Hometowns of the Marwaris, Diasporic Traders in India
Sumie Nakatani

Introduction
The Marwaris are renowned all over India for having emerged in the nineteenth century as themost prominent group of traders. Under colonial rule they played the role of intermediary traders
for the British and facilitated Britain’s commercial expansions. In the early twentieth century they
invested in modern industries and some of them became industrial giants. It is estimated that morethan half the assets in the modern industrial sector of the Indian economy are controlled by a groupof trading castes originating in the northern half of Rajasthan, popularly called the Marwaris[Timberg 1978:15]. As of 1986, the Birlas, the Singhanias, the Modis, and the Bangurs (allMarwari business houses) accounted for one third of the total assets of the top ten business housesin India [Dubashi 1996 cited in Hardgrove 2004:3].
Several studies on the Marwaris have been made. A well-known study by Thomas Timberg
focused on the strength of the Marwaris in Indian industry and explored the reason for theirdisproportionate success. Studying the history of Marwari migrations and the types of economic
activities in which they engaged, he discussed what advantages the Marwaris had over othercommercial communities in modern industrialization. He suggested that the joint family system, acredit network across the country, and willingness to speculate were important characteristics. The
possession of these advantages emerges from their traditional caste vocation in trade. The
Marwaris are habituated to credit and risk, and develop institutions and attitudes for coping withthem [Timberg 1978:40].
While researchers have discussed the economic activities and organization of the Marwaris,
the Marwaris’ eagerness for religious gifting and philanthropy has also drawn attention. Hynes
discusses the politics of gift giving by businessmen in a western Indian city. He argues that allkinds of gifting by merchants, from the tribute to Mughal rulers and religious gifts for temple
building, to modern philanthropy and even to financial support for nationalist movements, areconsistent with establishing a social reputation. The reputation acquired by these symbolic
investments contributes to building stable social relationships with members of their own
community and with their rulers, consequently promoting business success [Hynes 1987].
The way that merchants transform their wealth into reputation and into political influence isrelated to how they create public representations of themselves. This article focuses on thesymbolic investments of diasporic merchants in their hometown. While previous studies tended tosee the Marwari in relation to other groups of people in the societies they migrated into, I locate
them in their hometown. Based on fieldwork conducted in a business town in Rajasthan, I address
the questions of how Marwaris have kept in touch with their native places after migration and why- 63 -

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they invested in the houses and towns they had left. In other words I consider how and why
Marwaris exercised and exercise their presence in the towns they left and what is the meaning of“homeland” to these diasporic merchants.
In the following sections, I first present ideas about who the Marwaris are, and how they
became the most successful business group in India. Second, I look at the history of a business
town in Shekhawati, focusing on the relationship between rulers and merchants. Third, I discuss
the Marwari’s investments in their hometowns, especially mansions constructed with the fortunes
they had made abroad. Last, I consider the meaning of ‘homeland’ for diasporic Marwaris.

The Marwaris and Their History of Migration
Marwari literally means people who live in Marwar, a former princely state of Jodhpur. The
term is used in Rajasthan for anyone originating in the Marwar region regardless of occupation orsocial status. However, when used outside Rajasthan it specifically means migrant traders not only
from Marwar but from all regions of Rajasthan. It should be noted that most of the prominent
Marwari families in fact come from the Shekhawati region consisting of the following districts:
Jhunjhunu, Sikar, and a part of Bikaner. For example, these include the Birla from Pilani, theSinghania from Bisaw, the Dalmia from Chirawa, and the Saraf from Mandawa (see Map). It isamazing that leading industrialists and major business houses originate from such a small numberof little towns in Shekhawati.
For centuries the Marwaris, based in their hometowns in Rajasthan, had participated inlong-range trade at the crossroads of camel caravans from the Middle East, China, and India.
Taknet mentions trade routes that connected business centres within and outside Rajasthan [Taknet
1990]. The Mughal rulers constructed wells,
lodgings, and milestones (kos-minar) along theroutes for the service of travellers and collected
taxes from the users. Once the power of the
Mughals declined, caravans that carriedmerchandise fell victim to plunder and attack by
Marathas and Pindaris. Instead of giving
protection to the merchants, local rulers
sometimes engaged in plunder and exploited themerchants with heavy taxation. Loans takenfrom merchants were often not repaid by therulers. In addition to the increased insecurity ofthe trade routes, the system of octroi (changi), a
duty on various goods entering a town imposed
under British rule made trading expensive. The
traders in Rajasthan left their homes for British
India where they saw new opportunities.

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In 1813 the Charter Act of the British East India Company was renewed and its monopoly of
trade with India was abolished. This opened India up to private investment. Many British trading
companies were established in Bombay and Calcutta. They needed a large number of local agentsto get raw materials from rural areas and to sell goods made in England. Taknet writes that the
British government extended protection and support to indigenous traders by letting them stay in
British India, for which several kinds of promissory notes, contracts, warrants, and admission
letters were issued [Taknet 1990:11].
First, Marwaris moved to Calcutta or some other place outside of Rajasthan and foundthemselves some niche there. Then, they accumulated capital in trade and soon enough emerged as

Figure 1. Map of Towns in Shekhawati Region- 65 -

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important dealers in the foreign trade of opium, indigo, grain, and later cotton. They used an
extensive system of hundi bills of exchange, which were used in trade and credit transactions andalso used as remittance instruments for the purpose of transferring funds from one place to another.
A hundi is an unconditional order in writing made by one person directing another to pay a certain
sum of money to a person named in the order. The exchange, honouring, and discounting of hundis
rested on the networks of trust the Marwaris had across the country [Jain 1929].
Changes in land settlement policies and the ensuing greater commercialization of agriculture
also facilitated the growth of a capitalist trader class. Marwari traders were drawn to thecountryside as moneylenders and they financed the growth of new cash crops. They became achannel for British economic expansion and thereby gained substantially from participation intrade, banking, and commerce.
In the early twentieth century the Marwari community entered the manufacturing industry.
When the Marwaris moved into industry, they were inspired by the sentiments of nationalism,
modernization, and social reform. Timberg points out that entry into industry was both an
expression and a cause of the nationalist and reformist impulses in the community, because
industry was felt to be more productive than trade and more secure than speculation. Industry
decreased dependence on Britain while trade served as the substance of that dependence [Timberg
1978:67].
From the 1930s onward, some families emerged as industrial giants. The monopolies inquiry
commission of 1964 reported that 10 of the 37 largest North Indian–owned industrial houses were
held by Marwaris, and that those 10 firms controlled 7.5 billion rupees in assets. This made up
38% of the total assets controlled by the 37 largest industrial firms. The monopolies inquiry
commission listed the names of 147 large enterprises owned by Marwari groups, which included
23 jute mills, 34 cotton textile mills, 11 sugar mills, and 8 cement factories [Timberg 1978:9–11].
There are several reasons Marwaris could attain and retain their position of accumulating
capital. According to Timberg, it was partly because of the fact that they did not sink too much of
their capital in land, but preferred more risky and more profitable pursuits. It was also in part
because they had relatively easy access to credit, information, and manpower from theirorganization as a commercial community [Timberg 1978:175]. Markovits also suggests that
Marwari traders belonged to an all-India network and could draw sustenance from a constant
supply of capital and personnel from other areas of the subcontinent. The circulatory pattern of
their movements was an essential element of strength, as close links could thus be maintained with
their localities of origin [Markovits 2002:145].
As will be seen in the following sections, large all-India multi-branch firms of Marwaris inmany cases had their headquarters in Rajasthan. Capital and personnel constantly moved fromheadquarters to branches, while profits were regularly remitted in the other direction. Marwari
migrants left families in their home villages in Rajasthan and visited at intervals. They normally
moved out in their early youth, and remained as emigrants, except for vacation trips, until theirretirement. For the dispersed merchants, the hometown was the centre both of their family life andbusiness network.

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The migration pattern, however, evolved from periodic to permanent after the 1920s when the
migration of wives and women started. Although there have been many reasons for the decisionsof wives and children to leave their homes in Rajasthan to join their men folk in distant places, thelater migration of other family members, particularly women, was initially enabled by thecompletion of a railway corridor from Shekhawati to Calcutta in 1916, assuring safe and speedy
passage. The change in migration patterns affected the relationships Marwaris had with theirhometowns and transformed the original role and meaning.

Relations between Rulers and Merchants in a Rajasthan Town before the 1860s
Although the earlier migration of Marwaris goes back to the seventeenth century, the steadymigration from Shekhawati to Calcutta and Bombay began in the 1820s. Young men trusted toluck as they travelled on foot, camels, and boats along the river Ganges. In the 1860s constructionof railways between Delhi and Calcutta made migration much easier and accelerated the process.
In this section I try to understand the lives of merchants in the business towns of Shekhawati
before the 1860s when the semi-permanent migration of men became quite popular in Rajasthan.
As an example I describe the history of Churu where I did fieldwork and on which many historical
documents and other writings are available.
Churu, the main town in the Churu district, shares eastern and southern borders with
Jhunjhunu and Sikar districts. Churu is said to have founded by a Jat Chaudhri called “Chuhru”.
Maledv, a Rathor Rajput, killed him and established his rule in 1541. According to a book titled“Churu Mandal Ka Shodhpurna Itihas” written by a local historian, the first merchant families of
the Poddar and Bagla came in the 1560s from Fatehpur, 36 kilometres south of Churu. Churu
developed into a fort town during the reign of Thakur Kushalsigh (1694–1730). With the money
gained from a war with Maratha, he constructed a fort with six watchtowers and four gates for thesafety of the township [Agrawal 1974]. Thus, many merchant families from Fatehpur and nearby
villages migrated into Churu.
Located on the main route of overland trade, Churu flourished as an important business centre.
We know from a local discourse how much was paid in taxes by Churu merchants in the middle ofthe eighteenth century. A Digambar Jain temple and a public well (Chaulawa well) attached to it
were constructed around 1740 when commerce and trade in Churu were rapidly growing. It wassaid that the Chaulawa well was constructed using the amount of octroi generated in a day[Agrawal 1974:205].
In Thakur Kushalsigh’s time, or in the early eighteenth century, a merchant of Bhagothiram
Poddar lived in Churu. His ancestor is supposed to have been one of the first merchants who
migrated from Fatehpur in the sixteenth century. According to a tradition, a Jain holy man told him
to go to Bhatinda in Punjab, and it was there that he made his fortune in the wool trade [Modi1939 cited in Timberg 1978:138].
Bagothiram’s son Chaterbhuj extended the wool business to have its headquarters in Churu
and branches in Amritsar, Bhatinda, and Hissar. The family became the leading merchants in- 67 -

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Churu at the close of the eighteenth century. They dealt in wools and grains, which were then the
major exports of Punjab. Thakur of Churu, Shivsingh (Sheosingh) wanted to sharply raise the duty
on wool. The Poddar (Chaterbhuj) protested, but to no avail. In 1791, with the help of the Raja of
Sikar, the entire Poddar family left Churu and shifted across the border to his territory in Jaipur
state.1 There, 15 kilometres south of Churu, they founded the town of Ramgarh. Later the town
produced many successful business families and flourished in the nineteenth century.2
Although Churu was an estate (thikana) given to a feudal baron by the king of Bikaner, theThakur Shivsingh (1783–1814), the most senior baron in Bikaner State, was acting with increasing
independence. In 1813 the troops of Bikaner led by a Vaisha commander named Amarchandmarched to Churu. After a prolonged siege, when all bullets and cannonballs were exhausted,
Shivsingh fired cannonballs made of silver and sacrificed himself on the battlefield. The townshipof Churu fell into the hands of a Bikaner king named Suratsingh (1788–1828). In this battle the
Poddar and other major merchants took sides with Bikaner Maharaja, because they were angry
with Thakur Shivsingh. Churu was defeated mainly because of a lack of supply of food,cannonballs, and gunpowder [Agrawal 1974:259].3
The Thakur’s son Pritvisigh tried again to break away in 1818. In the same year, Bikaner andJaipur both ratified treaties with the British government accepting its paramountcy. In turn, theBritish agreed to help the princes maintain the status quo within and beyond their frontiers. In
1818 the allied forces of Bikaner and the British attacked Churu to suppress its revolt andPritvisigh was evicted. Since then Churu has come under the direct rule of Bikaner State.
Business in Churu in those days had been destroyed partly by the shift of merchants toRamghar and partly by constant raids by the barons of Shekhawati. The Maharaja tried to persuade
the merchants to return. Requested by the king of Bikaner, two Poddar families of Ramghar, thefamilies of Mirjamal and Nagaram, returned to Churu in 1823 after 32 years.4 The homecoming
was well received. All townsmen felt awed by the honour bestowed on the families. The event

1

According to my interview with Hanuman Poddar (1921–), a sixth descendant from Chaterbhuj, the cause of the
dispute between the Thakur and the Poddar was not a question of taxes. The quarrel was on a much smaller issue
involving a daily occurrence. Moving out of the town was a common means of resistance for merchants against theruler. When the Poddar left Churu, the family consisted of 52 members. Hanuman says that migration did not createa big problem for them because at that time they lived in a small hut with few necessities.
2
The prominent Poddar firms from Ramgarh were Sojiram Hardayal, Anatram Shivprasad, Harsamal Ramchandea,
Sevaram Kaluram, and Johurimal Ramlal─all early settlers in Calcutta. The largest among them was TarchandGursahaymal (later Tarchand Ghanshyamdas) run by Chaterbhuj’s son Tarachand. The firm added the opium tradein Malwa to other operations which included banking, gold wholesaling, wool exporting, and insurance [Timberg
1978:139]. It had branches all through the opium and cotton growing tracts of Malwa, in the ports of Calcutta andBombay, and the river ports along the Ganges: Mirzapur, Farrukhabad, and Patna. Tarchand Gyanshyamdas wasapparently the largest among the great firms of Marwaris in India between 1860–1914 [Timberg 1978:133].
3
A local story tells of the construction of an underground passage which connected the fort to the Poddar haveli. It
was said that Thakur often visited the Poddar house and the passage was also his escape route [Interview with Sunil
Agrawal on August 6, 2008].
4
Chaterbhuj had three sons: Jindaram, Tarachand, and Jauharimal. The families of Mirjamar and Nangram and twoof Jindaram’s three sons came back to Churu while the other families stayed in Ramghar.

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made the family respected and widely known.5
Mirjamal Poddar (1790–1848), a grandson of Chaterbuj, after coming back to Churu
expanded his business with his nephew Harbhagatray from Kashimir to Malwa, and from Multan
to Calcutta. He engaged mainly in banking, insurance, and exports. Mirjarmal was associated with
Ranajit Singh, the ruler of Punjab, from his early days as a local chieftain. Later Mirjarmal becamea court banker of the Punjab state. He also had close relationships with British officers, and wasgiven protection and other favours that improved his business enterprise.
There were many kings and chieftains who borrowed money from him. The Maharaja
Suratsingh of Bikaner, for example, obtained loans of 249,000 rupees, 144,000 rupees, and400,000 rupees in 1827.6 In Nagarshiri there remains a mortgage bill to testify that Suratsing gave
Mirjamar tenures (pattas) of many villages as security for those amounts. According to Taknet,
Mirjamal was so influential that the Maharaja gave him the following written contract: “Mirjamal
and his descendants will be free from any rule by the law department and they will not be punished
for three crimes, and those criminals kept in his haveli will not be arrested.” When the Maharaja of
Bikaner came to Churu on occasions of marriage, festivals, and litigation, he stopped his elephantin front of the Poddar haveli. To be visited by the Maharaja symbolized his highest esteem [Taknet
1990:49].
Economic Success in the Late 19th Century and Investments in Hometowns
The prosperity of the Poddar continued till the early nineteenth century. However, Churu,
located by an overland trade route, gradually lost its importance as a business centre. The ports ofBombay and Calcutta, handling large European vessels, completely overshadowed the establishedtrade routes that crossed Rajasthan. The change in the business environment made the merchantsof Shekhawati leave eastward for British India. As news of their success reached home, more men
joined them.
According to Timberg, the Marwari migrants started as clerks, brokers, or agents to the larger
Marwari firms, and soon moved into business on their own. The first Marwaris helped others toenter behind them. Thus, the existence of “great firms” such as Tarachand Ghanshyamdas, foundedby the Poddar of Ramghar, and Sevaram Ramrikhadas, founded by the Singhania family, was a
critical element in enabling the exodus of the Marwaris. For example, it was in TarachandGhanshyamdas’s Calcutta office (gaddi) that the Birlas started as brokers [Timberg 1978:146].
Rumdutt Goenka arrived in the 1830s to be the chief clerk of Sevaram Ramrikhadas, a large firmbased in Mirzapur. He not only established his family as major cloth traders, but gave initial
5

Stories of merchants’ homecomings are found in many different villages and towns in Shekhawati. According to
Vishunudayal Jhunjhunwala, the homecoming of a merchant, who had once left his native place as threatened by
Thakur and returned after years of absence by his request, was an honourable event for the whole family. It was notjust an important occurrence for the village folk but rather was used as a reference in the future to remember aparticular year and even a particular individual [Jhunjhunwala 2002:18].
6
According to Taknet, the amounts Maharaja Surat Singh borrowed were 127,000 rupees and 400,001 rupees in1825 and 1827, respectively [Taknet 1990:48].

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employment to many of his fellows, including Nathuram Saraf of Mandawa, who later became thefirst Marwari broker (bania) to foreign firms. Seth Nathuram was full of sympathy for his caste
fellows and later he opened a living place run on a cooperative basis for newcomers to stay in[Timberg 1978:187].
Supported by their caste fellows in the initial stage of migration, many men from Shekhawati
made enormous fortunes. After 1820 when these emigrant traders tightened their grip on thegreater part of the subcontinent’s commerce, many men from each of the towns in Shekhawati
started to pour money homewards. The fortunes they made were partly turned into conspicuousbuildings such as mansions, temples, wells, and memorials. Whatever it was, every building wascovered with paintings. Each man competed with his neighbour and the edifices grew larger andmore ambitious as the century progressed. When famine struck, they poured back more money totheir hometowns. Their relief projects took the form of yet more palatial buildings decorated withyet more paintings [Cooper 1994:12].
Among the decorative buildings in Shekhawati, the most numerous and spectacular weremansions called havelis. They were originally townhouses made by the Rajput estate owners. Later,
the patronage of constructing them moved from the hands of the ruling Rajputs to the affluent
merchants. The haveli was to the merchant what the fort was to the Rajput ruler. It was his home,
his status, his headquarters, and his defence.
The word haveli means ‘a surrounded or an enclosed space’ in Persian. Its origin could betraced to the word ‘haowala’, which means ‘partition’ in old Arabic and it also is related to theterm ‘hawaleh’ meaning ‘all round’ or ‘round about’ [Patel et al. 2006:15]. The original function ofa haveli, apart from providing a residence, was to wall in the domestic life of a family. Secluded
from the outside world, a haveli set its own pace of life. Throughout royal and feudal India thehavelis, whether inhabited by Hindus or Muslims, represented the rigid lifestyle of a society that
segregated its men from its women. The architecture of the haveli was conceived around thissocial norm [Wacziarg & Nath 1982:22].
The typical haveli in Shakhawai consists of two courtyards, broadly differentiated into anouter forecourt for the men and an inner courtyard for the women. The street entrance of a haveli
with two courts is sealed by massive, iron-reinforced gates. They are generally locked. A small
door in one of the leaves serves the occupants for their daily comings and goings. On the other sideof the haveli there is a bigger gate which leads to the nora, a stable for an elephant, horses, andcattle. The forecourt was accessible to all visitors. Here the baithak, the main reception room, issituated. The word derives from the verb baithna, to sit. This would also serve as the merchant’s
office. At one end of the forecourt, usually opposite the gate, is the entrance to the inner sanctum.
All the housework of the haveli takes place within the inner courtyard. It was almost the wholeworld for a newly-arrived daughter-in-law. She could rarely pass out through the door into theforecourt or beyond. Only the daughters of the household could move around freely with theirfaces uncovered.
The construction of havelis by merchants must have been followed by the strict observance ofparda, a custom of women’s seclusion, by the merchant community. There is not enough space- 70 -

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here to discuss when and how the custom of female seclusion, originally part of aristocratic or
ruling class culture, was adopted by the women of the merchant communities, but it is interestingthat female seclusion, which occupying a central place in nineteenth century “women’s questions”
in colonial Bengal, was intensified amongst the merchants in the same period they began to live inhavelis.
Most of the havelis in Shekhawati were built between the early nineteenth century and the1930s. Cooper, comparing earlier havelis with later ones, suggests that five main trends manifest
themselves [Cooper 1994:52–56]. Among them, the following three points seem to be important tounderstand the change in the function of the haveli. First, the older havelis would have a fortified
appearance with blank outer walls finished in coarse plaster. As the nineteenth century progressed,
the emphasis lay increasingly on the decorative appearance of the exterior with lots of paintings
and windows. Second, the enclosure of the upper story increased. By the middle of the nineteenth
century, the upper story of the building had a little balcony and open-arched windows, but apreference grew for rectangular windows closed by decorative wood and metal shutters. Third,
European features began to appear in the haveli architecture. These included colonial stylebungalows and stucco decoration featuring fruit and floral motifs from Victorian Britain.
From the changing trends in architecture, especially the increase in windows and decorations,
it is clear that havelis gradually developed into spectacles rather than defences and residences.
Each building was an expression not merely of affluence but also of confidence in a new era andstable governance under British rule. The merchants must have felt secure to display their triumph
to all the townspeople. Before the mid-nineteenth century it was unwise to draw the ruler’s
attention to one’s affluence.
There is a story widely known in Churu about a merchant called Gajraj Parakh who refused
repeated demands by the local ruler at the risk of his life. The story is as follows:
With his luck and industrious labour, Gajraj made fortunes in Calcutta and came back to
Churu, his hometown with 900,000 rupees. It was at that time an amount to that on which
seven generations of his family could live. He gifted Thakur of Churu 21,000 rupees out of
his earnings, but the Thakur again demanded money from him. In his refusal, Thakur tied hishands and threatened to set him on fire. Gajraj, however, held his own against the Thakur,
insisting that the money for later generations could not be given. Thakur let it go and set him
free.7
Historical writings show that Ishwalsingh conquered Churu fort and threatened Gajraj Parakh to
demand money in 1855 [Agrawal 1974:296]. From the event we can guess that the politicalsituation in Churu was unstable by the middle of the nineteenth century and people abstained fromostentatious displays of wealth. Also in 1855, Ishwalsingh was defeated by the Bikaner army and
Churu fort again came under the control of Bikaner State. Thus, it is probably after this event in
7This is a part of the story of Gajraj Parakh told to the author in 2008 by his sixth descendant, Raichand Parakh.

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the late nineteenth century that the merchants of Churu started to invest in many magnificent
buildings.
Those buildings were intended to be a physical reminder of the merchants’ huge fortunes andalso of their freedom. They needed more respect and reputation suited to their status as successful
merchants and prime subjects of British India. The most important and appropriate occasions toacquire and to show one’s status were the family rituals of marriage and death in which vast
expenditures would be incurred.8 The haveli was constructed, painted, and renovated especiallyfor a daughter’s marriage. We can imagine by seeing the entrance to the inner sanctum, the best
decorated part of the house, what an important role the haveli had played in the marriage
ceremony.
The door has a finely carved wooden frame and into the lintel, or in a little niche above thedoor, sits or is carved the figure of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of wisdom. Ganesh with his
two consorts Ridhi and Shidi preside over the entrance of the inner sanctum. This is acharacteristic of the haveli of merchants. Above the door there are almost always some torans.
These are flat objects, approximately 30 square cm, set on a wooden shaft. They are made of woodand metal and invariably have a parrot in the design. Each toran represents the marriage of a girlfrom the house, and the parrot is a messenger of love [See Photo].
When the bridegroom arrives at the door, ashow is made of fighting him off. He touches thelintel with a leafy branch and, his conquest made,the toran is then fixed above the door permanently.
As a stage of the family ritual, the haveli enabled
newly rich merchants to translate their recent
wealth into the form of social status in their
homelands.
Another important aspect of the haveli,
suggested by Hardgrove, is that merchants built
them to confirm their ties with their ancestors andwith the locality, and to create identities forthemselves. Interestingly most havelis wereconstructed in the names of ancestors who had
never lived in them. Hardgrove analysed thethemes of fresco paintings and discussed how
Figure 2. Entrance of haveli with seven torans.
Marwaris created an identity for themselves
architecturally through the construction of the haveli [Hardgrove 2004:93].
There are, according to Hardgrove, four types of paintings found on the walls of the same8

In 1879, at the age of eight, Puranmal Singhania of Fatehpur married the daughter of Jainarayan Poddar of
Ramgarh. There were 2,000 people in his marriage procession to Ramghar, 5 elephants, and a total of 800 horses,
bullock-drawn vehicles, and camels. Such extravagance was not unusual [Cooper 1994:39].

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building.9 These different types of paintings display hybrid images associated with foreign rulers(such as the British), alongside images of gods and goddesses associated with medieval bhakti
tradition. She argues that self-consciously appropriate symbols of modern European culture inpaintings suggest the merchants’ new cosmopolitan modern outlook, but at the same time thepotential risks of expressing a rootless cosmopolitanism are tempered by expressing the caste’s
self-image of religious piety and by maintaining a strong identity as sons of local soil. While thepaintings of gods and goddesses signify the merchant’s bhakti religiosity, the paintings of colonial
modernity, such as trains, bicycles, cars, planes, and gramophones, make visible the risingautonomy of merchant groups vis-a-vis their local royal patrons, whose crowns were becoming
increasingly hollow in the face of British colonial domination [Hardgrove 2004:96].
In the wall paintings of the havelis, we can see contradictory representations of merchants;
traditional and modern, sacred and profane, pious and wealthy, national and colonial. The haveli
was a focal point of these representations and the hometown was a centre of a merchant’s politics
of how to represent themself through varieties of symbolic investments.
The wealth of merchants was also poured into the development of public spaces. In Churu
there are temples, rest houses (dharamshala), cow protection sheds (pinjarapol), and public wells
and crematories (sansthan ghat) that were built and run by donations from the merchants. Fromthe late nineteenth century, modern buildings such as clock towers, schools, colleges, hospitals,
railway stations, libraries, city halls, and parks, became new forms of symbolic investments. Thosemerchants who contributed on a large scale were honoured and given titles by the British
Government. Among the Churu merchants during the 1890s, Bhagwandas Bagla was a top
businessman and given the title of “Ray Bahadur” and “Honorary Magistrate” in 1894.
Some might argue that the building of havelis should be differentiated from other investments
in philanthropy and public charities, because the latter are associated with a notion of service toothers. However, the importance of symbolic investments for merchants is to direct portions of
their profits and wealth into channels highly valued by society. As Hynes has pointed out, themerchants developed their portfolios of investment (‘gifting’ in his words) primarily in relation to
two distinct reference groups: the community of merchants of which they themselves are part, andthe ruler and the elite [Hynes 1987:341]. The building of havelis is made to show their prosperity
and trust worthiness to the people of their own communities, while modern philanthropy is carriedout to show their public service spirits and social responsibility to the British officers. Both havethe same meaning in which they made investments to acquire social respects and success ofbusiness.

9
According to Hardgrove, the first type of painting depicts Hindu gods and goddesses, folk stories, and devotionalbhakti traditions. Another group of paintings is associated with European rule and new images of colonial modernity
such as trains, bicycles, cars, planes, and gramophones. The third type of painting is portraits. Artists started to
depict individual subjects accurately after the technique of photography became more widely available in India fromthe 1840s. The final type of painting is pictures of women in their daily lives; for example, a woman breastfeeding ababy or giving birth. Some of those pictures were probably depicted to commemorate and publicize family events.
Pictures of private acts of courtship and sexual intercourse are also scattered among a number of havelis.

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Conclusions
We have seen that for Marwaris, a hometown is the centre of a network around which
personnel, capital, and honour circulate. As for conclusions, I will consider the meaning of“homeland” for the Marwaris who are essentially mobile. Why have Marwaris invested in theirhometowns after they left? Their symbolic investments have not been exclusively directed into
their hometowns, but I will argue that those made in the hometown have a special importance todiasporic Marwaris.
We have seen in the example of the Poddar in Churu that merchant communities are
essentially mobile. Bhagothiram Poddar was one of the first merchants who migrated to Churu
from Fatehpur in the sixteenth century. The reason for his migration was not known. He is
assumed to have been a treasurer of the Nawab of Fatepur [Timberg 1978:138], probably because
his family name Poddar comes from Potedar, a person holding the treasure (pota).10 The family
history of migration can be traced back further. The Poddar belong to the Agarwal community(jati) which is the most numerous and important in Shekhawati. Agarwals are said to haveoriginated in Haryana and take their name from Agra Sen, King of Agroha, the mythologicalhomeland they deserted. It is said that they fled southward in the face of Muslim invasions, but it
is probable that many were also attracted into Rajasthan by the prospects it offered.
Migration was common and natural for the merchant communities because they had neverbeen tied down to any particular land. By the nineteenth century, they neither owned land nor
invested in landed property. They were not permitted to build big houses and, as we have alreadyseen, it was unwise to draw the baron’s attention to one’s affluence. Their resources were strong
networks of trading partners and families, which made them flexible and their migration easier.
They would stay in places they had chances to set up businesses and leave a place when they could
no longer tolerate the amount of extortion by the rulers or when the overall business environmentchanged.
Around the late eighteenth century some merchants families such as the Poddar in Churu
started to hold power that surpassed that of the local rulers. In the nineteenth century large
numbers of merchants migrated out and achieved economic success in British India. Strictly
vegetarian and simply dressed, the Marwaris lived austere lives in their adopted places of work.
The austerity of their personal lives was not coupled with any reduction in their ego. The money
they earned was sent back to their homes in Shekhawati and each step in their ascent was
registered by the construction of some sort of building in their hometown. Each structure vied withthe others put up by rival families and, as a final touch, the walls were lined with paintings. It wasin their hometowns that their social position mattered.
However, what the migrant merchants tried to acquire by constructing those buildings was notjust social reputation. The havelis they built in their hometowns were neither for themselves nor

10
In another source, one of his ancestors, whose name was Raymal, was a secretary (or servant) of the great poet
Sundardas in Fatehpur [Agrawal 1987:13].

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for the female members of their families. They were for their ancestors. The mansion was mainly
constructed for ritual occasions in which the relationships with family ancestors, caste members,
and neighbours were highlighted. Thus, the haveli was constructed even after all the family had
left and gone ‘abroad’ to British India. It was important to hold family rituals in their palatial
ancestral houses, through which they could establish not only a social reputation as a wealthy
merchant but also their ties with their locality. In other words, the construction of ancestral havelis
was for the diasporic Marwaris to create a homeland, to locate their identity in the imagined
homeland, and to find their roots.
Haveli building by merchants, however, ceased around the 1930s. Does this mean that theyno longer needed their homeland or roots in Rajasthan? Hardgrove offers a variety of reasons. One
is related to the permanent migration of Marwari women and children to the colonial cities to join
their men folk, who had prospered and could now afford to house the extended family in the city.
But even more importantly, it was at that time that Rajasthan became less central to the Marwari
self-perception, and competition with the Rajput rulers became less important. Instead,involvement with the Congress Party and increasing participation in the affairs of the nationalist
struggle created a new, national arena for the staging of such concerns. Rajasthan in the eyes of the
Marwaris no longer remained the primary site of action, identity, and memory [Hardgrove
2004:107].
To the reasons raised by Hardgrove I want to add another one: that the tie with ancestors
became a family myth rather than a history or memory. The interviews I have conducted withsome of the Marwaris in Calcutta make clear that many of them could claim to have, or have had,a family haveli in Rajasthan, but fewer and fewer people have actually visited it. There are older
people who visit their hometowns once a year for a day or two to donate something to schools or
temples there and to check up on their havelis which are locked up or cared for by a local person.
Even today philanthropic projects, such as the establishment of temples, schools, hospitals,
and cow protection-sheds continue to be carried out among Marwaris in their hometowns. But theancestral haveli itself has lost its importance and no more investments in it have been made. Many
Marwari families living in Calcutta still perform a ceremony to mark the first haircut of a boy in
Rajasthan. The ceremony, however, is not performed in the boy’s ancestral house but in the templeof the family’s clan goddess (kuldevi) or ancestral god. For example, a boy of the Ganeriwalafamily aged just one year had his first-haircut ceremony in August 2010. His great grandfather had
migrated to Calcutta from Ratangarh, where his family has a haveli, but his ancestors are said tohave originated in a village called Ganeri. That is why they are called Ganeriwala. The ancestral
god of the Ganeriwala is in that village. The boy’s family visited Ganeri first and then the templeof their clan goddess (Chatrbhuja Matamai) in Fatehpur for his haircut ceremony. The family did
not visit Ratanghar, despite it being a hometown where they have a haveli and used to performfamily rituals. To the diasporic Marwaris of today, the location of their ancestral haveli does nothave much meaning, while they have still maintained a relationship with the place where the clan
goddess and ancestral god are located. Recently a list of the members of the Ganeriwala clanscattered all over India was made by a man living in Calcutta. A meeting of Ganeriwala clan

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members is planned to be held once a year. For them, clan membership seems to have become
more important for identity construction than ancestral houses are.
After all, the “homeland” for mobile merchants was defined by the supposed ancestral
domicile. Once it was a mansion constructed by the ancestor’s name and nowadays it is a temple
where the clan goddess and ancestral god are located. The families of the Singhania clan in
Calcutta transferred their clan goddess and ancestral god (Ramishan Mata and Dedar Kothi) fromthe original places in Rajasthan to a family temple in Calcutta. They thus have no need to visit
Rajasthan to perform family rituals. This group of Marwari families brought their ancestral
domicile into Calcutta.
For diasporic Mariwaris, the hometown has been consciously created and confirmed byvisiting and investing. This is because it is the place around which the most important resources
for merchants—that is, the personnel, capital and reputation—circulate. However, once the flow ofthese resources change, the “homeland”, as the centre of identity for mobile merchants, can bechanged as well.
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