Decline without Collapse

That Surat suffered a serious contraction in its economic activity between 1700 and 1900 seems beyond dispute. Two distinct phases of decline are discernible. The first began before the establishment of full British sovereignty over the city in 1800 and was at least partially a product of developments independent of the East India Company's rise, such as the growing insecurity of trade routes in the Mughal Empire, the increased pressures placed on local merchants by Mughal noblemen eager to supplement their revenues, and shrinking markets in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf as a result of instability in the Safavid and Ottoman Empires. These developments were accompanied by changes in which the English did have a hand, such as the displacement of Indian shipbuilding by European competitors and, particularly, the

rise of Bombay as a major center of commerce.^[13] The new port city, protected from Maratha raids and Mughal exactions alike, attracted many merchants from Surat itself, including some who had made fortunes as brokers of the company and as independent traders. Nonetheless Surat remained a major center of western Indian trade and industry at the end of the eighteenth century.

The second, more serious, phase of decline began with the establishment of colonial rule and lasted until about 1870. During this period Surat experienced a series of catastrophes: floods, earthquakes, famines, and fires, the most devastating being the fire of 1837, which raged for days and destroyed 7,000 homes and caused 5 million rupees damage. At the same time, the Tapi River gradually silted up, making the city inaccessible to the largest vessels. Yet, given the wealth and the resilience of the city's commercial elites, Surat might have rebounded from these traumas if not for serious structural changes associated with the rise of British power: the breaking of government's financial dependence on local merchant bankers, which eliminated a profitable area of investment for localsharaf s; the agrarian depression of the 1820s and 1830s, undoubtedly caused by excessive company revenue demands on the countryside; the declining position of the Mughal gentry and other landed elites who had been major consumers of Surti luxury goods; and shifts in patterns of international trade caused by the continued contraction of West Asian demand and the emergence of serious competition from the great European manufacturing centers. Also significant was the continued growth of Bombay, first as a port, then with the development of the modern textile industry, as a major manufacturing center. Large numbers of local merchants migrated there to participate in the burgeoning commerce.^[14]

Given the range of factors working against the city's prosperity, one might initially wonder how Surat remained as important as it did. Clearly, nineteenth-century demographic figures do not indicate an expanding urban economy. In 1816, Das Gupta has estimated, there were approximately 150,000 people living in the city, already a significant drop from a century earlier. In 1851, a local census estimated the population at 89,505.^[15] Even taking into account likely underreporting, the city had lost at least one-third of its population during the first fifty years of company rule. Residents left entire neighborhoods abandoned after fires and floods, and little new construction took place. The city lost its cosmopolitan flavor, since few foreign traders chose to maintain local outposts any longer. Centers like Bombay, Ahmedabad, and Karachi, where one can legitimately talk about processes of urbanization, were characterized by large numbers of migrants, high proportions of males, and a concentration of residents between fifteen and

thirty-five, the prime working years. The demographic characteristics of Surat, by contrast, approximated those of the general, predominantly rural, population of Bombay Presidency as a whole (see Appendix, tables A1–A5).

But Surat did survive. And by the time of the first imperial census in 1872, its population had leveled off at just over 100,000 people. For the next six decades, the city maintained stability in its numbers (see Appendix, table A6).

This survival was made possible largely by continued mercantile and artisanal activity. The city sustained into the twentieth century a prosperous and diverse set of indigenous merchants who still controlled much of social and economic life. Most of Surat's wealthiest men continued to be either traders or sharaf s.^[16] At the same time the city's character as a home for small-scale industry consolidated itself. By 1921 Surat had a higher proportion of its population working in industry (47 percent) than Bombay (about 39 percent).^[17] But in contrast to those in other industrial centers of western India, virtually all Surtis employed in manufacturing were concentrated in home-based industry.^[18] The 5 percent of the local labor force employed in larger units worked mainly in the city's three cotton mills, each founded by a member of the old Mughal nobility and each of which was afflicted with constant problems in attracting capital.^[19] Local business communities refrained from investment in modern industry, preferring either to devote their capital to commercial enterprise or to the mills of Bombay.^[20]

The persistence of considerable artisanal production in Surat is particularly surprising given classical historiographical assumptions which suggest that the competition of factory-produced goods from Britain brought about the ruin of indigenous manufactures. Undoubtedly Surti artisans were unable to compete in most lines of ordinary cloth intended for everyday consumption. Certain processes in textile production, such as cotton spinning and cloth dyeing, suffered greatly from the influx of European and Japanese goods. But local merchants and artisans showed considerable resourcefulness in exploiting niches in the world economy relatively free from the competition of large-scale Indian or European industry. This was especially true in luxury manufactures such as the making of pearl necklaces, jari (gold thread) products, kinkhab (gold and silk cloth), and other fine silk and cotton textiles. Markets in these goods survived, in part because old ruling and landed groups retained some prosperity under the British imperium and continued to use their incomes to maintain life-styles involving conspicuous consumption, and in part because newly emerging elites chose to emulate the aristocratic style, particularly on important ceremonial occasions. Even the Parsis of Bombay, thought to be among the most west-

ernized communities of India, were important consumers of luxury textiles. Important markets for local goods existed in Gujarat, the Punjab, Bengal, the Deccan, and South India.^[21]

Older markets in the Indian Ocean trade also survived, though hardly at seventeenth-century levels. In 1802, after decades of supposed decline in West Asian commerce, 35 percent of Surat's exports went directly to Arabia and Persia, about the same as the amount going to Bombay (much of which was undoubtedly reexported to the Red Sea and Persian Gulf). The value of piece goods exported to the Middle East far outstripped that of the region's cotton exports, easily South Gujarat's most substantial contribution to specifically colonial needs. A century later, many of Surat's most prosperous businessmen were continuing to sell local textiles, primarily luxury goods, in the traditional marts of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf areas, while others sent local manufactures to South Africa, Burma, Thailand, and China.^[22]

In 1910, the Collector of Surat District, perhaps forgetting Surat's illustrious past, even found reason to trumpet the city's successes in the luxury manufactures before his superiors in his annual administrative report:

Not only is Surat the world's center for the pearl trade, but it also holds the premier position in all India for gold and silver wire, and tinsel and brocade work and pre-eminently for the spangles and spirals of silver and silver gilt which it exports to Madras, Delhi, and many other centers. The Mahomedan population of Surat is very enterprising in foreign trade. Scarcely a family has not a branch establishment somewhere. From Tibet to South Africa, from Siam to Mombasa, everywhere the Rander and Surat Bohras penetrate and take with them silk and other goods manufactured in Surat. The wire and tinsel industry employs 10,000 persons while silk weaving employs another 10,000. Benares, formerly the chief competition, has now succumbed and it is said that at least 3000 skilled artisans have migrated from Benares to Surat recently because the employment and the state of the industry is better here.^[23]

Two of the industries mentioned in this report—pearls and jari —had in fact undergone something of a resurgence during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Pearl production received a considerable boost from the migration of Naginchand Jhaverchand, known as the "king of pearls," to the city after the 1896–97 plague in Bombay. Naginchand founded a syndicate of Jain pearl dealers in Surat whose members bought large quantities of pearls from Arab dealers in Bombay and brought them to Surat to be strung.^[24] The jari industry had also grown considerably. Surat had been only one of a number of major centers producing jari and jari products during the 1870s and 1880s, with, according to one estimate, around 1,200 men employed in

various phases of the industry. Local artisans, however, continued to improve their production methods, capturing markets from competitors in other cities who did not. Jari capitalists, largely drawn from the Patidar, Daudi Bohra, and Hindu Vaniya communities, fueled this expansion by searching out new markets and by providing their artisan clients with the capital to make technological changes. By 1910 the city was the leading jari manufacturing center in India, far surpassing Ahmedabad, Yeola, Poona, Delhi, and Lahore. Only Benares remained a serious rival. A local survey taken in 1909 estimated that nearly 500 dealers and from 8,000 to 10,000 workers were involved jari and its subsidiary industries.^[25] Expansion in the luxury manufactures may not have been sufficient to produce overall growth in the city as a whole, but it did sustain a certain equilibrium in the local economy.

While merchants and artisans continued to depend upon the commerce in luxury goods, they were nonetheless profoundly affected by developments in the larger world. By the early twentieth century, local textile producers had come to depend heavily on various foreign sources for their raw materials: silk thread came from China, gold and silver from European bullion markets, aniline dyes from Britain, and cotton yarn often from Japan. Pearl dealers obtained their raw materials from abroad, then sold the finished product through Bombay exporters to Europe. Not a single important local industry was untouched by changes in the world economy. But such changes did not need spell economic ruin when local economic actors adjusted to them with sufficient ingenuity.

Of course, some Surtis were involved in trades that could more appropriately be deemed colonial in their character, such as the trade in the agricultural produce of South Gujarat. Much of the region's cotton and grain, for instance, was sent to Bombay, where it was either sold to consumers or sent abroad. As overseas demand grew for India's raw produce during the nineteenth century, the marketing of grain and cotton expanded steadily.^[26] Yet these trades were only a small portion of the city's commerce. In 1895, cotton and grain dealers constituted about 5 percent of local payers of income tax; only six of Surat's seventy-two top income earners were cotton or grain dealers.^[27] Most people in these lines of commerce were Vaniyas or Brahmans.

There were also merchants engaged in the commerce of the Surat District in goods like cloth and sugar, trades which fit neither the traditional nor the colonial category perfectly. This commerce, always of some importance in the region, expanded under British rule, particularly after the construction of important railway lines that converged in Surat. In the fifteen years after the construction of the Tapi River Valley railway in the 1890s, cloth imports into Surat grew from 900,000

rupees to 2.5 million in value.^[28] Piece-good dealers purchased millmade cloth in Bombay and Ahmedabad through their agents, brought their goods to Surat, then either sold the goods or reexported them to the villages of South Gujarat. These traders were not confined to any single caste but generally belonged to high-status communities with long histories of commercial activity, such as Hindu and Jain Vaniyas, Brahmans, Daudi Bohras, and Memons.

In sum, Surat in the late nineteenth century was characterized by a complex market economy operating at a number of levels.^[29] Given this evidence, it is hard to accept the contention of R. D. Choksey that the "story of trade" in nineteenth-century Gujarat concerns only "internal exchange of mostly agricultural commodities, and overseas shipment of raw materials through the port of Bombay."^[30] The older luxury trades survived and often expanded alongside the export-oriented commerce in agrarian produce. A heterogenous and prosperous set of local merchants adapted to a slowly changing economic environment by exploiting diverse markets and sources of raw materials, both new and old. It is true that this commercial activity was not sufficient to fuel a "takeoff" in the urban economy. Surti producers were virtually excluded from participation in the manufacture of ordinary cloth and other necessities, the fields of investment that may have offered the greatest potential for expansion. But residents were able to sustain the commercial character of their city by continuing to supply areas of the world economy where Europeans had failed to become effective competitors.