Brahmins, Khatris, and Babus

Harish Damodaran

Chapter 3 in India’s New Capitalists, 2008, pp 48-91 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract In Premchand’s classic, Godaan, the sugar mill owner, who also runs a bank and speculates in stocks, silver, cotton, and wheat, is called Mr Khanna.1 Like all great writers, Premchand had a tactile sense of the ground beneath his feet as well as a capacity to transcend the immediate and the obvious. Khanna happens to be a Khatri surname; in 1936, when Godaan was published, there were hardly any big industrialists from this community. The only two famous Khatri names then were Karamchand Thapar (who had just about floated his first colliery and a couple of paper mills) and the sugar baron Gokul Chand Narang. The fact that Premchand consciously chose Mr Khanna as his mill owner, rather than a Mr Jhunjhunwala, a Mr Dalmia or a Mr Kanoria, only shows that the Khatris were an emergent force in Indian industry by the 1930s.

Keywords: Diesel Engine; India Limited; Utility Vehicle; Steel Import; India Cement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-59412-8_3

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230594128

DOI: 10.1057/9780230594128_3

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().