Business
Business was long the preserve of a few hereditary trading castes, so closely linked that their caste name came to mean any moneylender, shopkeeper or factory owner. After independence, middle and lower farming and service castes with no history of trade or banking became major business owners in their own right.
The spread of business ownership to new castes was uneven, strongest in the south and west and weak elsewhere. Even in the most open regions it has not reached the lowest castes. Elections and a welfare state produced many senior politicians, officials and judges from formerly 'untouchable' castes, but no major industrialist.
Business success changes a community's standing and its claims about itself. Once groups had prospered through cooperatives, they began asserting descent from higher, warrior lineages, and capital became a route upward for groups that had been socially excluded.
Farming groups moved into business when new crop varieties and better irrigation gave them surpluses to invest. Owning land and growing cash crops led naturally into processing them, such as turning cotton into textiles or curing tobacco. Where farmers lacked capital alone, they pooled it through cooperatives to build factories.
Groups shut out of established credit networks built their own, such as caste associations and community-owned banks. These institutions lent to members and gave them the backing that hereditary merchants got from family and kin.
A group without land can still convert schooling into entry to modern business. Early contact with imperial and global systems made some educated groups more flexible and open, so they moved into enterprise more readily than similar groups elsewhere.
Whether a community takes up business depends on how it sees traders. A farming caste that defines itself against the 'shrewd, dishonest' merchant looks down on business and stays out of it, even when it has land and wealth.
A new business class tends to gain political power alongside its wealth, and each strengthens the other. A regional party taking office coincided with a sharp rise in its core caste's fortunes. Where a group is blocked from business, the frustration can feed separatist politics instead.
Global trade gave groups without merchant pedigree a way into business that did not depend on the old domestic networks. Export-driven clusters, such as one town's knitwear industry, grew through foreign demand rather than inherited trading connections.
Businesses built on caste networks, shared credit and cooperatives sit uneasily with the individualism of modern markets. The result is a capitalism that takes different forms depending on the society and politics around it, rather than one universal model.