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After Ritu Birla had finished her second BA in history from Cambridge she knew she wanted to go on to do a Ph.D, but after a break. So she took a job with the Ford Foundation for a few years, working on community development issues. And it was there that she first heard the complaint about philanthropy in India: why did it barely exist?
Why, so the question went, didn't most rich Indians act like their Western counterparts in generously giving to charities, creating public institutions or supporting the arts? Was there an essential selfishness about the Indian character, no sense of obligations, or a lack of identification with those less fortunate?
There's a sanctimonious air to such questions that Indians would find acutely annoying, and yet it also seemed true, especially as more Indians became really rich, that few were inclined to follow a Bill Gates or Warren Buffett in giving away large chunks of their wealth in entirely altruistic ways.
But something about this argument did not seem right to Birla. From her own Marwari background she knew of many cases of substantial charitable bequests: "to dharamshalas, pathshalas, gaushalas... all those shalas!" she says. She started researching this and it lead to the subject matter of her Ph.D. thesis and a recently published book entitled Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India. Recently in Mumbai she delivered a lecture on the subject, the fifth in the excellent series of annual lectures on Indian business history organised by the Godrej and Tata archives.
Birla's research, conducted using sources like colonial debates on traditional Indian institutions, mercantile law cases and the account books of Marwari traders, threw up many examples of charitable donations by Indian merchants.
In a study of Jain merchants in Jaipur, for example, she found explicit categories of donation: "anukampa-dan, a gift given out of compassion; ucit-dan, a gift given out of duty; kirti-dan, a gift given to earn fame; abhay-dan, a gift of fearlessness; supatra-dan, a gift of religion." This established the existence of charitable donations, but also, in the way that each kind was clearly linked to intentions, suggested a fundamentally different way of thinking about it from the West.
In the West the tradition had been of entirely altruistic donations, to an abstract entity called the 'public'. Anything that comes with possible material benefits for the giver is seen as compromised. But this reflected a long dissociation from religion and community which was certainly not the case in India in the late 19th century (and possibly not even now).
Most Indian businessmen existed in a context of religious and community links, and saw it as quite natural to benefit them. Indian charitable donation came from a sense of dharma, a term which comes with a sense of linkages between giver and recipient that do not end with the giving.
Why, so the question went, didn't most rich Indians act like their Western counterparts in generously giving to charities, creating public institutions or supporting the arts? Was there an essential selfishness about the Indian character, no sense of obligations, or a lack of identification with those less fortunate?
There's a sanctimonious air to such questions that Indians would find acutely annoying, and yet it also seemed true, especially as more Indians became really rich, that few were inclined to follow a Bill Gates or Warren Buffett in giving away large chunks of their wealth in entirely altruistic ways.
But something about this argument did not seem right to Birla. From her own Marwari background she knew of many cases of substantial charitable bequests: "to dharamshalas, pathshalas, gaushalas... all those shalas!" she says. She started researching this and it lead to the subject matter of her Ph.D. thesis and a recently published book entitled Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India. Recently in Mumbai she delivered a lecture on the subject, the fifth in the excellent series of annual lectures on Indian business history organised by the Godrej and Tata archives.
Birla's research, conducted using sources like colonial debates on traditional Indian institutions, mercantile law cases and the account books of Marwari traders, threw up many examples of charitable donations by Indian merchants.
In a study of Jain merchants in Jaipur, for example, she found explicit categories of donation: "anukampa-dan, a gift given out of compassion; ucit-dan, a gift given out of duty; kirti-dan, a gift given to earn fame; abhay-dan, a gift of fearlessness; supatra-dan, a gift of religion." This established the existence of charitable donations, but also, in the way that each kind was clearly linked to intentions, suggested a fundamentally different way of thinking about it from the West.
In the West the tradition had been of entirely altruistic donations, to an abstract entity called the 'public'. Anything that comes with possible material benefits for the giver is seen as compromised. But this reflected a long dissociation from religion and community which was certainly not the case in India in the late 19th century (and possibly not even now).
Most Indian businessmen existed in a context of religious and community links, and saw it as quite natural to benefit them. Indian charitable donation came from a sense of dharma, a term which comes with a sense of linkages between giver and recipient that do not end with the giving.
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