[BITList] Gandhian national

[John Feltham]

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Birla, Ghanshyamdas  (1894-1983), businessman and politician in India, was born in the small village of Pilani in Rajputana, India, on 10 April 1894, the son of Raja Baldeodas Birla (c.1862-1957) and his wife, Yogeshwari Singhi (c.1863-1963). The Birlas were of the mercantile caste known as the Marwaris, whose roots can be traced back to seventeenth-century Rajputana. His family migrated from Rajputana in the mid-nineteenth century to Bombay in order to exploit the commercial opportunities developing there. In 1872 they were driven from Bombay by the plague and moved to Calcutta, where the family quickly established itself as a leading commercial gaddi (trading house) in Bara bazaar, the commercial heart of the city.

Birla's origins in such a very traditional trading caste were to influence his personality and values for the rest of his life. While not formally educated, he received the customary mercantile grounding in arithmetic and basic literacy. In his later life he assiduously pursued a regime of self-education and wrote widely and well, particularly on economic matters. At the age of twelve he joined the family firm and at sixteen had established himself as an independent jute broker. He was married twice: first, in 1908, to Durgadevi Somani (c.1896-1909), with whom he had one son, and then, in 1912, to Mahadevi Karva (c.1900-1926) with whom he had two more sons and three daughters. He was widowed for a second time in 1926 and never remarried.

Birla swiftly demonstrated outstanding entrepreneurial and business acumen, qualities that were shown to extraordinary effect during the First World War. The opportunities of the war and immediate post-war period for speculation on the Calcutta stock exchange and in the jute, silver, and opium futures market were considerable, and brought the family an enormous fortune. In 1919 Birla used these profits to invest in and run jute mills-hitherto a sector dominated by the British merchant community in Calcutta. He was, therefore, a pioneer of the Indian-owned modern industrial sector, moving later into cotton textiles in the 1920s and into automobile manufacture and insurance in the 1930s and 1940s. He never, however, wholly eschewed the trading and speculative businesses where his fortune had originally been made. By the outbreak of the Second World War the assets of the Birla group far exceeded those of any of the British managing agency houses, and were second only to those of the great Tata group of Bombay.

Birla was not only an innovator in the practical sphere of business; he was also an important pioneer of business organizational activity. He was the prime mover in setting up the Indian Merchants' Chamber in Calcutta in 1926 and a founder member of the Federation of Indian Commerce and Industry in 1927. The latter body rose swiftly to compete effectively for influence over officials and government economic policy in the last decades of the raj. Birla's role was enhanced by his ownership of the business periodical the Eastern Economist, and of the influential Hindusthan Times, which he bought in the late 1920s. His standing within the emerging Indian industrial class was fully recognized by the British imperial government, which went to some lengths to woo him from his affiliation with the nationalist movement. He was a member of several official commissions into financial and economic matters and he was befriended by both Churchill and Wavell, the viceroy, during the Second World War. However, in 1932 he declined the offer of a knighthood.

Birla's talents were never narrowly confined to business matters. From an early age he showed an absorbing interest in and aptitude for politics. Ironically, for a man who was to become one of the founding fathers of Indian industrial capitalism, Birla had a brief involvement with the revolutionary terrorist movement endemic in early twentieth-century Bengal. In 1914 he was forced underground for several months to evade imprisonment after being accused of hiding consignments of ammunition during the famous Rodda & Co. conspiracy case. His influential family was eventually able to have the arrest warrant rescinded. He is, however, better known for his involvement in the more conventional political activity of the Indian National Congress. His interest in nationalism was, in part, the consequence of his family's struggle, as relative newcomers to Calcutta, to establish their social and commercial standing among both the chauvinistic British and orthodox Hindu Marwari commercial communities. The excommunication of the Birla family by the powerful and ultra-traditional Marwari Association after his brother's marriage to a woman deemed to be of inferior status led Birla to embark upon a bitter and polarizing battle within the community, during which he sought to represent his approach to business and politics as a challenge to tradition and conservatism. This was symbolized by his personal enthusiasm for the Indian nationalist movement. His example influenced more progressive Marwaris to become loyal and generous supporters of the nationalist movement.

Though a reformist within his own community, Birla remained in many ways an orthodox Hindu and was attracted by the more culturally conservative wing of the nationalist movement, represented by such champions of Hindu cultural assertion as Lala Lajpat Rai and Madan Mohan Malaviya. He was a strong supporter and benefactor of Malaviya's great project the Benares Hindu University. In 1924 he helped him to form the Independent Congress Party (ICP), a faction within Congress which espoused the more exclusivist rhetoric of a resurgent Hindu India. In 1926 Birla was elected to the central legislative assembly as a representative of the ICP, and many saw him as a potential leader of the Hindu wing of the Indian nationalist movement. However, by the end of the 1920s Birla's sympathies had shifted towards the Gandhian wing of the movement.

Birla is perhaps best known for his close friendship with Gandhi, whom he first met in 1916; indeed it was at Birla's residence in New Delhi that Gandhi was assassinated in 1947. Though never formally a member of Congress and always willing to parley with the British, Birla became a convinced and passionate devotee of Gandhian nationalism. He is known to have financed Gandhi's ashrams and other philanthropic ventures, once commenting wryly on the enormous cost to himself of keeping the mahatma in poverty. The degree of his financial support for and influence over the political activities of Gandhi, particularly during the civil disobedience campaign, is a matter of some controversy. It is clear, however, that Birla was a trusted adviser of the mahatma. There is some evidence that he was instrumental in the decision to suspend the civil disobedience movement when it was felt to be harming Indian commercial interests. He was certainly associated with Gandhi's negotiations of the Gandhi-Irwin pact in March 1931, by which the mahatma agreed to attend the second session of the round-table conference talks on Indian constitutional development in London. Birla accompanied Gandhi to London for these talks, held in autumn 1931, as his personal adviser and also as an official delegate representing Indian big business. While there he engaged in private discussions with representatives of the Treasury and British business in India to try to reach agreement on a number of commercial and financial matters.

Birla's links with Congress were not limited to the mahatma. With Gandhi's withdrawal from active politics after 1934, he developed close relations with those Congress politicians most sympathetic to business interests and to constitutional methods, such as C. Rajgopalachari and Rajendra Prasad. He was particularly associated with Vallabhbhai Patel, Gandhi's shrewd political lieutenant in Gujarat and the unofficial leader of the so-called Congress right. By the late 1930s Birla's personal contributions to the movement, his ability to mobilize funds from Indian business, and his expertise on financial and commercial matters had made him indispensable to the Congress leadership, and he came to exert unrivalled influence over its economic policy. His role as chief strategist for Indian big business was confirmed when he co-authored the important wartime Bombay plan, the Indian industrialists' vision of development after independence. This called for an essentially capitalist economy in which dynamic business groups would promote rapid industrialization assisted by a strong central state. The pragmatism implicit in this approach to the economy also infused his attitude to India's communal problems. Having conducted an early study on the economic feasibility of an independent Pakistan, he concluded that a separate Hindu India would reap most of the economic benefits of secession. He became a discreet lobbyist for the partition solution, and was to play an important role in organizing the division of economic assets after the creation of Pakistan.

The years immediately after independence dealt serious blows to Birla's influence and he began to withdraw from political life. The assassination of Gandhi in 1947 and the death of Vallabhbhai Patel in 1950 removed his closest allies within Congress and any potentially effective curbs on Nehru's ascendancy. He enjoyed somewhat cool relations with Nehru, whose socialism he had always regarded with suspicion and hostility. But although he was opposed to nationalization and other restrictions on the private sector, Birla remained aloof from the right-wing business-backed Swatantra Party, founded in 1952 to oppose Congress. He continued to behave pragmatically in political and business matters and was the first to invest in Kerala after its election of a communist government in 1957; on meeting Khrushchov in Moscow 1961, he offered to establish factories in the Soviet Union. His loyalty was recognized in 1957 when he was awarded one of the Indian state's highest honours, the padma vibhushan.

After independence, therefore, Birla concentrated on his business, philanthropy, and writing. He wrote widely on economic and industrial issues, but is best-known for his memoir In the Shadow of the Mahatma, published in 1953, which includes extracts from his thirty-year-long correspondence with Gandhi. Of his many philanthropic activities perhaps the most important to him was a project to develop a technical university, the Birla Institute of Science and Technology, in his native village of Pilani. He was also co-founder and president of the Harijan Sevak Sangh, an organization devoted to liberating untouchables from the injustices of the caste system. In the 1950s and 1960s he oversaw his empire's expansion from cotton and jute textiles, aviation, automobiles, banking, and insurance into synthetic fibres, shipping, tea, cement, fertilizers, chemicals, and aluminium. The Birla corporate group achieved extraordinary growth, from twenty companies and assets of Rs 25 crores in 1946 to 150 companies and assets of over Rs 292 crores in 1965. During the populist phase of Mrs Gandhi's premiership in the 1970s, when private enterprise was discouraged, the Birla group became the first Indian multinational, establishing factories in Ethiopia, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines. During the 1970s Birla began to execute a complex succession plan for the increasingly labyrinthine Birla empire, and the division of his assets among his sons and nephews was managed smoothly and amicably. At his death in London, at the Middlesex Hospital, on 11 June 1983, the total assets of the Birla group were estimated to be worth about Rs 2000 crores-the second biggest corporation in India.

Birla's life demonstrates several aspects of twentieth-century Indian history. His participation in the nationalist struggle exemplifies the centrality of business and mercantile interests to Congress and the ambiguous and ambivalent balance of ambition for modernity and respect for tradition that India's nationalist movement peculiarly embodied. His own family firm's transformation from traditional trading house to multinational corporation was a common Indian twentieth-century experience writ large. In many ways his vision of a modern industrial India, achieved by private and public collaboration, has been closer to the reality of independent India than Gandhi's rural arcadia or Nehru's socialist utopia.

A.-M. Misra 

Sources  A. Ross, The emissary: G. D. Birla, Gandhi and independence (1986) + Hindusthan Times, 60/161 (12 June 1983) + Times of India (12 June 1983) + G. D. Birla, In the shadow of the mahatma: a personal memoir (Calcutta, 1953) + D. K. Taknet, B. M. Birla: a great visionary (1996) + R. N. Jajni, G. D. Birla (New Delhi, 1985)
Archives priv. coll., papers SOUND BL NSA, documentary recording
Likenesses  photograph, repro. in G. D. Birla, Path to prosperity: a collection of speeches and writings of G. D. Birla (1950) · photograph, Harvill Press, London [see illus.]
Wealth at death  Rs2000 crores: A. Ross, The emissary: G. D. Birla, Gandhi and independence (1986)




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