Are coffee-table books meant to be seen and read? Or should one just skim through the attractive visuals, with an occasional glance at what’s written? An Illustrated History of Indian Enterprise , brought out by industry body FICCI, should satiate both camps. True to its title, the book is replete with illustrations which hold the eye. Eight insightful essays by writers of repute also offer a compelling narrative on the journey of Indian enterprise and entrepreneurs over the ages.

Rare, vintage photos should delight business history buffs. For instance, a 1912 advertisement by Levers for its Sunlight soap shows Lord Vishnu with his consorts on the Garud vahan juxtaposed between the Emperor and Empress of India — a classic case of multinationals localising content while tipping the hat to the powers-that-be. A terracotta temple sculpture depicting maritime traders indicates the country’s long history of mercantile relationship with neighbouring countries. Black-and-white photographs of Jawaharlal Nehru surveying industrial projects in the early days of independent India are a throwback to the ‘commanding heights’ of the public sector. Many such visuals — from the ancient to modern times — speak more than words could.

The essays too have several gems. Shireen Moosvi in ‘Trade and Merchants in Mughal India’ outlines the interesting etymology of several vernacular business words. She quotes from the famous lexicographer Tek Chand Bahar (1740): “…when a sarraf loses his money and nothing remains in his till, he lights a candle (in day-time) as if he is searching for his lost money. Such a person is called a diwalia (candle-holder) — a Hindi word still in use for a person gone bankrupt.” The word hartal used commonly today for industrial action has its origin in hatt-tal (market closure), a major weapon of the trader when friction ensued between the merchant and State. Purushottam Agarwal’s two-page essay ‘The Indian Merchants of Astrakhan’ packs a punch by throwing light on the age-old peripatetic ways of the enterprising Indian businessman, which took him to lands as far as Russia and as early as the 17th century. There, he became increasingly Russianised, adopting names such as ‘Marwari Barayev’ and eventually merged his identity with the local mores. An 18th-century illustration of a Hindu community prayer in the Russian city of Astrakhan adds to the charm of the narrative.

R. Champakalakshmi in ‘Trade and Commerce in Early India’ talks of trade linkages established by merchants in south India with lands as far as Persia and Nepal in the north to Cambodia and Java in Southeast Asia.

Kautilya’s dictum that ‘merchants… are all thieves in effect, if not in name, and they shall be prevented from oppressing the people’ finds mention in Dwijendra Tripathi’s essay ‘Origins of Indian Enterprise from Ancient Times to 1947’. Far from being held in such low social esteem, businessmen today are credited with the dynamism of the Indian economy in recent times. In ‘Hopes and Conclusions’, Omkar Goswami writes: “If there is a single word that explains this growth, it has to be ‘entrepreneurship’.”

But the road has not exactly been smooth. In ‘Indian Enterprise since Independence’, Ashok V. Desai recalls the tumultuous times faced since Independence, and the transition from trade to industry. T.C.A. Srinivasa-Raghavan (‘Policy Impact on Business’) talks about the “near-total emasculation of private enterprise and a ghettoization of corporate India” for many decades after Independence. Only since the 1990s has the tide turned. Vikram Mehta describes the blow-hot, blow-cold equations that India and its policymakers have had with foreign businesses. The soft learnings mentioned by him in ‘Multinationals in India: A Dynamic Perspective’ — the need for qualitative judgement in analytic methodology, importance of localisation, and the fickleness of human emotion, which requires businesses not to take public support for granted — hold true for existing and aspiring entrepreneurs. Especially the takeaway that ‘public anger is a force that money and power cannot withstand’ is vital if business wants to retain hard-won respect.

Sadly, the 299-page book, a good read overall, disappoints in more ways than one. The editing, in parts, seems hurried with typos creeping in. For instance, there is a line about JSW Steel having iron ore mines in “Chili”. In one instance, a sentence has been left unfinished. In other places, the illustrations accompanying the essays do not seem apt. It also seems odd that despite the fact that the incumbent FICCI president is from the banking industry, there is little mention about the growth and contribution of banks in the Indian economy. These may be quibbles. What’s not though is the annoying pattern throughout the book of sponsor advertisements popping in where you least expect them — in the middle of an interesting essay. For instance, there are as many as 20 pages of corporate hosanna interjected between the penultimate and the last page of the essay ‘India Inc: Policy impact on business’. One doesn’t dispute the need to give sponsors visibility — after all, they have bankrolled the book. But couldn’t it have been done subtly and less intrusively? Perhaps by having dedicated sponsor sections at the end of each essay, or at the end of the book? By appearing in the middle of essays, they sometimes come across as corporate plugs. There is also the amusing, but unseemly spectre of industry rivals such as Hero MotoCorp and Bajaj Auto taking not-so-subtle digs at each other. A lack of attention to details prevents a good book from becoming a great one.

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