How powerful was Ambani? After a tip from an underworld don led to a police raid in the 1990s, Reliance senior executives were accused of violating the Official Secrets Act by possessing sensitive Cabinet documents, including a draft national budget. A joke quickly did the rounds in Delhi: the budget wasn’t leaked to Reliance; Reliance had leaked the budget to the ministry.
As Ambani’s lavish spending on advertising (often featuring film stars, cricketers, and models) wove the slogan “Only Vimal” through the minds of middle-class Indians, he proved adept at managing the media, too. If a small newspaper criticized the company, he could cripple it by pulling his advertisements. Some papers learned to attack Reliance in order to court its rupee, becoming promoters of the company when an ad spend was agreed. Occasionally, Ambani cut out the middleman, buying publications outright. His sons have followed suit: Anil’s company has a significant stake in one of the leading business TV channels, while Mukesh’s Reliance Industries group has a controlling interest in a media conglomerate that operates more than a dozen cable news channels.
As his fountain grew splashier, Dhirubhai Ambani became the country’s first business celebrity: his oval, smiling face, capped by receding slicked-back hair, was as recognizable to the middle classes as a film star’s. He had grown too big in stature for the Chevy Impala he’d dreamed of when first in Bombay. He traded up to a Cadillac: white, with fins.
* * *
By the late 1970s, Ambani’s image was seductive enough to start changing the culture itself. Just as Indira Gandhi democratized Indian politics, Ambani helped to popularize a more cavalier capitalism. To become rich like me, be daring like me—that was the gist of Ambani’s sales pitch to his employees; then to shopkeepers, whom he convinced to cut out the wholesalers and get their Vimal directly from him; then, after he went public in 1977, to his shareholders. “In their prosperity, our prosperity. For we are a family” was a line he maintained even when maximizing inequality of information at their expense.
In 1985, twelve thousand Reliance shareholders gathered on Bombay’s Cooperage Football Ground to approve the previous year’s financial results for the twenty-year-old polyester manufacturing company, in what was then the biggest annual general meeting in history. It’s now seen as a foundational moment in the creation of India’s first cult of equity. Yet shortly after the Cooperage meeting, a setback forced Ambani to raise capital at high speed through a debt and equity sale. Prospectuses and broker subscription forms were hawked like carnival tickets from loudspeakers strapped to autorickshaws, and dropped like wartime propaganda from helicopters over Ahmedabad. Along with tens of thousands of Indians, a huge battery of overseas companies also subscribed. Many of these buys, it turned out, were made by “shelf companies” with connections to Reliance, and therefore were insider buys that inflated the value of the stock. The profusion of on-paper firms was so great that a raft of names was taken from a portion of the Mahabharata called the Vishnu Sahasranama, “the thousand names of Vishnu.” It’s a joke Dhirubhai would have appreciated, even if he hadn’t authored it.
Within months, this and other instances of jugglery began to surface in a series of exposés by the Indian Express newspaper. The investigations, which alleged tax evasion and other corporate wrongdoing, also brought to light Reliance’s financial consideration for one of its biggest backers, the editor of the Times of India. The government confirmed some of the Express’s findings, and Reliance later had to repay evaded excise duty.
Ambani suffered a stroke as the exposés began, and it took him a hard year to recover. As for the Express, by 1988, according to the biographer McDonald, it faced more than 230 prosecutions by agencies in charge of company law, customs, income tax, foreign exchange, and import quotas. Notably, it was the Express’s lead investigator, not anyone from Reliance, who saw the inside of a jail cell. For, in addition to the obvious boons Indian politicians grant favorite corporate houses—preferential policies, government contracts, tax-free special economic zones—there’s also the perk of encouraging judicial delays in determining serious charges. One famous case, involving a senior Reliance official charged with conspiracy to murder a rival textile industrialist, has been dragged out for twenty-five years, and still shows no signs of resolution.
* * *
“Reliance is a triumph of trust,” Dhirubhai Ambani asserted in 2000, a year and a half before his death. If the trust was debatable, the triumph was not. Legal cases had slipped off his back, and following the economic liberalization of 1991, corporations such as his were freer than ever from government regulation and control. Some people even credited Ambani as a leading economic unshackler. In the account of the journalist and former minister in charge of privatization Arun Shourie, people such as Ambani, in boldly flouting the rules of India’s centralized economy, “created the case for scrapping those regulations. They made a case for reforms.” It’s an argument so stirring we nearly forget the more prosaic reality: that India was compelled to change not by reasoned policy arguments but by an acute balance-of-payment crisis, and by the International Monetary Fund.
Mihir Sharma gets closer to the significance of Ambani’s legacy when he argues that it freed ordinary Indians from caring about whether the money their icons made was clean or dirty. “Once you’ve made your money, you are a hero of the republic,” he says. “And Dhirubhai Ambani is sainted now, up there with many of the founders of modern India.”
Ambani was the first to make that sort of sainthood possible in India. In that sense, he marks the end of an epoch, and the beginning of another.
As a teenage socialist and activist, Ambani was shaken deeply on the winter’s day that Mahatma Gandhi (38) was assassinated. Yet individuals’ values change, as do countries’. In the decades after Gandhi’s death, Indians came to hunger less for equality than for growth, and found Gandhi’s critique of industrialization and warnings about thoughtless consumption about as useful as they found his homespun khadi. I’ve long suspected that Ambani was throwing shade on the skinny man with the stick and the glasses when he once advised an audience, “A society which condemns creators of wealth will always remain poor and miserable.” One reason we no longer have much suspicion of excess and inequality, or of those who facilitate it, is because, when compared to men such as Gandhi or Ambedkar (41), Dhirubhai Ambani was just as he’d claimed to be: the bigger shark.
NOTES
The page numbers for the notes that appear in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.
A Note on Sources and References
In many of the essays, cross-references to other individuals are signaled by names and chapter numbers in bold font. The wealth of cross-references is a sign of the rich historical interconnections between these figures. Sources for all direct quotes that I have taken from written or recorded archival material will be found in the notes that follow here. Direct quotes that are not cited are taken from interviews recorded for the radio series and book (the interviewees are all named in the text). In addition to these sources, the book draws upon a vast body of scholarship. For those interested in delving deeper, a bibliography of the sources I have used to research and write the book will be available online, at the website of the King’s India Institute.
The radio version of the book is available online, as a series of podcasts, from iTunes and at the BBC Radio 4 website, under “Incarnations: India in 50 Lives.”
1. The Buddha: Waking India Up
“My body became extremely lean”: Majjhima Nikaya, in Edward J. Thomas, The Life of the Buddha as Legend and History (1927; repr. New York, 2000), p. 65.
“without sensual desires”: Majjhima Nikaya, ibid., p. 66.
“deserted and in ruins”: Xuanzang, Si-Yu-Ki. Buddhist Records of the Western World, trans. Samuel Beal (London, 1884), p. 98.
“I renounce the Hindu religion”: B. R. Ambedkar, Dr. B
abasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches, ed. Vasant Moon (Bombay, 1979), cited in Gail Omvedt, Buddhism in India (New Delhi, 2003), p. 262.
2. Mahavira: Soldier of Nonviolence
“right from their respective”: Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Three Vital Questions,” Young India, Jan. 21, 1926, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 29 (Ahmedabad, 1994), p. 411.
“soldier” of nonviolence: Mohandas K. Gandhi, “On Ahimsa: Reply to Lala Lajpat Rai,” The Modern Review, Oct. 1916, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 13 (Ahmedabad, 1990), p. 297.
“After fasting two and a half days”: Kalpa Sutra, in Hermann Jacobi, trans., Gaina Sûtras, Part I (Oxford, 1884), p. 259.
“Jainism’s consistent historical stance”: Paul Dundas, The Jains, 2nd ed. (London, 2002), p. 233.
“a strange but perfect aloofness”: Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India, ed. Joseph Campbell (London, 1951), p. 214.
“Only they saw deeper”: Gandhi, “Three Vital Questions,” p. 411.
3. Panini: Catching the Ocean in a Cow’s Hoofprint
Take this sutra, for example: Ashtadhyayi, sutra 6.1.74, example adapted from Saroja Bhate and Subhash Kak, “Panini’s Grammar and Computer Science,” Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 72 (1993): 79–94.
“and therefore undergone the influence”: Johannes Bronkhorst, “Panini and Euclid: Reflections on Indian Geometry,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 29 (2001): 45.
4. Kautilya: The Ring of Power
“Three Cheers for Togo”: Jawaharlal Nehru to Brajlal Nehru, cited in B. K. Nehru, Nice Guys Finish Second (New Delhi, 1997), p. 7.
“An arrow unleashed”: Arthashastra, 10.6.51, in Patrick Olivelle, trans. and ed., Kingdom, Governance, and Law in Ancient India: Kautilya’s Arthashastra (Oxford, 2013), p. 387.
made The Prince look “harmless”: Max Weber, “Politik als Beruf” (Politics as a Vocation), in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, trans. and eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, 1946), p. 124.
“Just as it is impossible to know”: Arthashastra, 2.9.33, in Olivelle, trans. and ed., Kingdom, Governance, and Law in Ancient India, p. 118.
“Nine strokes with a cane”: Arthashastra, 4.8.22, in R. P. Kangle, trans. and ed., The Kautilīya Arthasastra: An English Translation with Critical and Explanatory Notes, 2nd ed. (Bombay, 1972), Part 2, p. 276; cf. Olivelle, trans. and ed., Kingdom, Governance, and Law in Ancient India, pp. 240–41.
“Even if it is possible”: Arthashastra, 2.9.34, in Olivelle, trans. and ed., Kingdom, Governance, and Law in Ancient India, p. 118.
“more into line with the mainstream”: “Introduction,” Olivelle, trans. and ed., Kingdom, Governance, and Law in Ancient India, p. 8.
5. Ashoka: Power as Persuasion
“Wherever there are stone pillars”: Seventh Pillar Edict, trans. Venerable Shravasti Dhammika, in Charles Allen, Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost Emperor (London, 2012), p. 425; cf. N. A. Nikam and Richard McKeon, trans. and eds., The Edicts of Asoka (Chicago, 1958), pp. 35–36.
“I have made the following arrangement”: Sixth Rock Edict, in D. C. Sircar, trans. and ed., Inscriptions of Asoka (New Delhi, 1957), p. 44.
“The king, who is called Priyadarsin”: Henry Falk, trans., “The Preamble at Panguraria,” in P. Kieffer-Pulz and J. Hartmann, eds., Bauddhavidyasudhakarah (Swisttal-Odendorf, 1997).
“One hundred and fifty thousand persons”: Thirteenth Rock Edict, in Nikam and McKeon, trans. and eds., The Edicts of Asoka, p. 27; cf. Jules Bloch, trans. and ed., Les Inscriptions d’Asoka (Paris, 1950), p. 125.
“tendencies like jealousy”: First Kalinga Edict, in Alf Hiltebeitel, Dharma: Its Early History in Law, Religion, and Narrative (Oxford, 2011), p. 48; cf. Bloch, trans. and ed., Les Inscriptions d’Asoka, p. 138; Nikam and McKeon, trans. and eds., The Edicts of Asoka, p. 62.
“Promulgation of dhamma”: Fourth Rock Edict, trans. Alf Hiltebeitel, in Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee (eds.), Reading the Fifth Veda: Studies on the Mahābhārata—Essays by Alf Hiltebeitel, vol. I (Leiden, 2011), p. 83.
“restraint in speech”: Twelfth Rock Edict, trans. the Venerable Shravasti Dhammika, in Allen, Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost Emperor, pp. 412–13; cf. Nikam and McKeon, trans. and eds., The Edicts of Asoka, p. 52; and Sircar, trans. and ed., Inscriptions of Asoka, pp. 50–51.
“Beloved-of-the-gods, King Piyadassi”: Seventh Pillar Edict, trans. Venerable Shravasti Dhammika, in Allen, Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost Emperor, p. 424; cf. Nikam and McKeon, trans. and eds., The Edicts of Asoka, pp. 33–34; and Sircar, trans. and ed., Inscriptions of Asoka, p. 76.
“monster of piety”: Romila Thapar, Ashoka and the Decline of the Mauryas, 3rd ed. (New Delhi, 2012), p. 3.
“I am exceedingly happy”: Jawaharlal Nehru, Speech in the Constituent Assembly, July 22, 1947, in Constituent Assembly Debates: Official Report 4, no. 7 (New Delhi, 1947), p. 765; available online at http://parliamentofindia.nic.in/ls/debates/vol4p7.htm.
6. Charaka: On Not Violating Good Judgment
“violations of good judgement”: In Dominik Wujastyk, trans. and ed., The Roots of Ayurveda (London, 2003), p. 20.
“not represent a completely unique ayurvedic point of view”: Dagmar Wujastyk, Well-Mannered Medicine: Medical Ethics and Etiquette in Classical Ayurveda (Oxford, 2012), p. 147.
“To produce a son”: Mitchell G. Weiss, “Caraka Samhita and the Doctrine of Rebirth,” in Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, ed., Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions (Berkeley, CA, 1980), p. 97.
“Doctors have almost unhinged”: Mohandas K. Gandhi, “Hind Swaraj,” in Anthony J. Parel, ed., Gandhi: “Hind Swaraj” and Other Writings (Cambridge, 1997), p. 63.
7. Aryabhata: The Boat of Intellect
“By the grace of Brahma”: Adapted from W. E. Clark, trans. and ed., The Aryabhatiya of Aryabhata (Chicago, 1930), p. 81.
“When sixty times sixty”: Ibid., p. 54.
“for only thus can it be stable”: Johannes Bronkhorst, “Panini and Euclid: Reflections on Indian Geometry,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 29 (2001): 55.
“Classical Indian geometry”: Ibid., p. 59.
8. Adi Shankara: A God Without Qualities
“all-knowing and virtuous”: Madhava-Vidyaranya, Sankara-dig-vijaya: The Traditional Life of Sri Sankaracharya, trans. Swami Tapasyananda (Madras, 1978), p. 14.
“merciless refutation of all hostile creeds”: Ibid., p. 136.
“I am neither earth nor water”: Adi Shankara, “Dasa Sloki,” trans. Paramartha Tattvam newsletter 6, no. 1–2, pp. 3–4, verses 1 and 5; available online at http://svbf.org/newsletters/wp-content/uploads/paramartha-tattvam-articles/Issue-1-21.pdf.
“hidden Buddhism”: See Upinder Singh, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century (New Delhi, 2009), p. 610; Natalia Isayeva, Shankara and Indian Philosophy (Albany, NY, 1993), pp. 12–16; Govind Chandra Pande, Life and Thought of Sankaracarya (New Delhi, 1994), ch. 9.
“ultimately unreal generally siphons off”: Wendy Doniger, On Hinduism (Oxford, 2014), p. 131.
“the way out of colossal error”: Jonardon Ganeri, The Concealed Art of the Soul: Theories of Self and Practices of Truth in Indian Ethics and Epistemology (Oxford, 2007), pp. 3–4.
9 . Rajaraja Chola: Cosmos, Temple, and Territory
“rhapsody to size”: David D. Shulman, The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry (Princeton, NJ, 1985), p. 401.
“Like bloodsucking yakkhas”: Culavamsa, 55.16–22, cited in George Spencer, “The Politics of Plunder: The Cholas in Eleventh-Century Ceylon,” Journal of Asian Studies 35, no. 3 (May 1976), p. 412.
“Can a mortal”: “Posters Seeking Jayalalithaa’s Release Unravel a New Facet in T.N. Politics,” The Hindu, Oct. 5, 2014; available at www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/posters-seeking-jayalalithaas-release-unravel-a-new-facet-in-tn-politics/article6471917.ece.
10. Basava: A Voice in the Air
&n
bsp; “Make of my body”: A. K. Ramanujan, trans. and ed., Speaking of Siva (New Delhi, 1993), p. 65.
“a voice in the air”: Ted Hughes, “The Art of Poetry No. 71” (interview with Drue Heinz), The Paris Review 134 (Spring 1995): 11.
“I don’t know anything”: Ramanujan, trans. and ed., Speaking of Siva, p. 64.
“Like a monkey on a tree”: Ibid., p. 50.
“a dagger of ‘crystal’”: D. R. Nagaraj, “Critical Tensions in the History of Kannada Literary Culture,” in Sheldon Pollock, ed., Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia (Berkeley, CA, 2003), p. 353.
“You are a blacksmith”: In Sadashiva Wodeyar, “Humanism of Basava,” Basava Journal 9, no. 3 (March 1985): 31; cited in S. A. Palekar, Concept of Equality and Ideal Society: Basaveshwara’s Model (Jaipur, 1997), p. 70.
“The crookedness of the serpent”: Ramanujan, trans. and ed., Speaking of Siva, p. 59.
“Don’t you take on”: Ibid., p. 61.
“The rich / Will make temples”: Ibid., p. 70.
11. Amir Khusrau: The Parrot of India
“There is a prosperous”: Ghazal 1772, in Paul E. Losensky and Sunil Sharma, trans., In the Bazaar of Love: The Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau (New Delhi, 2013), p. 75.
“The Muslim martyrs”: In Mohammad Habib, Hazrat Amir Khusrau of Delhi (Aligarh, 1927), p. 16.
“O Delhi and its artless idols”: From “The Fine Lads of Delhi,” in Losensky and Sharma, trans., In the Bazaar of Love: The Selected Poetry of Amir Khusrau, pp. 93–94; and see Sunil Sharma, Amir Khusraw: The Poet of Sultans and Sufis (Oxford, 2005), pp. 23–24.
“Composing panegyric kills”: In Sharma, Amir Khusraw, p. 18.