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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Gujarat and the Gujaratis," Behramji Merwanji Malabari embarks on a detailed exploration of the cultural, social, and economic fabric of Gujarat and its people. Written in the late 19th century, the book is characterized by its eloquent prose and a keen anthropological lens that celebrates the rich heritage of the Gujaratis. Malabari deftly intertwines historical analysis with personal narrative, presenting an engaging portrayal of the region's traditions, festivals, and industry, while situating Gujarat within the broader context of Indian society during a period of colonial scrutiny. Behramji Merwanji Malabari, an influential figure in the realms of social reform and literature, was deeply concerned with the well-being of Indian society. His experiences as a social reformer and advocate for education, particularly for women, inform his writings. Malabari's literary endeavors reflect his commitment to uplifting the Indian populace, making him an important voice in the socio-political landscape of his time, and underscoring his vested interest in highlighting the strengths and challenges faced by his own community. This work is highly recommended for readers interested in Indian culture, colonial history, and the evolution of regional identities. Malabari's nuanced narrative offers insightful reflections that resonate even today, making "Gujarat and the Gujaratis" a valuable resource for scholars and general readers alike. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Gujarat and the Gujaratis
Table of Contents
Introduction
Affectionate yet exacting, this book turns a regional portrait into a study of how tradition and change test one another. Approaching Gujarat as both subject and lens, it offers an intimate view of social life while probing the pressures that reshape customs, institutions, and ideals. Without relying on dramatic turns, it builds meaning through attentive observation, subtle irony, and a steady moral curiosity. The result is not a static catalogue of types, but a living conversation about how people adjust, resist, and innovate in public and private. Readers encounter a society reflected through humor, restraint, and a persistent demand for clarity.
Behramji Merwanji Malabari’s Gujarat and the Gujaratis is a work of nonfiction composed as social sketches and commentary. Written in English and set in western India’s Gujarat, it first appeared in the late nineteenth century, during British colonial rule. The book addresses an educated readership familiar with both local practices and the wider imperial public sphere, yet its focus remains emphatically regional. Rather than a travelogue in the conventional sense, it studies men and manners in situ, attentive to the rhythms of towns and institutions. The publication belongs to a period when Indian prose in English increasingly engaged social questions with satiric verve and reformist urgency.
The premise is straightforward: a perceptive observer guides readers through the textures of everyday life, assembling vignettes that together form a composite portrait. The narrative does not pursue a single storyline; it offers a mosaic of episodes and profiles, each illuminating a facet of community conduct, aspiration, and habit. The voice is urbane and poised, combining wit with sober appraisal. Malabari’s method is to juxtapose anecdotal scenes with reflective commentary, using contrast to reveal what routine often conceals. The mood shifts from playful to pointed without losing balance, producing an experience that is lively yet judicious, candid yet mindful of context and consequence.
Key themes recur with cumulative force. The book explores how education reshapes status and self-understanding, how commerce complicates prestige, and how public reputation intersects with private duty. It considers the friction between inherited custom and emerging norms, asking what endurance and adaptation look like in practice rather than in abstraction. Questions of gender, family, and generational change surface as part of a larger inquiry into social ethics. Throughout, communal identity is treated not as a fixed essence but as a dynamic negotiation among ideals, institutions, and everyday choices. The sketches suggest that reform and continuity are entwined, each testing the limits of the other.
For contemporary readers, the work matters as both document and dialogue. As a document, it offers a historically grounded self-portrait of a region at a moment of accelerated change, written by an author conscious of global conversations yet rooted in local knowledge. As dialogue, it invites reflection on the uses of satire in civic life, the responsibilities of criticism, and the perils of stereotype. It prompts questions still resonant today: How do communities narrate themselves without flattening complexity? What does progress demand, and at what cost? In articulating these tensions, the book models a candid, literate engagement with social reality.
Much of its appeal lies in craft. The sketches are brief yet layered, favoring the suggestive over the exhaustive. Caricature appears, but it is tempered by empathy and an insistence on proportion, so that humor sharpens rather than distorts insight. The prose is clear, attentive to cadence, and capable of sliding from anecdote into analysis without strain. There is pleasure in the textures of description, but description is never an end in itself; it points to choices, incentives, and responsibilities. This balance of style and scrutiny makes the book accessible to general readers while rewarding those interested in history, sociology, or literary nonfiction.
Approached with historical awareness and an open mind, Gujarat and the Gujaratis offers a careful, spirited introduction to a society defining itself amid competing claims of loyalty and change. It encourages readers to listen for nuance, to notice how small habits disclose large assumptions, and to distinguish affection from indulgence. Its concerns—public virtue, private conscience, institutional reform—remain perennially relevant, while its method—patient observation joined to principled evaluation—feels refreshingly modern. As an entry point to the region’s cultural conversation in the late nineteenth century, the book promises an engaging, thought-provoking encounter that is as informative as it is humane.
Synopsis
Behramji Merwanji Malabari’s Gujarat and the Gujaratis presents a late nineteenth-century portrait of a region and its people through a series of lively sketches. Written to acquaint outsiders and to guide the youth of Gujarat, it offers “pictures of men and manners” rather than a formal history. The book surveys towns and villages, occupations and castes, domestic habits, public institutions, and everyday speech. Malabari’s method is descriptive and anecdotal, assembling representative scenes and types to illustrate social patterns. While often humorous in tone, the chapters maintain an informational purpose, aiming to document prevailing customs and to record the character of Gujarati society in a period of change.
The opening chapters situate the reader in Gujarat’s physical and commercial setting: a coastal land of ports and caravan routes linking Kathiawar, Kachchh, Ahmedabad, Surat, and Broach. The author notes the landscape’s influence on habits of enterprise, thrift, and mobility, as well as the diversity of communities engaged in maritime and inland trade. He comments on dialects and proverbs that color everyday speech, using language as a window into values such as prudence and wit. This scene-setting frames the book’s approach, in which geography, market networks, and climate are shown to shape social organization and the rhythms of work, worship, and leisure.
Attention then turns to town life and the bazaar, where caste and occupation intersect in the routines of merchants, brokers, moneylenders, and craftsmen. The narrative depicts the trader’s counting house, the artisan’s shop, and the public square as theaters of negotiation, mutual obligation, and reputation. Typical figures include the Bania with his ledgers, the Vakil navigating courts, and the village Patel balancing revenue and custom. The sketches describe methods of bookkeeping, the role of credit, panchayat mediation, and patterns of hospitality. Rural scenes complement the urban portraits, showing land tenure, harvest cycles, and the informal authority structures that sustain village order.
Domestic life is treated through accounts of household organization, kin networks, and rites of passage. Detailed descriptions of marriages, festivals, and funerary customs illustrate how ceremony binds the community while imposing financial and social obligations. The author records practices surrounding dowry, guest feasts, and seasonal observances, noting the responsibilities placed on family elders. He examines dress, cuisine, and etiquette as signifiers of status and regional identity. Throughout, he traces how caste rules and neighborhood ties govern everyday conduct, while acknowledging the pragmatic compromises that occur in busy trading centers where different communities interact under shared civic obligations.
Women’s lives form a substantial theme, presented through observations on childhood, marriage, and widowhood across communities. The book outlines the incidence of child marriage, the constraints faced by young wives, and the legal and customary position of widows. It also records examples of female agency within the household economy and the gradual appearance of girls’ education in certain towns. Without departing from its descriptive stance, the narrative notes reform currents favoring later marriage ages, education, and relief for widows, alongside the social arguments used to maintain older norms. These chapters map a spectrum of practice rather than a single, uniform condition.
Religious belief and public devotion are surveyed across Hindu, Jain, Muslim, and Parsi communities. The author sketches temples, mosques, and fire temples, the roles of priests, mendicants, and bards, and the rhythms of fasts, fairs, and processions such as Navratri and Muharram. He records endowments and charity as civic forces, alongside popular credences in omens, healers, and auspicious times. Sectarian differences are noted, but equal attention is given to shared urban spaces and the coordination that festivals demand. These chapters emphasize how commerce, charity, and ritual intersect, shaping calendars of work and worship and forging habits of coexistence in dense market towns.
Education, letters, and the vernacular press receive focused treatment. The narrative describes indigenous schools and new institutions teaching English and modern subjects, along with examinations that structure aspirations for office and law. Teachers, textbooks, and debating societies appear as agents of change, while memorization and etiquette preserve continuity. Newspapers and pamphlets extend public discussion, and the theatre popularizes themes of morality, history, and reform. Malabari presents language as both a vehicle of modernity and a keeper of tradition, showing how journalism and drama help form opinion on social questions without displacing the oral cultures of proverb, song, and storytelling that remain influential.
Public administration and civic life are outlined through portraits of the court, the Vakil, the police, and municipal boards tasked with sanitation, roads, and water. The author notes the interaction between customary bodies and colonial institutions, documenting how petitions, public meetings, and voluntary associations channel local interests. He comments on relief efforts during periods of scarcity, on philanthropic trusts, and on the responsibilities of notable families. Commerce connects Gujarat to Bombay and overseas markets, bringing remittances, new habits, and occasional tensions. These chapters emphasize adjustment: communities negotiate regulation and reform while seeking to preserve neighborhood authority and the moral economy of trade.
The concluding chapters gather these sketches into a general appraisal of strengths and needs. Industry, thrift, humor, and civic-mindedness are recognized as assets, while extravagance in ceremony, restrictive marriage practices, and credulity before charlatans are identified as burdens. The book’s central message is pragmatic: gradual improvement through education, public hygiene, and fair law, coupled with the retention of cooperative institutions that sustain trust. Addressed especially to the young, the work invites readers to survey their society steadily, neither flattering nor disparaging it. As a composite of scenes, it offers a compact self-portrait of Gujarat in transition, preserving detail while pointing to measured reform.
Historical Context
Behramji Merwanji Malabaris Gujarat and the Gujaratis (1882) is set in late nineteenth-century western India, when the Gujarat region was divided between the British-ruled Bombay Presidency and powerful princely states, notably Baroda, Kathiawar agencies, and Kutch. Urban nodes such as Surat, Ahmedabad, and Broach (Bharuch) were transitioning from early-modern mercantile hubs into rail-linked colonial towns. The period followed the 1858 transfer of power to the British Crown and coincided with administrative reforms, expanding municipalities, and a widening vernacular and English-language press. Malabari, a Parsi reformer-journalist working chiefly from Bombay with deep ties to Gujarats towns and communities, surveys customs, civic life, and authority with satirical precision, using the social theater of streets, courts, and bazaars to frame a society negotiating modernity, colonial governance, and entrenched hierarchies.
The regions nineteenth-century political settlement underpins the books observations. Surat passed under decisive Company control in 1759 and 1800; Ahmedabad was secured after the Third Anglo-Maratha War (1817 1818), and the Crowns direct rule followed the 1858 Proclamation. Local disturbances in 1857 touched Ahmedabad and neighboring cantonments, but the aftermath brought a reconfigured judiciary, police, revenue systems, and early municipalitiesSurats in 1852 and Ahmedabads in 1873. These changes altered elite-bureaucrat relations and urban routines. Malabaris sketches repeatedly stage officials, petitioners, and notables in municipal and courtly spaces, capturing the frictions of new administrative norms, the etiquette of petitioning, and the performative politics of notability in Gujarats British-ruled districts and adjacent princely corridors.
Commerce and infrastructureespecially the cotton boom and the railwaysshaped the society Malabari depicts. The American Civil War (1861 1865) drove a dramatic surge in cotton exports from Gujarats districts (Surat, Broach, Kheda), enriching bania, Jain, Bohra, Bhatia, and Parsi firms; the post-1865 price collapse then exposed indebtedness and speculative excess. The Bombay, Baroda and Central India (BB&CI) Railway reached Surat in 1860 and Ahmedabad by 1863; the Narmada Golden Bridge at Bharuch opened in 1881, knitting markets across river barriers. Gujarati networks stretched to Zanzibar and Muscat, where merchant houses (for example, Tharia Topan in Zanzibar) brokered ivory, cloth, and grain. Malabaris portraits of shopkeepers, brokers, and opulent patrons mirror these cycles of windfall and ruin, criticizing conspicuous consumption, the patronage of caste associations (mahajans), and the uneasy accommodation between traditional guild authority and cash-credit capitalism.
The Baroda State crisis and subsequent reformist reign powerfully frame the princely backdrop. Malhar Rao Gaekwad (r. 1870 1875) was deposed after an 1875 inquiry into maladministration and an infamous attempt to poison the British Resident, Colonel Robert Phayre. The adoption and enthronement of Sayajirao Gaekwad III in 1875 reoriented Baroda toward bureaucratic centralization, fiscal regularization, and educational spending; Baroda College opened in 1881, and village administration saw closer supervision. Malabaris depictions of courtly spectacle, petitioners at durbars, and the calibrated deference between Resident, Diwan, and ruler condense that transition from personalized princely politics to programmatic reform, while noting how ritual rank, caste privilege, and colonial oversight continued to coexist uneasily.
Social reform currents in western India, gaining momentum from the 1860s onward, animate the books targets: child marriage, enforced widowhood, purdah, caste rigidity, and the constrained education of women. The 1862 Maharaj libel case, in which Justice Joseph Arnould upheld journalist Karsandas Mulji against sectarian clergy in Bombay, fortified the reformist press that Gujarati readers followed closely. Institutions such as the Prarthana Samaj (Bombay, 1867) and Gujarati writers like Narmadashankar Narmad (1833 1886) and Dalpatram (1820 1898) advocated widow remarriage and curricular modernization. Malabaris own later interventionsNotes on Infant Marriage and Enforced Widowhood (1887)and the contemporaneous Rukhmabai case (1884 1888) fed into the Age of Consent Act (1891). Though predating these climaxes, Gujarat and the Gujaratis prepares the ground: it records household anecdotes, ritual calendars, and marriage transactions, exposing the everyday mechanics of early marriage, seclusion, and dowry that reformers sought to dismantle.
The public sphere that gave Malabari his voice expanded rapidly. Gujarati and bilingual newspapersBombay Samachar (1822), Rast Goftar (1851), and Gujarat Mitra (founded at Surat in 1864)nurtured debate, while reading rooms, associations, and lecture circuits proliferated from Bombay to Ahmedabad and Surat. The Vernacular Press Act (1878) cast a shadow over regional journalism, encouraging strategic use of English platforms; Malabari edited the Indian Spectator from 1881, honing the urban, epigrammatic prose evident in this book. The Ilbert Bill controversy (1883) galvanized Indian elites in the Presidency to articulate legal equality. The social caricatures and civic dialogues in Gujarat and the Gujaratis reflect this argumentative culture, where municipal boards, clubs, and newspapers became arenas for status, reform, and satire.
Scarcity and disease set the constraints within which Gujarati society negotiated reform. The Rajputana Western India famine of 1868 1870 struck Kutch and parts of Kathiawar; localized scarcity recurred in 1876 1878, prompting grain controls, relief works, and the extension of district road and rail spurs. Cholera and smallpox outbreaks repeatedly tested urban administrations; Surats municipality (est. 1852) and Ahmedabads (1873) invested in wells, drains, and conservancy, often funded by merchant philanthropy from Parsi and Hindu trusts. Malabaris street-level vignettesfrom fetid lanes to charity dinnersregister the politics of sanitation and relief: he contrasts civic duty with showy benefaction, notes the tension between ritual purity and public health, and implicates both colonial frugality and local notables in the persistence of preventable misery.
As social and political critique, the book exposes the moral economies that sustained hierarchy: patriarchal authority within kinship, caste gatekeeping in guilds and temples, and the transactional etiquette binding officials and elites. Malabari indicts early marriage, seclusion, and ceremonial expenditure as engines of debt and illiteracy, while he mocks municipal grandstanding that substitutes speeches and plaques for drains and schools. He is equally alert to princely paternalism and to colonial aloofness that elevates procedure over justice. By anatomizing Gujarats bazaars, courts, and drawing rooms, he transforms local custom into a case against structural inequity, calling for female education, civic accountability, and reform grounded in indigenous moral argument rather than imitation or coercion.
Gujarat and the Gujaratis
PREFACE.
The page of the social and domestic life of the people of India is almost unread by Europeans. There are many reasons for this. First, there is the difference of language. Very few Englishmen have sufficient knowledge of any Indian language to converse with Indians with ease and fluency. Then, there is the deficient education and seclusion of Indian women, which cuts them off from social intercourse with English men, and renders their meeting with English women productive of very meagre results. Gravest of all, as a bar to free intercourse, is religious prejudice. This operates even where friendship exists between Englishmen and Indians. Over every avenue to real cordiality, the Hindu and Muhammadan have written up: "Yes. To smell pork! To eat of the habitation which your prophet, the Nazarite, conjured the devil into. I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you." It has been said that the way to an Englishman's heart is through his stomach: well, the people of India cannot penetrate to English hearts that way. Caste sits before every Indian door and forbids the European to enter. The very shadow of a European pollutes the food of a Bráhman; and though an Indian may enter a European's house of prayer, the sacred places of the Hindu may not be profaned by the European footstep.
The story of Indian domestic and social life can be set forth only by the pens of Indians themselves, and these pens have many restraints upon them. Pages, therefore, such as these which are here presented to the English public, deserve to be welcomed. The author possesses a remarkable knowledge of the English language, and combines with it an amount of candour and freedom from bigotry which is rarely to be met with anywhere. In these sketches of Indian life will be seen the struggles which clever and ambitious Indians, who have but a meagre patrimony, must undergo, first to educate, and then to support themselves. Here, too, will be seen evidences of the friction which exists between the governing and the governed race. It is to be hoped that the hauteur of the one and the irritation of the other are decreasing; but the European who goes to sleep with his boots in an Indian gentleman's lap while travelling in the same compartment of a carriage on an Indian railway, is, it is to be feared, not wholly extinct; and wherever he exists he spreads around him an atmosphere of discontent in which good feeling finds it impossible to breathe.
Among the more general and lighter descriptions there are many sketches that will be new to English readers, as, for instance, the manner in which the people of India enjoy their holidays, the elephant-fights in the arena at Baroda. Many of these more interesting passages have drifted into the later chapters, and might be overlooked unless pointed out by reviewers. Of pure literary interest is the chapter on the Hindú epic, the Rámayana, which the author, struggling, perhaps, a little beyond his depth, compares with the Sháhnámah, and even with the Iliad.
What is said about English law may not, perhaps, be acceptable to English readers, and its soundness may be contested, but amongst Indians there would be a universal consensus as to its truth. The law's delay is in India an intolerable grievance; and it is certainly the fact that in the first mutiny the English judges were the most frequent victims.
The portraits of Indian notabilities seem to be drawn from the life, and will, no doubt, be thought by some to be recognisable; and it may be learnt from them that it is not always those Indians who are most countenanced and raised to the highest posts by the English authorities, who are most acceptable to their countrymen.
It will be seen that the author, although a very much younger man, is a friend of Lutfullah and his fellow-townsman, and these sketches have something in common with the autobiography of the older writer. May the débutant be equally fortunate with the English public!
E. B. EASTWICK.
GUJARÁT
AND
THE GUJARÁTIS.
INTRODUCTION.
Permit me, gentle reader, to briefly explain the genesis of this little book. Starting on my pilgrimage in the too early twilight of life's day, I have often stumbled into dry nulláhs[1][1]—very dry and dismal, and with very steep sides. And in groping my way to reach the other side, I have badly barked my shins. But it is matter for thankfulness to be able to say that in none of my stumbles have I broken any bones. However bad the fall, I have always managed to pick myself up; and, with the rope thrown by friendly hands, have struggled up the stony hill-side. These "roughs and tumbles" of life have become a part of my nature, and I have often felt a vague sort of conviction that life would be scarcely worth living without some prospect of having to "rough i[1q]t."
A Poor Beginning.
I began life at twelve, giving private lessons. It was a poor beginning—the task of coaching big hulking lads was so dreary. At sixteen I became a regular teacher. I had seen enough of the world before this—the world of India, of course. I entered upon my new duties, therefore, with hearty interest. The work did not feel a drudgery for some time; but two or three years after, my migratory instincts again asserted themselves. I felt that I wanted a change. I had taught and studied children long enough, and I thought I must now study "children of a larger growth."
A Tempting Offer.
At this time I was offered the joint-editorship of a local (English) weekly. I jumped at the offer, and submitted it to a few friends whom I used to consult on matters beyond my management. These gentlemen, each and all, scouted the idea, and strongly advised me to keep where I was.
My Troubles.
Here began my troubles. I had already been favourably known as a versifier; and with the overweening confidence of youth, thought I had the right and the power to enlighten the public on political and other topics of the day. There was nothing for it, however, but to bow to friends' decision, once having sought their advice. During the next two years I had the most miserable time of it. They made me a morose, disconsolate verse-monster. I scribbled English verses by the yard; and after destroying the bulk of them, ventured to publish a few pieces. But no end of verse-writing could compensate for the glorious chance I had missed of becoming a journalist and public censor. However, I received fresh overtures soon after. This time I gave my elderly advisers to understand that I meant to act for myself, though I should be very glad if I could do so with their consent.
Struggles of a Cheap Newspaper.
It was a cheap weekly, hitherto owned by two partners, cousins, one who had given it money, the other brains. Two more partners were added, my friend N. bringing money, and I supposed as supplying brains. The work was fairly divided—the first proprietor, D., a small clerk, undertook business management. N. was to help D., and also to make himself useful to us—my friend P. and myself—in the literary business. For a week or two all went on smoothly; but we soon felt the necessity of discussing our position. N. was a man of temper, and among other things "compositors" did not take kindly to him. I received frequent complaints as to his harshness; but knowing he had brought us a thousand rupees I could do nothing more than appeal to his good sense. One Saturday night Mr. N. was given a "proof" to read. He corrected it; but instead of entering corrections on the margins, poked his pen into the body of the "composed matter." The compositor almost fainted at sight of the "proof" he had to revise—he could not follow the corrections, and the paper was delayed next morning. On Sunday, when we four proprietors met, I gently asked Mr. N. to be good enough to enter corrections, in future, on the margins of the proof-sheet. N. glared at me for what he took to be an insult, and replied that he had paid 1,000 rupees to be his own master—that he would do just what he liked, and would not be bullied by people who had not contributed a farthing. This sneer was passed over by me; but the co-editor winced under it, and replied hotly to N.'s insinuation. What threatened to be a bad quarrel was, however, soon made up; and we all adjourned to an adjoining hotel to discuss the future of the paper and a substantial breakfast provided for the occasion.
Editorial Vagaries.
But by-and-bye we two editors could not quite agree between ourselves. I was for treatment of social questions chiefly; my friend P. affected politics. We settled this difference by confining each to his own forte. Our ignorance, even in this, was as boundless as was our arrogance. But was it not glorious to criticise and ridicule the highest men in the country? What a privilege for too-early-emancipated school-boys! Nothing could be easier than my share of the literary work: I turned into prose, every week, two of my versified social essays, of which I had a plentiful supply at home. Did poet ever sacrifice his substance as I did, in those days, in the public interests? My sweet sonorous hexameters surrendered bodily to the manipulations of the deity P. D.! No martyr could do more. My friend P. wrote political essays. He was decidedly better-read than I. Certainly he took pains with his essays; but how could a young man of less than twenty overtake topics which baffle the grasp of practised veterans? One day, writing, I believe, of the battle of Plevna, P. asked me what was meant by "the Porte." I said "the Porte" was the Sultan of Turkey's principal wife. P. thought it was only the European title of the Khedive of Egypt. We often thought in that curious way, and often wrote ourselves down, in our own paper, a pair of conceited jackanapes. And when, next morning, we found out our mistake, we accused each other of ignorance, obstinacy, and so on.
Editorial Amenities.
