The Muslim businessmen of India

Mumbai’s Mid Day newspaper group was sold by the Ansari family this week. The Ansaris had owned it for 72 years, and they were the only Muslims to own a major English newspaper. Ansaris are converts from the Vankar caste of weavers. Many are from Uttar Pradesh, which they are thought to have fled after the 1857 mutiny.

The British chopped off the thumbs, the story goes, of these rebellious weavers, and so making them useless in their profession. The Ansaris moved to Bhiwandi outside Bombay, making it one of the largest weaving centres of the world.

The Ansaris of Mid Day did not make their money from weaving, but from newspapers. The founder was Abdul Hamid Ansari, who wrote and published the Urdu weekly Inquilab. Its website refers to him as ‘mujahid-e-azadi’ or freedom-fighter. Ansari was a Congressman who joined the Muslim League as did most of Bombay’s Muslims. But he did not accept Jinnah’s invitation to move to Pakistan.

His cause, he wrote Jinnah in a letter of which the Ansaris are proud, was India’s Muslims, and he and his press would remain here.

Jinnah turned to Mian Iftakhar-ud-Din instead, and he founded
Progressive Papers which published the Pakistan Times and Imroze.

Inquilab is still popular today in Bombay, and it has about 300,000 readers. Abdul Hamid Ansari’s son Khalid founded Sportsweek, India’s largest sports weekly, and then the afternoon newspaper Mid Day, in 1979. The Ansaris are now an upper-class, South Bombay family, and Khalid Ansari studied at Stanford and his son Tariq at Notre Dame. I worked for them for six years, when Tariq was managing director of the firm. His father was still chairman and a very active man, playing squash at Bombay’s exclusive Willingdon Club, where I would be summoned for early morning meetings.

This was my second job under a Muslim boss. I also worked at the Asian Age, a newspaper run by MJ Akbar. He was a clever and charismatic man, and a first-rate editor, but not a particularly good businessman. He lost his stake in that newspaper, and now runs a small weekend publication.

Akbar was raised in Calcutta, but was a North Indian Muslim of Kashmiri and Bihari origin.

Muslims should be attracted to tijarat, because the prophet of Islam was also a trader. But because few Indian Muslims are converted from trading castes, they are not particularly good at business. They tend to be tradesmen instead: carpenters, butchers, plumbers and so on.

The Indian exception is the Shia from Gujarat. Though it is a tiny community, perhaps no more than a half a million people, it totally dominates India’s other 160 million Muslims in matters of business. So it isn’t so much religion that makes a difference so far as the ability to trade is concerned, but the linguistic community an Indian belongs to, and his caste.

Wipro’s Azim Premji, India’s second richest man, is a Khoja. An electrical engineer from Stanford University, Premji is part of Bombay’s Khoja elite, whose most famous member was, of course, Jinnah. The Premjis owned a vegetable oil business incorporated in 1945 which Azim Premji inherited at the age of 21, after his father died in 1966. He founded the software division of the company in Bangalore at the age of 35, and that made Wipro the force it is.

Azim Premji is quite a simple man. Tariq Ansari of Mid Day knows him, and they both own holiday homes in Alibaug, an hour’s sail from Bombay. Tariq said to me once that he bumped into Premji at the jetty, and asked him how he would get from there to his house. “By autorickshaw of course,” a puzzled Premji told him, “don’t you know the service is very good?” Azim Premji flies economy class, and lives in three-star hotels. He is worth $17 billion (Rs1.4 lakh crore). This attitude is consistent with many very wealthy Gujarati families, Hindu and Muslim, who are interested in the creation of wealth and not particularly keen on showing it off.

The pharmaceutical company Wockhardt is owned by the Dawoodi Bohra Habil Khorakiwala. Educated at Purdue University, he runs a billion-dollar firm that makes generic drugs. Though the Khorakiwalas are wealthy and powerful, they are still socially conservative as all Bohras are. The Khorakiwalas also founded the first departmental stores in India, Akbarally’s. Photographed once at a function with some Bohra dissidents, FT Khorakiwala came under attack and was threatened with excommunication.

So far as I know, he apologised to the Syedna and was forgiven.
Another Gujarati Muslim, a Kutchchi, owns Cipla, which is also a pharmaceutical firm with sales of over a billion US dollars. It was founded by Khwaja Abdul Hamied, who got his doctorate from BerlinUniversity in 1927. The company is run today by his son Yusuf Hamied, who holds a doctorate from Cambridge University.

I have known many Gujarati Muslim businessmen because my father ran a small textile business in Surat. Their style is open and not secretive. A good example is the landlord of the property where my office is located in Bombay. He is a Gujarati Shia, and when he comes over for a cup of tea, he discusses his businesses and their numbers, and his profitability, quite comfortably.

This is a trait that Hindu merchant classes also have, and it goes against their stereotype of being deceivers. Their skill is actually the ability to see things unemotionally, and the ability, which is rare in India, to set aside honour. Their ethic is clear and tough, and the trading castes work hard to make their businesses successful. The Gujarati Shias share all of this.

There are also Sunni businessmen in India, but few. The dominant community here is again Gujarati, like the Memons of Kutchch, who do business around the world. Bollywood’s Muslim producers also tend to be Gujarati, like the Nadiadwalas, who have just released the Akshay Kumar film House Full. Nadiadwalas are from Nadiad, a town in Gujarat’s Charotar area, where my family is also originally from. Patels, incidentally, are peasants and not traders.

I can only think of one non-Gujarati Sunni industrialist of some scale and that is Hakim Abdul Hameed of Hamdard, makers of that delicious summer drink all Indians and Pakistanis are familiar with: Rooh Afza.

Hamdard was founded in 1906 by Hakim Abdul Majeed to make Unani (Greek) medicine, which the Arabs mastered a thousand years ago. Abdul Hameed still studies this and has produced an edition of the works of Ibn Sina, the first man of modern medicine, known to Europe as Avicenna.

Abdul Hameed’s brother Hakim Mohammad Said migrated to Pakistan, and he was killed in Karachi in 1998.

Pathans are famous for being skilled money lenders, but an opportunity once arose for a Kakezai to become a major industrialist. This happens in the story of an Indian business house that makes commercial vehicles, cars and tractors, and was founded in 1945. It was owned by the Mahindra brothers in partnership with, as the company’s website refers to him, “a distinguished gentleman called Ghulam Mohammed”. The partnership was called Mahindra & Mohammed, and its business was to make the very successful World War II car, the Willys Jeep.

The name Jeep comes from GP or General Purpose vehicle. Mahindra & Mohammed began assembling and selling Jeeps in India, whose unpaved road the tough cars were built to negotiate.
The partnership between the Mahindra brothers and Ghulam Mohammed continued till Partition, when the distinguished gentleman moved to Pakistan and took office as its first finance minister.

Malik Ghulam Muhammad (his spelling appears to have changed at some point) became governor general in 1951 when Liaquat was assassinated, and Khawaja Nazimuddin became prime minister. Ayub Khan wrote about Ghulam Muhammad in his book Friends Not Masters. He describes Muhammad as a crafty old man, stricken by illness and babbling in incoherence. I was taken aback to learn, while writing this piece, that Ghulam Muhammad was only 61 when he died in 1956. Ayub hints that it was Ghulam Muhammad who facilitated Iskander Mirza’s coup, and that he thought of Ayub, who was then defence minister, as being different from the other members of the cabinet, taking him aside to anoint him.

The firm Ghulam Muhammad gave up was renamed Mahindra & Mahindra, and is today a $6.3 billion company that has 1,00,000 employees.

Pakistan has many businessmen, most in Karachi (and many of those Gujarati), but also in Punjab. I heard Zia Mohyeddin tell a funny story about Chiniotis, and jokes about traders are apparently quite popular in Pakistan. But I came away thinking that the Chiniotis were a skilled community and I wonder what their original caste was.

Aakar Patel is director of Hillroad Media