The Historiographic Rejection of Caste in Commerce

Sanjay Subrahmanyam (1990) denies any caste basis for commercial activity, not only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as well. Writing less than a decade after Bayly, Subrahmanyam presumably finds the evidence for multicaste and intercaste commercial activity so strong, and Weber's orientalism so patent, that he sees no need even to criticize the thesis of incompatibility between Hinduism and capitalism.^[23] Like Bayly, he focuses on prominent merchants, among them the chief merchants and dubashes of the Coromandel. Unlike Bayly, he refers to them as "portfolio capitalists" rather than "burghers," perhaps to emphasize that their commercial activity was not confined to a single city but extended up and down the Coromandel, into the Tamil and Telugu kingdoms of inland South India and outward to Southeast Asia. In other important respects, however, Subrahmanyam depicts his portfolio capitalists in the same way as Bayly depicts his North

Indian burghers. Specifically, he describes them as more or less individualistic entrepreneurs who occupied "the middle ground between mercantile capitalism and political capitalism" (1990: 298), gaining and using political positions to further commercial interests, harnessing commercial operations to gain political influence, and in general operating at a scale unimaginable according to the orientalist conception of India as the land of jajmani and village moneylenders. In Subrahmanyam's words, they formed

a group of persons who, from the second half of the sixteenth century, emerge gradually into prominence, eventually assuming formidable proportions in the first half of the seventeenth century. These persons, whom we have termed "portfolio capitalists," occupied a shadowy middle ground between state and producing economy, and combined a role in the fiscal structure with participation in inland trade, currency dealing, movements of bills of exchange, and even seaborne trade on a quite considerable scale. (1990: 355)

Although Subrahmanyam does not deign to address Weberian stereotypes, he is careful to raise three questions about more recent historiographic interpretations. In the first instance, as indicated in the preceding quotation, he calls into question the assumption (and, at times, the explicit postulate) that the phenomenon of chief merchants' acting as portfolio capitalists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries represents an innovation in reaction to commercial demand from the newly arrived European companies. In contrast, Subrahmanyam forcefully argues a position with which the present study is entirely sympathetic: that the portfolio capitalists who mediated between Indian textile producers and European companies performed commercial roles that extend back before the arrival of the European companies to at least the intra-Asian trade of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Subrahmanyam's second characterization of portfolio capitalists is also one with which I am entirely sympathetic: that there existed no sharp separation of roles between merchants and "a 'militarily oriented elite' whose culturally sanctioned activities were land activities."^[24]

It is only with a third feature of Subrahmanyam's picture of portfolio capitalists that I have reservations. Citing Washbrook's (1975, 1976, 1982) study of the nineteenth-century rise of mercantile caste associations (see Chapter 2, above), Subrahmanyam argues against close identification of any functionally defined role with any ethnographic category, by which he means caste: "We cannot believe axiomatically that southern Indian society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries comprised of a set of well-defined and watertight compartments, in one of which it is possible to site

the mercantile communities of the region" (1990: 340). Subrahmanyam thus differs from Washbrook in denying that the precolonial organization of mercantile castes may have possessed properties that were "preadaptive" for the late nineteenth-century formation of political associations. Yet, as with Washbrook's treatment of nineteenth-century Komati merchants, it is important to emphasize that Subrahmanyam provides no information about intracaste cooperation between portfolio capitalists and that this omission leaves the question of mercantile caste organization entirely open. Moreover, it is important to separate the two conceptions of caste and commerce that Subrahmanyam attacks. It is one thing to argue that merchants engaged in war and politics, while warriors and politicians engaged in commerce. It is another thing to argue that absence of an exclusive occupational calling for some individuals rules out the possibility of any occupational specialization in the kin and caste groups to which they belong.

In this context, it is worth noting that Subrahmanyam's brief treatment of a dynastic merchant family of Balija Chettis is tantalizingly suggestive that ties of kin and caste did play an important but unexplored role in South Indian commerce. It may have been the case, as Subrahmanyam suggests, that this extended family operated with no special ties to other, less prominent members of their caste. But this was surely not always the case. And, as I shall argue for the Nakarattars, equally prominent merchant-bankers maintained commercially crucial ties to castemates that are invisible in the standard historical records.

Subrahmanyam's understanding of pre-Western portfolio capitalists is important because it deprives Weberians—and, indeed, all modernization theorists—of the argument that only involvement with Western financial institutions and rational, bureaucratic forms of government can trigger the forces of capitalism. Like more Eurocentric historians, however, Subrahmanyam still finds confirmation that Indian businessmen participated in capitalism—albeit an Indian capitalism—to the exclusion of caste and kinship. Yet, as indicated earlier in this chapter, it is precisely at the point where the unfolding commercial history of South India seems to provide an irrefutable case in support of these views that historians have shifted their attention to other issues. Had they continued with the economic concerns that motivated their studies of periods before the middle of the nineteenth century, the verdict would surely be less secure. For it is just at this time that the Nakarattars emerge on the scene in a major way. And it is precisely the qualities of their caste organization that enable them to take advantage of the changing colonial economy and become the chief merchant-bankers of South India and Southeast Asia.