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Mercantile Communities, Business and State in Twentieth-Century India: State of the Field

As one of the two last students at Cambridge who was taken on as supervisee by Anthony Low in 1988 I felt especially privileged. My research interest straddled two areas: mercantile communities (the Marwaris in particular); and business and the state. Both of these owed much to Anthony Low. My interest in the Marwaris was fortified by a piece he had published in 1991 entitled ‘The Forgotten Bania: Merchant Communities and the Indian National Congress’. In it, he argued that the connection between merchant communities and Gandhi was more than political and needed to be looked at in terms of the shared values of merchant communities and the significance of religious concerns. Thus the relations, he argued, were of a ‘quasi-filial and religious character’. The second scholar whose work steered me to look at merchants was Chris Bayly: his work on Allahabad; then his article ‘Indian Merchants in a “Traditional” Setting: Banaras, 178