‘We are not a unidimensional cardboard cutout’

This is not meant to be an encyclopaedia clarifies Salil Tripathi at the start ldquoI am Gujarati and mine is an individual interpretation of who we are and why we are the way we arerdquoCrafting his new book The Gujaratis A Portrait of a Community in an engrossing yet enlightening manner which few writers manage Tripathi presents 730 pages of a lifetimersquos observation of the community he was born into seven extended visits to Gujarat and mined memories of conversations with Gujaratis in 60 countries where his work has taken him over the yearsKnown for sharp entrepreneurship and the profitable deal Gujaratis should be equally celebrated for a multitude of other qualities In Tripathirsquos words paying tribute to his parents ldquoThey exposed me to the best that Gujarati culture has to offermdashpoetry integrity honesty a commitment to nonviolence and humility and shielded me from the uglier manifestations of Gujarati societymdashthe ostentation the increasing bigotry and arrogancerdquo Salil Tripathi author of Gujaratis A Portrait of a Community PicSworup NhasijuSo readers will meet Gujaratis including Hindus Muslims Parsis Jains Buddhists Dalits Christians ldquothose identifying with other ethnicities and may be of no faithrdquo Positing expansionist definitions Sardar Patel and MA Jinnah and paradoxical juxtapositions the Mahatma and Modi Tripathi says ldquoA Gujarati is one who speaks the language possibly counts in it dreams in it and thinks in it the one who has moved to the land where Gujarati is spoken by the majority the ones who may speak other languages but have made Gujarat their home and preserve their minority identities and the ones who may live anywhere else in the world but are of Gujarati heritagerdquoExcerpts from the interviewThe Gujaratimedium New Era School in Bombay is credited for its formative stamp on you born Gujarati but at ease as a citizen of the world Has this outlook influenced your widerencompassing inclusion of people counted as ldquothe GujaratisrdquoIndeed New Era was a very special place It gave you Gandhirsquos rootedness to the Indian ethos and Tagorersquos expansiveness in embracing the world I knew as much about Indian artists like MF Husain as about western artists like Salvador Dali as much about Sanskrit epics as about wellloved English poetry Irsquove always known Gujarati to be a language not a faith In an early encounter one columnist was surprised Irsquod include Tatas among prominent Gujaratis and not only Ambanis I said well therersquos also Azim Premjimdashfor what are Premjis and Tatas or Khorakiwalas and Godrejs if not Gujaratis too We all have multiple identities Gujaratis as well We are not a monolithic unidimensional cardboard cutout We must not let languages be confused with religions or other forms of identitiesStill from the song Ame Mumbai na Rahewasi from the 1949 film Mangal Fera The song charmingly presented the life of freedom for the Gujarati immigrant in Bombay in a nuclear family independent of prying inlawsWhat were some challenges faced in meticulously documenting such a complex communityOne there is a lot of material The other that a lot of remembered history is based on myths beliefs and songs of troubadours What is history and what is belief is a challenge that applies everywhere Sifting through contested facts and competing claims is always a problem and Irsquom not a trained historian I attempt making sense of the history including learning nuances which cast heroes in unflattering light sometimes and people considered to be villains as being more complex not so unsavoury If it makes readers question their assumptions the book will have served its purposeA 1990 stamp commemorating Ardeshir Godrej and Pirojsha GodrejThe last subsection in the book The Way We Kill is a boldly honest narrative thread Have you caught yourself stopping shortIt is never an easy time to speak about uncomfortable topics The fact that we Gujaratis announce our commitment to nonviolence and vegetarianism while having an appalling record of riots and communal and castebased violence shows the narrative is not as simple as it is made out I decided to let survivors describe what happened without using alarmist language Irsquove also attempted to understandmdashnot approvemdashwhat led to the thinking of those who felt that ldquotheyrdquo had the violence coming At the same time I show examples giving me hope Irsquove learned that generalisations are bad no narrative is straightforward Jamsetji Tata PicGetty ImagesYou work with a sprawling canvas but the Bombay chapter leaves one wanting moreBombay is an extremely important city for Gujaratis As the 19th century showed some of the finest modernist thinking came from Gujarati writers in the city Even if they went to Nadiad and Surat to write later as Govardhanram Tripathi and Narmadashankar Dave did their minds were shaped by their urban Bombay experience And Gujarati theatre is one of the few forms of commercially viable theatre Gujaratis in Gujarat feel they ldquoownrdquo the language and its aesthetics Those of us who consider Bombay to be their home disagree But there has been some decline tooAzim PremjiSo while I do spend time talking about the status of Bombay State and its bifurcation of Maharashtra and Gujarat and there are many Bombay experts in the book as well as a chapter on communities that helped build Bombay I did not want that to be the dominant story Friends in Gujarat reading early drafts told me they had no idea about some of the things Irsquove discovered It vindicates what I set out to domdashbe an outsider looking in and an insider looking outAuthorpublisher Meher Marfatia writes fortnightly on everything that makes her love Mumbai and adore Bombay You can reach her at mehermarfatiamiddaycomwwwmeher marfatiacomlsquoWe see nothing wrong with our contradictionsrsquoPrologueYou probably have strong opinions about us that we are vegetarian and supposed to be clever at making money Many of us piously say we are vegetarian and late evening when our family is glued to Arnab Goswami on television we tiptoe out and visit the hawkerrsquos cart down the alley to eat omelettes the more adventurous among us even develop a taste for kebabshellipYou may not know our poets and writers because you think the only book we care about is the ledger We are obsessed with success which we feel can be measured objectively only through money Paiso bole chhe money talks Even at funerals you might find men discussing stock market prices while looking suitably gloomy randomly doing namaste when someone passes byhellipYou find it hilarious that we wave the tricolour vigorously but rarely join the army Actually some of us do If you call us cowards we point at the man whose photograph is on all currency notes in India except the old onerupee note Mohandas Gandhi and claim we are nonviolent As with all such unjustified insults we will see that there is more than enough valour among GujaratishellipWe have run motels in America fought apartheid in South Africa been expelled from Uganda formed trade unions in London sold opium to China and financed Subhas Chandra Bosersquos Indian National Army in Southeast Asia We dominate the list of Indiarsquos wealthiest yet our poor break ships and clean drains Hospitable yet calculating mercantile and pragmatic pious and yet tolerating violence worldlywise while claiming to be spiritual cheerful and transactional We see nothing wrong with our contradictionslsquoAme Mumbai na Rahewasi We are Residents of BombayrsquoAmong the first outsiders to grasp the hand the East India Company extended were Gujaratis who left Kathiawad and Gujaratrsquos squabbling princely states with arbitrary rules and corrupt practices to move to this city which became urbs prima in Indis to trade and explore the wider world under the benign system of rule of law that the British promisedTrading GujaratismdashKapols Bhatias Parsis Bohras Memons Khojas Jainsmdashcame to earn academically inclined Gujaratis came to learn and became writers lawyers and teachers Poor Gujaratis came too from Kathiawad and made clay pots from many other parts the Dalits came doing the menial tasks others would not dohellipWith the need for capital growing the first stock exchange emerged under a banyan tree at Horniman Circle in Bombay in the 1830s where about a dozen sharebrokers met to trade By 1860 there were sixty share brokers almost all GujaratiTextiles were now imported from Lancashire and Parsis joined the fray setting up mills The British had experimented with the cotton grown in Gujarat but they preferred the longstaple variety found in the American South By the 1850s spinning and weaving mills were being set up in EnglandhellipToday Gujaratis are largely found in four areas of Bombaymdashold money is located in the cityrsquos south near Malabar Hill and Walkeshwar where diamond merchants professionals and industrialists live the older parts of the cityrsquos south such as Bhuleshwar and Kalbadevi are where you find many working in the cityrsquos wholesale trade the western suburb of Vile Parle and its colleges set up by Gujarati trusts is home to the professional working class and academics and the distant suburbs of Kandivli and Ghatkopar is where many other families including professionals live You also find Gujaratis in the slums of Dharavi and in congested parts of Mohammed Ali Road Street signs in many parts of the city are written in Gujarati as are the names of some stations of the cityrsquos lifeline the suburban train network Even as the cityrsquos Gujaratimedium schools dwindle Gujarati power continues to assert itself just try ordering chicken biryani from Zomato at any address in WalkeshwarExcerpted with permission from The Gujaratis A Portrait of a Community by Salil Tripathi Aleph Book Company