JAINISM AND THE LIFE OF TRADE: CUTTING EMERALDS IN JAIPUR

Lawrence A. Babb

Amherst College

This is the story of a mineral and how it became intertwined with the lives of

Jaipur Jains. The mineral is a precious form of beryl known as emerald, the stone that

was the foundation of Jaipur’s famous gemstone-cutting industry. The community within

which Jaipur’s emerald business took root and flourished was almost entirely ©vetåmbar

Jain. Because Jains were so central to the development and evolution of the business, our

story can be read as a case study of how Jain traditions engage with the world of

commerce.

I begin with a brief overview of the industry’s basic structure, and then move to a

discussion of its history from its inception to its high point of profitability in the post-war

era. At the elite level, the business evolved as part of the way of life of a Jain

community, and the business and the community were mutually entangled in such a way

that the life of trade and the life of the community were fused. The century’s late decades

brought radical changes in which this union of community and commerce came to an end

and the business broke free of its old communitarian anchoring. In all of this, Jainism

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was indeed an important factor. The role it played, however, was more social than

religious in any strict sense, and had little to do with the teachings of the Jinas.

THE INDUSTRY

Jaipur’s lapidary industry encompasses two spheres of activity, manufacturing

and trading. Though analytically separate, these activities are often undertaken by the

same individuals. Manufacturing is the cutting and polishing of gemstones and the

fabrication of jewelry, and involves both owners of firms and artisans who do the actual

physical work of manufacturing. Trading is the buying and selling of raw materials and

finished products, and is the business of traders and a vast army of brokers whose

mediation is essential to buying and selling in Jaipur’s gemstone and jewelry trade.

When interviewed in late 2005, the Executive Secretary of the Jewelers Association of

Jaipur estimated that roughly 10,000 traders, manufacturers and brokers are involved in

the business in Jaipur, but there is no way to verify this number. The Association itself

then had 2,300 members, of whom brokers (a separate membership category) numbered

385.

The artisans (kårîgars) are mostly Muslims. Many are highly skilled, and skill is

particularly important in work with emeralds. Emeralds are more prone than other stones

to flaws and irregularities of various sorts, which means that a worthy stone presents a

unique problem to be solved: minimizing weight loss while at the same time bringing out

the best qualities it has to offer. In the case of the most valuable stones, this can involve

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constant consultation between the manufacturer and the artisan, and the manufacturer is

often in the position of having to place great trust in the skill and judgment of the artisan.

The basic social unit of this business is the family firm, large or small. It is

difficult to say how many such firms exist, but they abound in the city’s jewelry district.

Typically they occupy a floor or part of a floor of an urban havelî. Some of these

buildings are still occupied by owner-families, but many people in the business have left

their old neighborhoods and moved to newer and less congested neighborhoods outside

the walled city. A manufacturing area is typically a single large room where the artisans

sit on the floor with their equipment. The person supervising the workers, who might be

an owner or a salaried supervisor, usually sits at a low table where he can inspect and sort

the raw materials and finished products and also keep a close eye on the artisans who are

believed to be masters of theft.

Until the late twentieth century the owners of such firms—or at least the elite

owners—have been mostly ©vetåmbar Jains belonging to the Osvål and ©rîmål castes.

Although they are very similar in outlook and behavior, the Osvåls and ©rîmåls are,

strictly speaking, two separate castes, each with its own origin mythology, caste

subculture, and internal clan and lineage structure. The ©rîmåls were the pioneers of the

jewelry business in Jaipur; a handful of ©rîmåls who migrated from Delhi and other

cities dominated the jewelry business in the city’s early years. People say that there were

five jeweler families in Jaipur in at the time of its early eighteenth-century founding, and

four of these were ©rîmål (the other was Måhe¹varî). At least one Osvål jeweler family,

still very prominent in the trade today, was in the city from a very early period, and there

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must have been others, but to the best of my knowledge Osvåls became a major factor in

the business only in the nineteenth century.

A window into early nineteenth-century Jaipur’s caste composition is A. H. E.

Boileau’s account of his eight-day visit to the city in August of 1835 (Boileau 1837). His

description of the city’s social structure is extremely sketchy, but the fact that he states

that the Osvåls of the city then numbered 4,500 (ibid.: 234) at least indicates that they

were a major presence in the city’s trading community at that time. He says nothing of

the ©rîmåls, but we know that they were certainly present in significant numbers at the

time of Boileau’s visit because the ©rîmål temple in Johari Bazar was completed in V.S.

1869 (1812 C.E.).1 The ©rîmåls are now and were probably then a smaller group than

the Osvåls, and they might have simply escaped his attention.

Informants state that intermarriage between the ©rîmåls and Osvåls was barred in

the past, but it was clearly sometimes allowed because informants also state that in the

past ©rîmåls would accept brides from, but not give their daughters to, Osvål families. In

the hypergamous marriage culture of northern India, this reflected a sense of superiority

on the part of ©rîmåls. However, the separation between the two castes became greatly

attenuated in the twentieth century. Intermarriage between ©rîmåls and Osvåls is no

longer seen as remarkable, and the former invidiousness has disappeared as far as I can

tell. Their relationship is also buttressed by a shared religious culture, ©vetåmbar

Jainism, a point to which we return later.2

Indispensable to the Jaipur’s gemstone business are brokers who are a ubiquitous

presence in jewelers’ offices and in the backstreets and lanes of the city’s jewelry district.

Although it is not an ironclad rule, it is generally assumed that any transaction has to

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involve a broker if only as a formality. If no broker is involved, a non-broker is

sometimes asked to “be the broker” in order to meet this requirement. I am told that

Osvåls used to predominate at the apex of the brokers’ profession, but this is certainly not

the case today. Upper echelon brokers belong to all of the region’s principal trading

castes, and brokers in general come from a wide range of social and cultural

backgrounds. Many are Muslims.

Apart from the Osvåls and ©rîmåls, there are many other distinct and separate

groups involved in the industry. For example, more complex polishing operations are

frequently put in the hands of Gujarati specialists. Heavy gold jewelry is still made by

“Marwari” artisans (i.e., goldsmiths of local origin), but most modern open-setting

jewelry is fabricated by Bengali specialists who began to appear in large numbers in

Jaipur in the 1970s. Bead stringing was once the occupational specialty of the Pa²vå

Måhe¹varîs—a subgroup of the Måhe¹varî caste—who formed a residential cluster in

what is now the Bapu Bazar area. Jaipur’s famous kundan-meena work was originally

brought by Sikhs from Lahore, said to have come at the invitation of Maharaja Man

Singh I in the sixteenth century (Tillotson 2006: 151). Their descendants form a small

community still practicing this art today.

Considered in its entirety, the industry can be seen as knitting together a cluster of

very diverse communities in a single system of complementary roles. It is an example, if

you will, of “industrial multiculturalism.” Each group brings its own traditional skills

and talents to the industry, and their variety can be seen as a local echo of the fabled

diversity of India itself.

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 HISTORY

Visitors to Jaipur are likely to come away with the impression that its lapidary

industry is somehow deeply “traditional.” Its venue is Johari Bazar, an area that has

apparently been devoted to the jewelry business since the city’s founding in 1727. And

while modern factories on the city’s outskirts are where the business is headed these

days, gems are still cut and polished in the old fashioned way using simple and often

hand-powered tools in small operations in the crowded inner byways of the old walled

city. But make no mistake. Jaipur’s gemstone industry is, in historical perspective, not

truly old at all. Indeed, it was a radical departure from the past when it first came into

being, and this occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Jaipur Jewelers

A gemstone industry, however, is not the same thing as a jewelry business, and

the jewelry business has been a part of Jaipur’s life from its earliest days. When

Maharaja Jai Singh created Jaipur, he encouraged merchants, artisans, and other

professional specialists to settle in his new city, and in the turbulent eighteenth century it

was an excellent place of refuge for well-off traders. Its situation on an open plain was

based on an innovative concept—given the time and place—of a capital city as a

physically accessible trading center open to maximum communications with the outside

world, not a fortified redoubt (Sachdev and Tillotson 2002: 39). Tax concessions and

offers of free land for residences were additional inducements for merchant immigrants

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(Roy 1978: 52, 57). Jewelers were included among these incoming traders, and Jai

Singh’s high regard for the jewelers who came to his new city is often spoken of with

pride by the city’s jewelry community as part of their shared heritage.

They came to a city that was rapidly becoming very affluent, which was an ideal

environment in which to conduct a jewelry business (ibid.: 51-62). Vital trade routes

passed through Jaipur, notably the route from Agra to Gujarat, and the presence of a large

contingent of traders in the city population was itself a condition highly favorable to the

creation of wealth. Well-off state officials were also resident in the city, and Jai Singh

encouraged (“made it almost obligatory,” in Roy’s words [ibid.: 58]) the state’s jågîrdårs

to live in Jaipur in houses built by the state and paid for in installments by their

aristocratic occupants. Although Jaipur’s subsequent history was to bring major

economic setbacks as well as growth and progress, the eighteenth century was a period in

which the basic character of the city as a busy center of economic activity crystallized.

It must be stressed, however, that Jaipur’s old jewelry business was a different

sort of enterprise from the city’s modern lapidary industry. Although it certainly

involved manufacturing, including the cutting of gemstones, this activity was constrained

by the limitations of local and regional markets. In those days, the main market for gems

consisted of the social elites of the region, i.e. the royal families and their blue-blooded

feudatories in the ²hikånås. The presence of jågîrdårs in Jaipur itself provided such a

market ready at hand, and by the nineteenth century rich traders were becoming

significant consumers of gems as well. Still, the Indian market was too limited to support

a major gemstone manufacturing industry. That development had to await an overseas

export market.

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 But if the Jaipur jewelry business was not itself a gemstone industry, the skilled

workers required by such an industry were in place locally and so was concept of

overseas export. We know that by the latter part of the nineteenth the finishing of garnets

from locally abundant rough stone had become a Jaipur specialty, and this production

was for export, not for domestic markets. Roy (1978: n. 29) quotes the 1882-83 Report

of the Political Administration of Rajputana as follows:

‘It may be noticed that there is now a large trade in garnets, which are collected

here from mines mostly in other Rajputana States, though partly also in Jeypore

and are exported to Europe, the smaller ones being for use in watches and the

larger yielding, according as they are cut, carbuncles or other ornamental forms of

the Stones’ (quoted from p. 10 of the report).

From this passage it is clear that all that was needed for an industry to develop was the

right stone and the right market. This came with the emerald.

The Advent of the Emerald

It is very likely that Jaipur’s emerald industry arose because of the initiative of a

single individual, a Digambar Jain named Banjilal Tholia. I know of no documentary

evidence for the belief that he was actually the industry’s founder, but this is widely held

among Jaipur jewelers, and the chronology of his career strongly suggests its truth.3

Born in 1857 to a family of cloth merchants belonging to the Kha¿ðelvål Jain

caste, he was trained in the jewelry business of the day by a ©vetåmbar Jain jeweler

belonging to the ©rîmål caste named Suganchand Saubhågchand Jargad. That Banjilal

8
was included among this man’s apprentices was quite unusual because in those days the

lucrative and prestigious jewelry business was almost entirely in the hands of ©vetåmbar

Jains. It should be explained that the Kha¿ðelvål Jains have never been a trading caste as

such (at least in Jaipur), although they tend to be regarded as such. For the most part,

they have found employment in service, most notably in state bureaucracies. The fact

that Banjilal’s family was in business was therefore itself somewhat unusual, and it is

said that he was able to become Jargad’s apprentice only because of a fortuitous

friendship between Jargad and his paternal uncle. In other words, he began as a complete

outsider to Jaipur’s elite jewelry community of those days, and his subsequent career can

be read as an illustration of the principle that persons new to an activity are sometimes

the sources of key innovations.

Banjilal’s training, which began at the age of ten, could not have included the

finishing of emeralds from rough because there was no emerald rough available in India

at that time. Although the emerald has been on the scene in India from ancient times, and

while it is numbered among the classical navratna (the nine precious stones), it is not,

and has never been, a truly Indian stone. India has never been a significant source of

emerald rough. It is true that emeralds have been mined in Rajasthan in recent times, but

these deposits were unexploited before their recorded discovery in 1943 (Sinkankas

1981: 445-48). Writing in the nineteenth century, S. M. Tagore (1879: 204), in his

comprehensive treatise on gems, is uncertain whether India ever produced emeralds.

According to oral tradition within the Tholia family, Banjilal’s initial involvement

with the emerald occurred as the result of a contact in Calcutta. There he had a close

relationship with a Jeweler named Umrav Singh who was probably acting as his Calcutta

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broker. Umrav belonged to the ©rîmål caste, and it is likely that he had caste or family

connections with the jewelry community of Jaipur, which would have been the link with

Banjilal. He introduced Banjilal to the owner of a then-prominent Calcutta-based agency

house called Kilburn and Company.4 This company traded between India and Europe in

a wide variety of items, and they were Indian agents for a London-based firm specializing

in diamond brokerage called Pittar, Leverson and Company who had mining rights of

some kind in Colombia. How the idea originated is unknown and unknowable, but as a

result of this contact, and through the agency of Kilburn and Company, Pittar, Leverson

and Company began to supply Banjilal with emerald rough for cutting and polishing and

to receive his product in London on consignment. A rough idea of when Banjilal’s

emerald business began is provided by copies of some of his business correspondence

(dating from October 31, 1897 to September 17, 1900) that have been recently discovered

by an alert member of the Tholia family, Mr. Sudeep Tholia. From these materials it is

clear that by the late 1890s Banjilal’s manufacturing business had become very big

indeed, and it seems likely that by this time it had been functioning for decades.

Extrapolating backward on the basis of the average number of invoices per year in the

years covered by the correspondence, Sudeep Tholia believes that Banjilal’s emerald

manufacturing began in the early 1870s, and this strikes me as a reasonable deduction.

Inevitably, others began to take up the same business, and they probably also

obtained Colombian rough from Kilburn and Company, at least at first. The system of

apprenticeship in practice among ©rîmåls and Osvåls—the same from which Banjilal

himself had benefited—played a key role in the spread of the business. In this system,

the teacher was called a guru and students were often referred to as celås, and lines of

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disciplic succession developed on the model of religious tutelary lineages. The

socialization of jewelers in the business thus drew upon a very ancient paradigm of

learning. Although apprenticeship within kinship groups is probably as old as the jewelry

business itself, there is no direct evidence that extra-familial apprenticeship was practiced

prior to Banjilal’s apprenticeship with Jargad, although I strongly suspect that it was. But

by the early twentieth century, and probably earlier, extra-familial apprenticeship was

fully institutionalized.

Banjilal himself had a few apprentices, but more important by far as a teacher was

an associate in business named Ratanlal Phophalia (on whom see Bha¿ðårî et al. 1934:

169-70). Born in 1862, he was a ©rîmål who belonged to an old Jaipur jewelry family

that had done business in the city from its beginnings. He had also had been trained by

Suganchand Jargad, and this was probably the foundation of his relationship with

Banjilal. The exact character of this link is unclear, but it was apparently a business

arrangement that continued to connect the two families even after Banjilal’s death in

1929. In his day, Ratanlal was a powerful figure in Jaipur’s gemstone elite; he was state

jeweler (råj jauhrî), very rich, and had many apprentices who became historically

important jewelers in their own right (Mukîm 1972: 22).

The pattern by which the business spread presents us with an interesting example

of how social and cultural factors can influence the diffusion of innovation. Despite the

fact that Banjilal, a Digambar, was arguably the emerald business’s founder, it never

spread to any extent within the Digambar community; instead, leaped from him to

Ratanlal Phophalia and thence to the ©vetåmbar community and in essence became their

special field of trade. On the Digambar side its spread was probably inhibited by the lack

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of a strong business culture, the Kha¿ðelvål Jains being largely a service caste. On the

©vetåmbar side its spread was encouraged by a well established business culture and

given channels to flow through by the apprenticeship system. There is little doubt that

apprentices tended to be chosen on the basis of preexisting social networks among

©rîmåls and Osvåls, with the result that the business stayed within the ©vetåmbar

community.

By the early twentieth century, Jaipur’s emerald industry had assumed the basic

form it was to retain for most of the remainder of the century. A force behind its early

growth was the rise in gemstone prices, especially emerald prices, that began at the turn

of the century and continued until 1929 (Ball 1935:638-639). It was a very international

business from the start. On the supply side, it was completely dependent on imported

raw materials for its most important product: finished emeralds. It was also totally

dependent on overseas markets, in those days mainly in Europe, and the European

orientation had a tremendous impact on the industry’s product. India’s older gemstone

craft culture had focused on beads, cabochons, and carved pieces, and had placed primary

emphasis on conservation of weight, with massiveness seen as a highly desirable trait in

precious stones. The European market demanded a different kind of product with the

accent on lighter, faceted stones.

It was not only a new industry but a new kind of industry. The business expertise

and lapidary skills upon which it depended were thoroughly indigenous, and the fact that

they were already in place in Jaipur fulfilled a precondition making it possible for the

industry to develop there. But the industry itself was something entirely new and

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profoundly cosmopolitan. It was, to use Theodore Levitt’s now ubiquitous expression,

“globalized” at birth, and it has retained that character ever since.

SOCIAL CONTEXT

I now turn specifically to the owning and managerial class and to the social and

cultural context which they conduct their businesses. To understand this context fully, it

is necessary to examine the way it has changed over time, and so I begin with a bit of

nostalgia. If you ask older elite members of the business—©rîmåls or Osvåls whose

families have been in the business for generations—about the current state of trade, you

are likely to hear a sad story of decay and decline. They will tell you of a golden age in

which the business was rooted in what they see as solid values and was conducted in a

manner they deem to have been more ethical and honorable than is the case today. Now

it would be easy to dismiss the reveries of these elite informants as mere rosy-tinted

reveries of gentlemen of a certain age—what Laidlaw (1995: 353) calls “[f]antasies of a

just-vanishing Gemeinschaft.” But leaving the older-timers’ moralizing aside, there once

was a time when the transactional life of Jaipur’s gemstone business was indeed

conducted in a social and cultural environment very different from today’s. This was a

time when the business was socially congruent with a single culturally homogeneous

community, a ©vetåmbar gemstone elite, and the business was as least as much an aspect

of this community’s life as a separate domain of economic activity.

A Business Community

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 Although the ©vetåmbar gemstone elite consists of two castes, Osvåls and

©rîmåls, it is in many respects—not all—a single community, and this has been true for

many decades. In a history of the Osval caste published in 1934, the author refers to

Jaipur’s “©rîmål and Osvål society” (¹rîmål evam osvål samåj) (Bha¿ðårî et al. 1934:

170)—that is, as a single “society”—suggesting that such a community was generally

perceived to exist even then. As far as I can tell, this community never had sharp

external boundaries, and probably simply graded off into a wider Osvål and ©rîmål

universe. It was defined, rather, by its social center of gravity, which was the jewelry and

gemstone business and the collective life that evolved around it.

Its collective sense of itself was strongest in its early days when it was relatively

small and its interactional density was enhanced by residential concentration. When the

Jewelers Association of Jaipur began in 1927 it had only thirty-seven members, although

there was certainly a much larger penumbra of smaller players surrounding these ultra

elite families. In the immediate post-war period, the business was still relatively small.

A directory of Jaipur jewelers published in 1962 (Nawalkha 1962: 497-509) includes a

total of only 573 names, and many of the listed individuals seem to be very minor

dealers. The majority of the principal gemstone families lived in close proximity to each

other in havelîs in Johari Bazar, and this encouraged social interaction at multiple levels.

This area was then more livable than today—less crowded, with far less of the traffic

congestion and constant hubbub that are so much a part of life in central Jaipur

nowadays. Older informants tell of how, in the evenings, senior jewelers who

functioned as community elders once sat together on wooden platforms known as takhtås

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stationed in public spaces in Johari Bazar. Surrounded by less influential listeners and

hangers-on, they conferred and gossiped—about market conditions, prices, and social

matters as well. These gatherings functioned as central exchanges for business and social

information, and also as informal courts where judgments were rendered on those whose

behavior deviated from shared standards of propriety and morality.

For the most part, both the pleasures and discomforts this cheek-by-jowl lifestyle

are now things of the past. The community has grown larger, and the exodus from the

walled city has attenuated the old neighborly congeniality of Johari Bazar. But even in

its current state of partial dispersal, the small-town atmosphere still exits, and I was

astounded at the extent to which my informants seemed to know about each others’

doings: their marriages and other family matters, business successes or reverses,

misbehaving children, and so on. The persistence of this shared life is partly explained

by the jewelry and gemstone business itself, which continues to provide a crucial domain

of mutual contact. But leaving business aside, two of the most important sources of the

community’s integration are kinship and religion.

Kinship

The ©vetåmbar gemstone elite is bound together by a network of parallel and

crosscutting ties of descent and marriage. Although I have no survey numbers, it is likely

that the majority of these families are linked in some way or another by kinship ties. In

the course of my research I have discovered on many, many occasions that my

interlocutor was related to some apparently (to me) socially distant individual, frequently

15
by more than one pathway. This overall situation is undoubtedly the cumulative result of

the pull of common business activity on marriage choices over time, which was probably

also responsible for the erosion of the barrier of endogamy that formerly separated the

Osvål and ©rîmål castes.

Kinship plays a crucial role in business life, but we must recognize that it engages

with business in very complex ways. At one level, kinship is obviously the social glue of

a business based, as this one is, on the family firm; one trusts family—in this context

especially agnatic kin—first and most of all. Kinship relationships or ties of kinship

supplemented by friendship (e.g., one’s son’s best friend) thus provide the scaffolding for

all kinds of business interactions. Kinship also plays a key role in the informal settling of

disputes; relatives, for example, might be seriously embarrassed by one’s default of a

business obligation and apply pressure to negotiate a settlement or seek arbitration But

these observations must be qualified. Trust is not merely a matter of kinship. Many

other considerations converge in deciding with whom to do business, especially a given

individual’s general reputation in business and in life. Nor is agnatic kinship is

necessarily a solid foundation for a family business; the splitting up of quarreling

brothers is a routine affair. Indeed, kinship is sometimes seen as mixing badly with

business, at least in some contexts. To do business with affines, for example, leaves the

kinship relationship hostage to a potential default, which is a serious social danger.

The relationship between business interests and marriage choice is also a complex

matter. Business inevitably has an indirect effect on marriage choice because the

financial status of the negotiating families is always a fundamental consideration, and the

earning potential of a groom is also a crucial issue. In addition, a son-in-law of limited

16
means can receive crucial business support from his wife’s family, and informants say

that well-off families sometimes secure the marriage of an undesirable daughter by means

of an implicit promise to give business support to a son-in-law from a socially and

financially modest background. Some families, moreover, have the reputation of (in

effect) selling their sons to the highest dowry bidder. All this said, it is important to

stress that the relationship between business interests and specific marriage choices

should not be overplayed. To the best of my ability to judge, marriage is not usually

negotiated for business reasons as such. Leaving general financial issues aside (always

crucial), the most important considerations on the minds of those negotiating marriages

are the social reputation of potential affines and the personal characteristics of the

prospective bride or groom and other family members.

I think it would be closest to the truth to say that the business life has exercised

something like a gravitational effect on social space, bending it inward and affecting

marriage networks in a general way, as it did all aspects of social life. The gemstone

business created a context in which families enter into a common sphere of interaction

and mutual knowledge, and this was bound to influence the trajectories of marriage

networks over time. This, in turn, has enabled kinship, close and remote, to be one of the

factors binding the ©vetåmbar gemstone elite into a single community.

Religion

An assessment of the role of religion in the collective life of the ©vetåmbar

gemstone elite must take into account the existence of sectarian divisions within the

17
community. The most important split is between image-worshipers (Mýrtipýjaks, also

known as Mandirmårgîs) and the non-image-worshiping reform sects (Sthånakvåsîs and

Teråpanthîs). The image-worshipers and non-image worshipers are probably about equal

in number, but this is only an approximation based on informants’ rough estimates. The

image-worshipers are themselves subdivided between the followers of two mendicant

lineages, the Khartar Gacch and the Tapå Gacch. Although the Tapå Gacch has a large

temple in Johari Bazar, its lay following is relatively small, with the result that the

Khartar Gacch dominates the ©vetåmbar image-worshiping scene. Because the Khartar

Gacch can be considered the religious core of Jaipur’s gemstone elite, we turn to it first

and address the question of the non-image worshipers later.

There is no question about the closeness of the links between the Khartar Gacch

and the gemstone business. In Jaipur, the principal lay organization representing the

Khartar Gacch is the ©rî Jain ©vetåmbar Khartar-gacch Sangh. Of the thirty members

of its managing committee (mostly Osvål, but with some ©rîmåls), at least nineteen are

in the jewelry business, and it is certain that most of those who are not themselves in the

business have close relatives who are. The ©rîmåls are closely identified with the

Khartar Gacch as a caste, and the ©rîmål Sangh, which manages ©rîmål-owned religious

institutions, is also dominated by jewelers. At any Khartar Gacch ceremony in Jaipur,

most attendees will be associated with the jewelry business in one way or another.

The ritual culture of the Khartar Gacch with its focus on temples and temple

ceremonies is rich in possibilities for the ritualization of a sense of community identity.

The main Khartar Gacch temple, upå¹ray, and community hall are all located in the heart

of Johari Bazar, and are magnets for the gemstone community. Major pýjås and other

18
ceremonies such as the communal observance of paryý¼a¿ attract large groups of

attendees, and an observer cannot help but be struck by atmosphere of mutual familiarity

and communitas prevailing at these events. The mass feedings with which major

ceremonies are often terminated (significantly called svadharmî våtsalya, meaning

roughly [an expression of] affection or love of co-religionists) are commensal reiterations

of religious fellow feeling.

Further contributing to a sense of religious community is the practice of pious

donation by individuals—almost always men—to temples and in support of rituals.

Donation is a method by which Jain laymen convert their material wealth and business

success into religious merit (pu¿ya) and is also a kind of theater in which they seek and

validate social honor within the community.5 The right to donate is often won in

potlatch-like auctions (known as ghî bolî) in which individuals make competitive bids for

the privilege of playing a specific role in a given ceremony. These auctions are often

quite lengthy affairs and are an important part of the script in major ceremonies. They

are watched with intense interest by other attendees because of the economic and social

information they convey, and can be seen as perfect examples of the transmutation of

economic capital into the “symbolic” capital of high social reputation (Bourdieu 1977:

171-183). Social reputation then falls into a feedback loop in which it enhances business

success. My sense is that Peter Flügel (1996: 156) is quite right in his doubt that

donation-derived reputation is directly related to economic credit; the relationship is more

indirect. I would prefer to say that because ritual donations revalue the worldly gains of

business in the coin of piety, an auction winner in a major ceremony (which can involve

very substantial sums of money) projects an aura of both worldly success and good

19
character, an auspicious combination certainly likely to resonate in his dealings with

others in the marketplace. The donor’s business successes then present the appearance of

virtue’s rewards.

The question of business success aside, what needs to be stressed is that the honor

generated by these practices is social in nature. Although the honor earned becomes an

attribute of the individual donor, as does the religious merit, in its essence it is a

collective sense of approbation within a community, in this case the image-worshiping

©vetåmbar gemstone elite. And to some extent the high honor won by munificent

donations gets reflected back on the community to which such a person belongs, with the

result that the whole community comes to partake of the honor they bestow on the

individual (Laidlaw 1995: 340-412).

Sectarian and ©vetåmbar Identity

Of the non-image-worshipers, the Teråpanthîs have not figured very prominently

in the gemstone business, but the Sthånakvåsîs have been quite important in the history of

the business and in the business today. As is true of the city’s principal Khartar Gacch

associations, jewelers dominate the Sthånakvåsîs’ local organization. Of the fifteen

members of the managing committee of the ©rî Vardhmån Sthånakvåsî Jain ©råvak

Jaipur Sangh, only three are not jewelers.

The religious fissure between ©vetåmbar image-worshipers and non-image

worshipers is not a chasm in Jaipur, but it is real enough. The absence of temples and

temple ceremonies among the Sthånakvåsîs lends to their religious practice a very

20
different quality from that of the image worshipers. For example, initiated mendicants

are, by default, even more central to religious life among Sthånakvåsîs than among

image-worshipers, and among Sthånakvåsîs there is nothing directly comparable to the

image-worshipers’ ghî bolî. But it is also true that the differences between Sthånakvåsîs

and image-worshipers are not great at the level of basic beliefs, values, and ascetic

practices. And most important, the divide between the two sects is also transcended by a

definite sense of ©vetåmbar identity.

©vetåmbar identity is loosely defined in opposition to Vai¼¿ava Hindus and

more sharply defined in opposition to Digambar Jains, who are the true “others” of

Jaipur’s ©vetåmbar Jains. It is also supported by similarities of belief and practice

outside the ambit of temples and image worship. In addition, and very importantly, it

finds anchoring in a ritual culture of magical forces that constitutes a sort of “lower level”

of ©vetåmbar religious practice. The absence of temples and images has tended to

constrict this particular area of religious life for Sthånakvåsîs, but it is precisely this that

is one of the greatest strengths of the image-worshiping tradition in Jaipur. It is therefore

to the image-worshipers’ shrines and temples that Sthånakvåsîs often turn when in need

of miraculous intervention in their worldly affairs, despite their doctrinal aversion to the

worship of images.

Central to the quest for miraculous power among Jaipur’s ©vetåmbar Jains is the

cult of the Dådågurus, which is strongly linked to the Khartar Gacch. The Dådågurus are

Khartar Gacch monks of past centuries who have become quasi deities who come to the

aid of Jain devotees.6 Because its central figures are Jain monks, this cult passes muster

as a legitimately Jain means of mobilizing supernatural forces. Occupying a similar

21
niche is Nåkoâå Bhairav, the guardian deity of a Pår¹vanåth temple currently run by the

Tapå Gacch at Nakoda near Balotra in Barmer District. Large numbers of pilgrims visit

this temple, drawn by Nåkoâå Bhairav’s reputation as a powerful protector and helper of

Jain devotees. He is very much a businessman’s deity many of whom pledge a certain

percentage of their profits to him, in effect making him a business partner. The

Dådågurus, Nåkoâå Bhairav, and similar deities are worshiped by boon-seeking

©vetåmbar Jains of all sectarian backgrounds, image-worshiping and non-image-

worshiping alike. Those who worship these deities must enter the image-worshipers’

ritual world, which they do as ©vetåmbar Jains, not as non-image-worshiping sectarians.

Despite the fact that Jaipur’s modern gemstone manufacturing business was

pioneered by a Digambar Jain and the fact that some Digambars have always been a part

of the gemstone business at the highest level, the Digambars are outsiders to this

intensely ©vetåmbar milieu. This was brought home to me with particular force when I

once had the privilege of attending the funeral of a well known Jaipur Sthånakvåsî

jeweler who had taken and completed the vow of santhårå. Because of this man’s stature

in the gemstone business, his social importance, and the manner of his departure, his

funeral was a major community event, and the number of attendees was well over a

thousand. Here was the old ©vetåmbar gemstone elite in force. My companions pointed

out with pride that “every samåj” was present. By this, however, they meant all

©vetåmbar sects. If there were any Digambars present, which I doubt, they were very

few.

Reputation

22
 As is well known, trust is essential in a business in which most transactions are at

most only partially visible legally, which is very much true of Jaipur’s gemstone

business, and trust in the marketplace is made possible by the sanction of reputation.

Reputation is a shared evaluation and is thus inherently a social thing. This being so,

where reputation operates, there must be some “community of reputation,” and Jaipur’s

gemstone elite was and remains today precisely this kind of community.

The salience of reputation in the life of a group depends on two conditions: a

relatively frictionless flow of information within the group and the existence of shared

standards of judgment. Jaipur’s gemstone elite is a community in which ideal conditions

for information flow exist. It is a socially involuted community, united by a network of

economic and social ties, with ©vetåmbar Jainism and its ritual traditions as its widest

unifying context. It is, as we have observed, a small town in a big city. As for shared

standards of judgment, there is no reason to believe that the normative system of the

Osvåls and ©rîmåls is significantly different in content from those of other similar

trading castes, but the issue is not content but the group’s sense of its own shared

standards of behavior. Whether always vindicated by actual behavior or not, members

the gemstone elite certainly believe that they are mutually responsible to the same basic

values.

Furthermore, the reputation in question has a somewhat fluid quality that greatly

enhances its efficacy as a foundation for trust. For one thing, it is an attribute that spills

over from one department of life to another. By that I mean that one’s reputation as a

businessman affects, and is affected by, the community’s assessment of one’s behavior in

23
totality—as a family man, a participant in religious life, and so on—a composite quality

denoted by the term “character” in English. In this sense, reputation represents a moral

bridge between the marketplace and social life at large, and virtue becomes a form of

creditworthiness. Furthermore, reputation is not an attribute of individuals in isolation;

an individual’s reputation is partly derived from that of his family, just as that of his

family is partly dependant on his. Writing of Jaipur’s ©vetåmbar Jains, James Laidlaw

(1995: 355) has characterized this overall pattern well. As he points out, “credit” is seen

as an attribute of whole families, reflecting the conduct of family members both in the

market and in social and religious life more generally. In Laidlaw’s words, “Sharp

practice in business, and failure in business, equally rule out a family as desirable

marriage partners; and recklessness among the men, or immodesty among the women,

damages the credit of the family.”

Fixed Prices

I can think of no more characteristic expression of the communitarian business

ethos we have been examining than a system of fixed prices that prevailed in Jaipur’s

gemstone market for many decades. Its existence will come as a surprise to those who

imagine that all prices in India are subject to bargaining. It is gone today, and its demise

will also be part of our story.

This system, known as the dharåva² system, applied only to the manufacturers’

sale of finished stones and almost exclusively to emeralds. It worked as follows: A

batch of finished emeralds of a given shape would first be sorted for luster and color. On

24
the basis of these sortings, the stones would then be separated into paper packets, each

containing stones of the same size, luster and color. Prices would be assigned to each

packet, after which they were assembled along with a list of the packets in a package

bound together with a rubber band. The list would indicate the number of stones in each

packet, their collective weight in carats, and their price per carat. This whole procedure,

starting with the sorting and ending with the putting together of the packages, was known

as “making dharåva²,” and the bound package was referred to as a “dharåva².” The

essence of the system was the principle that the prices of these paper packets were fixed

and could not be bargained down. Although an entire dharåva² bundle was sometimes

sold to a single buyer, the unit of sale was normally the packet. The packet could not be

broken up for the sale of individual stones or for substitutions.7 The basic rule was that

the buyer had to take the packet at the price demanded, “Take it or leave it.”

At first glance, it would seem reasonable to suppose that the purpose of such a

system was to stifle competition between manufacturers, thus keeping prices artificially

high. In favor of this view is the fact that when the system finally came to an end it was

because of price competition, as we shall see. But although dharåva² prices were

certainly set at a level that would guarantee profits, it is far from clear that prices were set

in order to maximize profits in disregard of other considerations. In fact, informants who

knew the system in its heyday say that the prices, though fixed, were generally

considered quite reasonable. One dealer who was very active in the 1970s told me of

how he once he bought some manufactured emeralds from one of the most established

manufacturers at the fixed price. He knew the manufacturer’s margin, he said, and it was

very high, and yet within twenty-four hours he was able to resell the same emeralds to

25
another buyer at a 40% profit. The point he was trying to make is that prices were—in

his view—remarkably low.

Given this, we must assume the existence of some x factor at work in the system

that an analysis based purely on “buy cheap, sell dear” does not quite catch. An

indication of what this factor might be can be found in an article written by Champalal

Chordia (Caurâiyå 2003), the son of the man generally credited with the creation of the

system (Suganchand Chordia), in which he describes how the system began. He tells of

how his father had purchased Rs. 3,600,000 worth of emerald rough from a Paris trader

named Rosenthal around 1920. When the product was ready, the problem of selling such

a large quantity arose, and for this he turned to his 100-125 apprentices (this figure must

refer to then-current and former apprentices, and I suspect is too high). He sold the

dharåva²s to them (presumably at a fixed price, although the author does not actually say

this), and they got 50-100% profits and were very pleased. This way of doing business

then spread to the rest of the jewelry community.

This story is best read not as history but as a cultural insider’s interpretation of the

fixed price system. From this perspective, the story has one main point, and that point is

social. We see that there was a preexisting relationship between seller and buyers, in this

case a relationship between a master manufacturer and his apprentices. Any

knowledgeable reader would understand that the apprentices were young members of the

gemstone elite of the day. This preexisting relationship imposed a condition on the

transaction, which was that the buyer as well as seller was entitled to make profit. In fact,

the idea that both parties to a transaction are entitled to a profit was a core element in the

ideology of the fixed price system.

26
 We must not be naïve about this. For one thing, the high profit margins that

apparently prevailed in the emerald business until the close of the twentieth century

meant that leniency in pricing was an affordable luxury for sellers. Furthermore, we do

not have to believe that the sellers’ motivations were purely altruistic. In a small and

socially involuted community to which both buyer and seller belong, precisely the kind of

community exemplified by the old ©vetåmbar gemstone elite, pushing people to the wall

on prices (or on anything else) can carry social as well as business penalties. And this is

the point. The intermingling of business and social penalties lends a characteristic tenor

to business conducted within a community of reputation.

ECLIPSE

The apogee of the historical career of Jaipur ©vetåmbar gemstone elite was the

1960s and 1970s. The emerald was the centerpiece of their privileged position; it was the

industry’s prestige stone, and it was the source of immense profits to those who

manufactured and traded it. Profits were huge during this era—margins of 500% were

not unusual, and I suspect they were sometimes higher than that. But the very

profitability of the emerald business was also its vulnerability because it had become a

tempting target for outsiders. The business was easy to take up by anyone who had

access to raw materials and credit. Experienced artisans were locally available, and even

a newcomer could at least do quick-and-dirty work if he had a supply of rough. And he

could do better than that by entering into partnership with an experienced manufacturer.

Given these conditions, the dominance of the old elite was vulnerable to challenge. The

27
challenge duly arrived in the 1960s in the form of a remarkable man named Shiv Shankar

Gupta.

Kha¿ðelvåls

Still active in the business, Gupta is an extraordinary individual by anyone’s

standards—a legendary figure in Jaipur’s gemstone world and a man whose career is a

true saga of entrepreneurial adventure. One must, of course, be on one’s guard against

the tendency to overrate the importance any individual in initiating social change, and it

can certainly be argued that, by the time Gupta entered the picture, the old pattern of

Jaipur’s lapidary industry had run its course and change was in the wind. But there is no

doubt that he was the actual catalyst.

To understand the nature of his impact on the business, we must begin with his

social background. The critical fact is that he belongs to a prominent Rajasthani trading

caste known formally as Kha¿ðelvål Vai¹ya. Although the term “Kha¿ðelvål” is

commonly used in ordinary speech, there is in fact no such caste. At least four distinct

castes trace their origins to the ancient town of Khandela and are therefore known as

Kha¿ðelvål. This includes the Kha¿ðelvål Jains (the caste to which Banjilal Tholia

belonged) and the Kha¿ðelvål Vai¹yas. There are also Bråhma¿ and carpenter castes

bearing the Kha¿ðelvål label, and possibly others. However, when people speak of

Kha¿ðelvåls they are almost always referring to the Kha¿ðelvål Vai¹yas, and that is the

sense in which the term will be used from this point forward.

28
 The Kha¿ðelvåls are entirely Hindu as far as I know, and are completely separate

from the Kha¿ðelvål Jains with whom they do not intermarry or interact in any other

special way. While there is no generally agreed-upon hierarchy of trading castes in

Jaipur, the Kha¿ðelvåls cannot be said to enjoy the same traditionally lofty social

standing as the ©rîmåls and Osvåls. In part, the higher status of the latter two groups is a

function of their relative wealth and their historical connection with the lucrative and

high-status jewelry and gemstone business. By contrast, the Kha¿ðelvåls have found

commercial niches mainly as grain merchants and sweet sellers, far less profitable and

certainly less highly regarded fields of trade. In describing their relative status to me,

Gupta described his caste as “poor.” This is untrue on any absolute scale, but he was

referring to their position relative to the ©rîmåls and Osvåls. They are indeed less

wealthy as a community than ©vetåmbar gemstone elite.

The principal change Gupta’s brought to the emerald business was that he made it

possible for significant numbers of members of his own Kha¿ðelvål caste to enter the

business for the first time. Many see him as a Robin Hood figure, as indeed he sees

himself. He did not exactly steal from the rich, but the foothold he gave newcomers in

this very profitable business was definitely at the expense of the old gemstone elite. His

motive, however, was not altruism but the need to solve a simple business problem.

Gupta was not an expert jeweler, but he had been in the rough business since the

early 1950s when he had begun to sell Russian emerald rough in the Jaipur market.

Then, in the late 1950s or early 1960s, he had managed acquire a large quantity of

Colombian rough, apparently consisting of previously discarded material that was

available by the “ton” (his word). Later, after 1963, he obtained even larger amounts of

29
emerald rough from Brazil. The sheer amount of his rough created a problem, which was

that of how to get rid of such large quantities at a profit. He was perfectly willing to sell

to members of the established elite, which he did at first, but he was still left with unsold

surpluses. Possibly under the pressure of his own creditors (a surmise on my part), he

solved the problem in a way that was both shrewd and creative: he created a new market

for emerald rough by bringing completely new people into the business.

Gupta insists that that Kha¿ðelvåls were not his only beneficiaries, and this is

true. In fact, his intervention released a floodgate in which people from many new

groups found a foothold in the ownership ranks of the business for the first time, and this

even included Muslims. One of Jaipur’s most prominent lapidary industrialists, a Muslim

who at the time of my research was the managing director of a major factory-based firm,

was one of his beneficiaries. Mostly, however, his beneficiaries were his fellow

Kha¿ðelvåls, at least at first. This is hardly a surprise. When he began to look for new

customers, he did so at first by utilizing his own existing social networks, and these led

directly into his own Kha¿ðelvål caste. Gupta himself says that he began by assisting

thirty or forty individuals, and that this had grown to “a few hundred” by 1970. Over the

next decade the influx continued, and ©rîmål and Osvål informants say that by the 1980s

the business was undergoing a fundamental transformation. One could say that the caste

and ethnic variation of the industry as a whole was beginning to be duplicated in the elite

level.

The End of the Old Order

30
 A casualty of this new state of affairs was the fixed price system, which by most

accounts was on its way out in the early to middle 1980s and was finally gone in the

1990s.8 I highlight its demise because it was such a characteristic feature of the economic

and social order that once prevailed at the apex of Jaipur’s emerald business during the

days of ©vetåmbar elite ascendancy.

The cause of its demise was clearly competition. During the 1980s the presence

of newcomers in the business, a steady rise in the cost of raw materials, competition from

abroad, and various other factors as well, all converged in such a way that profit margins

in the emerald business began to be squeezed.9 This did not happen suddenly, but by the

middle of the decade the process was well underway. Small manufacturers were in a

particularly difficult position. Manufacturers tend to be cash hungry; the money they

commit to manufacturing (for raw materials, labor, etc.) is inevitably tied up until their

product leaves the factory door, which can be weeks or months. In particular, those who

were new in the business and/or small operators without large cash reserves sometimes

had to sell their product in a hurry in order to purchase new rough, to pay off workers, or

to meet obligations to creditors. This was more than the old system of fixed prices could

bear. Competitive pressures now trumped community norms as manufacturers, including

members of the old elite, found themselves having to cut prices in order to sell their

goods in a far more competitive business universe.

Significantly, however, the old community norms retained some force, at least for

a while. This is shown by the fact that for a time sellers continued to state a dharåva²

price which would be the coupled with an offer of a discount. Vice thus pays its usual

tribute to virtue. An informant who entered the business in the mid-1980s recalls that

31
there were three different types in the business then. Some old-line manufacturers were

still sticking by the old fixed price system. Others stated fixed prices but then gave

discounts. A third group simply bargained from the outset. Although ©vetåmbar Jains

predominated among the old-liners, they were present in all three of these groups.

The fixed price system can be seen as the miner’s canary of the old order of

things; its demise was a foreshadowing of further changes that were already underway.

By the end of the century, the business was fundamentally reconfigured. It was now

competitive at a level unknown before. But equally important, it was now sociologically

transformed as well. The emerald business germinated, grew, and ultimately flourished

in a communitarian milieu in which business and the social order in which it was situated

—a community of reputation—were deeply entangled with each other. This was no

longer the case. It is not that the old community disappeared—it exists today. But that

community’s customary ways of doing business could not withstand the new competitive

pressures, and in any case the ownership stratum of the business was now only partially

congruent with its erstwhile ownership elite. The business, in other words, was becoming

disentangled from its former community context.

Which brings us back to nostalgia. What my ©vetåmbar elite informants stress

above all is what they perceive as a moral change in the business. They say that other

communities now in the business are unscrupulous, without ethical standards, and totally

heedless of collective responsibility. The Kha¿ðelvåls’ attitude, one Osvål informant

said, could be summed in the expression “If it’s a matter of drowning, then the village

(i.e., the business) will drown, but if it’s a matter of swimming, then we’ll swim”

(dubegå to gånv Dubegå, tirenge to ham tirenge). This sort of moral censure, I believe,

32
represents a genuine apperception of real change expressed by my informants in their

own non-sociological idiom. Because the change involved a disembedding of the

business from a social—i.e., normative—framework, members of the old elite were

bound to feel and express their resentment in moral terms. Even if taken at face value,

however, this judgment confuses an effect for its cause. It was competition that changed

the business, not moral decline, and I know of no evidence that Kha¿ðelvåls are any less

(or more) ethical in business matters than ©vetåmbar Jains.

But my role is not to moralize about any of this. It cannot possibly be that nobody

cheated in the old days, or that the business was then somehow an exercise in practical

morality. Where there is business, corners will be cut, and making money was then, as

always, what business is about. That, as they say, is business. The gemstone business

works well as a business today; it provides employment and subsistence for many, and

serious wealth for a few. It is neither better nor worse than before; it is simply different,

and the product of historical changes that were probably inevitable. Nor did the

©vetåmbar gemstone elite disappear as a result of these changes, for they are still very

much on the scene. Some of these families have exited the scene, and others could be

described as coasting in the sense that they continue to function in the business but

without fully adapting to changes in the way the industry is being conducted these days.

Still, many of the old elite have adjusted well to change and have played leading roles in

the recent evolution of the business, which is increasingly focused on calibrated

production of semi-precious stones. But if members of the old gemstone elite are still in

the picture, the picture itself is very different from before.

33
 JAINISM AND THE LIFE OF TRADE

So what if anything does the foregoing teach us about Jainism and business? Let

me begin by suggesting that it would be very difficult to maintain that doctrinal Jainism

had much to do with the fact that Jains, not Hindus, were the ones who developed

Jaipur’s emerald business. It is true that the business was pioneered by a Digambar Jain,

Banjilal Tholia, and that it was subsequently taken up mainly by Jains. But those who

took it up were ©vetåmbar Jains, not Digambars, despite Banjilal’s critical initial role.

This is an important fact. If we concede that doctrinal differences between ©vetåmbar

and Digambar versions of Jainism are minimal (a major point of monastic discipline

notwithstanding), this suggests that it is to caste culture rather than religious beliefs that

we must turn in attempting to explain how and among whom the business evolved. The

©rîmåls and Osvåls were castes with a strong business orientation and a tradition of

apprenticeship that enabled the business to take root and spread among them. The

Kha¿ðelvål Jain caste, the caste to which most of Jaipur’s Digambars belong, is more

service than business oriented. In consequence, the gemstone business could not—or at

least did not—find a suitable growing environment among the Digambars.

Those who actually developed the industry did not engage with it as Jains but as

jewelers and businessmen. Jewelers were obviously prepositioned to take advantage of

the opportunity presented by the new industry because of the business they were in, and

this is what many of them did. But the entrepreneurial zeal and skill they brought to the

game are part of a generic trading caste culture of western India (Babb 2004) and are not

traits of Jains specifically. Some of these trading castes are Jain, or mostly Jain, but some

34
(such as the Kha¿ðelvåls and Måhe¹varîs) are entirely Hindu. It is easy to imagine an

alternative historical scenario in which, had they been positioned to do so, Hindu

merchants could have developed the industry along the same lines the Jains did. Indeed,

non-Jains—of whom the Kha¿ðelvåls are the most dramatic example—are flourishing in

the business today, as we have seen.

I therefore suggest that our materials show that Jainism’s contribution to the

career of Jaipur’s lapidary industry was primarily social rather than religious in a

doctrinal or ideological sense. It is Durkheim more than Weber whose insights are most

relevant to Jains and gems in Jaipur. Jainism mattered primarily because it was a

cohesive factor in the life of the community within which the industry found a social

niche and evolved. In this sense, Jainism was more important as a symbolic projection of

community identity than as a body of teachings about the attainment of liberation. It was

able to play this role because, sectarian divisions notwithstanding, ©vetåmbar Jainism

and its ritual culture transcended caste and sectarian divisions that might otherwise have

hindered the shared life of the gemstone elite. I see no evidence, moreover, that Jain

ethics rendered actual business behavior more ethical than it might otherwise have been.

Business is business, as we have said, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that

Jain businessmen are more or less ethical than their Hindu counterparts. More important,

I suggest, was the prevailing sense of fellow Jainness as one of the ingredients of shared

life in a community of reputation. This sense of things acted as a support—not the only

one—the feeling that, within this community one could be reasonably confident that

business behavior was responsible to shared social norms that could not be ignored with

impunity. In the great days of the ©vetåmbar gemstone elite this confidence permitted

35
business to be conducted in an atmosphere of relative ease, generosity and mutual trust,

as epitomized by the now defunct dharvåva² system of fixed prices.

This community provided an environment within which a modern, globalized, and

tremendously profitable business could take birth and ultimately grow in ways its early

practitioners could hardly envision. It is also probably in the nature of things that, sooner

or later, any truly successful business will, bowing to economic imperatives, break free

from the social mold in which it was formed. As we have seen, this was precisely the

destiny of Jaipur’s gemstone business.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An earlier version of this paper was presented as the 2007 Annual Jain Lecture at

SOAS. It is based primarily on fieldwork that took place between August 2005 and

January 2006 in Jaipur. Those who have assisted me in my research are too numerous to

be listed here, but four individuals deserve special mention. Surendra Bothara has been a

source of constant support and excellent advice in all of my research in Jaipur. Subhash

Bothra gave me many valuable insights into the workings Jaipur’s jewelry business, and

Ashok Bothra was my guide and companion throughout the period of research. Despite

his busy schedule as businessman and community leader, the late Rashmikant Durlabhji

was always generous with his precious time and was one of the principal sources of my

understanding of the business. I owe special thanks to Sudeep Tholia who generously

36
shared Banjilal Tholia’s late nineteenth-century correspondence with me. I would also

like to thank Prof. R. K. Pant and the Department of History and Indian Culture,

University of Rajasthan, for my institutional affiliation during the research period. The

research was supported by a Senior Short-Term Fellowship from the American Institute

of Indian Studies.

37
1
My thanks to Mahopadhyay Vinaysagar for helping clarify this matter. The date of completion is

indicated in an inscription in the temple; it is reproduced in Vinaysågar 2005: 309-10.

2
In Jaipur there also exists a small community of Digambar Osvåls. They migrated from Multan at the

time of Partition.
3
The details of his life have been summarized in a recent article in Journal of Gem and Jewellery

Industry (Journal 2008).

4
Agency houses were partnership businesses though which private trade was mostly conducted in the

British India of this period. See Radhe Shyam Rungta 1970: 5-6.
5
The best account of this institution is Kelting 2009.
6
For more details on this cult, see Babb 1996.
7
One older jeweler, however, told me that sometimes a buyer was allowed to remove a maximum of

20% from a packet.

8
Nowadays one old-line gemstone elite firm continues to conduct a portion of its business on the old

fixed-price basis, but this is only a tiny remnant of the old system.
9
One great complication for the small manufacturer was the growing demand for calibrated emeralds

(i.e., of uniform size). This is a complex subject and beyond the scope of this paper.