India Grows at Night by Gurcharan Das

Author:Gurcharan Das [Das, Gurcharan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184756746
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

RISING ON THE BACK OF FREE MARKETS

That India is rising in the twenty-first century on the back of free markets is not surprising. It has a long tradition of encouraging and promoting markets. Since ancient times the merchant has been a respected member of society, one of the ‘twice-born’, a high caste in the social hierarchy. Merchants and bazaars, however, emerged even earlier as centres of exchange in the towns of the Indus Valley (3300–1500 BCE) or even in the Neolithic age, soon after Indians first engaged in agriculture and there was a surplus. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau has taught us, inequality also had its origins with the birth of agriculture because with it was born private property.

There was purpose to economic activity and the ancients were acutely aware of it when they posited artha, ‘material well-being’, as one of the goals of life. They believed that the pursuit of money is justified to the extent that it leads to the good life. That good life also had other goals, in particular, dharma, ‘moral well-being’, which was higher than artha. This meant that there was a right and a wrong way to pursue wealth, something that Lalit Modi forgot. Moreover, the pursuit of artha was meant to make the world a better place. In today’s language we might interpret this to mean that business has a purpose—for example, to take a society from poverty to prosperity, a goal that many contemporary Indian entrepreneurs subscribe to.

Because the state was historically weak, regulation in India was generally light. An exception to this was the heavily regulated state in the political economy text Arthashastra. The king’s dharma, we are told in the Mahabharata, was to nurture the productive forces in society, including the market: ‘The king, O Bharata, should always act in such a way towards the Vaishyas [merchants, commoners] so that their productive powers may be enhanced. Vaishyas increase the strength of a kingdom, improve its agriculture and develop its trade. A wise king levies mild taxes upon them’ (Mahabharata, XII.87). Practical advice indeed—otherwise, the epic goes on to suggest, Vaishyas will shift to neighbouring kingdoms and the king will lose his tax base.

The merchant was generally well thought of. He is often the hero in the animal and human stories of the Panchatantra, the Kathasaritsagara and other texts, where he is sometimes a figure of sympathy and at other times of fun. The Mahabharata speaks of Tuladhara, a respected trader of spices and juices in Varanasi, who surprisingly instructs a high Brahmin about dharma and how to live. Speaking modestly, he compares his life as a merchant to a ‘twig borne along in a stream that randomly joins up with some other pieces of wood, and from here and there, with straw, wood and refuse, from time to time’.

The analogy of the twig brings to mind the picture of a real-life trader who has multiple suppliers and buyers, and whose gains and losses are not in his control but depend on the impersonal forces of the market.

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