Something is afoot in the arcane world of Indian business history. A discipline with practically no takers ten years ago, it is suddenly experiencing a resurgence—in journals, conferences, business schools, and archives. The initial flourish occurred in the 1980s when the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) hosted seminars that led to three important volumes edited by Dwijendra Tripathi (1930–2018). But with Tripathi's retirement in 1990, the institutional anchor disappeared and the field made little progress. The scholarship that ensued up to 2005 is well captured in a bibliographic survey, and the experiences of teaching and researching business history in that era are documented in the proceedings of a round-table conference held at IIM Bangalore in 2009.Footnote 1 In this article, I document the second phase of growth of the discipline that has occurred over the past decade.
Scholarship
The standout volume in the past decade has been Tirthankar Roy's A Business History of India (2018), marking a seminal contribution to the field.Footnote 2 Arriving fourteen years after Tripathi's grand synthesis, it is similar in scope but offers a new historiography.Footnote 3 If Tripathi's focus was on entrepreneurial history and big business, Roy ties business history firmly to economic and global history and ventures into fields outside the world of big business. If Tripathi illustrated the transition from mercantile to industrial capitalism, Roy attempts to show how globalization or cosmopolitanism and nationalism shaped capitalism in India between 1700 and 2015, in phases marked by the years 1850, 1930, 1980, and 2000.
Roy's central question is not if and how colonialists exploited India but why and how capitalism flourished in India. This differs from standard left-Marxist narratives of Indian economic history and also veers away from Tripathi's stance on colonialism and business history. Roy argues that openness to the global economy eased the constraint on capital and allowed capitalism to emerge in a capital-scarce region. British merchants and professionals are to be seen not as exploitative agents but as the conduits of modern ideas, money, and machines. The narrative on Indian merchants and business communities builds on the work of Tripathi and others, but Roy also cites new material to show collaborations with outsiders, especially the Japanese, in the early twentieth century. Roy locates the roots of India's import-substituting industrialization policies in the 1920s rather than the 1950s and argues that they led to an unsustainable balance of payments (BoP) position following Independence, until workers’ remittances began to ease the constraint in the 1980s. Thus, the period from 1930 to 1980 of withdrawal from the global economy, coupled with state policies on price controls and licenses, hampered private enterprise and the quality of products. Since the 1980s, globalization and market forces have led private enterprise to make a dramatic comeback.
The strength of Roy's business history is in the detailed attention paid to the transfer of ownership of firms from British to Indian hands in the mid-twentieth century and the fate of multinational firms in India. However, I find Roy's post-Independence account less persuasive than Dwijendra Tripathi and Jyoti Jumani's account published in 2013.Footnote 4 Tripathi and Jumani provide a much fuller account of the role and evolution of public-sector units and the subtle differences between Nehru's mixed economy and his daughter Indira Gandhi's socialist economy. The significance of higher-education institutions in engineering and management, for instance, is highlighted at some length by Tripathi and Jumani, but ignored by Roy.
Roy's book appears to be a cross between two of his earlier ventures written during a prolific decade in which he produced on average a book every year.Footnote 5 As a result, the key propositions of A Business History of India act as reinforcements of his larger scholarship in economic history and may not come as a surprise to those well versed in his previous work. The book has limitations, of course, of which some are puzzling and some are glaring. Roy's book is about capitalism of production and pays little attention to the critique posed by a seminal volume on consumption history, of which Roy himself was a coeditor.Footnote 6 It includes little about how consumer attitudes were shaped in the interwar period or what Douglas Haynes refers to as the emergence of “brand-name” capitalism. Equally puzzling is its omission of the advent of managerial capitalism or management education, despite citing over ten IIMA cases. The glaring omissions or parts that receive short shrift include labor movements in the colonial period, the cooperative as a mode of business organization, and relationships with the natural environment. The omission of one of the world's greatest industrial disasters, in Bhopal in 1984 involving the multinational firm Union Carbide, is a case in point. The book in its current edition is open to the critique that it covers capitalists rather than capitalism.
Between the grand syntheses of Tripathi and Roy, several other studies have appeared, probing new sources and questions. There is now a good history of the information and technology (IT) sector and a novel history of engineering as a profession in India.Footnote 7 Two excellent volumes on law and business have emerged, and the widening of the social base of Indian entrepreneurship has also been analyzed.Footnote 8 Claude Markovits and Gijsbert Oonk have published their long-standing work on Indian business history, including the Indian diaspora, in book volumes.Footnote 9 Indrajit Ray's research on the industries of colonial Bengal, Michael Aldous's work on corporate governance in colonial India, Abhishek Chatterjee's work on financial development in early-colonial India, Christina Lubinski's work on multinationals in colonial India, and Stefan Tetzlaff's work on technical transfers in post-Independence India are all important contributions using hitherto unexplored archival sources. The history of small-scale business, difficult as it is to write, has been accomplished in a stellar manner by Haynes's Small Town Capitalism, based on research conducted over a decade in western India.Footnote 10 While Haynes mainly studied textiles, his work offers a template for how one can study businesses in small towns using non-English sources of information.
Several doctoral theses, completed or near completion, probe different aspects of Indian business history.Footnote 11 Penguin's Story of Indian Business series, edited by Gurcharan Das, has made several important pieces of research accessible to the wider public. An anthology of Indian business featuring the voices of business leaders has also been compiled.Footnote 12 The growth in scholarship is also reflected in special issues on India published in Business History Review in 2014 and recently published in Business History and the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing. At the World Economic History Congress, the number of business history panels on India increased from one in Kyoto in 2015 to two in Boston in 2018.Footnote 13
Methods and Sources
Compared with the earlier strand of research and scholarship, two distinct trends are notable in the recent resurgence: a greater usage of business archives and of oral history as methods of research. Researchers today have access to at least ten business archives in India and abroad. The Unilever Archive in the United Kingdom and the J. Walter Thompson Archive in the United States provide comprehensive information on Indian operations of those multinational firms since the second quarter of the twentieth century. The Tata Group and Godrej Group archives in India are outstanding in scope and accessibility, with documents going back to the nineteenth century. The archives of the State Bank of India and the Reserve Bank of India are important, as are the upcoming corporate archives or heritage collections of Bajaj (manufacturing), Cipla and Dr. Reddys (pharmaceuticals), DCM and FabIndia (textiles) and WIPRO (IT). Going forward, the IIMA Archives strives to document not only its institutional history, dating back to 1961, but the history of business more generally, by hosting special collections. An interesting development in India is the conversation among historians, businesspeople, and archivists that has begun at a variety of events, including those hosted by Harvard Business School (HBS) in Mumbai in 2017, the Section of Business Archives (SBA) of the International Council on Archives (ICA) annual conference held by Godrej Archives in Mumbai in December 2017, and the Kolkata Business History Workshop in April 2018.
Similarly, oral history is gaining prominence as a method of research practice at both individual and institutional levels. The Creating Emerging Markets (CEM) project, led by Geoffrey Jones and Tarun Khanna at HBS, chronicles the lives of over a hundred leading business leaders in several countries, including more than twenty in India. The Itihaasa project in India provides a digital museum with over forty interviews of leading personalities and various reports and documents, tracing the evolution of India's IT sector. Students at IIMA are doing oral history projects on local businesses in Ahmedabad. Such digital archives are useful for generating research and also provide an alternative mode of pedagogy in business history electives, as is being done at IIMA.Footnote 14 Aside from oral history, researchers are also employing quantitative methods to analyze firm- and industry-level directory data and corpus linguistics methods using digitized archival newspaper data.Footnote 15
Ways Forward
The scholarship on Indian business history can be advanced in several directions. First, the history of management functions outside of marketing—finance, operations, strategy, human resources, and the like—is yet to be explored in great depth. Opening up the black box of the firm in a historical perspective is not only necessary but also academically attractive to researchers based in management schools who may need to publish in management journals. Financial History Review, for instance, has yet to publish a paper on India.
Second, the history of business requires wider coverage in terms of regions and sectors. More research is required on businesses in the erstwhile princely states, smaller towns, central India, northeast India, and the Himalayan region and on sectors such as agriculture, real estate, chemicals, banks, and media. Widening the focus from India to South Asia would also stimulate more comparative research on the evolution of business, especially in the late twentieth century. All of this would require researchers to engage with historical sources in languages other than English.
Third, representation of women and the lower castes has to increase in the production and content of scholarship. Seminal contributions have come from female scholars and archivists, but the share of male authors, as seen in the references section of Roy's book, continues to be over 90 percent. And virtually all writers and archivists have belonged to the upper castes. It is, then, no surprise that virtually no scholarship exists on the history of women and lower castes in the world of Indian business, an open field for future research. Such research is all the more important now that gender quotas are mandated on Indian corporate boards, and a tectonic shift occurred in 2005 with the establishment of the Dalit Indian Chamber of Commerce & Industry (DICCI) for the social group formerly referred to as the Untouchables.
Finally, Indian business history used to comprise a lot of biographies, and there seems to have been a lull in this area of scholarship. Several sponsored biographies of individuals and firms have appeared, but I cannot think of a single solid piece of scholarship in this genre since Medha Kudaisya's 2003 biography of G. D. Birla.Footnote 16
For research to occur, institutions need to take the lead in attracting students and scholars. Godrej Archives now sponsors two fellowship programs and IIMA runs a History Internship series. Business history is currently being taught or being planned as an elective at the IIMs in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta, and Sambalpur and at Ahmedabad University. But it needs to broaden further and encourage doctoral students, in particular, to consider business history as one area of their research portfolio. Challenges aside, it does seem to be a promising time for any researcher, young or old, in India or outside, to engage with the business history of India. To paraphrase Tripathi, there is now more dynamism in the tradition.
