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.

The Banned biography of Dhirubhai Ambani

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AN INVITATION TO BOMBAY

The envelope was hand-delivered to our house in Golf Links, Tan enclave in New Delhi whose name captured the clubbable lifestyle of its leisured and propertied Indian residents, soon after we had arrived in the middle of a north Indian winter to begin a long assignment. It contained a large card, with a picture embossed in red and gold of the elephant-headed deity Ganesh, improbably carried on the back of a much smaller mouse. Dhirubhai and Kokilaben Ambani invited us to the wedding of their son Anil to Tina Munim in Bombay.

In January 1991, just prior to the explosion in car ownership that in later winters kept the midday warmth trapped in a throat-tearing haze overnight, it was bitterly cold most of the time in Delhi. Our furniture had still not arrived-a day of negotiations about the duty payable lay ahead at the Delhi customs office where the container was broken open and inspected-and we camped on office chairs and fold-up beds, wrapped in blankets.

The Indian story was also in a state of suspension, waiting for something to happen. The Gulf War, which we watched at a big hotel on this new thing called satellite television, was under- cutting many of the assumptions on which the Congress Party's family dynasty, the Nehrus and Gandhis, had built up the Indian state. The Americans were unleashing a new generation of weap- ons on a Third World regime to which New Delhi had been close; its Soviet friends were standing by, even agreeing with the Americans. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwalt had pushed up oil prices and forced the Indian Government to evacuate some three million of its citizens working in the Gulf. The extra half-billion dollars all this cost India was pushing the country close to default on its foreign debt. Officials from the Ministry of Finance were already negotiating a bail-out from the IMF in Washington; the IMF was setting stiff 'conditionalities'-in effect a complete shift from Nehru's model of high external protection for the economy and government allocation of savings. Even the CNN clips of Tomahawk cruise missiles zipping neatly down the streets of Baghdad were in themselves part of another breach in India's walls. The clites who ran the national TV monopoly or the big newspapers no longer had India's half-illiterate population to
themselves.

Little of this was admitted in New Delhi. The coalition government of V P Singh, which had swept out the glamorous Rajiv Gandhi on a battery of corruption scandals, had itself collapsed in November after less than a year in office. India was ruled by an even smaller coalition of opportunists under a wily politico called Chandrashekhar, kept in office at Rajiv's pleasure for who knew how long. Everyone clung to the autarkic, Third World verities. Politicians and journalists pounced on the slightest admission by their fellows that perhaps India's vision of the world had been flawed and it had better adjust to the new order. At the Ministry of External Affairs, in the red sandstone majesty of Sir Herbert Baker's Secretariat buildings, a bright young official on a new economic desk assured me that India's finances were strong enough to take the strains. At a party of intellectuals' young academics and filmmakers in rough cotton kurta-payjama suits scoffed at the prospects for satellite TV. How would the advertising payments get out to the broadcaster through the maze of foreign exchange controls? Which foreign companies would want to plug products they could neither export to India nor make locally?

The wedding invitation was a good excuse to break away from this stalemate in New Delhi, and make contact with the Indian commercial class in Bombay. There it looked as if a raw entrepreneurial spirit was straining to break through the discouraging political crust. Word of the Ambani family and their company Reliance Industries had spread to Hong Kong as prime examples of this brash new India which might finally have its day, courtesy of the changes the Gulf War symbolised.

Everything about the Ambanis, in fact, was a good magazine story The young couple's courtship had been a stormy one, ready-made for the Bombay show-biz magazines. The bride, Tina Munim, was a girl with a past. She had been a film starlet, featuring in several of the Hindi-language films churned out by the hundreds every year in 'Bollywood'-most including improb- able violence, song-and-dance routines, and long sequences with the female leads in wet, clingy clothes. Before meeting Anil, Tina had had a heavy, well-publicised affair with a much older actor. The groom, Anil, was the tearaway one of the two Ambani boys. His parents had frowned on the match. Bombay's magnates usually tried to arrange matches that cemented alliances with other powerful business or political families. This one was not arranged, nor did it bring any more than a certain popularity. Hired assailants had been sent with acid and knives to scar Tina's face, so went the gossip (apocryphal: Tina's face turned out to be flawless). Anil had threatened suicide if he could not marry Tina, went another rumour. Finally, the parents had agreed.

The father, Dhirubhai, was no less colourful and even more controversial. He had first worked in Aden in the 1950s. I recalled a stopover there in my childhood, aboard the S. S. Oronsay, a buff-hulled Orient Line ship, en route to my father's posting in London with his Australian bank in 1958. The image was of grim, dark-brown peaks surrounding a harbour of brilliant blue, a host of merchant ships tied up to moorings, and a busy traffic of launches and barges. The trip ashore was by launch, landing at Steamer Point, where Arabs and Indians besieged the white faces, trying to sell us Ottoman-style cushions or to drag us into their duty-free shops. Now someone like those desperate salesmen in Aden was a tycoon in Bombay.

Ambani had got into polyester manufacturing in a big way, and got huge numbers of Indians to invest in shares of his company, Reliance Industries. In India, the home of fine cotton textiles, it seemed that people couldn't get enough polyester. The only constraint on local producers like Reliance was the government's licensing of their capacity, or where they built their factories. To jack up his capacity, Ambani had become a big political fixer. In the recent minority government formation, it was said, his executives had been shuttling briefcases of cash to politicos all over Delhi. There had been epic battles, with the press baron Ramnath Goenka of the Indian Express and with a textile rival from an old Parsi business house, Nusli Wadia. A year or so earlier, a Reliance public relations manager had been arrested for plotting to murder Wadia. The man had been released, and nothing was moving in the case. Was it genuine or a frame-up? Indian colleagues were not sure: no conspiracy was accepted at face value.

So we took our first trip inside India, making our way down to New Delhi Railway Station in a yellow-and-black cab, one of the 1954 Morris Oxford design still being made in Calcutta, in the rose-coloured haze of a winter afternoon; letting a red-shirted porter heave our bags on his head and lead us to the train, establishing our rights to the coveted two-berth compartment in the middle of the First Class Air-Conditioned carriage from the list pasted by the door.

The train slid across the flat beige northern landscape of wheat-stubble and square houses as night fell. In the morning we were trundling past palm trees and mangrove-bordered creeks before humming into Bombay through suburban stations packed with commuters.
If New Delhi was a city of books, discourse, seminars and not much action or precision, Bombay was one where people made the most of the nine-to-five working day before battling their way home to the distant suburbs. Most crucially, Bombay had accepted the telephone as a medium of dialogue-not merely as a preliminary to an exchange of letters setting up a meeting. It was also unashamedly concerned with money and numbers. New contacts like Pradip Shah, founder of India's first rating agency for corporate debt, with the slightly alarming acronym of CRISL, or Sucheta Dalal, a business journalist at The Times of India, or Manoj Murarka, partner of the old stockbroking firm of Batlivala & Karani, rattled off the details of industrial processes, forward- trading in the sharemarket or conversion dates of debentures at bewildering speed.

The wedding was going to be big, so big that it was to take place in a football stadium, the same one where Dhirubhai Ainbani had held many of his shareholders' meetings.
But it began in an oddly casual way. As instructed, we went mid-afternoon to the Wodehouse Gymkhana Club, some distance from the stadium. There we found guests milling in the street outside, the men dressed mostly in lavishly cut dark suits and showy ties, moustaches trimmed and hair brilliantined. The women were heavily made up, laden with heavy gold jewellery, and wearing lustrous gold-embroidered silk saris. Anil Ambani appeared suddenly from the club grounds, dressed in a white satiny outfit and sequinned turban, sitting on a white horse. A brass band in white frogged tunics struck up a brash, repetitive march and we set off in separate phalanxes of men and women around the groom towards the stadium. Every now and then, the process would pause while the Indian guests broke into a pro- vocative whirling dance, some holding wads of money above their head. The stadium was transformed by tents, banks of inarigolds and lights into a make-believe palace, and filled up with 2000 of the family's closest friends and business contacts. They networked furiously while a barechested Hindu pundit put Anil and Tina through hours of Yedic marriage rites next to a smouldering sandalwood fire on a small stage. Later, the guests descended on an elaborate buffet on tables taking up an entire sideline of the football pitch, starting with all kinds of samosas and other snacks, working through a selection of curries and breads, and finishing with fruits and sweets wrapped in gold leaf. The next day, the Ambanis put on the same spread-if not the wedding ceremony at another reception for 22000 of their not-so-close. friends, employees and second-echelon contacts.

Retrospectively, by the standards of Bombay a few years later, it looks a modest and traditional affair. Before their joint marriage of three children in 1996, the ingratiating Hinduja family had an elaborately illustrated book prepared on the Hindu marriage and sent to all invitees. Other business alliances were celebrated with elaborate stage-sets based on the ancient epics; lines of elephants led the processions of the grooms and diamonds were pasted to the foreheads of women guests. But at the time, the sheer size of the wedding was seen as a sign that Dhirubhai Ambani had made it through the political travails of 1989~90 and was unabashed-and certainly not strapped for cash or friends.

It was flattering to be there and to have a Reliance public relations manager take me up to meet the Ambanis-flattering, within a month of arriving in India, to meet the country's fastest moving, most controversial tycoon. An interview was promised shortly, once the festivities were over. An early cover story was clearly a possibility, an antidote to the gloomy political news out of Delhi. It would help my standing at the Far Eastern Economic Review if India was an upbeat business story and I was right on to it.

That of course was the desired effect. Reliance was desperate to raise funds for expansion and was looking to foreign sources, so some image-building in a prestigious magazine was highly useful. A newcomer to India would be more inclined to play down the controversies and look at the company's prospects.

The interview, when it took place a month or so later, was stimulating. Dhirubhai Ambani came limping around a huge desk when I was ushered to a sofa and greeted me warmly. Despite the obvious effects of a stroke in a twisted right hand, his mahogany skin was smooth and healthy, his hair plentiful and slicked back decisively in a duck's tail. His attention was unwa- vering. Disarmingly, Dhirubhai admitted to many of the youthful episodes that were the subject of rumour, and responded evenly when I raised some of the criticisms commonly levelled against him. He didn't mind people calling him an ‘upstart' or even worse names. It just meant they were trapped in their complacency while he was racing ahead. But the disputes were now 'all history' and the former critics were now all his 'good friends' buying their polyester and raw materials from him.

'The orbit goes on changing,' he declared airily. 'Nobody is a permanent friend, nobody is a permanent enemy. Everybody has his own self-interest. Once you recognise that, everybody would be better off.'

However, Ambani did point to an unfortunate trait in his countrymen. 'You must know that, in this country, people are very jealous.' It was not like in Hong Kong or other East Asian countries, where people applauded each other's success, he claimed. In India success was seen as the prerogative of certain families. But he didn't really mind. 'Jealousy is a mark of respect,' he said.

The interview resulted in a cover story for the Far Eastern Economic Review which portrayed Ambani as the business underdog trying to break through the government's red tape and the prejudices of a tired Bombay business establishment. Naturally enough, Ambani and his PR men were pleased. His one quibble, I was told, had been my pointing out some glossed-over problem areas in the Reliance annual reports, which had been put in the notes to the accounts, fine-print areas that only the professional analysts really read. The comments were true enough, but they made it look as though Reliance was unusual among Indian companies in these practices.


The Reliance public relations office continued to be attentive, supplying advance notice of newsworthy events. At one point later in 1991, there was another glimpse of Dhirubhai Ambani's energetic mind. His Delhi office passed on a request for information about Indonesia's engagement in the late 1980s of the Swiss cargo clearance firm Societe Generale de Surveillance (SGS) to administer its imports and exports, thereby sidelining the country's notoriously corrupt customs service for several years. I sent off some clippings, intrigued that the man accused of smuggling whole factories through the ports of India now seemed to be advocating Swiss efficiency in place of the lax adininistration of which he had supposedly taken advantage. The proposal got to a high level in the government before being canned, but not before causing panic in the Indian customs service-which may have been all Dhirubhai wanted to do anyway.

There were daily updates from the Reliance PR staff on an issue of convertible securities issued in the Eurornarket in May 1992, the first by an Indian company and tangible proof of India's reforms reconnecting it to the world economy. There was a company-organised trip out of Bombay up to its new petro- chemicals plant at Hazira, involving a bumpy flight in a chartered turboprop to the airfield at Surat, bare of airport terminals or navigational aids as far as could be seen, and a drive through the old textile trading city, squalid despite its lucrative silk and diamond industries-and, a couple of years later, notorious for an outbreak of bubonic plague. Across the Tapti River, a glittering array of pipes and towers had indeed come up, and cryogenic tankers full of sub-zero ethylene were tied up at the jetty. Reliance was clearly not just a paper empire.

But the history of political and corporate activity had put a sinister shadow across the glearning success. M through the government changes of 1990 and 1991, the press carried references to a certain 'large industrial house' supporting this or that party or being behind certain politicians. Scores of party leaders, ex-ministers, senior bureaucrats, and heads of the big government- owned banks and corporations were said to be Ambani friends' or Ambani critics'. Mostly it was the friends, it seemed, who got the jobs.

People made bitter and cynical remarks about the Ambanis in private. The press coverage, especially in the Indian business magazines, had a repetitive quality. A myth was being created and sustained. At a meeting of shareholders in a big Bornbay engineering firm named Larsen & Toubro late in 1991, convened to approve a takeover by the Ambanis, this undercurrent of hostility welled up into a physical melee. In the shouting and jostling, the two Ambani sons had to flee the stage. The controversies kept continuing right through the 1990s.

Dhirubhai Ambani attracted adulation or distrust. To his millions of investors, who had seen their share prices multiply, he was a business messiah. To one writer, he was a 'Frankenstein's Monster' created by India's experiments with close government control of the economy.

'There are three Dhirubhai Ambanis,' one of his fellow Gujaratis, a writer, told me. 'One is unique, larger than life, a brand name. He is one of the most talked about industrialists., and for Gujarati people he has tremendous emotional and sentimental appeal. He is their ultimate man, and has inspired many emulators. The second Dhirubhai Ambani, is a schemer, a first-class liar, who regrets nothing and has no values in life. Then there is the third Dhirubhai Ambani, who has a more sophisticated political brain, a dreamer and a visionary, almost Napoleonic. People are always getting the three personalities mistaken.'

In a legal chamber lined with vellum-bound case references, a senior lawyer took an equally stark view. 'Today the fact is that Ambani is bigger than government,' said the lawyer in all seri- ousness. 'He can make or break prime ministers. In the United States you can build up a supereorporation but the political system is still bigger than you. In India the system is weak. If the stock exchange dares to expose Ambani, he tells it: I will pull my company shares out and make you collapse. I am bigger than your exchange. If the newspapers criticise, he can point out they are dependent on his advertising and he has his journalists in every one of their departments. If the political parties take a stand against him, he has his men in every party who can pull down or embarrass the leaders. He is a threat to the system. Today he is undefeatable.'

Surprisingly, the role played by Dhirubhai Ambani received only cautious side-references in most books about contemporary Indian politics. No biography of him was in the bookshops, although Indian journalists and conunentators had produced 1quickie' biographies of other new celebrities in vast numbers. The work of the economic historians largely cut out in the 1960s. The few biographies of other Indian businessmen were commissioned works, not very well written, and notable for a worshipful attitude to the subjects. No one drank, cursed, cheated or philandered. Their workers were all part of the family. Almost everyone lived an abstemious vegetarian life, accumulating wealth only to give it away to temples, hospitals and schools.

By 1992, Reliance was tapping investors in Europe for fund- ing, and international investment funds were being allowed to play the Indian sharemarket directly. A few years later, the company had started borrowing in New York on a large scale. The Ambani story was becoming of greater interest outside India, at least to investors and perhaps to a wider audience watching the explosive growth of capitalism across Asia.
The idea of this book occurred in 1992, and I put it to Dhirubhai Ambani later that year at a second meeting in his Bombay office. Ambani seemed receptive, and agreed that his life story could be 'inspiring' for a younger generation of Indians as well as interesting to those thinking of dealing with India. I left the meeting with an understanding that he had agreed to talk about his life at meetings to be arranged and that, if so, I would show him the completed draft as a courtesy and listen to any objections-but retain the final say on the content. The book would not be credible' otherwise, Ambani concurred.

A year slipped away without further progress, and then relations with Reliance took a downturn. By the end of 1993, Reliance was in the bidding for several oilfields in the Arabian Sea. The government oil search corporation had discovered the fields but did not have the funds to build the huge production rigs, gas compressors and pipelines that were needed. Several contacts among rival bidders were alleging that the tender was being rigged in favour of Reliance. Indian politicians and bureau- crats are masters at tilting an 'open and transparent' tender into a one-horse race, by techniques such as keeping the weighting of bidding factors uncertain or secretly promising later concessions to compensate for underbidding. In the event, Reliance swept the field, and a director with one of the losers told me: 'We were shafted, and for the wrong reasons.'

Writing about this would not advance my request for access to the Ambanis for the book, but my duty was to the magazine that employed me. The first of two articles in the Far Eastern Economic Review about the oilfields battle drew a bitter complaint from Anil Ambani that the report was 'defamatory'-a complaint not sent directly to me, or to the magazine, but in a letter sent to the head of one of the rival companies, the Australian resources giant BHP, and copied to the heads of theamerican and Australian diplomatic missions in New Delhi.

Thereafter, I wrote occasionally about Reliance and, in July 1995, left my job with the magazine to spend more time on the book. A letter to Dhirubhai Ambani informing him of this move went unanswered. Over the following 18 months, the research led me into all corners of Bombay life, from the slum homes of the senii-criminal underworld to the offices of powerful business tycoons, to several cities and towns in Gujarat on crowded country buses and trains, to converted churches in London and Leicester ringing with the Hindu chants of the Gujarati diaspora.

The reception varied. Almost everyone wanted to know if the book was authorised or sponsored. It was neither, I said, but Ambani had been told and so far had not expressed to me a view either way about it. Many of those people who knew Dhirubhai Ambani in his early days in Junagadh and Aden and then starting his business in Bombay were willing to talk. Some others-such as his former Aden colleague and Middle East co-ordinator in Dubai, Bharat kumar Shah, asked for a letter of clearance from Ambani himself, which again was not forthcoming. One Bombay journalist who agreed to share his knowledge picked up the telephone immediately I arrived at his flat and rang Anil, Ainbani's office. 'I have told him if you are wanting scandal you will lose the whole story,' he said down the phone to the executive who answered. The next day, I was invited to lunch by a pair of Reliance public relations executives and quizzed closely about my intentions.

Dhirubhai Ambani did respond to a birthday greeting sent at the end of December 1995, but there was still no word about his attitude to the book. A month later, however, I flew especially to Bombay for an interview arranged with his former export manager, Rathibhai Muchhala, who according to numerous other sources 'knew everything' about the early days. At the appointed time, Muchhala was not at his office in the industrial belt behind Bombay's airport. A secretary telephoned him: he was at the Reliance head office. Muchhala was sorry, but Ambani's office had advised him not to meet me.

Ambani's personal assistant, Dinesh Sheth, then confirmed this: there were several proposals for biographies and some months earlier Dhirubhai Ambani had indicated to his staff that he did not want at that stage to encourage or co-operate with any of them. Sheth professed ignorance of my previous letters, so I sent another the next day, offering to come at any time to discuss the book.

Ironically, the reception among those figures who had been critics or opponents of Reliance was also wary. Phiroz Vakil, a senior advocate in tiny chambers in Bombay's old Fort, surveyed me intently while stuffing Erinmore Flake tobacco into his pipe and warned that people would suspect I was being used by the Ambanis to draw out information. Among some others, my earlier favourable write-ups of the Ambanis still told against me. 'I suppose you think he's a hero,' said the retired Finance Ministry official and Cabinet Secretary Vinod Pande, down the phone.

Others just seemed too battle-weary When I rang the Orkay Silk Mills chairman Kapal Mehra and asked to meet him, there was a long pause. 'I'm afraid that won't be possible,' Mehra said. The former prime minister Viswanath Pratap Singh did not reply to a letter and giggled nervously when I cornered him at a cocktail party in New Delhi. No, he could not possibly talk about any one company, Singh said, easing away quickly.

Those who did agree to talk for the most part insisted on anonymity: they had to live in India, they explained. Word of some of these meetings must have been passed back to Reliance, for in January 1997 a stiff letter arrived from Kanga & Co in Bombay, lawyers for Dhirubhai Ambani and the company, warn ing that their clients 'understand and apprehend that the pro- posed publication contains material which is defamatory to our client'. It was claimed that 'at no time' had there been any attempt to verify the material with the clients. Action for exem- plary damages and injunction against publication were threatened if the book was defamatory At this point it had not even been completed, let alone delivered to the publishers.

Fortunately, the several controversies that hit Reliance in the second half of 1995 produced a deluge of paper from Indian Government agencies. The various reports opened up many previously obscure and controversial aspects of the company's operations. At the same time, the controversies compelled Reli- ance to give its own explanations, which became part of the public record.

Even so the overall result, unavoidably, has been a book that becomes progressively less intimate to its subject as the story advances, drawing more on published reports, available documentation, and anonymous interviews with those who had engaged with Dhirubhai Ambani and Reliance Industries from the outside. The book is less satisfactory and less sympathetic, perhaps, than it might have been with co-operation from the Ambanis and access to them. As my research and writing progressed, however, word came from several sources that the family was compiling its own record of Dhirubhai Ambani's life and his company's growth, so a version of events from the inside may also be put to the public soon.

to be continued...........