Back to Barbara Harriss-White index Back to Religions Section 1 Forward to Religions Section 3   India's Religions and the Economy Section 2 The religious minorities in India's economy 1. Muslims The case of Siliguri The Case of South Indian Leather Small Town Muslim Commerce The economic bases of communal violence The material base of the Gujarat Pogrom 2. Christians Caste, Christianity and economic change 3. Sikhs Religious Plurality and Class Formation 4. Jains Religion, accumulative and reproductive practices 5. Parsis   Notes   Bibliography Tables (on separate page)   The religious minorities in India's economy Given their size and economic importance we should clearly begin with the religious identities of the Scheduled Tribes and Castes, which are by no means to be assumed to be always incorporated into Hinduism. (47) To explain how the religious identities of Scheduled Tribes and Castes (ST/SC) are deployed in accumulation is out of the scope of this essay. They are highly heterogeneous. Any explanation will be specific to time and place and it will involve distinguishing ethnicity from caste as well as from religion. This task needs another scholarly life. But there is a reason beside the sheer enormity of the task for setting it aside. This essay is concerned with capitalist accumulation, while the vast majority of the people in the Scheduled Tribes and Castes are found in the exploited work-force of small and marginal peasants and labourers, and indeed they constitute its largest component. (48) They are also those most politically disenfranchised. When they sometimes convert to Islam, Buddhism or Christianity, they may be using religion to escape extreme social stigma, economic oppression and marginalisation. (49) Despite this structural oppression, they are certainly not "socially excluded", indeed they are now poised for mass mobilisation. They make up major parts of the Indian mainstream in relation to which the privileged and secure elites are "the excluded". The religious ideas and forms of social organisation which have informed the dispossession of labour from the means of production - the religious justifications for the creation of a labour force free only to sell itself, a process which is as fundamental to capitalism as is the productive investment of surplus - are very obscure. (50) All this is work for the future. In what follows here, we examine the economic positioning of some of the minorities : Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Jains and Parsis. (51) We follow the approach of Hugh Seton-Watson, of whom A.J.P. Taylor, reviewing a book by Seton-Watson that covered the entire third world, observed that he resembled the curator of a museum who insists on showing you every room. '"Do we really have to know about Madagascar?", you ask; but "Yes", says Mr Seton-Watson, "you must"'. Each of these religions is included because it illustrates aspects of religious plurality and its economic significance.   1. Muslims India has more Muslims than any other nation except for Indonesia - 107 million in 1991, making up 12.6 % of the population and having a growth rate of 32% in the decade of the 80s, higher than that of both the Hindu majority (which grew by 25%) and the Christian minority (21.5%). (52) Their uneven dispersal affects the many roles they play in the economy. Half of India's Muslims are compacted into the northern "Hindi heartland" and West Bengal. There are smaller concentrations in peninsular India, on the Kerala coast and by the border with Pakistan. While most Muslims live in rural areas, they are nonetheless twice as urbanised as their population share would suggest. (53) We have noted that "difference" has been codified in laws grounded in religion. Electoral democracy evolved to cater separately for electorates defined in terms of their religions, and the history of modern India has been punctuated by eruptions of violence between Hindus and Muslims. But Muslims are not covered by India's laws of positive discrimination. While Hindu nationalists have depicted an Islamic "community" as both threatening and indulged, if there is a "problem" of Muslims in the Indian economy then it is one of economic backwardness and under-performance rather than one of superior economic power. In the late 1980s (using the most recent data), Muslims were found to be half again as likely as Hindus to be below the Poverty Line. (54) In fact, there exists a literature stressing Muslim backwardness which both results from, and reinforces, the construction of religion as a base for economic competition. (55) Although Muslims are disproportionately urban, they are extremely under-represented in India's capitalist elite. Out of 1,365 member companies constituting the Indian Merchants' Chamber of Bombay in the 1980s, some 4% were owned by Muslims, and as late as 1988 no Muslim-owned company featured in the top one hundred corporates, though some do now. Of the 2832 industrial units listed for monitoring in the 1990s by the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy only four (0.0014%) were owned by Muslims. Despite the entry of new entrepreneurs, including Muslim women, and despite the fact that Muslims head some of the most successful and dynamic IT corporates, these are still the exceptions that prove the rule. One survey found just over 1% of corporate executives were Muslim. (56) If Muslims are not in the vanguard of business accumulation, they are also under-represented in the Indian state apparatus: for example, in the Indian Administrative Service (3%), the Police (2.8%), the Railways (2.65%) in the nationalised banks (2%) and in Parliament (5 to 8%). (57) While there are no data for Muslim representation in education, the Muslim illiteracy rate is 15% higher than that for Hindus (including ST/SCs), and the proportion of Hindus who get secondary education is three times that of Muslims. (58) At the same time, the population of Muslims is highly differentiated in complex ways, according to sect, to internal, caste-like stratification, to biradari (industrial/occupational guilds) and region. (59) "Muslims are not a homogenous group but a conglomerate of many communities" (Ali, 1992, p34). Upon this cultural and religious differentiation, their equally complex economic differentiation has to be mapped. The first element in this differentiation is the Muslim peasantry, most heavily concentrated in Jammu and Kashmir and the Ganges Valley belt along the southern border with Nepal. While this peasantry is itself internally differentiated by landholding, operational scale and labour process, two features stand out. First, the mass of Muslim cultivators are small peasants in regions of poor irrigation which have lagged in the adoption of new agricultural technology - and in agrarian structures where strong elements of extra-economic compulsion persist. (60) Second, throughout India, while the proportion of rural Muslims engaged in agricultural labour (24%) is close to that of rural Hindus (28%), the proportion self-employed in agriculture is significantly smaller (36% for Muslims, 44 % for Hindus). Muslims have a higher incidence of landlessness (35% opposed to 28%), and the proportion of rural Muslims in non-agricultural wage work, artisanal craft production and what is still known as "menial work" (services and petty trade, much of which involves high levels of skill but low levels of pay) is also greater - 36% contrasted with 28%. (61) On the one hand, the occupational distribution of rural Muslims in contemporary India shows a distinctive "path dependence" from the Mughal era of courtly patronage and exploitation. On the other hand, their social separation from Hindus and their freedom from Hindus' distinctive social obligations may have encouraged innovative activity. An observation from a south Indian village where Muslims were a small minority still seems pertinent several decades after it was written, for it is often quoted : "the fact that Muslims seem to have remained on the fringe of the society has made them more versatile...[while it would never do for a Hindu] peasant to squat on the floor of his shop and offer goods to passers-by, who might be of lower caste or even untouchable... a Muslim can do this... [I]f a peasant opened a shop... he could never make money like a Muslim shopkeeper because a peasant was expected to be charitable and therefore obliged to sell goods on credit, a Muslim need not do this". (62) Hindu people of "peasant" castes have of course opened shops in very large numbers, and Muslim traders now sell on credit and charge interest. Another element in the economic differentiation of Muslims is the downward mobility resulting from the migration to Pakistan of professionals and the ashrafi elite, and from the political degeneration of Islamic feudalism after Independence. In the wake of the state-enforced zamindari abolition in UP and Hyderabad, the absentee landowning aristocracy and their retainers lost their role and, often, their livelihoods, dragging with them the urban and rural artisans whose livelihoods had depended on courtly tastes and demand. Only a small and educated minority of the landed elite remained near the seats of power and obtained employment and new status, often retaining control over their land through renting and letting. (63)   The case of Siliguri These elements may be seen at work in Siliguri, a rapidly growing town of some 200,000 inhabitants, distributing consumption goods to the plantation region of West Bengal. While the territory of the future town had been owned entirely by powerful Muslim families, "due to miscalculation, uneconomic habits and family litigation, these Muslim personalities lost their land, capital, power and position" (Mondal, 1997, p.53) and at Partition they were forced to East Bengal. As Siliguri expanded, some 10,000 Muslims migrated there, establishing themselves mainly in slums alongside low caste Hindus in a "microcosm of Muslim society and culture" (ibid). Muslim men work as traders, skilled artisans, recyclers and providers of petty services. Old links between biradari (guild) and occupation are dissolving; endogamous groups have become less rigid. Nevertheless, the occupations of tailoring, cotton carding, fishmongering, goat butchery, greengrocery and book binding are still carried out by Muslims in occupational groups. While alliances now blur the social boundaries of the ashrafi elite and ajlaf (64) subordinates, new socio-economic categories with new economic meanings are being formed. These distinguish the amir (the educated, rich few) from the gharib (the poor majority). Despite this internal economic and cultural differentiation, Muslims in Siliguri are generally described as being poor, socially separate, passive supporters of the ruling CPI(M), and marginalised by their religion and its impact on their education. Siliguri's Muslims, especially their girls, are relatively poorly educated. Muslim children are educated in separate religious schools (madrassas) and in Urdu rather than Bengali, the local language. (65) Another major element in the economic positioning of Muslims is their tendency to occupy niches historically shunned by Hindus for reasons of ritual pollution. So butchers may be either untouchables, or Muslims - qassabs. Muslim control of tanning, glue, soap, hides and leather (and rubber and plastic), shoe and leather goods production (and now export) has developed from their important role in butchery. Small town restaurants ("military hotels") have developed , based on Muslim culinary specialities that include meat, as much as from Hindu rules of commensality which long prevented all but the ritually purest from running even vegetarian eating places.   The Case of South Indian Leather The case of the leather industry in South India shows how a series of factors have transformed the way it had been stratified by religion, though it is still controlled by Muslims. At the macro level, state policy has required the export of hides to be replaced by semi-finished and finished leather products. At the micro level, the diffusion of demands for dowries from upper into the lower castes has changed Hindu social attitudes to work involving ritually polluting substances as bride-givers come under the social compulsion to supply dowries. The production of leather goods is being vertically integrated, and the labour process is being transformed from one using casual workforces, confined to Muslim or Scheduled Caste labourers working on-site, to one that includes the subcontracting of stitching and other processes to poor, forward-caste child and female workers. They work at some distance from the tanneries, in the seclusion of their homes and in an atmosphere of "shame" and of patriarchal compulsion. The world-wide rise in demand for Indian leather products, and the entrepreneurial responses to this by Muslim tanners, have led to the rapid accumulation of considerable capital and to new portfolios of Muslim investment in agribusiness and property. (66) Already in the 1970s, the acquisition of the trappings of high status by Muslims in the leather industry had "begun to distort the traditional system of social stratification and rank order"(Ahmad, 1975, p.246-7). But the transformation of cattle into commodities is not the only route to accumulation that ritually polluting niches in the economy have opened up for Muslims. The Hindu fear of "outcasting" by overseas travel on the one hand, and the ritual importance for Muslims of the pilgrimage to Mecca on the other, gave Muslims an early incentive to develop the travel industry. The predominance of Muslims in bidi (country cigarette) production, (where Muslims comprise 80% of the work force, though they own none of the dominant brands) is explained by both the caste Hindu's avoidance of pollution and by the fact that smoking was introduced into India by Muslims. Muslims also cite "Hindu ritual pollution" as the reason for their control of the recycling of physically polluting waste and scrap: bone, paper, card, metal, glass and plastics. In many regions Muslims dominate plumbing, masonry and metal products, hardware, locks and even mechanical and electrical repairs, which are thought to trace back to the conversion to Islam of low caste Hindu lohar blacksmiths. (67) And there have been strong economic incentives for other low caste or untouchable Hindu castes to convert to Islam - and a significant number have done this. (68) Yet another element that has given Muslims a distinctive role in the economy is the revival and expansion of industries whose workforces require highly skilled craftsmen. Craft skills are reproduced in the families of artisans which survived the decline in the 1950s and 60s of the princely patronage that had given them life. These families responded to the transformation of services and goods for a few patrons into the supply of commodities for national and international demand. As a result, many of the craft-based industries have remained strikingly localised. So in Uttar Pradesh, for example, Muslim artisans produce brassware in Moradabad, pottery in Khurja, glassware in Ferozabad, carpets in Bhadodi and Mirzapur, carpentry and woodwork in Sharanapur, hand printed textiles in Farrakhabad, cotton and silk embroidery in Varanasi, perfume manufacturing (to which the development of unani medicines is related) in Lucknow, Kanauj and Jaunpur and handloom cloth in Mau. In Bihar, large numbers of Muslims are silk and cotton handloom weavers. Muslim workers dominate the bidri ware (69) and carpet industries in Andhra Pradesh, and silkworm rearing and toy industries in Karnataka. In Jaipur, Rajasthan, some of the stone cutters and marble workers are Muslim (though tribal women and children are also used in quarrying), and Gujurat's block and screen printing industry employs Chippas, a Muslim group. Certain of these craft based industries have evolved into a full-blown local Muslim capitalism. The examples most often quoted are Moradabad brassware, which has profited from demand from the Middle East, and cloth and clothing manufacture and trade, which have developed from the skills of Muslim tailors (darzis) and weavers (julahas)). It is quite common for the surplus in these industries to be appropriated from the Muslim workers by Hindu and Jain immigrant trading castes which proceed to reinvest it elsewhere. They routinely supply production and consumption credit and raw materials, and sometimes have been found to provide food as an advance against pay. They arrange sales, state licences, development permits and finance and organise technical change. (70) Given that in sectors where Muslims provide the uneducated but skilled labour force, the traders are not necessarily Muslim, it has often been concluded that the "Indian Muslim [has a] dislike for trade and commerce" (Ahmad, 1993, p.41). More specifically it is said that "the generality of Muslims in Hindustan and the Deccan kept away from trade and commerce, at least up until independence" (Khalidi, 1995 , p.68) and even that they have been "devoid of a middle class of businessmen" since then (Wright, 1981, p.37). (71) Yet Muhammed himself was a merchant. At the start Islam flourished in an urban and commercial culture. (72) In fact there are many regions in India, especially but not exclusively on the west coast, where Muslims have long been assimilated into the merchant class, both as immigrants and as local converts.   Small Town Muslim Commerce Mattison Mines' study of Muslim merchants in Pallavaram in northern Tamil Nadu is one of the few accounts we have of the impact of the social organisation of any minority religion on economic practice. Published in 1972, it showed that while high-caste Hindus spurned commerce there, the conduct of business by Muslims was regarded as a sunnath, a custom of the Prophet's, and therefore as "an occupation conveying religious merit". The fact that these merchants were Muslim could not be separated from their being in a type of bazaar trade which was not regulated by the state. Nor could it be distinguished from the fact that it belonged to a particular place. The significance for accumulation of being Muslim was therefore ambiguous. The influence of Islam was expressed in a variety of ways, including a pronounced preference for the employment of Muslim wage labour by Muslim merchants - a spreading of opportunities for livelihood most easily achieved in the bazaar economy. Further, the universalist cosmopolitanism of Islam meant that there were trusted contacts at long distance, including overseas, ready to develop trade networks. (73) At the time of Mines' fieldwork, however, these "bazaar" merchants had not expanded into national trade networks or industries - whether "small scale" (as the Muslim leather industry nearby was then classified) or corporate. This was attributed by Mines to the constraints of "embeddedness" in the personalised and informalised bazaar economy. In the bazaar, while credit was available through established links of trust and mutual dependence, its scale was too small and too short-term for investment in industry. In the bazaar too, practical experience was valued above the technical education needed to manage industry. A family or kin-based work force was still valued above cosmopolitan contractual relations. (74) In the absence of other systematic evidence on the reach of Muslim business, Wright's analysis of advertisements over a run of 14 years in Radiance, an English-language, Islamic fundamentalist, weekly magazine, is summarised in Table 2. From this information, it seems that both upwardly mobile ajlaf and downwardly mobile and adaptable ashrafi capitalists formed a largely metropolitan body of Muslim accumulators. But Wright concluded: "(t)he trouble is that as the traditional functional division of labour between religious communities as well as sects and jatis breaks down... competition can and does erupt into politicised violence" (1981, p.43). This violence has since intensified.   The economic bases of communal violence Despite the lack of evidence that Muslim capitalists constitute an economic threat at the national level, contemporary communal violence can have an economic base. (75) A Parsi police commissioner is credited by the Organiser, the newspaper of the RSS, with the following conclusions : " A riot does not occur in a sleepy little village of UP where all suffer equally, nor in a tribal village of Madhya Pradesh where all live safely in their poverty. It occurs in Moradabad where the metal workers have built up a good industry...or Aligarh where lock-makers have made good,... or in Bhiwandi where powerloom rivalries are poisonous. It occurs in... Ahmedabad and Hyderabad and Jamshedpur where there are jobs to get, contracts to secure, houses and shops to capture, and it occurs in Agra and Ferozebad and in all other towns where economic rivalries are serious and have to be covered up with the cloak of communalism". (76) A list of sites of communal violence compiled by Khalidi (1995, p.22) shows - contrary to the general impression that south Indian Muslims are better assimilated and/or protected than in the north - that urban and metropolitan sites are targeted throughout India. Riots and progroms are rarest and most infrequent where Muslims are the smallest proportion of the population. Their incidence is reported not to be affected by the degree of working class organisation across religious boundaries. One case study of the informalisation of the textiles industry in Kanpur, however, finds that while an older generation of workers clings to union politics as a defence against informalisation, a younger generation of "flexible", casualised labour is forced for advancement into relations of clientelage for patrons eager to use them to foment communal violence. (77) They are most likely in urban sites where Muslims have visibly accumulated or benefitted from remittances, where Hindu social and physical space is being asserted or reclaimed, and where the state's regulatory and repressive capacities are weak or have been captured by a religious group. Although the triggers are usually cultural and religious ("trifling incidents"), although a connection needs making between a cultural symbol and specific local circumstances, and although the violence that erupts may be to persons, it rarely fails to involve property as well, including business assets. (78) Material explanations focus upon the local economic interests which stand to profit from the physical removal of competition. They are often one and the same as the political interests which gain from the mass mobilising effect of events which distract attention from conflicts within parties or factions, or between castes, classes or genders. (79)   The material base of the Gujarat Pogrom "Gujarat is generally known as a prosperous, progressive and peaceful people" (Joshi, 2000, pG61). However, in late February 2002, the Gujarat of Gandhi was exposed for the myth it was. Not a sporadic riot but a state-prepared pogrom engulfed slums, affluent urban residential areas and "sleepy little villages" of Gujarat. It is estimated that over 2000 Muslims were killed and up to 100,000 displaced. (80) In its wake, relations between Hindus and Muslims have changed throughout the country in a way in which many scholarly commentators fear is permanent. While these events certainly cannot be reduced to expressions of economic competition, it is important to recognise the force of the materialist explanation. It seems to run as follows. (81) Gujarat is a precociously industrialised state, with a highly unevenly developed agrarian hinterland. Although artisan castes, Muslims and backward castes have made modest inroads in sectors where they have long histories of activity or where small capitals are appropriate, most of Gujarat's capitalist accumulation is dominated by a coalition of forward castes - patidars/patels, banias and brahmins - some 20% of the population. (82) Gujarat is a state where labour of all sorts has been ruthlessly disempowered. (83) It is one where a class based politics of resistance has foundered in extremely sticky territory and has had to yield to organisation based on caste and ethnicity - and this without conspicuous success. (84) In order to preserve and protect this dominant class position and the social order it reflects, it has been necessary to control the state. In other parts of India, this is effectively done by a promiscuous funding of all potentially victorious or subversive parties by individual capitalists or collectively by their associations. Then pressure is applied on victorious, ruling parties at the points in the state where regulative policy is implemented. (85) In Gujarat however, rather than working re-actively in this way, capital has worked actively in politics. Mass political mobilisation by capital may require incentives in the form of redistributed resources. But Gujarat has a poor and deteriorating record in social sector spending: it has not followed this route. There is another strategy. Capital can resort to the construction of a strong ideology which legitimates the status quo, distracts from challenges to it and can be practised using threat or coercion. Hindutva aspires to more than this, however. Labour is to be actively co-opted in a way redolent of the totalising projects of state fascism. (86) The social order is declared as being Hindu and minorities are incorporated only on terms of subservience. Their hatred of minorities then deflects labouring people from the underlying economic causes of their poverty and oppression : their relative lack of assets, livelihoods, income and physical and social security, which markets do little but intensify. A growing body of evidence attests the overwhelming allegiance of the intermediate capitalist classes to the Hindutva project. (87) From 1996, once in power in Gujarat, the BJP set about creating a structure of tax, infrastructure , subsidies and regulative procedure that benefits these classes disproportionately. Individual accommodations between businessmen and the state confer further selective advantages. (88) Labour has been kept rightless at work and denied rights to social security. Labour is also co-opted to the ideological project in a range of ways. A large number of political organisations cut across caste and tribal status, gender and the rural-urban divide, and infiltrate civil society groupings. Through means as varied as the open-ended exchanges of patronage and the authoritarian socialisation of children and youth - in and out of school - "others" are defined and hatred inculcated. (89) While Christian churches and schools had been the object of violent attack in the years running up to 2002, (90) the Godhra riot was used by organised groups of trained riot-makers to trigger a violent "response" against Muslims not only from hardened riot makers but also from parts of society green to such communal savagery. From women and middle classes to dalits and (later on) tribal people, hatred based on religion took brutal shape. (91) Muslim property was carefully targeted and destroyed. In places where Muslims are insecure labourers on a par with dalits and tribal workers, attacks on their persons and homes were and are attacks on their only "property": the integrity of their bodies. Muslim workers have subsequently been laid-off and sacked in disproportionate numbers. All Muslims have been forced into a greater residential segregation than before these events. (92) The conditions of Muslim "rehabilitation" require not competing with Hindu commercial interests. (93) Communal violence did not occur everywhere in Gujarat. There is a clear relationship between districts in which there were riots and attacks on Muslims and their property and electoral support for the BJP. (94) The apparent conundrum of near destitute tribals attacking Muslims in eastern Gujarat has been researched in some detail and found to have been the outcome of a long history of careful communalisation. Through means including the Hinduisation of their religion, rural tribal people are being manipulated to exact revenge on one segment of the class which exploits them - Muslim moneylenders - for the long history of their dispossession of rights to land, water and forest resources, for the degradation of their environment, their political division and their development-induced displacement and differentiation. (95) In eastern Gujarat rural "tribals were made to fight a proxy war on behalf of baniyas" (Devy, 2002, p41). Incited with alcohol and issued with threats of violence they perpetrated economic crimes which benefited Hindu businessmen. For the latter, religious revenge was fused with that of business competition and market control. A full panoply of tactics: fomenting rivalry, the creation of factions, use of the police, litigation etc will be deployed to contain the risk of tribal hostility turning on Hindu landowners, moneylenders and traders. (96) While there is no doubting the special nature of the history of communal politics in Gujarat (of which the account above is but the briefest of summaries), this case reveals the mechanics of the mass mobilisation required for workers to be co-opted more generally into a totalising project of complicity with their own oppression in the interests of an elitist authoritarianism, a "deified" racist nationalism and militarism. These form the lowest common denominator of full blooded fascism. (97) As Banaji has observed, these forms of mobilisation echo the recruitment of religion into a project of regenerative nation building that took place as fascism developed in Europe. The forms of oppression and repression that burst into violence in Gujarat and the increasingly well co-ordinated activity of unco-ordinated and un-civil societal groups are expressions of political culture easily seized upon by fascist political parties. (98) Whether the large expanse of India's non-state -regulated economy can be organised in the state-corporatist form that characterised European fascist states is much more open to doubt. (99) It is a great irony that, although support for the Hindutva project originates in the capitalist classes, the expanding informal economy is likely to be as formidable an obstacle to a full blooded fascist Indian state as are her secularist forces.   2. Christians The second largest minority considered here comprised only 2.32% of the Indian population in 1991, though numbering a substantial 20 million. While a third of Goans are Christian, and while Christians form the majority in almost all the small states of the north east, most Christians are to be found in Kerala, where they account for 20% of total population, and in a belt in Tamil Nadu, where they account for 6%. In half the states of India, Christians number fewer than 1% and are mostly marginal peasants and agricultural labourers. The history and geography of conversion has resulted in distinct and separate groupings and denominations, polarised at their extremes between on the one hand Syrian Christians in Kerala, who trace themselves back to brahmins converted by the apostle Thomas (who arrived in India in AD 52); (100) and on the other dalit and tribal Christians who converted in mass movements from the last part of the 19th century onwards. Syrian Christians have developed as a "jati among other jatis" (Webster, 1992, p.34). They are said to live in relative social exclusivity to this day, perhaps because of - rather than despite - their having multiplied into no less than 15 denominations, and their long history of accommodation with imperialism. Joining British capital as workers, supervisors and agents, they differentiated into money-dealing, industrial capital and commercial capitalism. From here, they moved on to establish credit institutions and modern banking on the one hand, and the rubber and tea plantations, the development of vertically integrated agri-business (and the joint stock form of corporate ownership) on the other. Syrian Christians are now well represented in the state and in corporate sector management. But using tightly knit credit, Syrian Christians have also invaded low-status sectors. In Kerala and elsewhere they dominate mechanised fishing, chains of beauty parlours and dry cleaning. The Christian Churches (particularly the Roman Catholic Church under the Portuguese) also accumulated significant capital assets and are now major employers in their own right. Tapping foreign aid and state subsidies too, churches run by high caste Catholics have invested in educational and medical infrastructure, commercial property, farms and factories. Their surplus is ploughed back and also invested in India's capital markets. Church institutions cannot possibly employ all the low caste and dalit Catholics who need work. (101) Protestant Christianity, condemning the systems of power expressed both by caste and by the subordination of women, was more successful at eliminating caste within Christian society in north India than it was in the south where it met with opposition from Syrian and Catholic Christians as well as Hindus. Whether Indian Protestantism has been more successful in its fight against caste than it has against the subordination of women is not known. Certainly, educated Protestant women are a significant minority in the professions. (102) When Dalits converted to Christianity, they were no longer eligible for state support under the system of educational and job reservations for Scheduled and other low ("backward") castes. Their livelihoods now depended on education and on wide regional networks of Christian contacts. So a minority of educated Christians "became teachers, clerks, nurses, hospital attendants, railways and postal employees, drivers, conductors, mechanics and policemen. Some have become doctors, professors, advocates, writers, singers, printers and engineers and a few have become higher level government officials" (Wiebe, 1988, p.192). Their descendants form an urban, propertied, educated, salaried and professional elite, some of whom have interests in rural land. The great majority, however, remain rural wage workers and "in the highly competitive struggle for upward mobility they face prejudices both as Dalits and as Christians" (Webster, 1992, p.10).   Caste, Christianity and economic change David Mosse's study of a village in Southern Tamil Nadu where a large harijan (outcaste) population is divided between Hindus and Christians, and further between Catholic and Protestant, shows that all the harijan castes have been struggling to reduce the relations of subordination in which they are locked - through patronage, dependence on tenancy and many kinds of service provision. (103) Yet in an elaborate process of status mobility, (involving "downward displacement, role bifurcations and trade-offs between status and resources"), Christianity has helped people to reduce their economic relations of dependence (as in the case of Protestant harijan paraiyan caste) but also for achieving specific indicators of higher status (e.g. the Catholic harijan pallar caste). People at the very bottom of the system of harijan caste rankings provide services reciprocally or on a market basis, though market exchange is qualified by personalised transactions. Elsewhere contracts are reworked in the idioms of higher status. Instead of work on order, there is negotiation, with honorific presentations, cash payment and the development of new contexts in which services can be provided and received. Demeaning tasks and forms of payment are transferred to women or avoided through migration. Markets for credit and labour have been created and the principle that Christian harijan pallars can have rights to private landownership has been established. Mosse finds that "religion makes no difference to (the) inter caste relations" of hierarchy and rank being replicated and challenged by harijans. (104) Each episode of assertion has been organised at the level of the individual economic service performed. The history of emancipation for cattle scavengers is different from that for the operators of irrigation sluices; the history of Catholic and Hindu pallar labour, bonded to high caste agricultural employers, is different from that of Catholic and Hindu chakkiliyan labour bonded to pallar employers. The struggle for the transformation of the "idiom" of service has a different history from the history of the struggle over the use of village space. But there is a common thread in the liberating effects of adherence to a Christian church. Not all change has been emancipating. Now that Christian missions have been abandoned and their independent patronage has vanished, Protestant paraiyans have been forced back into servile roles. (105) Shiri, studying rural Protestant dalits in South India, confirms that they are suffering from deteriorating debt, poverty and illiteracy, as the churches and their services disintegrate. (106) Some Christians, particularly tribal Christians, are the object of growing communal violence, while others, particularly Syrian Christians, have seen their churches approved as "swadeshi" by the RSS. (107) In the year 2000, press reports appeared regularly of the desecration of religious property, of the Sangh Parivar's (108) accusations of "forced conversion", of word-of-mouth hate campaigns, cases of threats, harassment and even murders of priests, nuns and missionaries. Towards the end of the year, it was proposed to reform Christian divorce laws in order to eliminate their gender bias. The chief sites of aggression against Christians are Orissa, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and the "potentially Christian states" of the North East. It is widely held that this persecution has no economic base. But to the extent that churches attempt to protect tribal and dalit Christians from exploitation by Hindu moneylenders and traders, and some actively challenge oppression, religion may be the idiom of reprisal. (109)   3. Sikhs The Sikh minority is not much smaller than the Christian - 16.3 million in 1991 (1.92% of the total population). Forming a large majority in Punjab, one fifth lives in neighbouring states where Sikhs form about 7% of the population, while the diaspora pervades India and reaches out to the UK, the USA and Canada. Like Christians and Muslims, despite their egalitarian religious ideals, Sikhs are segmented into sects, which are loosely associated with different sectors of the economy. Some 20% of Sikhs are scheduled caste mazhabis, mostly poor agricultural producers and labourers with economic interests at variance with Sikh Jats. The dominant Jat landowning caste form a third of the Sikh population. With assured irrigation and with relatively large, consolidated holdings, Sikh Jats were famously at the forefront of adoption of the seed-fertiliser technology introduced in the mid 1960s. (110) By 1981, on 1.6% of India's land area, with a canal irrigation system built under colonial rule and on holdings consolidated at the time of the devastating movements of population at partition, Punjab was producing 73% of the wheat procured for public distribution by the state, and 48% of all procured rice. (111) Yet, although Punjab still has the highest level of aggregate rural wealth and consumption expenditure in India, the returns to Punjab's agriculture have been notably unequal, reflecting the relatively advanced capitalist production that achieved these results. (112) In the 1980s estimates of rural poverty varied between 18 and 33%. (113) However, "what strikes most about Punjab is the way production and exchange are almost neatly compartmentalised on religious and caste lines. The peasants are Sikhs (jats), merchants are Hindus (khatris, aroras, baniyas). Sikhs cultivate, organise agricultural production. Hindus trade. Peasants live in villages, merchants live in towns" (Singh, 1999, p.191). The religious alignment of the economy is set against a background of unbalanced sectoral development and political turbulence. (114) While 70 % of rural households are Sikh, 85% of urban households are Hindu. The segmentation of the Sikh merchant castes - they do exist, notwithstanding Singh's valid generalisation quoted above - is so great that not only trade but also industry is dominated by Hindu capital - see Tables 3 and 4. (115) Agricultural trade is largely in the control of baniyas whose accumulation strategy focuses on agro-industry, notably the processing of wheat, rice and oilseeds. Trade in manufactured goods is dominated by khatri and arora castes. Disrupted at Partition, this trade is strongly networked into metro-capital unrelated to agriculture and outside Punjab. Despite high levels of both rural and urban consumption and its top rank in agriculture, industry in Punjab is relatively underdeveloped, ranking only 10th in industrial development. It has a distinctive structure of small-scale industry, limited to eight kinds of activity in cotton processing and metal working. (116) This industry derives more from princely patronage prior to Partition, and to the immigration of Hindu arora traders, than to the locally generated agricultural surplus. Even the expansion of ramgharia artisanal engineering is more oriented towards trade in spare parts, and repairs to agricultural machinery, than to machine production. One explanation for this social and economic alignment attributes it to the central state's reluctance to invest in a region bordering Pakistan. But Sikh reluctance or inability to invest in sectors dominated by Hindus is also suggested as being equally important. The hesistance or inability of Hindu trading castes to invest in productive industrial capital may play a part as well. (117) Whether caused by lack of push or lack of pull, the small-scale nature of Punjab's industry structures the demand for non-agricultural labour, which then tends to be supplied by unskilled migrants from Bihar. It repels educated Sikhs, whose unemployment rates are high. At best, they seek work elsewhere, exploiting the mercantile networks of their co-religionists abroad. (118)   Religious Plurality and Class Formation Religion plays a complicated role in shaping accumulation inside Punjab, even if the state's surpluses feed accumulation elsewhere in India. The structural differentiation of agriculture has been thwarted by continual, politically resented state subsidies and concessions to the Sikh religious minority which controls a strategic national resource - foodgrains. Moreover, the communal stratification of production and trade in Punjab defines class formation. While the agricultural sector produces a commercialised surplus, exchange relations in Punjab tend to be stratified by religion. Where Producers and traders compete over the distribution over the surplus, their religious alignments are accentuated. The reinforcement of exclusive religious alignments may then serve to carve a local moral space to protect and legitimate access to surplus. Arvinder Singh (1999) concludes from this that Punjab's communal conflict may be interpreted as a symptom of a transition to an industrialised, but pluralist, society. (119) 4. Jains Jains number 3.4 million, but their economic significance is much greater than their share in the population (0.4%). (120) While their epicentre is in north west India (the desert area of Rajasthan once known as Marwar), they are distributed parsimoniously in urban and "rurban" settlements throughout the sub-continent. With a religious philosophy of nonviolence (121), adherence to truth and the renunciation of worldly passion, and with a claim to be caste free and ritually egalitarian, Jains are commonly found to be relatively wealthy local merchants, moneylenders and pawnbrokers, and are divided in a complex way into two main sects, and then into further subsects, jatis and family lineages defined by locality and occupation. (122) Jainism drew its first support from traders: "it was because of their adherence to ahimsa (non-violence), that they never took to farming or agriculture and turned instead to commerce, trading and banking" (Chopra, 1998, p.167) - and to revenue collection and the keeping of village records under Mughal rulers. As Laidlaw writes (1995, p.87): "The social homogeneity of the lay Jain community in subsequent millennia has sometimes been exaggerated, but the extent to which Shvetambar Jainism especially has been a religion of the commercial elite is by any standards remarkable". The Jain mercantile diaspora developed under the Mughals and was consolidated under the British. Many of the Jain, baniya caste businessmen who laid the foundations of Indian manufacturing industry began as clerks, brokers and agents in the "great firms" of the 19th century which dealt in opium trading, banking, insurance, the wholesaling of gold, and the export of wool.   Religion, accumulative and reproductive practices The question whether Jain capital is organised in a distinctively Jain way, with implications for accumulation, has generated a rich but inconclusive body of research. It has been argued, first, that Jains are culturally distinct in business, and, second, that Jains are organised more effectively than others. On the first point, Laidlaw's insights into a Jain community working in the gem trade in Jaipur show that it is as tightly bound economically as the Tamil Muslim community described by Mines. Yet it differs from that Muslim community by being socially non-binding. "Jain communities, because they are not closed or bonded groups, are best seen as the medium and outcome of social clustering around corporate religious property. Families tend to drift out of the community if their membership is not sustained and renewed through some combination of religious observance, economic participation, kinship and marriage links, residential proximity and day to day interaction" (Laidlaw, 1995, p.349). (123) As to whether Jains are organised more effectively, their marriages and alliances are a crucial basis of their capital accumulation. Jain identity structures Jain accumulation. Laidlaw quotes Fox on the Tezibazaar baniyas: there are "'business families" not 'family businesses"'. (124) A family's "credit" in business "is its stock in the broadest sense, which includes social position, its reputation and the moral and religious as well as the business conduct of all its members... When a family contracts a good marriage, its credit increases....(t)he potential impact on business confidence of particular potential alliances are explicit factors for consideration...because business practice depends...so much on trust, moral conduct and financial standing... This means that a family's credit lies not only in the hands of the men who are actually engaged in business, but in those of its women too. When sons succeed automatically to their father's position in the family firm, the future of the business enterprise is, quite literally, in the women's hands. Thus the distinctive religious division of labour in wealthy Jain families - with men making generous donations and women undertaking periodic extended fasts - has an economic dimension" (Laidlaw, op. cit., p.355-6). So Jain religion affects economic activity through the private sphere and its gender division of religious practice and piety. On the other hand, commercial accumulation quite obviously transcends the bounds of caste and religion. (125) When Ellis studied urban baniyas in Rajasthan, half of whom are Jains and half Vaishnava Hindus, he found that Jain merchants themselves identified three areas of difference : the spatial arrangement of the business site, their accounting procedure, and the importance of public and community service. (126) But on close inspection, Ellis found that in none of these respects do Jain merchants actually differ from their Vaishnava counterparts. (127) Further, for both groups of merchants the patrilineage and its economic endeavours are synonymous. Business is a religious duty and a source of merit. Business failure is regarded by both religious groups as signifying sin or lack of religious merit. Lack of religious merit may be protected against by religious deeds. Thus religious deeds are "priced" in relation to assets , liabilities and commercial risks. "Credit and merit are cumulative, self-fulfilling and with concrete effects upon survivability, especially where competition is oligopolistic - which is the typical situation of a small market town" (Ellis, op.cit., p.104-5). Ellis was driven to conclude that "Jains are not culturally distinct as businessmen, nor do they form a separate economic interest group" (op.cit., p.106).   5. Parsis In 1991 there were about 76,000 Parsis in India, some 54,000 living in Mumbai with a further 40,000 abroad. (128) Having been land-based in rural Gujarat for centuries, after seeking refuge there from religious persecution, Parsis migrated to Bombay some 300 years ago. (129) There, through the conjuncture of their acceptability to the very small set of British capitalists and their experience of craft production and trade, they "took a decisive lead in industry by establishing cotton spinning and weaving mills in the latter half of the 19th century and the earliest import and export firms" as well as shipbuilding and construction (Luhrmann, 1996). There is very little literature about their role in the contemporary economy. Parsis remain important promoters in the corporate sector (where they have a reputation of being relatively progressive employers) and are prominent in the professions. However, their pre-eminence has been lost and although they are significantly wealthier and more educated than average in Bombay - a survey in 1982 showing some 40% of Parsis in employment being in professional, technical and clerical posts contrasted with 22 % for the population as a whole - Parsi industrial capital is actually highly concentrated. (130) Parsi philanthropy, however, extending outside the religious community is an important component of collective identity, and the Parsi panchayat provides Parsis with a system of social security - for healthcare, education and the relief of acute poverty - which mitigates their inequality. (131)   Notes (47) See footnote 3 and Ilaiah, 1996. Back (48) Shinoda, 2000 (49) See Ilaiah, op.cit., for an introduction. (50) For Weber, "pariah people" were trading off low ritual status under Hinduism against the monopoly over work opportunities it created (1962, p.16-18). Otherwise this issue seems to be ignored. (51) For the story of Parsis, see Chopra, 1998; Guha, 1984; Lurhmann, 1991 and 1996. Their panchayat system of social security is unique and their strong philanthropy mitigates not only their own inequality but also that of other people's. For Buddhism, see Gellner, 2001. (52) Govt. of India, 1999, p.194-5. Back (53) Calculated from data in Ahmad, 1993. There is great variation between cities. While Murshidabad and Malappuram have over 2 million Muslims, respectively 61 and 67% of the total population and Hyderabad has over 1 million, 39%, Lucknow is 20% Muslim, Calcutta 18% Bombay 17% Aligarh 15% Delhi 9% and Madurai but 5% (Muslim India, 1997, vol 172, p.150). (54) 53% of Muslims were under the expenditure poverty line of Rs 160 per caput per month, contrasted with 36% Hindus, according to NSSO data quoted in Subramaniam, 2001, p.11. (55) See for example Ahmad, 1973, 1975; Ali, 1992; Ahmad, 1993; Khadidi, 1995. Back (56) Goyal, 1990, pp.535-44. (57) Respectively Wright, 1981, p.43; Khadidi, 1995 , p.69-75 and see particularly pp.77-88 on the armed forces (where, though there are no data, Muslims are known to be grossly under-represented; Ali, 1992, p.44; Ahmad, 1993, p.40-41; Halder, 2001, p.32. There is vigorous debate over the causes of this under-representation: poor levels of education versus self-reinforcing communalist discrimination - and over its historical drift. (58) Subramaniam, 2001. (59) The principal sects are Shias and Sunnis although there are quite distinct smaller communities such as the Ismaili Boras and Khojas and the Memons along the western littoral. The greatest internal divisions are between the Ashrafi, Persian elite and the Ajlaf, descendants of native converts. The main upper caste-like groups throughout India are Sheikh, Saiyyad, Khan, and Pathan, while Qureshi, Ansari Idrisi, Mahaldar, Raien and Momin are considered as of lower status. Among the biradaris (or guilds) are halwais (sweetmakers), idrisis (tailors), gaddi (milkmen), quereshis or qassabs (butchers), ansaris (clothmakers), julahas (weavers), zari (embroiderers), bidi makers, metal workers and locksmiths (I. Ahmad, 1973; Ahmad, 1993; Mann, 1992; Mondal, 1997). Muslim history is conventionally viewed from the north, as a product of forced conquest, whereas Islam actually had a much longer history in South India and spread through persuasion , trade and intermarriage (Ali, 1992). Back (60) Ahmad, 1975, p.241-3; Khalidi, 1995, pp.54-9. (61) National Sample Survey, 43rd Round, 1987-88, Table 27r p.56. (62) Epstein, 1964, p.33 quoted in Ahmad, 1975, p.243 and in Khadidi, 1995, p.56. (63) As in the case of the Kidwai lineage of east-central Uttar Pradesh (Ahmad, 1975, pp.235-41; Bhatty, 1973, p.97-98). Back (64) See footnote 48. (65) Mondal, 1997. (66) Harriss-White, 2003, Chapter 7 (67) Mondal, 1997, chapter 5. (68) Khadidi, 1995, p.25,73; Wright, 1981, p.38, p.41. (69) Ornamental metal work of a pewter-copper alloy inlaid with silver. Back (70) Khadidi, 1995, p.70-73; Cadene, 1998, p.116. (71) That migrant small businessmen from India could establish large-scale industries in Pakistan has not passed un-noticed (Papanek, 1967) and has been used to fuel rival arguments: one holds that Muslim capital was drained from India in that process and the other, that lack of accumulation by Indian Muslims is the result of communal discrimination by a state operating in the interest of Hindu business castes - see Wright, 1981; Ali, 1992. (72) A careful study of the doctrines of Islam has failed to find any serious obstacle to capitalist activity. The practice of riba, condemned in the Koran, is not "interest" but the doubling of principal and interest if the debtor cannot pay when due. The prohibition of usury has always had "little practical effect" and is understood by scholars as a response to particular circumstances and not as intended to hold for all time (see Rodinson, 1987, pp.73-76). In the rare conditions when Muslims do not take interest it is due to a warping of doctrine. Social institutions owing their origins to misunderstandings of sacred scripture can be found in other religions, notably Christianity. (73) Mines, 1972 , p.93-98. Back (74) Mines, op.cit. p.109,pp.112-118. (75) This is not to say that communal violence never erupts for purely religious, political or cultural reasons (see e.g. Engineer, 1984a, p.2). (76) Organiser (28th September 1980, p.14) quoting K.F. Rustomji, "Communal Violence" in Opinion (16th September 1980) and quoted in Wright, 1981, p.43. (77) Deponte, 2000. (78) Desai, 1984, pp.22-3; Engineer, 1984b pp.36-41. During the Coimbatore riots of 1997, while police destroyed the assets of Muslim pavement sellers, paid riot makers simultaneously wrecked Muslim cloth shops (Peoples' Union for Civil Liberties, 1998). Back (79) Professional agitators, organisers, looters and arsonists have for decades been hired for this purpose. Engineer, 1984 a, p.2; 1984 b; Khadidi, 1995, pp.20-27, 50-1; Ali, 1992 , p.42. Riots have been broken down into their elements and these have been commodified. (80) D'Souza, 2002; Yagnik and Sheth, 2002; NHRC, 2002; Nussbaum, 2003 (81) See G. Shah, 2002, Prakash, 2003,for the wider context (82) Shinoda, 2000 (83) Breman, 2002. Nowhere is this more evident than in the period of liberalisation in which the textiles industry has been downsized and shed labour and what remains is being rampantly informalised. Back (84) G. Shah, 2002 (85) Harriss-White, 1993 (86) Laclau, 1982 (87) Prakash, 2003 (88) Enabling the evasion of sales tax raids and other kinds of enforcement including that of urban planning laws (Prakash, 2003 - see also Harriss-White 2003, chapter 3). (89) Prakash, 2003 (90) Editorial, 1999; Joshi, 1999 Back (91) See Balagopal 2002 for dalits, Lobo, 2002 and Devy 2002 for tribals (92) Chakravarti, 2002 (93) Balagopal, 2002 (94) Prakash, 2003 (95) Joshi, 1999 Back (96) Lobo, 2002, Devy , 2002 (97) Kothari, 2002, Carsten 1967, Loucks and Hoot, 1948 (98) Banaji, 2002/3 (99) Harriss-White, 2003, ch 10 (100) Govt. of India, 1999, p.198-99; Chopra, 1998, p.245. Back (101) Kurian, 1986. (102) From 1870-1930 large numbers of low caste and tribal people converted to Christianity, Webster argues, to escape poverty and demeaning status, and at their behest rather than that of missionaries. Bengal, Orissa, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh witnessed movements among tribals; elsewhere the specific jatis and the proportion of converts varied greatly. The mass movements had a greater impact on the church - imprinting it with a dalit stamp - than on dalit converts many of whom faced economic boycotts and physical abuse (Webster, 1992, pp.41-65). Rural dalit christians could improve their public health environment, and had access to education and medical facilities. But they had limited economic mobility and, grouped with elite Christians who did not share dalit interests, they gained nothing by way of representation under the Constitution; and they have continued to be excluded from reserved seats and deprived of protective discrimination, even when these were extended to Sikh dalits in 1950 and neo-Buddhist dalits in 1990 (Mosse, 1994; Shiri, 1997; Webster, op.cit. , p.126-8, p.190; Wiebe, 1988, p.182-193). (103) Mosse, 1994. Mosse uses the word harijan as this is the word used by the people he studied, but he reminds us that all words for untouchable imply specific discourses on identity. Ben Rogaly comments that this is true even for "former untouchable" (2001, Pers. Comm.) Back (104) Mosse , op.cit. , p.82. (105) Mosse, ibid (106) Shiri, 1997, pp.115-134; p.242. (107) "Swadeshi" is a term appropriated by Hindu nationalists. It means "self-provisioning" with reference to the production and consumption of Indian-made goods. In this case the elite, right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh which has done much to develop the ideology of Hindutva - "Hindu-ness' - confers Indian "authenticity" upon the Syrian Christian Church. Back (108) The Sangh Parivar is the family of (right-wing, Hindu nationalist) organisations. (109) See reports in Communalism Watch and Governance Monitor: http://www.saccer.org e.g. Attacks on Minorities Dec 6th, 2000, from which the data reported here were obtained. Monthly reports of attacks to people and property also reveal the emergence of a new social movement of poor Christians consisting of a set of organisations with economic agendas. (110) Govt. of India, 1999, p.202-3; Chopra, 1998, p.190-1;Wallace, 1986, p.365-66; Singh 1993; 1997. Back (111) Wallace, 1986, p.367. This concentration is now less marked. The relative roles of remittances and local accumulation in the creation of agrarian wealth have been disputed - see Helweg, 1987, p.151. (112) See for critical evaluation Byres, 1981, Bhalla, 1999. (113) Wallace, op.cit. p. 369; Singh, 1999, pp.103-9. Sikh merchant castes include Pothohari refugees from West Pakistan who captured markets for cloth in Indian Punjab, Delhi and North West India and produce cycles, motor parts and radio parts. Ramgharias have also developed from being artisan converts - tarkhan (carpenters) and lohar (blacksmiths) - to occupy substantial accumulation niches in contracting and engineering in the Punjab. (114) Sikh revivalism has taken two distinct forms : one egalitarian and humanistic, against Sikh casteism, and the depravities associated with increasing consumption; the other sectarian and communal, in reaction to threats to Sikh identity (Singh, 1987). Back (115) Telford, 1992, p.980. Arvinder Singh presents data from surveys by the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy for the ten largest corporates in Punjab in 1994, showing that only one is Sikh-controlled and that only 9% of Board members are Sikh (Singh, 1999, p.152-3). (116) Wallace, 1986, p.371-2: in the 1980s, these were woollen textiles and hosiery, cotton ginning and processing, cotton textiles, sewing machines and parts, steel re-rolling, cycles and cycle parts, agricultural implements, machine tools and sports goods. By the mid 1990s the largest corporates were in textiles, liquor, pharmaceuticals, cycles and TVs. On the All-India scale, industrial firms are numerous, oriented towards trading, with low fixed capital and high working capital components and high levels of debt and gross output per unit of fixed capital . In 1996 only 15% of trading firms were controlled by Scheduled Castes. These were small firms, largely rurally located, with poor endowments of working capital and barriers to credit (Singh, 1999, p.144-69). (117) See respectively Wallace, 1986, p.372 and Singh, 1999.Back (118) Sikhs have been well represented in the state. Another sector, the army, historically important for Sikh employment, has seen the numbers of Sikhs greatly reduced since the secessionist movements of the 1980s (Helweg, 1987, p.151). (119) Singh, 1999, pp.174-199. (120) Govt. of India, 1999, pp.200-201; Laidlaw, 1995, p.84, p.92. (121) Including in its most distilled form the violence of agriculture to plants, pastoralism to animals and industry to animals, plants and people. For this reason there are also said to be few Jain medical practitioners. (122) The two sects are shvetambaras (white clad) and digambaras (sky clad) (Laidlaw , 1995, p.116; Chopra, 1998, p.166-7). See Jones and Howard, 1991, for a study of Jain trader-moneylenders in Rajasthan, where they sell goods on credit to Hindu villagers but act as pawnbokers and moneylenders primarily to bhil tribal people.Digambara Jains are in agriculture in southern Maharashtra and northern Karnataka (Pierre Lachaier, 2001, Pers. Comm.). Back (123) He goes on to describe the annual auctioning of silver "visions' during the festival of mahavir janam through which resources are raised to maintain centripetal institutions such as temples and meeting halls and the religious and public functions housed in them. Leading families compete for the honour of supporting these institutions. (Laidlaw, 1995, p.349-50). (124) Fox, 1969, p.143; Laidlaw, 1995, p.354-5.Back (125) Carrithers and Humphrey, 1991, p.8. (126) Ellis, 1991, p.101; corroborated by Laidlaw, 1995, p.364, 374. (127) Scholars of Jain and Vaishnava baniya history such as Gillion (1968), Timberg (1978) and Munshi (1988) have also made the same point. (128) Luhrmann, 1996 Back (129) See Chopra, 1998 pp248-9 and Guha, 1984, for historical detail of this Zoroastrian faith more than 2,500 years old. (130) Promoter families of Tata, Godrej and Wadia being of particular prominence respectively in iron and steel, consumer goods and textiles; see Guha, 1984; Lurhmann, 1996 (131) On the panchayat see Lurhmann, 1991, p33; also see Lurhmann for Parsi hospitals, industrial townships, charitable trusts and the improvement of formal industrial labour force conditions.