OFFICE CHAI, PLANTER'S BREW
S Muthiah, Ranjitha Ashok
Westland
525 pages; Rs 599
A granduncle of mine had a carefully preserved top hat in his bedroom cabinet. As far as memory serves me, he always wore pristine dhotis and kurtas, and a hat seemed an incongruous addition to his wardrobe. But when asked about it, he would tell the story that had become family lore. As an employee of the British Petroleum in the 1930s, he was working outdoors on a summer day, when his immediate superior, one Mr Jones, took off his own hat and gave it to my granduncle. Like many of his generation, my granduncle rued the passing of the paternalistic British corporate culture.
S Muthiah and Ranjitha Ashok's book collects plenty of such anecdotes from erstwhile employees of British firms in India, and presents them in an immensely readable format. Describing the inception of the book, Mr Muthiah writes in the introductory "Compiler's Note": "I've been urging retirees to put down the stories of their lives, record their experiences at work and in the world around the workplace... for their grandchildren." During a conversation with two former executives of British firms, P Unnikrishnan and A V Ram Mohan, at the historic Madras Club Mr Muthaih "got nominated to compile the book".
The project is interesting and rare - and would have been a little intimidating to the team. Biographies of corporate personalities are a dime a dozen in India, but there are usually hagiographical accounts of the lives and times of promoters of companies, usually commissioned by their heirs. So while it is easier to find a biography of JRD Tata or Dhirubhai Ambani, one would be hard pressed to find anything on the lives of the legion of managers and executives who ensured the smooth functioning of their companies through their professional expertise. This book fills the essential gap in the corporate history of the country by recounting the lives of these backstage players.
But this also refocuses the light on a crucial stage in our colonial history: The period between 1930 and 1970, when the Britons were relinquishing control over institutions in the country and Indians were taking over. Along with political institutions, their business counterparts, too, experienced the zeitgeist. Trade was, after all, central to the colonial encounter. As scholar Ephraim Kleiman writes in his essay "Trade and the Decline of Colonialism": "Trade is widely held to be the goal of colonialism. One school of thought... regarded it as the prime mover of imperialist expansion." East India companies came first; armies and political institutions followed.
The structure of Office Chai, Planter's Brew is ambitious. It compiles about 50 interviews of executives of erstwhile British mercantile firms and planters, recalling their professional days. Most of the interviews are listed under either of the two categories: "Mercantile Officers" and "Planters". The reason for such categorisation - which also inspires the title - is explained in the book, the title for which was originally was Boxwallahs - a slang used to describe businessmen. But many of those chronicled in the book were engineers or provided services or were planters. So, this title was vetoed.
How the current title came about is an interesting anecdote: "In mercantile offices, it was the way tea was once served to the officers; British officers were served tea and biscuits on a tray complete with teapot with cosy, cup and saucer, and sugar and milk and biscuits separately, but when it came to Indian recruits in those early days they got ready-made tea in a cup with biscuits by its side on the saucer. As for planters... many remembered them being settled in the evening with a drink."
Such quaint stories are a dime a dozen in the book, which is quite long at 525 pages. For instance, T K Madhav, whose changing jobs from Carritt Moran, Cochin, to Thomas Tea Company in 1970 - an unheard of professional manoeuvre - had caused a scandal in the "sedate world of tea broking", was hired by his first employers more for his cricketing skills than his educational achievements. His interviewer, Richard Luff, then chief of the company in Cochin, noticed him at a cricket match and called him for an interview. After a discussion on the game, Mr Madhav, a fast bowler like his interviewer, was told: "in the coming season, the Club would have a good opening attack."
Nostalgia is the guiding emotion of the book - about a time that was unique because of the collaboration it witnessed between the erstwhile colonial masters and the new generation of Indians taking the baton from them. But, reading one narrative after another, many of which are not all that different from the other, can also begin to get a tad boring.
Also, though the book does not explore it, two things are glaringly evident: the lack of women in the dramatis personae and the social status quo that these first-generation Indian managers represented. The nostalgia of the narrators is unable to conceal how the corporate structures were essentially exclusive boys' clubs - and how far the situation has now changed, though a lot is still wanting.
Yet, at a time when India is opening up its markets to foreign direct investment, this book is likely to serve the important purpose of reminding us of a time when colonial FDI in the country packed its bags and left.
