Kolkata had the Marwari traders, Mumbai the Parsi businessmen; what about Delhi? For a long time now, it has been said that Delhi never had a strong business community. Indeed, the first factory came up only in 1886 — Delhi Cloth & General Mills. In spite of being the seat of power for centuries together, Delhi did not develop a strong mercantile community, it is argued, because it was landlocked, unlike Kolkata and Mumbai.
This may not be entirely true. Delhi has always had a strong community of merchant bankers — the Baniyas. They derive their name from vanijya, Sanskrit for commerce. They invested large sums of money in, apart from other things, overseas trade. Their promissory notes were accepted not just in India but also in faraway places in North Africa. Before East India Company came on the scene, they used to run efficient postal systems all over North India.
About 200 years ago, some Rajputs came to the city and became followers of Mahavir Jain. They too were enthusiastic businessmen. In 1838, there is evidence of clashes between the Jain and Baniya communities. There is also evidence that Bahadur Shah Zafar, the Mughal king, had an ice factory running in Delhi, which helped keep his palace cool in the summer months. Some enterprising Parsi gentlemen are also known to have brewed beer in Delhi which they sold to the East India Company troops when they had laid siege to Delhi during the 1857 mutiny.
A fair account of Delhi’s businessmen of this time can be found in a handful of books: William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal, Mahmood Farooqi’s Besieged: Voices from Delhi 1857 and Pavan K Varma’s Ghalib: The Man, the Times (all three from Penguin).
Chunnamal and Salig Ram were prosperous businessmen of Delhi in the days of the Mughal court. They were bankers and supplied shawls, brocade and other items of luxury to the royal toshakhana. When the mutiny broke out, Zafar asked the wealthy families of the city for loans. Salig Ram saw the dangers clearly. He was not unaware of the court’s precarious finances. There was a good chance that he may not even have gotten his principal back. He did not lend any money to the king. Chunnamal had already fled the city. The supplies to the toshakhana had ended. Salig Ram perished in the mutiny, killed in all probability by mutineers. Once the mutiny was crushed, Chunnamal was back in Delhi to start life afresh. He was asked by the authorities to restore order in the chaos-ridden city, a service that earned him the title of Rai Bahadur.
Then there was the Gurwala family of bankers. Their firm’s name was Bukshi Ram Mohan Lal — it bore the name of its 18th-century founders — but it was known as Gurwala because the family was in the habit of giving gur in liberal measures to men who went on pilgrimages. Not just for pilgrims, the gur came in handy for animals also — it gave them energy to plough through rough terrain, slush and mountains. Ramji Dass, the Gurwala patriarch during the mutiny, lent money not once but thrice to the Mughal court. So, once the English were back in power, the Gurwalas found themselves out of favour. It was a tough task for the Gurwalas to claw themselves back into reckoning. But that’s precisely what Ramji Dass did.
The mutiny didn’t kill the spirit of these businessmen. They bounced back soon. There were around 20 joint stock companies registered in Delhi and Punjab by the 1880s. Half a dozen of these companies had capital of more than Rs 100,000.
