Friday, July 7, 2023
Sunday, June 13, 2021
Ilayarasanendal Origin- a historic view
Historic View: Origin of Ilayarasanendal
Question:
If Kerala was under the Vijayanagara Empire, why weren't Telugu Naickers appointed everywhere in Kerala just like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka?
Answer:
Yes. Kerala was very much under Vijayanagara Empire since Kumara Kampanna (Son of Bukkaraya of Vira Shaiva Sangama Dynasty) expedition in 14th century.
1.Instead of Telugu Naickers, the Governors of Travancore Kingdom was from the family of Tenkasi Pandiya Kings- Tenkasi Pandiyans had marital alliance with Vijayanagara Tuluva Dynasty.
2.Governors of Northern Kerala were Telugu Naickers before Mysore Kingdom become prominance under Aravidu Dynasty.
1.Yes. Ravillas were Military Commanders in Vijayanagara Empire in Northern Karnataka; later became Governors of present day Northern Kerala during Achuta Devaraya regime; called back to Roya Vellore after Talikota war.
2After Vijayanagara rule, Ravillas were given Thirukkottupalli and Ilayarasanendal as Mannariya Polypats by Madurai Naickers.
Thirukkottuppalli along with the fort of Koviladi was lost to Chanda Shahib and Ravillas settled down at Ilayarasanendal.
During British Ilayarasanendal was downgraded from Mannariya (no tax) Polypat to Kattukuththagai Zamin in Tinnevely District.
The account is more or less same for Kuruvikulam Pemmasani Kings.
இளையரசனேந்தல் ஜமீன் கதை
இளையரசனேந்தல் ஜமீன் கதை
குருவிகுளம் ஒன்றிய முன்னாள் பெருந்தலைவர் விசுவாமித்திரன் அவர்களுடன் ஒரு சந்திப்பு!
(2015) மீள்பதிவு
அருணகிரி:
அண்ணாச்சி வணக்கம்.
நீங்கள் இளையரசனேந்தல் ஜமீன் வழிதோன்றல்களுள் ஒருவர்.
கொடிவழித் தேடல் தொடர்பாக உங்களைச் சந்திக்க வந்தேன்.
ஜமீன் வரலாறு குறித்தும், கொடிவழி குறித்தும் சொல்லுங்கள்.
விசுவாமித்திரன்:
இளையரசனேந்தல் ஜமீன்தார் சேது பாஸ்கர வெங்கடாசல அப்பாசாமி அவர்களுடைய மகள் வழிப் பேரன் நான்.
சேது பாஸ்கர அப்பாசாமியின் தாத்தா
செவத்த துரைக்குக் குழந்தைகள் இல்லை.
அவருடைய இரண்டு தம்பிகளுக்குத்தான் பிள்ளைகள். அவர்களுடைய கொடிவழிப் பிள்ளைகள்தாம் நாங்கள்.
இளையரசனேந்தல் ஜமீன்தார் எல்லோருமே ‘அப்பாசாமி’ என்றுதான் அழைக்கப்படுவார்கள். அவர்களுடைய முன்பெயர்கள் மட்டும்
ஆர்.வி.கே. அப்பாசாமி, ஆர்.எம். அப்பாசாமி,
ஆர்.வி.ஆர். அப்பாசாமி என மாறி வரும்.
அருணகிரி:
இளையரசனேந்தல் ஜமீன் எப்படி உருவாயிற்று?
விசுவாமித்திரன்:
திருமலை நாயக்கர் காலத்தில் எங்கள் முன்னோருக்கு இந்தக் கிராமங்களை வழங்கி இருக்கின்றார்கள். இதுதான் அவர் வழங்கிய செப்புப் பட்டயம்.
(பட்டயங்களைக் காண்பித்தார். படம் உள்ளது.)
தலைவர் வைகோ அவர்கள் எங்கள் இல்லத்திற்கு வருகை தந்தபோது இந்தப் பட்டயத்தை அவர்களிடம் காண்பித்தேன்.
தமிழில்தான் பொறித்து இருக்கின்றார்கள். எழுத்துகளின் மீது சாக்பீஸ் தடவி என்ன எழுதி இருக்கின்றார்கள் என்பதைப் படித்துப் பார்த்தேன்.
சில சொற்களின் பொருள் எனக்கு விளங்கவில்லை. யாரேனும் கல்வெட்டு எழுத்துகளைப் படிக்கின்ற ஒருவரிடம் கொடுத்து விளக்கம் கேட்க வேண்டும் என்று கருதுகின்றேன்.
விசுவாமித்திரன் அவர்களுடைய துணைவியார்:
வாசுதேவநல்லூர் அருகே தலையணையில் நடந்த சண்டைக்காக ஆர்க்காடு நவாப் எங்களுடைய இரண்டு தாத்தாக்களை வேலூரில் இருந்து அழைத்துக் கொண்டு வந்தார்.
இப்போது வேலூர் சிறை இருக்கின்ற இடத்தில்தான் அவர்கள் அப்போது வசித்து இருக்கின்றார்கள்.
தலையணைப் போரில் வெற்றி பெற்றதற்காக வாசுதேவநல்லூர் அருகே 1000 ஏக்கர் விதைப்பாடு நிலத்தை ஆர்க்காடு நவாப் கொடையாகத் தந்தார்.
அந்த இடத்தையும் அவர்கள் விருப்பத்தின் பேரில் தேர்வு செய்து கொள்ளச் சொல்லி இருக்கின்றார்.
எந்த இடத்தில் கோட்டை கட்டுவது என்பதற்காக ஆய்வு செய்து கொண்டே வந்தபோது இளையரசனேந்தலில்தான் மண்ணும் தண்ணீரும் சம எடையில் இருந்ததாம்.
அதனால் இந்த இடத்தைத் தேர்வு செய்து கோட்டை கட்டி இருக்கின்றார்கள்.
இது உறுதியான இடம்.
அருணகிரி: ஜமீன்தார் என்ற பட்டம் எப்படி வந்தது?
விசுவாமித்திரன்: வெள்ளைக்காரர்கள் காலத்தில்தான் அந்தப் பெயர் வந்தது.
அருணகிரி: இந்த ஜமீனில் படைகள் இருந்தனவா?
விசுவாமித்திரன்:
இல்லை. படைகள் கிடையாது.
திருமலை நாயக்கருக்கு வரி வசூல் செய்து கொடுக்கின்ற பணி மட்டும்தான்.
பின்னாட்களில் ஆங்கிலேயர்கள் இந்தப் பகுதிகளைக் கைப்பற்றியபோது எங்கள் ஜமீனுக்கு வந்து
இனிமேல் நீங்கள் வரி வசூலை எங்களிடம்தான் கொடுக்க வேண்டும் என்று சொல்லிவிட்டுப் போனார்கள்.
அருணகிரி:
இந்தப் படம் (ஜமீன்தார்) திருநெல்வேலி ஏ.ஜே. போஸ் ஸ்டுடியோவில், 1912 ஆம் ஆண்டு எடுக்கப்பட்டு இருக்கின்றது.
அந்தக் காலத்தில் இங்கிருந்து
திருநெல்வேலிக்கு எப்படிச் சென்றார்கள்?
விசுவாமித்திரன்:
குதிரையில்தான் போனார்.
வாசுதேவநல்லூர் விவசாய நிலங்களைப் பார்ப்பதற்காக வாரம் ஒருமுறை இளையரசனேந்தலில் இருந்து குதிரையில் போவார்.
மற்ற எங்கள் குடும்பத்தினர் வில்லு வண்டியில் போவார்கள்.
நான்கு குதிரைகள் பாதுகாப்பாகச் செல்லும்.
குருவிகுளத்தில் உள்ள சம்பந்தி வீட்டுக்கும் குதிரையில்தான் வருவார்.
வேட்டைக்கும் போவார். துப்பாக்கி சுடுவதில் கெட்டிக்காரர்.
ஒருமுறை மலைப்பாம்பிடம் மாட்டிக் கொண்டாராம். அப்போதும் மறுகையில் இருந்த துப்பாக்கியால் பாம்பைச் சுட்டுக் கொன்றாராம்.
அவ்வளவு துணிச்சல்காரர்.
அவரைப் பார்த்தாலே பயப்படுவார்கள்.
ஆனால் தர்ம சிந்தனை உள்ளவர்.
நிறைய தான தருமங்கள் செய்து இருக்கின்றார்.
ஒருமுறை குடித்து விட்டு வேகமாகக் குதிரையில் வரும்போது புளியங்குளத்தை அடுத்த ஐய்யனார் கோவில் அருகில் விழுந்து விட்டார்.
பலத்த உள்காயம்.
கும்பகோணத்தில் ஒரு மருத்துவமனைக்குக் கொண்டு சென்றார்கள்.
ஓரளவுக்குக் குணமாகித் திரும்பி வந்தார். ஆனாலும் சரியாக நடக்க முடியவில்லை.
சிலகாலம் அரண்மனையிலேயே இருந்தார்.
32 வயதிலேயே இறந்து போனார்.
அருணகிரி:
இளையரசனேந்தல் ஜமீன் கிராமங்கள் யாவை?
விசுவாமித்திரன்
சித்திரம்பட்டி, புளியங்குளம், அய்யனேரி, ஆண்டிபட்டி, கொம்மங்குளம், இளையரசனேந்தல், வடக்குப்பட்டி, பிச்சைத்தலைவன்பட்டி, தேவர்குளம், பிள்ளையார் நத்தம், தர்மத்துப்பட்டி, குளக்கட்டாகுறிச்சி,ரெட்டியபட்டி, முத்துகிருஷ்ணாபுரம், கஸ்தூரி ரங்காபுரம், வரகனூர் வரையிலான கிராமங்கள்.
அருணகிரி:
இப்போது நீங்கள் வசிக்கின்ற குளக்கட்டாகுறிச்சி வீடு எப்போது கட்டப்பட்டது?
விசுவாமித்திரன்: 1920 களில் கட்டப்பட்டது. பாறைப்பட்டி, நாகம்பட்டி, முத்தால்நாயக்கன்பட்டி ஆகிய ஊர்களிலும் இதேபோன்ற வீடுகள் உள்ளன.
என்னுடைய தந்தையார் இந்தப் பகுதியில் ஒரு பண்ணையார்.
இவர்களது குடும்பத்தார் இந்தப் பகுதியில் உள்ள எட்டுக் கிராமங்களில் கிஸ்தி வரிவசூல் செய்து இளையரசனேந்தல் ஜமீன்தாரிடம் கொடுப்பார்கள். இவர்களை ‘ஜூரி’ என்பார்கள்.
அருணகிரி:
வரி வசூலை எந்த முறையில் தீர்மானிப்பார்கள்?
ஒரு ஏக்கருக்கு இவ்வளவு என்ற கணக்கா? அல்லது ஓராண்டுக்கு ஒரு தொகை, அல்லது விளைச்சலில் ஒரு பங்கு என்ற கணக்கா?
விசுவாமித்திரன்:
விளைச்சலில் பங்கு என்பது இல்லை.
அது விவசாயிகளை நேரடியாகப் பாதிக்கும்.
இன்றைய நாள்களில் வருவாய்த் துறையினர் ஒரு ஏக்கருக்கு இவ்வளவு தொகை என்று வசூலிப்பது போலத்தான் அந்நாள்களிலும் வசூலித்து இருக்கின்றார்கள்.
அருணகிரி: என்ன அளவு பணம்?
விசுவாமித்திரன்:
அரையணா, முக்காத் துட்டு, ஒரு அணா என்ற கணக்குத்தான். அப்படிக் காசுகள் கூட எங்களிடம் இருந்தன. இப்போது இல்லை.
அருணகிரி:
வெள்ளை அரசாங்கத்துக்கு இந்த வரியை எப்படி ஒப்படைத்தார்கள்?
விசுவாமித்திரன்: கோவில்பட்டி கிருஷ்ணன் கோவிலுக்கு அருகில் நான்கு ஐந்து கட்டடங்கள் உள்ளன.
ஜமீன்தார் செவத்த துரை காலத்தில் கட்டப்பட்டவை. சத்திரம் என்று சொல்லுவார்கள். ஆண்டுக்கு ஒருமுறை அங்கே வெள்ளைக்காரத் துரைகள் வருவார்கள். அவர்களிடம் கொண்டு போய்க் கொடுக்க வேண்டும்.
அவர்கள் இந்தப் பகுதிக்கு வந்தபோது
ஜமீன் கிராமங்களை இரண்டாகப் பிரித்தார்கள்.
ஒன்று குருவிகுளம் ஒரு ஜமீன்.
மற்றொன்று இளையரசனேந்தல் ஜமீன் ஆனது.
அருணகிரி:
இளையரசனேந்தல் ஜமீன் கட்டடம் இப்போது எப்படி இருக்கின்றது? பார்க்கலாமா?
விசுவாமித்திரன்: நான் அழைத்துச் செல்கிறேன்.
(குளக்கட்டாகுறிச்சியில் இருந்து இளையரசனேந்தல் சென்று இடத்தைப் பார்வை இட்டோம். படங்கள் எடுத்துக் கொண்டேன்).
இந்த மாளிகை கட்டி 350 ஆண்டுகள் ஆகின்றன. கட்டியவர் பெயர் தெரியவில்லை.
மேற்கூரை மட்டும்தான் விழுந்து விட்டதே தவிர, சுற்றுச் சுவர்கள் எல்லாம் இன்னமும் அப்படியேதான் நிற்கின்றன. அந்தக் காலத்தில் அவ்வளவு வலிமையாகக் கட்டி இருக்கின்றார்கள்.
இந்த அரண்மனையில் மாமா மற்றும் அவருடைய இரு மனைவியர், அம்மா, பிள்ளைகள் நாங்கள் எல்லோருமே இந்த வீட்டில்தான் இருந்தோம்.
இந்த இடத்தில் ஒரு பெரிய அரங்கம் இருந்தது.
சுற்றி ஆட்கள் உட்கார்ந்து கொள்ளலாம்.
நடுவில் மாப்பிள்ளை, பெண் உட்கார ஒரு தேக்கு மர நாற்காலி இருந்தது. ஜமீன் குடும்பத்துத் திருமணங்கள் அனைத்தும் இந்த வீட்டில்தான் நடைபெற்றன.
கிழக்கில் இருக்கின்ற கட்டடத்தில்தான் தர்பார் ஹால் இருந்தது.
சுற்று வட்டாரத்தில் இருந்து வருகின்ற வரி வசூல் எல்லாம் அந்தக் கட்டடத்தில்தான் கொண்டு வந்து கொடுப்பார்கள்.
எங்கள் மாமா காலத்திற்குப் பிறகு கட்டடம் பராமரிப்பு இன்றிப் பாழடைந்து விட்டது. மேற்கூரை எல்லாம் விழுந்து விட்டது. இப்போது சுவர்கள் மட்டுமே இருக்கின்றன.
இந்த இடத்தையும் கூட விற்று விட்டார்கள். தஞ்சாவூரைச் சேர்ந்த சிலர் வாங்கி இருக்கின்றார்கள்.
அருணகிரி: தஞ்சாவூர்க்காரர்கள் இளையரசனேந்தல் கிராமத்தில் இடம் வாங்கி இருக்கின்றார்களா?
விசுவாமித்திரன்:
ஆம்; அது மட்டும் அல்ல; இந்தச் சுற்று வட்டாரத்தில் சுமார் 1200 ஏக்கர் வரையிலும் அவர்கள் வாங்கி இருக்கின்றார்கள்.
1996 வரையிலும் இளையரசனேந்தல் ஜமீன் வீட்டில் இருந்த நான்,
1996 இல் மறுமலர்ச்சி தி.மு.கழகத்தில் இணைந்ததற்குப் பிறகு, குளக்கட்டாகுறிச்சிக்கு வந்து விட்டேன்.
அதனால், யார் யார் அந்த இடங்களை வாங்கி இருக்கின்றார்கள் என்ற பெயர் விவரம் எனக்குத் தெரியாது. ஆனால் வாங்கி இருக்கின்றார்கள்.
அருணகிரி:
இளையரசனேந்தல் ஜமீனில் யாருக்கு யார் வழித்தோன்றல்கள் என்ற கொடிவழிப் பட்டியல் இருக்கின்றதா?
விசுவாமித்திரன்:
இதுவரை எழுதி வைக்கவில்லை. இனிமேல்தான் உருவாக்க வேண்டும்.
எங்கள் தாத்தா சேது பாஸ்கர வெங்கடாசல அப்பாசாமிக்கு (ஜமீன்தார்) இரண்டு தாரம்.
மூத்த மனைவிக்கு இரண்டு பையன்கள்.
ஆர்.எஸ். அப்பாசாமி, ஆர்.வி.என். அப்பாசாமி.
ஆர்.எஸ். அப்பாசாமி பிள்ளைகள்:
சாய்ராம், ராஜ்குமார், மோகன், கிருஷ்ணாராம் உட்பட 8 ஆண்கள்.
காசிப்பாண்டி, இராஜேஸ்வரி என இரண்டு பெண்கள். கோவில்பட்டி, வாசுதேவநல்லூரில் வசித்து வருகின்றார்கள்.
ஜமீன்தார் செவத்ததுரை காலத்தில் கோவில்பட்டியில் கட்டப்பட்ட கிருஷ்ணன் கோவில் பரம்பரை அறங்காவலர்களாகப் பொறுப்பு வகித்து வருகின்றார்கள்.
வாசுதேவநல்லூரில் உள்ள நிலபுலன்களைப் பராமரித்து வருகின்றார்கள்.
எங்கள் தாத்தாவின் இரண்டாவது மனைவிக்கு
ஒரு ஆண். முத்தால நரசிம்ம அப்பாசாமி, ராஜலெட்சுமி ஒரு பெண். (எங்கள் தாயார்).
மாமாக்கள் ஆர்.வி.என். அப்பாசாமி, முத்தால நரசிம்ம அப்பாசாமி ஆகியோருக்குக் குழந்தைகள் இல்லை.
எங்கள் தாத்தா ஜமீன்தாரின் தம்பி வெங்கடசால அப்பாசாமி-நவநீதம் அம்மாள் ஆகியோருக்கு, கோவில்பட்டி இலக்குமி நூற்பு ஆலையின் மேலாளராகப் பொறுப்பு வகித்த செல்வராஜ், இராஜஇராஜேஸ்வரி என இரண்டு பிள்ளைகள். இராஜேஸ்வரியை கோவை பிரிமியர் நூற்பு ஆலை தாமோதரசாமி குழுமத்தில் திருமணம் செய்து கொடுத்து இருக்கின்றார்கள்.
அந்த அம்மையார் இயற்கை எய்தி விட்டார். அவருக்கு சரத் சந்திரன், இராஜேந்திரன், செல்வராஜ் ஆகிய மூன்று மகன்கள் இருக்கின்றார்கள்.
ஜமீன் குடும்பத்தில் பாகப்பிரிவினை பிரச்சினை ஏற்பட்டபோது, எட்டயபுரம் எட்டப்ப மன்னர் தலையிட்டு இரண்டு பாகங்களாகப் பிரித்துக் கொடுத்தார்கள்.
நடுவப்பட்டி, கஸ்தூரி ரங்காபுரம், முக்கூட்டுமலை, நக்கலமுத்தன்பட்டி உள்ளிட்ட கிராமங்கள் முதல் தொகுதி என்றும்,
தேவர்குளம், பிள்ளையார்நத்தம், முத்துகிருஷ்ணாபுரம், தோப்புரெட்டிபட்டி, குளக்கட்டாகுறிச்சி இவையெல்லாம் இரண்டாம் பகுதி என்றும் ஒதுக்கிக் கொடுத்தார்கள்.
முதல் தொகுதி, செல்வராஜ் வகையறாவுக்கும், இரண்டாம் தொகுதி எங்களுக்கும் கிடைத்தது.
எங்கள் தாய்மாமா முத்தால நரசிம்ம அப்பாசாமிக்குப் பிள்ளைகள் இல்லை.
எனவே, எங்களைத்தான் பிள்ளைகளாக வளர்த்தார்கள். நாங்கள் எல்லோருமே இளையரசனேந்தல் ஜமீன் வீட்டில்தான் வளர்ந்தோம்.
எனவே, குளக்கட்டாகுறிச்சியை விட இளையரசனேந்தல் சுற்று வட்டாரக் கிராமங்களில்தான் எங்களை அனைவருக்கும் தெரியும்.
அருணகிரி: உங்களுடன் பிறந்தவர்கள் எத்தனை பேர்?
விசுவாமித்திரன்:
நாங்கள் பத்துப் பேர். ஐந்து ஆண்கள், ஐந்து பெண்கள். ஒரு அக்கா பக்கத்தில் இராமலிங்காபுரத்தில் இருக்கின்றார்கள்.
இருவர் கோவில்பட்டி, கடலையூர்; ஒருவர் கோவை; ஒருவர் அமெரிக்கா.
எனது ஒரு அண்ணனும் தம்பியும் இளையரசனேந்தல்; நாங்கள் மூன்று பேர் இங்கே குளக்கட்டாகுறிச்சியில் இருக்கின்றோம்.
பதிவு
அருணகிரி
9444 39 39 03
(2015)
மீள்பதிவு
12.06.2021
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Arunagiri Sankarankovil
Sunday, May 10, 2020
Saturday, April 25, 2020
Naidu and Gounder Capitalist Families of Tamil Nadu
Manchester of the South;
Light Engineering Powerhouse of India’—these are the usual catchphrases used
for Coimbatore, a district in Tamil Nadu (TN) that produces roughly 15 per cent
of the country’s cotton yarn, generates 45 per cent of its knitwear exports,
and meets half of the domestic pump sets requirement.
At one level the basis
for these appellations defies conventional ex- planation. Coimbatore possesses
none of the classic attributes associated with mainstream industrial centres.
It has no abundance of mineral wealth to speak of. The Kongunad region of
western TN—mainly Coimbatore and Erode districts—is landlocked, surrounded by
the Western Ghats and hills on almost all sides. Being far removed from the
major ports—Chennai is over 500 km by road, while it is 450 km to Thoothukudi
and 190 km to Kochi—Coimbatore enjoys none of the location advantages accruing
to Mumbai, Surat, Jamnagar, Kolkata, or Visakhapatnam. Neither has it been
strategically positioned like Ahmedabad on major commercial routes connecting
the ports with the principal towns of the hinterland. Historically, the Kongu
upland plains may have served as an important gateway for troops and commodity
movement over the Ghats through the Palakkad gap. Being in the middle of the
southern peninsula also made it a buffer of sorts between the rulers of the
great Tamil valley centres and those in the Mysore Deccan and west coast
kingdoms. Even these functions were undermined by the thick forest cover and
lack of good roads, which meant that the region was sparsely populated right
till the early part of the nineteenth century. Also, never in its history has
Coimbatore reaped the concomitant economic benefits of being a political or
administrative headquarters like Delhi, Kolkata, and Chennai, a financial
capital on the scale of Mumbai or, for that matter, an ancient temple town a la
Madurai, Thanjavur, Ramanathapuram, and Kanchipuram.
Last, but not least,
Coimbatore’s emergence as one of India’s pre- eminent manufacturing hubs has
been brought about not by Nattukottai Chettiars or other traditional mercantile
interests but by industrialists of two communities—the Kammavar Naidus and
Kongu Vellalas (Gounders)—whose primary vocation is farming. That would convey
an impression of a region with a well-endowed agro-climatic regime, buttressed
by perennial rivers and munificent monsoons. Again, the facts point otherwise.
The western zone districts of Coimbatore, Erode, Karur, and Dindigul receive an
average annual rainfall of 714 mm, which is not only below the all-India level
of 1,190 mm, but even the overall 925 mm figure for TN. Indeed Kongunad lies in
a veritable rain-shadow, rendering it the driest region of the state. It has
also not been blessed by extensive irrigation works of the kind seen in the
Cauvery delta or the Vaigai and Tamirabarani rivers in the southern Tamil
districts. Unlike the relatively dry and newly settled Kongu country, these
systems have been the backbone of a fecund rice-based valley civilization
stretching back to their early Chola and Pandya builders, and capable of
sustaining two, or even three, crops a year.
Here we look at how
Coimbatore has risen to what it is today, in spite of all its perceived
inherent infirmities. More specifically, we examine the two main communities
that have contributed to its ‘Manchesterization’ and
transformation into a
land of foundries, machine shops, and engineering
units fabricating a whole range of goods from castings, motors, and compressors
to pump sets and wet grinders. If the evolution of Chennai and its neighborhoods
into a major engineering and automotive hub owes a lot to Tamil Brahmin groups
like TVS and Amalgamations, the same can be said about the Naidus and Gounders
vis-à-vis Coimbatore.
Antecedents
of Commerce in the Region
Kongunad might not have
been bestowed with the magnificent irrigation networks of the great Tamil
valleys, nor with fine alluvial soils rendered fertile by the silt washed down
by rivers. What it did have though was large tracts of black cotton soil and
significant reserves of underground water. These soils were heavy in texture,
prone to water- logging, and tended to develop deep cracks under dry conditions.
At the same time they contained sufficient clay and organic matter which, in
conjunction with exploitation of the subsoil aquifer, could yield a decent if
not bumper harvest. This, however, called for cultivation of an intensive
nature centred on well-irrigation, as opposed to the surface tank or riverine
flush irrigation resorted to by delta farmers. It further entailed considerable
investment in boring wells through the hard local gneissic rocks, additional provision
for drainage, and deploying stronger ploughs and bullocks to till the heavy
soil and extract water tucked several feet below. A facilitating factor here
was that Kongunad had been settled comparatively late, because of which its
soils were less overworked and retained a lot of natural fertility.
In the process, its
agricultural economy evolved on different lines from that in the river valleys.
While the secure paddy agriculture of the deltas spawned a landed aristocracy
of Brahmin and Mudaliar mirasidars and kaniyatchikarans (literally, controllers
of land) who distanced themselves from cultivation, the land in Kongunad could
not support such a regime. Since field preparation alone was a rigorous
exercise, often necessitating secondary tillage, the characteristic production
unit was the independent thottam or open well irrigated, compact garden plot.
The soil texture demanded a style of capital-intensive farming that was
adequately remunerative, but not conducive for absentee landlordism or a
detached approach. Most holdings clustered around an optimum size of 5–10 acres
that could be watered by a single well and intensively cultivated by a family
and team of hardy cattle (the local Kangayam breed). The counterpart to the
Brahmin-Vellala deltaic kaniyatchikaran in Kongunad was the ‘sturdy’ Gounder
and ‘enterprising’ Naidu agriculturist. Not that there were no mirasidars, but
rarely were they absentees living in big towns or cities.5 The Kongunad
mirasidar was typically a hands-on manager, who took a close interest in the
tenanted holdings. Operating at higher levels of capitalization also made him
more commercially oriented and involved in marketing the crop to ensure returns
commensurate with the investment in his land. Further, he was more receptive to
new productivity-enhancing techniques such as installing engines to draw water
from wells in place of the conventional bullock-powered lifts. Indeed, among
the valuable dowry items that P.S.G. Naidu—a prominent mirasidar and one of
Coimbatore’s industry doyens whom we shall encounter in the next section—is
said to have presented to his daughter Rangammal when she married in 1911 was
an oil engine to irrigate her in-laws’ lands!. Another indicator of the
region’s commercialized agriculture was land prices: a tenancy survey in 1946 recorded
the average rental value of Coimbatore’s thottams to be virtually the highest
for TN and to have risen the most in the preceding thirty-odd years. This
reflected the huge capital investments in land improvement, including building
and maintenance of wells and subsidiary channels.
Initially, Kongunad
peasants produced coarse grains like cumbu (pearl millet), cholam (sorghum),
and ragi. The main cash crops were castor, horse-gram, cotton, groundnut,
tobacco, gingelly, and chilli. The decisive change was the introduction in
1904–5 of ‘Cambodia’— an exotic long-staple variety of cotton from Indo-China
(Cambodia). Till then, Indian farmers were growing only short-staple local
cultivars, Gossypium herbaceum and Gossypium arboreum. These desi cottons were
suited for coarse handspun and woven cloth but had limited demand in overseas
markets or even among domestic spinning mills. The colonial authorities’
attempts to develop long-staple American upland cotton—Gossypium
hirsutum—acclimatized to Indian conditions, had also come to naught.
‘Cambodia’, on the other hand, yielded good quality fibre, even as it had long
roots (unlike normal hirsutum varieties) that reached down to the deep water
table. It was, therefore, ideal for the black soils of Kongunad. With mills
willing to fork out a premium, farmers took up large-scale cultivation of the
new variety, which was termed Marvadi Paruthi or ‘moneylending cotton’ in view
of its profitability. When the century began, Kongunad had no organized market
for cotton. By World War I, Tirupur—hitherto a nondescript ginning centre 40 km
from Coimbatore—became a leading cotton market of the Madras Presidency, even
attracting thirty-odd traders from Mumbai in 1916 who went around villages
offering loans to farmers to produce ‘Cambodia’. At the end of the War, cotton occupied
a third of the region’s sown area and had roughly doubled its coverage in a
quarter of a century.
But Kongunad peasants did
not stop at cultivation. Given their commercial predisposition, they were less
inclined to leave the marketing of their crop to merchants. As G.K. Sundaram,
the nonagenarian chairman of Lakshmi Mills Company Limited, puts it: ‘Our
growers even then knew what was happening in Bombay, about daily price
movements and when to sell.’9 A sample survey in 1919 showed that a third of
the cotton sold in Tirupur was brought into the market yard by the cultivators
themselves.10 Some of them sold the kapas (raw cotton) directly to ginners,
realizing much more than what they would have done by marketing it to local merchants.
Soon, a section—especially the bigger mirasidars—became commission agents,
handling the crop from not only their own but even the neighbouring farmers’
fields. From there they went on to be traders, then ginners, and eventually
millowners.
Kamma
Naidu Entry – Lakshmi & PSG Groups
While the Gounders made
up the bulk of Kongunad’s peasantry, the foray into industry was led by large
landowning mirasidars from the Kammavar Naidu community: originally migrants
affiliated to the Kammas of AP. Among them was G.K. Sundaram’s father
Govindaswamy Kuppu- swamy Naidu. Belonging to Pappanaickenpalayam on the
outskirts of Coimbatore, Kuppuswamy Naidu was when he set up a small ginning
unit in 1905 that used a pair of oxen to pull the rollers in the gins.
Coimbatore then had only one mill owned by Robert Stanes.The Stanes were
basically coffee planters in the Nilgiris who had established a curing facility
in Coimbatore in 1861, before starting the Coimbatore Spinning and Weaving
Mills Company in 1888. To cater to this mill Robert Stanes encouraged locals to
put up gins and it was ostensibly at his prodding that Kuppuswamy Naidu
installed oil engines to replace oxen power. In 1910, Kuppuswamy Naidu promoted
Lakshmi Mills. Although only a ginning factory, it was intended to become a
full mill in due course. The plan was derailed due to heavy losses incurred by him
during the War in forward trading and speculation in kapas. When the War ended
Kuppuswamy Naidu was saddled with huge margin-financed stocks which he had to
dispose of at throwaway prices in Mumbai.
As a result, the credit
for floating the first ever Naidu-owned textile mill went to the family of
Peelamedu Samanaidu Govindaswamy (P.S.G.) Naidu—which founded the Sri Ranga
Vilas Ginning, Spinning & Weaving Mills in 1922. Close on its heels was the
Radhakrishna Mills, promoted in 1923 by yet another mirasidar-turned-ginner and
trader, V. Rangaswamy Naidu. Kuppuswamy Naidu had to wait till 1929 to
commission his first Coimbatore Cotton Mills. Lakshmi Mills remained a ginning
factory until 1933, before becoming a regular mill. All these concerns were
largely funded by capital mobilized through community and kinship networks. The
Ranga Vilas mill was incorporated with a share capital of Rs 3.3 lakhs. Of its
45 shareholders, 38 were Naidus, with the PSG family owning a 55 per cent
controlling stake. Similarly, when Lakshmi Mills was registered in 1910 with a
capital of Rs 100,000, Kuppuswamy Naidu’s chief associates were P.R.
Narayanaswamy Naidu, S.N. Nain Naidu, P.R. Rangaswamy Naidu, and R.
Krishnaswamy Naidu.
Someone who appears to
have played a significant part in this period is K. Krishnaswamy (K.K.) Naidu,
son-in-law of P.S.G. Naidu and beneficiary of the earlier-mentioned oil engine
gifted by the latter for his daughter’s marriage. A mirasidar from
Karadivavipudur village in Palladam taluka, K.K. Naidu not only supplied cotton
to the ginning units of PSG & Sons but supposedly bailed the family out
once by extending a personal guarantee, following financial difficulties
arising from a contract entered into by them with Volkart Brothers, a Swiss
trading firm. The PSG family reciprocated this assistance by contributing to
the share capital of Sri Balasubramania Mills that K.K. Naidu himself floated
in 1934. K.K. Naidu and his maternal cousin C.N. Venkatapathy Naidu were also
initially partners in Kuppuswamy Naidu’s Coimbatore Cotton Mills. But
differences of opinion between the directors caused a split, with K.K. Naidu
and Venkatapathy Naidu deciding to have their own separate Balasubramania and
Kasthuri mills, respectively.16 K.K. Naidu was instrumental in providing
venture capital and related support to a number of other mills in Coimbatore.
These include Sri Ramakrishna Mills Coimbatore Ltd of S.N. Rangaswamy Naidu
(SNR group) and Sri Ramnarayan Mills of N. Velappan.
At the start of the
century Kongunad had a solitary mill belonging, as we saw, to the Stanes. By
1947 there were 32 in the Coimbatore- Salem belt, accounting for 48 per cent of
the Tamil region’s total spindle capacity. Of the 32, 16 were owned by Naidus,
with 10 of them being controlled by the PSG, Kuppuswamy Naidu, and V.
Rangaswamy Naidu groups. The three families exercised marginal control even in
some of the remaining Naidu undertakings. Interestingly, most of these came up
after the onset of the Depression, by which time the textile industry in Mumbai
had gone into long-term decline. ‘The Depression actually helped us because the
textile machinery manufacturers in Manchester were willing to supply their
equipment cheaply, which we could install’, says G.K. Sundaram. Moreover, the
new mills were consciously located nearer the villages, helping them to further
prune capital and labour costs. Also, the crisis in the Mumbai industry may
have proved a blessing by way of restricting competition— something that got an
added boost through the clamping of duties on imported yarn in 1927 and 1931,
besides the Civil Disobedience movement and the swadeshi (indigenous production)
drive during this period.
But a more important
reason for Coimbatore emerging as a mini- Manchester, even as the mills in
western India were floundering, had to do with structural factors. Unlike the
composite spinning-cum- weaving mills in Mumbai, the Coimbatore textile units
were primarily spinning concerns, selling yarn to the numerous handloom weavers
concentrated in the region. ‘We never faced a serious problem of marketing,
since Coimbatore was itself a big handloom centre’, notes G.K. Sundaram. The
substitution of mill yarn for handspun yarn actually stimulated the cottage
weaving industry by enhancing raw material availability and contributing to the
latter’s productive capacity. This physical proximity and symbiotic link with
the handloom sector—in later years this extended to the knitwear and power loom
clusters in adjoining areas like Tirupur, Erode, Karur, and Salem— conferred
the region’s mills with a tremendous advantage over the Mumbai industry and
also explains its continued resilience today.
Kammas in Southern Tamil Districts:
An issue worth addressing
here is: why couldn’t the successful industrial transition achieved by the
Kammavar Naidus of Coimbatore be replicated by the same community in the
southern Tamil districts, where, too, it took to the cultivation of ‘Cambodia’
in a big way. A plausible explanation may have been the entrenched European
presence in the cotton markets of the far South. Being close to the Tuticorin
port, the cotton-growing areas of Tirunelveli and other southern districts were
basically geared towards production for the export market. The big European
expatriate firms were, hence, active there right from the beginning. Volkarts
built its first gin in Tuticorin in 1876. A. & F. Harvey followed suit two
years later. Elsewhere, Rallis had gins in Sattur, Virudhunagar, and
Tirumangalam. Before the century ended the Harveys also had spinning mills at
Papanasam, Tuticorin, and Madurai. Kongunad, by contrast, was relatively virgin
territory. The Stanes there had 46,434 spindles in 1941, whereas the
corresponding spindleage with the Harveys and Binnys (who had the Buckingham
and Carnatic mills near Chennai) was 465,424 and 119,108, respectively. All the
mills of the Lakshmi, PSG, and V. Rangaswamy Naidu families put together had a
spinning capacity of 205,724 or less than half that of the Harveys. The dominance
of the Harveys can be gauged from the fact that its yarn prices set the market
benchmark and other mills had to sell for ‘round about 2 annas less. These
would well have deterred the southern Naidus from taking a leaf out of the
books of their Kongunad brethren, who ironically may have benefited by being
distant from the ports.
But not all the
pioneering Naidu entities have built on the lead given by their founders. The
V. Rangaswamy Naidu group was ranked forty- seventh out of the country’s top
seventy-five industrial houses listed by the Monopolies Inquiry Commission in
1965. The Industrial Licensing Policy Inquiry Committee of 1969, too, rated it
fifty-third among seventy-three premier groups. Apart from owning a clutch of
textile units (Radhakrishna Mills, Jayalakshmi Mills, Tirumurti Mills, VR
Textiles), the group had forayed into sugar (Kamala Sugar Mills) and aluminium
(Madras Aluminium Company Limited or Malco). Most of these are now either
closed (including Radhakrishna Mills) or have been sold (Malco, which was
acquired by Anil Agarwal’s Sterlite Indus- tries in 1995).
The PSG family is known
today mainly for the trust set up by the founder’s four sons—P.S.G.
Venkataswamy Naidu, P.S.G. Rangaswami Naidu, P.S.G. Ganga Naidu, and P.S.G.
Narayanaswamy Naidu—in 1926, running several educational institutions in
Coimbatore. It also has an ‘industrial institute’ that manufactures motors,
pumps, machine tools, and castings, even while PSG has ceased to exist as a
business group per se. The original Sri Ranga Vilas Mill has been taken over by
the state-owned National Textiles Corporation (NTC). Sri Kumaran Mills,
established by the group in 1936, is now under D. Krishnamurthy, whose father
G.V. Doraiswamy is the son of P.S.G. Venkataswamy Naidu. Another mill, Sri
Varadaraja Textiles, is with Krishnamurthy’s brother D. Varadarajan. Then we
have Sri Karthikeya Spinning & Weaving Mills of G.R. Karthikeyan, the
grandson of P.S.G. Ganga Naidu through G. Ramaswamy. G.R. Karthikeyan is
incidentally also the father of Narain Karthikeyan, ‘the fastest Indian on
wheels’. All these are mills not big by modern-day standards or even in
relation to some of the newer and more dynamic textile conglomerates. The only
entrepreneur of note from the PSG stock today is probably Rajshree Pathy, the
granddaughter of P.S.G. Ganga Naidu through another son, G. Varadaraj. She
heads Rajshree Sugars & Chemicals, which has two sugar mills at Theni and
Villupuram districts with a crushing capacity of 7,500 tcd. Rajshree is married
to G.K. Sundaram’s son S. Pathy, although she insists that her business, set up
in 1990, is distinct from that of Lakshmi Mills.
Among the old mirasidari
Naidu business families, it is only Lakshmi that has survived. Beginning with
mills, the group diversified into textile machinery by investing in Textool
Company (started in 1946 by a Sheffield-trained engineer, D. Balasundaram) and
Lakshmi Machine Works (LMW) in 1962. It also went into making artificial fibre
through South India Viscose (SIV)—a joint venture with the V. Rangaswamy Naidu
family—in 1957, besides promoting a fabric processing company, United
Bleachers, in collaboration with some other mills in Coimbatore. SIV was taken
over by the Shapoorji Pallonji Mistry group in 1983, before being wound up in
2003. In the same year Textool was merged with LMW. United Bleachers was sold
in 1996 and eventually declared sick. While Lakshmi Mills (with over 200,000
spindles) and LMW are still there, it is the latter that is now the real cash cow.
With a 60 per cent share in the domestic spinning equipment market, LMW is seen
as being one of the few global manufacturers of the entire textile machinery
range.
The waning influence of
the Naidu textile gentry does not, however, mean that the community is a spent
force. On the contrary Naidu capital has moved on to other areas. Even in
textiles, they continue to wield significant power, though the new magnates are
no longer drawn from traditional mirasidar ranks, as we will find out in the
following section.
New Vistas
Father
of Coimbatore Foundry – Narayanaswamy Naidu
Like textiles, the
origins of Coimbatore’s fabled engineering industry lie in the
commercialization of its agriculture. The progenitor of its first
foundry—today, the region has some 600 of them—was Narayana- swamy Naidu.
Hailing from Pappanaickenpalayam, the village from where Kuppuswamy Naidu came,
he initially worked in Robert Stanes’ workshop (the latter, besides
popularizing cotton ginning using oil engines, also introduced the lathe and
the drilling machine to Coimba- tore). In 1922 Narayanaswamy Naidu opened a
small unit to repair gins and sugarcane crushers. Since procuring castings was
not easy then, he is believed to have gone all the way to Kochi to study the
operations of the crucible furnace at the Cochin Shipyard. Two years later the
Dhandayuthapani Foundry (DPF) was born. By 1928 it had produced Coimbatore’s
first belt driven pump. The PSG Industrial Institute similarly started off as a
workshop—to service and manufacture ploughs and other farm equipment—followed
by a foundry that came up almost the same time as DPF.
Coimbatore’s
Enduring Symbol -G. Doraisamy (G.D.) Naidu
But if there is one
enduring symbol of Coimbatore’s engineering ethos it is G. Doraisamy (G.D.)
Naidu. Indeed, so pervasive is the legend of this ‘Thomas Alva Edison of India’
that parables detailing his exploits abound to this day. Originally from
Kalangal village where his father, Gopal Naidu, farmed about forty acres, G.D.
Naidu (1893– 1974) studied for barely three years in the local school. He left
the village as a 20-year-old, the apparent trigger being an auto-cycle
belonging to an English settlement officer. The Englishman, one Mr Lancashire,
had visited the village on survey work in this strange-looking vehicle that
became an object worthy of possession for the young Kalangal resident. The
story goes that G.D. Naidu went to Coimbatore and worked as a hotel boy for a
couple of years to save enough to approach the same Mr Lancashire and convince
him to part with the bike. Once got, the machine was ripped apart; the parts
were dismantled and reassembled a sufficient number of times to permit a
thorough scrutiny of its structure and working.
How true the above tale
is in all its minute details cannot be ascertained. What definitely exists is a
photograph of G.D. Naidu seated on the said auto-cycle. And what cannot be
denied is the man’s creative genius and self-experimentation capacity, proof of
which is the range of things he designed and made on his own: valve radios,
slide rules, clocks, a 16 mm projector and movie camera with a distance
adjuster, a model two-seater car, a vote-recording machine, and an electric
razor- cum-blade that he got patented in Germany. The ‘Rasant’ razor, incorporating
a small motor and operated by dry cells fitted inside, was made by G.D. Naidu
at a factory in a German town called Heilbronn.32 Many of these inventions can
be seen at a museum in Coimbatore bearing his name, which also displays the
famous auto-cycle and numerous gadgets accumulated from his travels round the
world.
G.D. Naidu’s signal
achievement though was in developing the country’s first indigenous electric
motor in 1937 along with D. Balasundaram, even before the Kirloskar Brothers.
It was the motor’s success that fuelled the foundation of Textool by
Balasundaram and later on LMW. How the two went about it is a story in itself,
best told by G.D. Naidu’s son G.D. Gopal: ‘First, they made the castings and
then the windings, the shaft and the stamping. In the beginning, the bearings
and enameled wires were being imported, which stopped when War War II intruded.
So, they fabricated a machine to make and draw the wire, followed by an enameling
plant to produce the enamel for the copper wire. They also tried to manufacture
the bearings by making the steel balls and rings. By then, the War had ended.’
As a businessman G.D.
Naidu’s career was no less spectacular. After the stint at the hotel he worked
in a ginning factory, before managing to mobilize capital to establish his own
gin. But like many others he was bitten by the trading bug and went to Mumbai,
where his associate in cotton speculation and blowing-up savings was none other
than Kuppuswamy Naidu. With little money in hand, G.D. Naidu offered his
services as a mechanic to Robert Stanes who, instead, advanced him a loan to
buy a bus. This coach, operating between Pollachi and Palani in 1920 with G.D.
Naidu himself behind the wheel, was the precursor to the United Motor Service
(UMS). By the 1930s UMS was running a fleet of 600 buses across Coimbatore, the
Nilgiris, and the Cochin- Malabar districts. G.D. Naidu left his distinct imprint
here as well. Among his innovations were an automatic ticketing machine (a
variant of his vote-recording machine), a vibrator-testing device, and auto-
radiators requiring little water. UMS further diversified into manufacturing
radios, fans, pumps, motors, valves, sanitary ware, wet grinders, and assorted
goods like electronic voltage stabilizers and mosquito terminators. Some of
G.D. Naidu’s ambitious plans to undertake commercial production of the ‘Rasant’
electric razor and even putting up an automobile factory in Coimbatore failed
to take off. The locally available steel did not meet the specifications of the
Norwegian steel that he had originally used to fabricate the blade.
The UMS group still
remains, though its activities are somewhat low profile, focusing mainly on
tool and die making, plastic injection molding, prototype design, and the
manufacture of precision lathes and CNC (computer numerically-controlled)
machines. Likewise, DPF continues to manufacture pumps, motors, monoblack,
diesel engines, and machinery spares, while not being the force it was in the
pioneering days of Narayanaswamy Naidu. Balasundaram’s inventive zeal has been
carried forward to an extent by his son B. Jayachandran, whose Jaya Automotives
has the distinction of developing the first indigenous diesel engines for the
‘Ambassador’, ‘Premier Padmini’, and ‘Standard 2000’ cars, besides rolling out
India’s first ‘own car’ by the name of ‘Mayura’ in 1986. The contribution of
G.D. Naidu, D. Balasundaram, and Narayanaswamy Naidu (one should perhaps
include Robert Stanes as well here) etc. has been to foster a culture of
industrial research and shopfloor innovation that has become a hallmark of
Coimbatore. From producing its first pump in 1928 and India’s first motor in 1937,
the organized pumpset industry in Coimbatore is alone today worth Rs 1,200
crore, out of an all-India market of Rs 2,500 crore.34 And this is a sector
dominated by Naidus: CRI Pumps of G. Rajendran , Fisher Pumps (part of the
Sharp Tools group of K.K. Ramaswamy), Mahendra Pumps of Mahendra Ramdas, Suguna
Industries of V. Lakshminarayanaswamy, Ellen Industries of V. Dhamodaraswamy,
and Perfect Engineers of R.R. Ranganathan. Much of the region’s strength is
derived from its foundries and skilled human resource base. These have made it
a manufacturing haven for castings, auto components, and light engineering
goods of all hues.
L.G.
Balakrishnan & Brothers
When G.D. Naidu bought
the first bus that he drove in 1920, the man on the conductor’s seat was a
cousin of his, L.R. Govindarajulu (L.R.G.) Naidu. By the time the second bus
arrived, they had split the business. While UMS operated the Coimbatore–Kerala
belt, L.R.G. Naidu’s Varadaraj Motor Service (VMS) plied eastern districts like
Madurai and Tiruchirapalli. Over time VMS also grew into a fleet of 250 buses.
From a fleet operator L.R.G. Naidu went into bus bodybuilding and in 1937
founded L.G. Balakrishnan & Brothers (LGB). From producing chains for
two-wheelers and four-wheelers LGB has become India’s largest supplier of
automotive and industrial chains (‘Rolon’ brand). Another company, Elgi
Equipments, was set up in 1960 to make garage service station equipment. It is
the market leader in this segment—covering vehicle hoists, wheel balancers,
crash repair systems, paint booths, and airconditioning recovery units—and also
a major player in air compressors and diesel engines. The Elgi group is today a
premier light engineering conglomerate. Other concerns in its fold include
Pricol Limited (the biggest domestic manufacturer of automotive dashboard
instruments and accessories), Elgitread India (a specialist in tyre retreading
machinery and raw materials), Elgi Electric & Industries (motors,
alternators and diesel generator sets), and Elgi Ultra Industries (which
produces ‘Ultra’ wet grinders, among other things). Even though automotive
engineering has been the Elgi group’s forte, like all mainstream Naidu
industrial houses it has a stake in textiles, through Precot Limited and Super
Spinning. ‘Our entry into spinning was mainly due to V.N. Ramachandran, who was
married to my sister, Vijayalakshmi’, says L.G. Varadaraj, son of L.R.G. Naidu.
Premier Cotton Spinning Mills Limited was incorporated in 1962 by V.N.
Ramachandran and his brother N. Damodaran, along with L.G. Balakrishnan
(Varadaraj’s brother). Precot is an offshoot of this company and, together with
Super Spinning, controls over 300,000 spindles. While Precot and Super Spinning
are part of the Rs 2,000 crore Elgi Empire, V.N. Ramachandran’s son, R.
Jagadish Chandran has his own Premier Mills Group with 200,000-plus spindles.
Both these groups are currently as big, if not bigger, names in the textile
industry than the old Naidu mill magnates, the Lakshmi Group included.
K
G Group
Another important ‘new’ Naidu textile combine
is the KG Group. Its founder, K. Govindaswamy Naidu, was born in 1909 at
Peelamedu, the village of P.S.G. Naidu. However, unlike the latter’s 1,200
acres plus landholding, Govindaswamy Naidu’s father, Kondasamy, cultivated a
mere twelve acres. Govindaswamy was not enamored of agriculture and migrated to
Annur, which is an hour’s drive from Coimbatore. There he first took up road
construction, before starting a raw cotton trading venture in 1932. By 1942 he
had built his first gin to separate lint from the raw kapas and was supplying
to the scores of mills that had come up in and around Coimbatore. Over the next
couple of decades he added three more ginning factories. The next stage was to
enter milling, which his group did by not establishing new, but buying
existing, units. In 1970 it took over Sri Kannapiran Mills, followed by the
Kadri Mills Coimbatore Limited in 1975, both of which were in corporated in
1946 and had changed hands several times.
Since then the KG group
has become a fully-integrated textile major with operations straddling ginning,
milling, weaving, knitting, the manufacture of terry-towels (Sharadha Terry
Products Limited), denim fabric (K.G. Denim Limited) and jeans-wear (‘Trigger’
jeans). The Rs 700 crore group also has interests in the production and export
of gray iron castings through CPC Limited, formerly Coimbatore Premier
Corporation. Further, there is the K. Govindaswamy Naidu Medical Trust which
runs the 350-bed ‘super-speciality’ KG Hospital in Coimbatore and an Eye
Hospital that claims to have conducted 65,000 free cataract surgeries with
intra-ocular lens implant. Heading the trust is
G. Bakthavathsalam, the
group founder’s son, who is a cancer surgeon from the Madras Medical College.
‘I was doing a postdoctoral fellowship at Mount Sinai, Chicago, in the early
1970s, when my father called me over to start the hospital. He had studied only
till the fifth standard, but was keen that I become a doctor. We began with 25
beds in 1974 and today it is an Rs 40 crore business on its own’, he notes
Aravind
Eye Hospital Dr G V –Infinite Vision.
An even more remarkable
medical venture is the Aravind Eye Care System (AECS) of Govindappa
Venkataswamy, from Sivakasi, Southern Tamil Nadu, who initiated it as an
eleven-bed private clinic in 1976 after retiring from Madurai’s Government
Medical College as head of its ophthalmology department. Today, it is a case
study in the world’s top business schools, forming part of every other management
guru’s evangelical armory. In 2004 the five Arvind Eye Hospitals at Madurai,
Coimbatore, Tirunelveli, Theni, and Pondicherry, with a 3,600-bed combined
strength, performed a mindboggling 228,894 surgeries and handled 1,635,500
outpatient visits. Cumulatively, from 1976, AECS has conducted more than 2.2
million eye surgeries and attended to nearly 18 million outpatients.
Three-fourths of surgeries and two-thirds of outpatient visits are serviced
free of cost; yet it has proved to be a financially self-supporting venture
with an estimated annual turnover of Rs 60 crore. The system also has a
manufacturing division, Aurolab, to produce intra-ocular lenses and suture
needles, which have considerably brought down the cost of cataract surgeries.
Poultry
Sri Venkatesa Group
Besides textiles,
engineering, and hospitals, the Naidus have a presence in industries such as
paper and poultry. The Venkatesa group— whose founder G.V. Govindaswamy Naidu
established the Sri Venkatesa Mills in 1934—owns a number of paper mills in
Udumalpet taluka, even as its original textile business has grown to roughly
85,000 spindles. The group, now under the founder’s son-in-law V. Genguswamy
Naidu, also runs a chain of schools all over Tamil Nadu and a women’s college
at Udumalpet.
Equally well known in
paper is R. Ramaswamy who, in fact, pioneered the design and manufacture of
paper plants in India. Formerly employed with LMW, he set up Servall
Engineering in the early 1970s, which is a leading integrated paper and pulp
machinery maker. Ramaswamy’s company also had a coated duplex paperboard
facility that he sold in 2000 to L.M. Thapar’s Ballarpur Industries, before the
latter disposed of the same to ITC in 2003. B. Soundararajan’s Suguna Poultry
group is another Naidu concern to have come up only in the last two decades or
so. It is now an Rs 1,000 crore enterprise—next to Venkateshwara
Hatcheries—with operations extending from the breeding of grandparent and
parent stock to contract broiler farming, poultry feed manufacture, and
processing meat for exports and the domestic market.
The
Gounders
We have so far fleetingly
referred to the Gounders. Partly, this has to do with their comparatively late
entry into industry. The Gounders, no doubt, formed the numerically dominant
section of Kongunad’s peasantry. Like the Naidus they were progressive
agriculturists, drawn pretty early into marketing their own crop. A souvenir
released on 28 October 1938 to mark the ‘silver jubilee’ of the Kaleeswarar
Mills, founded in 1906, gives information on its first board of directors.
Among them is V.C. Vellingiri Gounder, described as a ‘landlord’ from
Vellakinar village. The same souvenir carries the copy of a glowing ‘address’
to the company’s managing agent, P. Somasundaram Chetty, by prominent ‘cotton
and yarn merchants of Coimbatore’ on 8 March 1926.Two names in this list of
merchants are E.R. Kandasamy Gounder and P. Rathinasabapathi Gounder.
Notwithstanding this
involvement in the cotton trade, the first Gounder-promoted mill did not come
up till 1935, by which time the initial Naidu industrial trickle had turned
into a veritable flood. And even after the establishment of Gnanambikai Mills
by V.C. Vellingiri Gounder—who almost three decades back was in the first board
of Kaleeswarar Mills—no new Gounder mill was floated in the next twenty years.
Then, between 1955 and 1957, two mills were started: the Sri Karunambikai Mills
of A.V. Ramana Gounder at Somanur and Sri Sakthi Textiles of N. Mahalingam at
Pollachi (both in Coimbatore district). The latter mill happened to be the
maiden industrial venture of what is today the Rs 1,600 crore Sakthi group,
whose foundations were laid in the early 1930s by Mahalingam’s father P.
Nachimuthu Gounder. We will study this conglomerate—with interests in sugar,
transport, finance, auto components, textiles, education, edible oils, etc.—in
greater detail later.
But the arrival of
Gounder capital, in the true sense—in contrast with isolated cases of
industrialists from the community—is a phenomenon mainly of the 1980s,
coinciding with Tirupur’s emergence as a pre-eminent cotton knitwear export
hub. Between 1984 and 2004 the export of cotton knitwear from Tirupur soared
from 10.42 million pieces (valued at Rs 9.69 crore) to 400.47 million pieces,
worth Rs 4,553.77 crore or more than a billion dollars. That translates into an
annual compounded growth of 31 per cent in rupee terms. Further, these only
represent direct exports and exclude indirect shipments routed through agents
in Mumbai, Delhi, and other centres. Of India’s total export earnings of Rs
9,948.90 crore from knitted garments in 2004, Tirupur’s share was 46 per cent.42
In the processTirupur has displaced traditional knitwear export clusters such
as Mumbai, Ludhiana and Delhi to storm into the numero uno position.
To understand the
relevance of all this to us one needs only to examine the profile of Tirupur’s
exporters. Of the top fifty firms—which accounted for Rs 2,200 crore or
slightly under half of exports from the region in 2004—as many as thirty-three
are Gounder-owned. The community’s dominance becomes all the more stark when we
look at the composition of the office bearers of the Tirupur Exporters’ Association
(TEA). In this case, six out of seven—A. Sakthivel of Poppys Knit- wear
(president), N. Chandran of Eastman Exports Global Clothing (vice-president),
S. Duraiswamy of Prem Knitwear (vice-president), K. Manthrachalam of Jaihind
Mills (joint secretary), P. Vidhyaprakash of Styleman, and K.A.S. Thierumurthi
of Stallion Garments—are Gounders.The odd man out is the secretary, G.
Karthikeyan of General Textile Industries, who is from the Kaikola Mudaliar weaving
community. Viewed against this background, we ought to explore Tirupur somewhat
closer.
Tirupur, as already
noted, shot into prominence as a cotton market in the early part of the
twentieth century. This was facilitated by its location in the middle of a
cotton-growing belt and also a railhead built in 1862 linking it to both the
east and west coast ports of Madras and Beypore. In 1931 Tirupur had six cotton
presses and eighteen ginning factories; by decade end it also had three mills,
two of them owned by Devanga Chettiars (a weaving caste) and one by a Muslim
trader (Asher Textiles). The early
knitting units, too, were set up primarily by the two communities. They
included M. Abdul Raguman Sahib’s Azad Knitting Company (started in 1926),
Rajendra Knitting of Pethi Chetty, and Khadar Knitting of S.A. Khadar, who
founded the South India Hosiery Manufacturers’ Association (SIHMA) in 1956.
Easy access to yarn, the availability of cheap land and labour (relative to
Coimbatore), and hard water from the Noyyal river conducive to bleaching were
key drivers behind the mushrooming of knitwear units in Tirupur. The 1961
Census put their number at 230.
There were two basic
characteristics of these units. Firstly, they pre- dominantly produced banians
(vests) for the domestic market. For the same reason, Tirupur is still called
India’s ‘banian capital’, a tag it has not been able to shrug off to this day.
Secondly, they were composite units, wherein all operations were under one
roof. The yarn sourced from mills was knitted into fabric, which was then
calendared (for shrinkage control) and bleached to produce the ‘white’ cloth
ready for garmenting. The processed fabric was cut to the required dimensions
before stitching, labelling, ironing, packing, and dispatch of the finished
product. All these were carried out in-house, with only bleaching being
occasionally contracted out. This system was in vogue till roughly the late
1960s. The impetus to change came from labour militancy. Kolkata, at that
point, was still the country’s most important centre for cotton knitwear in
terms of output. A series of strikes and lay-offs there prompted North Indian
merchant capital to look at Tirupur as an alternative sourcing base. They began
by supplying fabric from Ludhiana, to be cut and stitched by workers at their
homes. In due course this became standard practice even among local factory
owners, who encouraged employees to put up their own finishing units with
offers of regular orders. Soon, there were individual households with not just
a power table bearing 6–7 stitching machines, but even second-hand circular
knitting machines bought from Ludhiana that converted yarn into fabric. Towards
the end 1970s the erstwhile workers were producing whole garments on contract
and subcontracting portions of their work to further layers of job-workers. The
old order of vertically integrated knitwear companies had crumbled, as manifest
in official data recording a decline in the number of workers per unit in Tirupur
from 74 in 1965 to 21 by 1984.
What this fragmentation
of the production process simultaneously did was provide an entry point for
Gounders into knitwear manufacture. While the traditional Kamma or Naidu
transition to industry may have taken place through investment of accumulated
agricultural surpluses, in this case certain push factors appear to have been
more at work. Many of the first-generation Gounder knitwear entrepreneurs were
farmers from villages surrounding Tirupur who had been pushed into employment
in hosiery units because of consecutive monsoon failures, declining water
tables, and rising cultivation costs. At the same time the demise of composite
manufacturing had vastly reduced the outlays required for starting a unit,
enabling the Gounders to gain a foothold in the industry. And once that
happened it was only a matter of time before they had taken over; a study in
1984 provided the following community-wise break-up of Tirupur’s knitwear
units: Gounders 62 per cent, Chettiars 14.4 per cent, other Hindus 18.8 per
cent, and non-Hindus 5.5 per cent. The basis for Gounder dominance lay not in
access to capital as much as in their exercising control over the entire
subcontracting network. One estimate showed 72 per cent of indirect exporters
(units supplying to the ultimate exporters) and 74 per cent of job-workers in
Tirupur to be Gounders. That in itself created formidable entry barriers for
‘outsiders’, including direct exporters who, ergo, had to confine themselves to
sourcing rather than manufacturing.
Like their predecessors
the new Gounder firms began by producing banians for the local market. While
Tirupur was exporting small inner-wear consignments even in the 1970s—mainly
through traders in Mumbai and Kolkata—the real boom began in the ensuing
decade. The man who is said to have triggered it by making the first
high-volume export purchases from Tirupur was Antonio Verona, an Italian agent
who came in 1979 through exporters based in Kolkata. Sensing Tirupur’s potential,
Verona stayed on to expose local knitwear units to the intricacies of producing
for the world market and even invested heavily in a Gounder-owned concern, City
Knitting. Although it folded up eventually after the rejection of a major
order, the process of export-led manufacture was well in place. Also, a second
generation of Gounder businessmen had then come onto the scene. These were
either educated siblings of existing ex-worker-owners or a new lot of
professionals on whose initiative TEA was formed in 1990 (as a parallel to the
more domestic market-oriented SIHMA). Alongside, Tirupur’s product profile
expanded to ‘basic’ T-shirts, and then to more fashion-intensive sportswear,
jackets, sweatshirts, Bermudas, children’s wear, skirts, and lingerie, largely
catering to global buyers like C&A, Wal-Mart, JC Penney, Sara Lee, Marks
& Spencer, Tommy Hilfiger, and GAP.
A typical case of a
Gounder ex-worker from a rural background making the switch over to local
banian maker, indirect exporter, and, finally, direct exporter is provided by
S. Ramasamy of Best International. ‘Best’ Ramasamy, as he prefers to be known,
belonged to a farming family in Velayuthampalayam, which is 25 km from Tirupur.
Being a dry area, where accessing water meant digging a bore-well 1,200 feet deep,
life wasn’t easy. At the age of 16, Ramasamy, who had failed to make it even to
high school, went to Tirupur as a labourer in a bleaching unit. ‘That was in
1962 and I worked there [Murugan Bleaching, owned by a relative] for five
years’, he recounts. In 1967 Ramasamy set up a banian unit in which he invested
Rs 10,000. Half of this came from his savings while working and the rest by
mortgaging his twenty- acre agricultural land. Ramasamy also managed to raise
Rs 15,000 from the State Bank of India (SBI), which went towards procuring
‘Sieko overlock’ sewing machines from Ludhiana. Initially, the fabric was
purchased from outside and his unit, employing eight workers, did the
bleaching, manual cutting, stitching, ironing, and packaging. In 1975 he
installed four knitting machines—sourced from Raj Mechanical Works, again of
Ludhiana—to undertake direct fabrication from yarn.
For the first ten years
Ramasamy restricted himself to making banians and marketing them under ‘Simla’
brand in the four southern states. In 1977 he fulfilled an export order through
a Mumbai-based Gujarati trader (‘one Mehta of KT Corporation’). But the big
order came four years later from Uganda. That was the time when that country’s
military dictator, Idi Amin, had been deposed and been succeeded by Milton
Obote. ‘It was part of a 40 lakh T-shirts order timed for their elections.
Basically these were banians on which Milton Obote’s photo had to be printed on
the front and the name of his party, Uganda People’s Congress, on the back. I
had to deliver 40,000 pieces valued at Rs 30 lakh, which was more than my
company’s net worth. But the problem was that banks refused to open a letter of
credit (LC). A Uganda LC is worse than toilet paper, they told me. Thankfully the
payment came in a year’s time’, Ramasamy states. After that there was no
looking back. In 1985 Ramasamy ventured into direct exports and today his group
has an annual turnover of over Rs 200 crore. This includes exports of Rs 125
crore, mainly undergarments and kidswear supplied to American and European
retail giants, such as Sara Lee, Mothercare, C&A, Tesco Stores, and
Wal-Mart.
While Gounder entry into
knitwear was originally facilitated by the breakup of the old composite units,
the last ten years or so have witnessed a renewed trend towards vertical
integration. Best International, for instance, now has five garmenting
factories with facilities for not just knitting, cutting, and stitching, but
even for fabric compacting, rotary printing, computerized embroidery, and steam
ironing. It also has a unit that makes elastic tapes for undergarments. The
only operation being outsourced is bleaching and dyeing, even as the company is
put- ting up a dyeing plant at Perundurai in adjoining Erode district. As if these
were not enough, the company has two spinning mills at Dharapuram with a
capacity of 60,000 spindles. This case of the wheel turning full circle is not
specific to Ramasamy. As the TEA president, A. Sakthivel, points out, all major
exporters are aiming at vertical integration and the pressure for it is coming
from the buyers. ‘They want us to ins- tall state-of-the-art fabrication and
processing machinery within our own unit that makes it more amenable to quality
control and meeting their stringent norms’, he notes.52 Thus, the old
Ludhiana-make second- hand circular knitting machines capable of making only
‘fine’ fab- ric have been substituted by imported German or Italian equipment
that can knit a wider range of ‘Jacquard’, ‘Inter-lock’, ‘Single Jersey’,
‘Honeycombed’, and ‘Waffle’ structures. Similarly, traditional steam
calendaring and open winch bleaching have given way to compacting,
tumble-drying, and ‘soft flow’ dyeing, while rotary printing and steam ironing
have replaced screen-printing and electric irons. And, like Best International,
all the big direct exporters, from Eastman to Poppys, Centwin, KPR Knits, Prem
Knitwear, and the Royal Classic group (which owns the ‘Classic Polo’ and
‘Smash’ brands), have established their own spinning mills of 20,000 to 30,000
spindles each, so as to secure
supplies of yarn. This, to a great extent, was spurred by the spiralling of
yarn prices during the mid-1990s, in the wake of the government liberalizing
exports. ‘We were then at the mercy of the Naidu mill-owners of Coimbatore,
which is no longer so’, says a leading knit- wear exporter.
In fact the massive
Gounder foray into spinning since the 1980s is something not as well documented
as their overwhelming domination in cotton knitwear. One of TN’s biggest
textile barons today is P.S. Velusamy, whose Sri Shanmugavel group controls
nine mills in Dindigul district with aggregate spindleage of 3.5 lakhs. Other
major Gounder spinning concerns are the KPR group of K.P. Ramasamy (which also
owns KPR Knits), Sangeeth Textiles of E.N. Ramasamy, the Chola Textiles group
of A.P. Appukutti, and Eveready Spinning Mills of A.R. Subramaniam. All have
capacities in excess of one lakh spindles each, Making them bigger than even
the ‘old’ Gounder textile entities like Gnanambikai, Karunambikai, and Sri
Sakthi. What is further interesting is that these mills have come up in
Dindigul, Erode, and satellite towns around Coimbatore such as Annur and
Tirupur. Thus, the Naidu textile bastion of Coimbatore has been subjected to
aggressive Gounder encroachment from the fringes.
Textiles apart, the
Gounders have a substantial presence in engineering and agri-business. The Rs
200-crore-plus Texmo Industries, promoted in 1956 by Ramaswamy Gounder, is a
market leader in agricultural pumpsets. His son R. Kumaravelu runs a separate
company, Aquasub Engineering that also markets pumps under the ‘Texmo’ and
‘Aquatex’ brands. P. Subramanian’s Shanthi Gears—listed among the hundred best
small-sized companies of Asia-Pacific and Europe by Forbes magazine in its 1
November 2004 issue—is a major manufacturer of industrial gearboxes, gear
wheels, motors and assemblies. K. Ramaswamy’s Roots Industries is India’s
leading and the world’s eleventh biggest supplier of electric and air horns for
automobiles and commercial vehicles. In sugar there is—besides N. Mahalingam’s
Sakthi Sugars—Bannari Amman Sugars of S.V. Balasubramaniam and Dharani Sugars
and Chemicals of Palani G. Periasamy. Bannari Amman, as we shall later see, is
an off- shoot of the Sakthi group and, like the latter, a diversified Rs 1,200
crore conglomerate. Dharani Sugars’ founder previously taught economics and
business management at the University of Baltimore in the US. Palani G.
Periasamy also owns the Hotel Le Royal Meridien at Chennai and runs various
educational institutions, including the PGP College of Engineering &
Technology at Namakkal. Another US-returned entrepreneurial venture is the
Coimbatore-based Kovai Medical Center and Hospital Limited (KMCH) of Nalla G.
Palaniswami, an endo- crinologist from Wayne State University at Michigan. His
group, too, operates colleges offering paramedical courses in nursing,
pharmacy, physiotherapy, and occupational therapy.
One Gounder businessman
of recent vintage who deserves mention is M. Ramasami. Hailing from Rasipuram
village in Salem, Ramasami graduated from the Tamil Nadu Agricultural
University, Coimbatore, in 1966, after which he worked with the state
agriculture department as an extension officer. In 1973 he went into the seed
business by organizing production for big domestic companies like Mahyco and
Mahendra Seeds. The companies would supply Ramasami the foundation seeds, which
he then multiplied. ‘I did this by contracting with other farmers. Though my
father had 50 acres, I chose not to use it because the land was joint family
property. Also, seed production was a new concept for them’, his discloses.54
In 1986 Ramasami established his own research farm of 140 acres at Attur in
Salem. By 1992 his company had released its first cotton research hybrid,
RCH-1, which was followed by RCH-2 in 1994. The latter hybrid created a record
by covering an estimated 22 lakh acres in 1998–9, which was a tenth of India’s
total cotton area. Today, Ramasami’s Rasi Seeds is engaged in contract seed
farming over 10,000 acres. In 2004 it became India’s second company after
Mahyco to commercially launch a genetically modified version of its cotton
hybrid, incorporating the controversial ‘Bollgard’ (BT) gene of the US life
sciences major, Monsanto. The Rs 200 crore Rasi group has further put up a
20,000-spindle spinning mill at Attur and a garmenting unit at Tirupur, so as
to cover the whole chain from basic seeds research to final knitwear products.
But the ultimate
embodiment of Gounder capital is Tirupur and specifically TEA: arguably one of
the country’s most effective industry associations. Part of its success derives
from the dominance of one community in ownership networks. An equally important
factor relates to the size of the individual exporters. Collectively, Tirupur’s
direct knitwear exports are well over Rs 4,500 crore; however, its single
largest exporter, Eastman Exports, did just Rs 350 crore in 2004. ‘Our strength
is our smallness that is conducive to cooperative effort. You don’t find this
in a place like Ludhiana, where there are big individual companies who are not
as keen to develop the export cluster’, says R.M. Subramaniam, adviser to TEA.
The result: Ludhiana, which used to be a pre- eminent exporter of woolen
knitwear in the Soviet era, hardly exports any now. Its annual knitwear exports
of about Rs 630 crore comprise only cotton.
The most visible sign of
TEA’s collective lobbying strength has been a scheme to bring 185 million
litres per day (LPD) of water to Tirupur from the confluence of the Bhavani and
Cauvery rivers in Erode through a 55 km pipeline. Out of the 185 million LPD,
125 million LPD is to meet the requirements of Tirupur’s dyeing and bleaching
units, with 25 million LPD being earmarked for the local municipality and the remaining
water for villages along the route. Billed as the first ever ‘public-private
partnership’ project in India’s water sector, the implementation authority for
the Rs 1,000 crore project is the New Tirupur Area Development Corporation, in
which the main stakeholders are the TN government, TEA, and Infrastructure
Leasing & Financial Services Limited. ‘Our own current requirement is
around 100 million LPD, whereas we have been getting only 85 million LPD. The
project is designed to serve not just our present-day, but future growth needs
as well’, Subramaniam adds. The industry has also demonstrated its clout by
repeatedly stalling official moves to impose stringent effluent discharge norms
on bleaching and dyeing units, which are seen to be primarily responsible for
polluting the Noyyal River. Although there was a setback in the form of a High
Court judgment in July 2005, requiring compulsory installation of reverse
osmosis plants for secondary treatment of effluents, the units have managed to
rally political opinion seeking financial assistance from the state and union
governments to enable them to conform to the ‘unfair’ order.
STUDIES
OF THREE GROUPS
1. SAKTHI GROUP
The Sakthi group’s roots
are in Pollachi, an overgrown village 40 km south of Coimbatore towards the
Annamalai hills, where P. Nachimuthu Gounder was born on 11 November 1902. His
father Palani Gounder was a modest landowner who mainly farmed groundnuts on
about 10 acres. Nachimuthu Gounder broke away from the family vocation early in
life (he managed to study up to the seventh standard) by plying 6–7
bullock-carts from Pollachi to the Valparai tea estates up the hills. In the
early 1920s he moved from hiring out carts to operating taxis and then Lorries,
before launching the Annamalai Bus Transport (ABT) Limited in 1931 with fourteen
buses. By 1940 this had grown to forty. Simultaneously, the scope of his
business expanded to servicing and repair of buses and trucks. At the time of
nationalization of public transport services by the state government in 1972,
ABT boasted a fleet strength of 150 buses. In short, yet another industrial
family from South India—in the case of T.V. Sundaram Iyengar, the Seshasayees,
G.D. Naidu, and L.R.G. Naidu—that started off as mofussil transport operators.
N. Mahalingam was 23 when
he joined his father in 1946, after doing a bachelor’s in physics at Chennai’s
Loyola College and mechanical engineering at the Guindy Engineering College.
During Nachimuthu Gounder’s time—he passed away on 7 February 1954—the group
confined itself to transport. Besides ABT, which ran buses and serviced heavy
vehicles, the other big group concern was Gounder & Company, formed in 1950
as a distributor for ‘Tata’ vehicles and seller of spare parts. The activities
of Anamallais Retreading Company and Sakthi Finance—incorporated in 1954 and
1955, respectively—were again transport-related. Sakthi Finance was essentially
into hire-purchase financing of trucks to complement the vehicle dealership
business. By then Mahalingam had also entered politics, winning the 1952 state
assembly elections from Pollachi. He remained a Congress legislator for a
further two five-year terms. But Mahalingam’s career in politics ended with the
1967 general elections, when he unsuccessfully contested the Coimbatore
parliament seat.58
The group’s first
manufacturing project was Sri Sakthi Textiles, started in 1957 at Pollachi with
12,000 spindles. The following year, the Indo-Swiss Synthetic Gem Manufacturing
Company (now Sakthi Synthetic Gems) was set up at Mettupalayam, north of
Coimbatore, to produce rough synthetic diamonds and gem crystals used in
jewellery. The group’s flagship, Sakthi Sugars, commissioned its first plant in
1964 on the Bhavani riverside at Erode. Mahalingam had conceived of it in the
late 1950s while being a director of the Amaravathi Cooperative Sugar Factory
at Udumalpet. There were also some disastrous pro- motions like Sakthi Pipes to
fabricate cast iron spun pipes for water projects. The unit at Elavur, near
Chennai, was doomed right from the time orders were placed for the plant and
machinery from Germany. The rupee’s steep devaluation in 1966 pushed up the
foreign-exchange component to Rs 1 crore, against the anticipated Rs 60 lakhs.
The slashing of budgetary allocations on infrastructure accompanying the
deflationary policies of this period made matters worse, especially for a
project dependent on government contracts. The company’s management was taken
over by the TN government in 1972, before it was sold to Electrosteel Castings
Limited of the Kejriwals in 1982 (the Kolkata Marwari group that acquired a dominant
stake in Lanco Industries).
How much did community
networks help in the group’s industrial forays? ‘Well, quite a bit,
particularly in the initial stages of raising monies. Since we were pioneers in
the community, there was lot of backing for our initiatives’, admits M.
Manickam, Mahalingam’s eldest son, who is vice chairman and managing director
of Sakthi Sugars. Take Sakthi Sugars, in which the promoters subscribed to only
5.45 per cent of the initial share capital. Between 1961 and 1989 the promoters’
(family members and group concerns) stake ranged between 1.43 per cent and 5.45
per cent. The largest block of shareholders comprised community people (mostly
farmers) and public financial institutions, who held 40 per cent each, the rest
being with the public. ‘My father had full faith in the farmers and he believed
that they will never sell their shares to outsiders. But I insisted that if the
company had to be effectively managed, we must increase our stake to at least
26 per cent. So in 1990 the company came out with a rights issue to increase
its share capital from Rs 3.6 crore to Rs 5 crore and we picked up Rs 1.25
crore of the additional equity, while the other shareholders renounced their
rights. Thus, we raised our holding to 23 per cent and over a period it has
gone up to 40 per cent’, says Manickam.
The other route for
mobilizing funds was Sakthi Finance, which once used to be the Pollachi Credit
Society and has an asset base of nearly Rs 250 crore now. Community connections
also proved useful in the not-too-distant period, when sugar prices had
nosedived and Sakthi Sugars accumulated cane payment arrears of Rs 70–80 crore.
‘It was a harrowing time from 2001 up to mid-2004. Given the low realizations
from sugar, we wanted to put up a 32 MW cogeneration plant, which banks,
however, refused to finance. We held back cane payments for 14–18 months and
practically took the growers’ money on credit to fund it. But for our community
links, all this would not have been possible. We somehow convinced them that
the company will pay later and ultimately the cogeneration plant is in
everyone’s interest’, reveals Manickam.
Today, the Sakthi group
is an Rs 1,600-crore-plus combine, out of which more than Rs 700 crore comes
out of sugar and associated pro- ducts, including alcohol and power. Apart from
its Bhavani plant that has a capacity of 7,500 tcd, Sakthi Sugars operates a
4,000 tcd unit in Sivagangai district and a 2,000 tcd facility at Dhenkanal in
Orissa.59 The group additionally owns Sri Chamundeswari Sugars, which has a
4,000 tcd plant at Mandya in Karnataka. The transport-related businesses have
also grown, notwithstanding nationalization of its bus services. The parent
company, ABT Limited, with a turnover of Rs 275 crore, is the largest dealer
for Maruti Udyog in TN and runs a network of auto service stations and
workshops. Besides, it is involved in cargo transport and courier services.
Another company, the Rs 370 crore ABT Industries, is a leading distributor of
‘Tata’ vehicles and operates a one lakh litre per day dairy plant.
The group also has
interests in manufacture of castings and auto components (which contribute
about Rs 130 crore), soybean and related products (Rs 50 crore), and education
(the Kumaraguru College of Technology in Coimbatore and Dr Mahalingam College
of Engineering and Technology at Pollachi). Then, there are family-owned firms
like Anamallais Retreading Company, Anamallais Engineering (engaged in
automobile body-building and fabrication), N. Mahalingam & Company
(dealership of home appliances and ‘Tempo’ and ‘Kinetic’ vehicles), and Sakthi
Estates (coffee, tea, and cardamom plantations), which together generate
roughly Rs 120 crore. The group’s original manufacturing ventures—textiles and
synthetic gems—have, more or less, been relegated to the background. Its two
spinning units—Sri Sakthi and ABT Textiles—have an aggregate capacity of just
75,000 spindles, after nearly fifty years.
2. THE BANNARI AMMAN GROUP
The Bannari Amman group’s
founder, S.V. Balasubramaniam, is
technically N. Mahalingam’s cousin: his father, Sangampalayam Veda- nayagam
Gounder, was the brother of Mahalingam’s mother Rukmani Ammal. However, given
the age gap of seventeen years between them, Mahalingam was more of a father
figure to Balasubramaniam, who was the eldest of four brothers and a sister.
Born on 4 February 1940 in Sangampalayam village of Pollachi, Balasubramaniam’s
father culti- vated groundnuts in 45 acres of dry land, and tobacco, chilly and
vege- tables in another 10 acres of thottam or irrigated land. After studying
till the seventh standard in a local private school, Balasubramaniam joined the
Udumalpet high school before going to Chennai’s Vivekananda College to do an
intermediate in physics, chemistry, and natural sciences. ‘I wanted to pursue
medicine. But in 1956, my father died. Since my sister was not married and the
family needed to be looked after, I had to return. Moreover, my father happened
to be the village munsif [headman]. As this was a hereditary post, my aunt
[Mahalingam’s mother] did not want the family to abdicate it and I got back to
the village’, he recalls.
It was here that
Mahalingam, sensing Balasubramaniam’s keenness to study, took over the
responsibility of financing the education of the four brothers. Balsubramaniam
decided to give up medicine and, instead, graduated in commerce at the
Government Arts College in 1959 and qualified to be a chartered accountant in
1964 (later, in 1981, he passed the company secretary examination as well). On
Mahalingam’s direction he joined Sakthi Sugars as its internal auditor and rose
to be chief accounts officer in 1966, deputy general manager in 1967, general
manager in 1974 and finally vice chairman in September 1983. Around this period
Mahalingam’s son Manickam returned from the US, after doing a master’s in
business management at Ann Arbor, Michigan. ‘I felt that the time had come to
start something on my own. Mr Mahalingam had also suggested this to me a couple
of times before. I resigned on 8 September 1985, having been with the company
for twenty-one years from 1 September 1964’, notes Balasubramaniam. He did not
have to begin from scratch, though. Much before Balasubramaniam laid down
office, his brothers and brother-in-law, P.K. Doraiswamy, had their businesses
going: Annamallai Retreading Company (different from the Sakthi group’s
Anamallais Retreading Company) and Anamallais Agencies for dealership of ‘Escorts’
tractors and Hindustan Motors vehicles. ‘Mr. Mahalingam gave us these firms in
1974. My father and he were originally partners in them’, says Balasubramaniam.
Further, they had developed a cargo parcel concern, ARC Parcel Service. In 1980
there was a split wherein Doraiswamy took the parcel service company and the
brothers retained the retreading and agency concerns. In the same year they
established Sakthi Murugan Transports, followed by Vedanayagam Hospital at
Coimbatore in 1981 under a brother, S.V. Kandasami, who is a professional
urologist.
Even prior to all this
Balasubramaniam was a ‘silent partner’ with V.M. Kailasam (formerly commercial
director of Sakthi Sugars) in Kamadhenu Drinks, which was set up at Erode in
1972 to make arrack (country liquor). ‘This was an independent venture of
Kailasam [who managed to get the licence] and myself. Mr Mahalingam did not
want Sakthi Sugars to be involved in liquor as a matter of principle and they
have stuck to this. After Kailasam died in 1976, I took charge while continuing
to be in Sakthi Sugars’, observes Balasubramaniam. In 1978, he floated
Coimbatore Alcohol and Chemicals Private Limited (CAC) to produce industrial
alcohol and extra neutral spirit. In 1983, during the chief ministerial tenure
of M.G. Ramachandran, Balasubramaniam got a licence to manufacture Indian-Made
Foreign Liquor (IMFL) using the extra neutral spirit from CAC. The new company,
Shiva Distilleries, started making liquor under various names like ‘Monitor’
whisky and dry gin, ‘Brisnoff’ vodka, and ‘Shivas’ brandy and rum. The last two
labels ran into some trouble because of their phonetic similarity with the
illustrious ‘Smirnoff’ and ‘Chivas Regal’ brands. The liquor business did well
to generate adequate investable surpluses for Balasubramaniam.
His first venture after
leaving the Sakthi group was Bannari Amman Sugars. But here, too, Sakthi Sugars
subscribed to 300,000 shares of its initial equity capital in 1985, which was
more than the 250,000 shares held by Balasubramaniam himself. After a rights
issue in 1992, Bala- subramaniam’s stake in Bannari Amman Sugars increased to
970,000 shares, against the 600,000 shares owned by Sakthi Sugars. It was only
in 1994 that Sakthi Sugars’ entire holding was bought up by Balasubra- maniam,
a pointer to the nurturing role played by Mahalingam. As Balasubramaniam
emphasizes, ‘it was he who even gave the name Bannari Amman to my company’. Its
first unit was commissioned in early 1986 at Sathyamangalam in Erode. Beginning
with a capacity of 1,250 tonnes, it was expanded in phases to 4,000 tcd along
with a 28 MW cogeneration plant. A second unit at Nanjangud near Mysore in
Karnataka came up in 1992, which now can crush 5,000 tcd and pro- duce 36 MW of
power. CAC was merged with Bannari Amman Sugars.
In 1995, while Shiva
Distilleries and Kerala Alcoholic Products (another IMFL unit at Palakkad
incorporated in 1992) remained independent entities.
Today, the Bannari Amman
group has a turnover surpassing Rs 1,200 crore. Sugar and derived products aside,
it has interests in textiles (Bannari Amman Spinning Mills and Shiva Texyarn,
with combined spindleage of 100,000), wheat milling (two flour mills that can
process nearly 300 tonnes of wheat per day), education (Bannari Amman Insti-
tute of Technology at Erode) and the manufacture of granite slabs and tiles.
Like the Sakthi group, it is also involved in transport (Sakthi Muru- gan
Transports and Shiva Cargo Movers), auto dealership (for Hindus- tan Motors and
Mahindra & Mahindra), and tyre retreading.
3. CRI PUMPS
In our case study of a
Naidu-owned business, we will profile a family with no mirasidari trappings
which is yet a product of Coimbatore’s unique industrial environment bequeathed
by the early pioneers from the community. Krishnaswamy was by no means a big
landowner; even the ten acres that he farmed in Palladam was taken on lease.
His son, K. Gopal, studied till the sixth standard and was 18 years old when he
began working as an apprentice in the foundries of the PSG Industrial Institute
and Textool Company. That was in the late 1940s, when a host of engineering
establishments had sprung up in Coimbatore. Like many others employed with
these units, he learnt on the job and be- came a skilled moulder.
In 1957 Gopal branched
out to set up a small non-ferrous foundry at Ganapathy, which is today one of
Coimbatore’s main engineering hubs. In 1961 he used the in-house foundry to
start a unit, Rajendra Industries, to fabricate valves for pump priming systems.
By the middle of the decade he was selling these valves—basically spares for
agricultural and domestic pumps—under the ‘CRI’ brand, with ‘RI’ being short
for Rajendra Industries and ‘C’ denoting that the product was from Coimbatore.
A strike in 1970 led to Rajendra Industries closing shutters for about six
months. On being reopened it was rechristened CRI Industrials. In 1972 Gopal
established one more valve-making concern. This was in another industrial area,
Avarampalayam, and was called Coimbatore Rajendra
Industries, to distinguish it from the earlier Rajendra Industries.
In 1978 Gopal took the
next step of producing agricultural pumps at Coimbatore Rajendra Industries.
These were ordinary belt-driven pumps, in which the engine is separately
installed on the well mouth and power is transmitted to the pump near the water
level through a belt drive. But within the next couple of years he was also
manufacturing motors and ‘monoblocks’ (in which the motor is fused with the
pump, making it a more efficient system) under the ‘CRI’ brand. Simultaneously,
another facility, Chola Raja Industries, came up at Saravanampatti to supply
machined castings and other pump parts to Coimbatore Rajendra Industries. ‘My
father had this fascination for the ancient Chola emperor, Rajendra. I was also
named after him’, remarks G. Rajendran, Gopal’s third son. Shortly after that,
in April 1980, Gopal passed away; he was barely 50 years old. His eldest son
Velumani was already helping out with sales then. After Gopal’s death, the two
other sons, Sounderarajan and Rajendran, joined the business. ‘But it was our
mother, Ranganayaki, who was the guiding force. She used to visit the factories
every day, before she passed away in 1996’, adds G. Rajendran, who has a
diploma in electrical engineering from PSG College of Technology.
By the end 1980s the
family’s business had grown. In 1988 Chola Raja Industries became Chola Pumps Private
Limited, which manufactured jet pumps, monoblocks, and single-phase motors for
domestic household use. Coimbatore Rajendra Industries was likewise converted
into CRI Pumps Private Limited in 1996, focusing on agricultural pumps and
motors. Another company, Ransar Industries was set up in 2000 to produce
submersible pumps for both domestic and agricultural applications. In addition
a modern mechanised foundry, Meltech Castings, was established at
Chinnavedampatti in 1992 to cater to all the pump-making concerns, even as the
original CRI Industrials (now called CRI Industries Private Limited) continued to
produce valves and pump spares. ‘We were the first in South India to get the
Bureau of Industrial Standards’ ISI certification for our valves. Also, we are
one of the few fully-integrated pump concerns in India, with our own foundry
and in-house facilities to manufacture valves, spares and motors’, claims
Rajendran.
The privately-held CRI
Pumps group today has a turnover of Rs 250 crore, with an annual production
capacity of 750,000 pumps and motors, and exports to over forty countries. It
is one of the three top players in Coimbatore’s Rs 1,200 crore organized
pump-sets industry, along with Texmo Industries (a leader in agricultural
pumps) and Fisher Pumps (a specialist in mini-monoblocks or regenerative pumps
for garden-use). ‘Our strength is big centrifugal pumps of 0.5 to 20
horsepower’, explains Rajendran, who looks after production and re- search at
CRI Pumps, while Velumani (the chairman) and Sounderarajan are in charge of
financial management and marketing, respectively.
Source:
Dr Harish Damodaran, India’s New Capitalists
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China adopted Mass Production.
India into customization.
i.e Walmart and Zara.
Indian Mills
Arvind, Lakshmi, Vardhman…
Century old Quality Mills.
Chinese mills, 30 to 40 years age, relatively younger;
Set up in rural areas;
By farming peasants and
Secondary pass outs.
There is a saying:
For items,
Under30$, leave it to China;
Above 150$. Leave it to Europe;
In the middle, give it to India.
The result,
China’s textile exports are at 120 billiom $;
6 times than that of India.
Then came,
India’s Mass Producers;
Chiripals, Jindals, Aarvees, Etcos, Alps, Sintex ….
Perceived by Garment Manufacturers as NBMCs;
Non-Banking Merchandising Companies;
Giving extended Credit without collateral;
Rather than Fabric Suppliers.
On the other end,
There are Indian Retail giants,
Aditya Birlas, Future Retails, ITC, Westside, Yes Arvind;
Adopting JIT, means no orders in lean seasons.
For Garment Manufacturers,
Exporters make payment 3 to 6 months;
Stare at all along AW;
Stare at all along SS.
Trade receivables stretched;
All along Supply Chain.
From Yarn to Retailers.
Many went Burst,
Receivables become Non Receivables.
It is the Indian Culture;
Will Covid-19 make it worst for the better?
With New Supply Chain terms for
Indian “Kanban” System.