by the independence mood. Krishnakant Vakharia, later a leading lawyer in Ahmedabad, was two years ahead of Dhirubhai at the school and met him soon after his arrival in Junagadh. The two took part in a gathering of students to discuss the freedom movement. Vakharia recalls that all were inspired by the nationalist ideals of Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and most of all the socialist Jayaprakash Narayan, then still in the Congress Party.

The Modh boarding house where Dhirubhai was staying became the headquarters of a new group to push these ideals, which they called the Junagadh Vidyarti Sangh (Junagadh Students' League). The objective was to take part in the national independence movement and Gandhi's swadeshi (self-reliant) economic programme, which involved boycotting imported factory made goods in favour of village craftwares such as homespun cotton (khadi). Activities were to include meetings to salute the proposed national flag of India-the saffron, white and green tricolour with the ox-wagon wheel in the middle, which was then the Congress flag-as well as motivation sessions and sports meetings for the other students.

Vakharia became the president of the Sangh, with Dhirubhai and another student called Praful Nanavati serving as secretaries. 'We organised a lot of functions, like saluting the national flag, and took a lot of risks,' said Vakharia. At one time we printed pamphlets with a photo of Gandhi, and with that we approached some leading citizens to be our sponsors-but no one agreed. In Junagadh at that time no one was allowed to even utter "Jai Hind" or "Vande Mataram", or sing national songs. Even wearing khadi made you a suspect in the eyes of the Nawab's CID.'

In 1946, the students learned that Kaniala Munsi, a lawyer who was later a leading Congress Party politican and a minister in Nehru's first government, would be visiting Junagadh. They decided to invite him to address their members in the compound of a boarding house for lain students. The Nawab's police summoned Vakharia, Dhirubhai and Nanavati, and threatened the three with arrest, expulsion from school and trouble from their parents unless they gave an undertaking that no political speech would be given.

It is here that Dhirubhai shows a spark of his later genius at bringing apparently irreconcilable demands into an accommodation, if through a dubious intellectualism. "We had said that a literary figure would deliver a speech,' said Vakharia. 'Dhirubhai whispered that there was nothing wrong in giving this undertaking. "We are not going to give the speech. If there is any breach in the undertaking, it's a problem between Munsi and the police."' Munsi came and delivered a rousing speech in favour of early independence.

As 1947 wore on and partition of British India along Hindu Muslim communal lines became more likely, the political position of the princely states came under great scrutiny. By August, when the transfer of British power was due, all the rulers came under pressure to accede to either India or Pakistan. In most of the more than 550 states, the decision was clearcut because of geographical position, the religion of the ruling family, and the predominant religion of the population.

Three difficult cases stood out after 'freedom at midnight' on 15 August. In Kashmir, contiguous with both India and Pakistan and with a Muslim majority, the Hindu ruler wavered. In the immensely wealthy and large central Indian state of Hyderabad, which had a Hindu majority, the Muslim Nizam had dreams of independence from both India and Pakistan. Then there was Junagadh, what the historian H. V Hodson called 'the joker in the pack'.

Junagadh was close to the western side of Pakistan, and had a Muslim ruler. But its fragmented territory was interlocked with that of neighbouring Hindu-ruled states, and its people were mostly Hindu. Moreover, it contained the great Hindu pilgrimage sites of Somnath and Dwarka.

In 1946, the Nawab's prime minister and closest adviser, the Diwan, had become sick and gone into prolonged convalescence. Stepping into his shoes in May 1947 as acting Diwan came Sir Shah Nawaz Bhutto, a politician from Sindh active in the Muslim League of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistan. (Bhutto himself was the father and grandfather of two later prime ministers of Pakistan, Zulfikir Ali Bhutto and Benazir Bhutto.)

Bhutto kept in close touch with Jinnah and had the Nawab obey his advice to 'keep out under all circumstances until 15th August'. Then, on the day of the transfer of British power, the Government of Junagadh announced its accession to Pakistan. Hodson believes Jinnah never actually thought Junagadh would be allowed to join Pakistan. The objective of the exercise was to set uncomfortable precedents for Nehru in the more pressing contest for Kashmir and perhaps Hyderabad. If Nehru agreed to a plebiscite in Junagadh, which he eventually did, it would help Pakistan's case for a popular vote in Muslim-majority Kashmir. If the Junagadh ruler's decision was accepted, over the wishes of his people, the same could apply in Hyderabad. If the Indians simply marched into Junagadh, protests against a similar Pakistan!, use of force in Kashmir would be greatly weakened.

Nehru adopted the course of negotiation while throwing a military noose around Junagadh in the neighbouring Hindu-ruled states, which had all acceded to India. Two subordinate territories of Junagadh, the enclaves of Babariawad and Mangrol, were taken by Indian troops on 1 November 1947 without bloodshed.

Meanwhile, Indian nationalists began agitating within and without Junagadh for the overthrow of the Nawab. In Bombay on 25 September, they declared an Arazi Hakumat' or Parallel Government under the presidency of Samaldas Gandhi, a relative of Gandhi who was editor of the newspaper Vande Mataram. From a temporary base in Rajkot, Gandhi kept in touch with supporters inside Junagadh by human couriers simply walking across the open frontiers of the isolated state. Other nationalist journalists, including the editors of the Gujarati newspaper lanmabhoomi in Bombay, called for volunteers to gather in Bhavnagar and other cities close to Junagadb for a non-violent invasion.

The students in the Junagadh Vidyarti Sangh threw their limited weight against the Nawab also. 'We were too scared to carry out physical sabotage like attacking power stations,' said Vakharia. 'So our sabotage consisted of spreading false rumours to cause panic, and supplying information back to the provisional government. We used to send someone to Jetalsur or Jedpur in the Indian union to pass on the information.'

In Junagadh, as in many other parts of India, the partition steadily developed a murderous communal nature. Two Muslim communities, called the Sodhana and Vadhana, had taken a militant position in support of accession to Pakistan and mounted big processions through Junagadh, threatening Hindus with ret- ribution if they opposed it. As it became clear that Pakistan was in no position to support the Nawab, Hindus turned on the Muslim minority and massacred whole communities in some outlying villages.

Food shortages developed, and the Nawab's revenues dried up. As his administration lost its grip, the Nawab decided the game was up and made a hasty departure for Karachi, taking with him all the cash and negotiable assets of the treasury, his family and many of his dogs (though his consort, the Begum, forgot her youngest child in the royal nursery and had to turn back to collect the infant). On 8 November, after an earlier meeting of the State Council, Bhutto wrote to the Indian Government's representative at Rajkot asking India to take over the state to avoid a complete administrative breakdown, pending a honourable settlement of the accession issues.

The Indian Army moved into Junagadh without incident on 9 November, and the communal tension quickly settled down. However, Vakharia recalls a small communal riot breaking out in Junagadh soon after independence, when some shoe shops belonging to Muslims at Panch Hatadi (Five Shops Area) were looted by Hindus. The students of the Junagadh Vidyarti Sangh went to the area to protect the Muslim shops, but their presence was misunderstood by the police.

One of the students was a fellow Modh Bania and boarding house companion of Dhirubhai named Krishna Kant Shah, who had been born in Kenya and sent back to Junagadh for his education. He was arrested by the police as one of the looters and taken to the lockup early in the evening. The leaders of the Sangh went to the police headquarters and met the police commissioner, named Lahiri, to argue Shah's innocence.

'Dhirubhai [who was then 16] showed a lot of courage in arguing with the police commissioner to defend Shah,' Vakharia said. 'The arguments went on for two or three hours, and all of us were threatened with arrest for obstruction of justice. But we were determined we would not go until our colleagues were released. Eventually they decided to let Shah go at midnight.' It was a debt Dhirubbai was to collect from Shah in controversial circumstances more than 30 years later.

The people of Junagadh voted overwhelmingly to join India when a plebiscite was held in February 1948, though Pakistan never recognised it. Dhirubhai returned to his studies, and took his matriculation in 1949. Vakharia studied law and continued with his political activity, following Narayan out of the Congress Party into the new Socialist Party in 1948. On graduating in 1951 he moved to practise in Rajkot and then Ahrnedabad, and eventually came back into the Congress later in an active legal- political career.

With his family still extremely poor, Dhirubhai had no such option. On finishing high school, he had to look for work. At the age of 16, Dhirubhai was physically strong, and already possessed of the persuasiveness that was to mark his later business career.

It is tempting to look into the culture of the Modh Bania for an explanation of what his critics see as his ruthless business ethics and 'shamelessness'. But many other entrepreneurs have also sprung from the same background in Kathiawar: most would shrink from the manipulation of the government that became part and parcel of the Ambani operation, even at the cost of less success.

The answer lies probably in the deep poverty that his family endured as the cost of his father's devotion to a teaching career. While he also learned that life is a web of relationships and obligations, Dhirubhai was fired with an ambition never to become dependent on anyone or to stay long in somebody else's service.