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Nattukotai Chettiars were the most prominent business community from the Tamil region. The book Fortune Seekers, A Business History of the Nattukottai Chettiars, by Raman Mahadevan, an economic historian, captures their spirit of enterprise that led many of them to seek their fortunes overseas. The story of the community connects South India, Burma, and South-East Asia across the Bay of Bengal. It also spans the British imperial era and that of the modern nation state.
The traumatic turn of events during and after the Second World War left the community materially and emotionally drained. A large number of Chettiar families had to come to terms with the harsh realities of the times. It was a watershed moment. For many, simply continuing in their traditional profession was in doubt.
For these Chettiars, the 1950s and 1960s were extremely trying times, as they sought to adjust to their difficult situation. Some of the wealthy Chettiar firms rose to the occasion to help the less fortunate fellow Chettiars ‘rebuild their lives’ by providing them employment in the financial and commercial institutions and industrial establishments they controlled. These included large commercial banks and financial institutions such as the Indian Bank and the Indian Overseas Bank, and the United India Insurance Company, which were controlled by the Raja Sir family and the MCT family, respectively, and the industrial establishments of the AMM group and Karumuthu Thiagaraja Chettiar. Karumuthu Thiagaraja Chettiar also helped the destitute Chettiars ‘by making them selling agents of the yarn produced by his mills’. Some others saw opportunities in small-scale financing in rural south India or in small-scale trading in paper distribution and pharmaceutical products, two areas of commercial enterprise where Chettiar presence is said to be significant. The traumatic experience of Burma, however, continued to haunt them across generations and in a sense, scarred their psyche.
An attitudinal change could be observed in a large number of young and adolescent Chettiars who were either witness to this experience or grew up absorbing the lore of their families’ travails, which had reduced them to penury. They consciously opted out of commerce and traditional banking and instead chose to take up white-collared professions. The educational institutions set up by some of the wealthy Chettiar families, such as the Annamalai University and the Alagappa Polytechnic and, later on, the Thiagarajar College, provided Indian students access to higher technical education. Incidentally, it also helped Chettiar boys and girls from modest families access modern education as a means to professional employment. The outcome of this, interestingly, was the emergence over the years of a significant number of highly accomplished Chettiar professionals in fields ranging from medicine, engineering, atomic science and pure science to software and IT-related financial services. A good many of the Chettiar professionals, especially in the IT and financial services sectors, also chose to move to greener pastures overseas when opportunities emerged, especially to the US, UK, Australia and Singapore. In 2003, as many as 5000 Chettiar families were said to have settled in these countries. The numbers could well be much larger now.
Interestingly, a section of the Chettiars, possibly the third or fourth generation of those who operated in Burma, are still finding it difficult to come to terms with the perceived injustice and the consequent enormous loss they encountered there in the 1940s and 1950s. They still entertain more than a glimmer of hope that the grave historical act of omission and injustice will be appropriately corrected and that they may still manage to get due compensation for the land and other assets that were seized from their forefathers in Burma. With this in mind, a group of Chettiars took the initiative in 2007 to set up the Burma ‘Mudhaleetalar Kuzhu’, or Burma Investors Group. This registered body has about 300 members, of whom around 100 possess documents showing family ownership of land to the extent of 300,000 acres in that country. According to a member of this group, the present value of the Chettiar property and other fixed assets in Burma is estimated to be around Rs 1 lakh crore.3
The group is said to be drawing up a plan to work with the Burmese government to identify these properties and to arrive at a compensation price through their sale. These expectations of the Chettiar groups seem more a pipe dream than a reality.
The rapid and fast-paced economic and social changes since the 1930s and 1940s had a domino effect that contributed to weakening the caste and community bonds. There was a progressive atrophy of all the traditional institutions and social norms that sustained reciprocity and mutual sodality. The steady shift from traditional banking to various forms of modern business based on European models almost automatically drove home the importance of English education. Since good modern educational facilities were available mostly in urban centres, there was a steady migration from Chettinadu to these cities to avail of the emerging opportunities for advancement. The outcome was the increasing nuclearization of Chettiar families in place of their unique joint family structure. Another significant change, noticeable from the 1940s and 1950s and thereafter, was the weakening of caste-based conflict resolution systems and mechanisms. Caste panchayats appeared to have outlived their relevance. The Chettiars were increasingly resorting to the modern legal system for resolving disputes. The courts were flooded with cases of intra-Chettiar disputes, many of them related to the share of familial property.
In comparison to the lower- and middle-class Chettiars, those from the upper crust or the elite Chettiars appeared to have weathered the Burma storm somewhat better as they had managed to transfer some of their wealth earlier. Moreover, as compared to Burma, Chettiars with investments in Malaya and Ceylon suffered to a slightly lower extent. Some of the well-to-do firms that managed to dispose of their overseas assets and transfer the capital back to India, especially in Malaya and Ceylon, sought to invest these in plantation companies and in textiles. But the chunk of Chettiar wealth is in the form of prime real estate across Chennai as well as in plantations that they control, which are spread over large tracts in the north and west of Coorg. Some of the capital in retreat from the overseas found its way into small textile mills and power looms. Karumuthu’s success story seemed to have inspired many Chettiars to follow suit. It was said as many as thirty Chettiars chose to invest in textiles.
Excerpted from Fortune Seekers: A Business History of the Nattukottai Chettiars by Raman Mahadevan with permission from Penguin Random House India.