Book Excerpt: The Gujaratis- A Portrait of a Community by Salil Tripathi

An exclusive excerpt from The Gujaratis- A Portrait of a Community by Salil Tripathi (Aleph Book Company, 2025).

PROLOGUE

Aavo mari sathe!

Aavo, beso; shu lesho, thandu-garam? Nasto pani?

Come with me!

Welcome, do sit down; what will you have, something hot or cold? Some tea? Snacks? Water?

So you want to know about us, the Gujaratis. You want to know who we are, what has made us the way we are, and you wonder why we act the way we do. You know quite a bit about us already and you probably have strong opinions about us: that we are vegetarian and we are supposed to be clever at making money. We are practical and pragmatic. We murder the finest cuisines in the world by adding sugar and Amul cheese to everything, transforming Punjabi, Chinese, and Italian food into concoctions that Punjabis, Chinese, or Italians would instantly disown. When we travel, we expect to eat dhokla and ganthiya in Amritsar, Shanghai, or Rome. We generously share our snacks (which we pronounce as snakes), and we have food taboos that exasperate our hosts (no onion or garlic on Fridays, pooris only made of amaranth flour during the monsoon month of Shravana). Many of us piously say we are vegetarian and then, late evening, when our family is glued to Arnab Goswami on television, we tiptoe out and visit the hawker’s cart down the alley to eat omelettes; the more adventurous among us even develop a taste for kebabs. And we bury its taste by chewing paan before returning home, so that nobody can suspect our post-prandial indiscretions.

And we break into garba at the slightest pretext.

Garba has near-religious significance: what goes around comes around doesn’t always mean karma; for us, it means garba.

You may not know our poets and writers because you think that the only book we care about is the ledger. We are obsessed with success which we feel can be measured objectively only through money. Paiso bole chhe, we know that money talks. Even at funerals you might find some men discussing stock market prices while looking suitably gloomy, randomly folding their hands and doing namaste when someone passes by. We can walk into a restaurant and brazenly ask for one cup of tea with three saucers, which the friends accompanying us will share. We buy a newspaper for `4 and eight of us pass it around to read it, because making paisa vasool (extracting value from money) is our birthright. Some of us are known to haggle with a hapless call centre worker for an hour on the phone to get `20 refunded.

You smirk at our meticulous planning but entrust the logistics of organizing complex events to us. You find it hilarious that we wave the tricolour vigorously but rarely join the army. (Actually, some of us do.) If you call us cowards, we point at the man whose photograph is on all currency notes in India (except the old one-rupee note), Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948), and claim we are non-violent. And, as with all such unjustified insults, we will see that there is more than enough valour among Gujaratis. As to non-violence, that’s another story altogether, as we periodically erupt into gruesome violence, massacring hundreds of our own.

In India alone, there are some 55 million people who consider Gujarati to be their mother tongue (at approximately 4.58 per cent of the population), and possibly there are 6 million more of us abroad, on every continent, if not in every country. One out of every three Indians abroad is supposed to be a Gujarati. In a video that has gone viral on the internet among Gujaratis, the popular raconteur Sairam Dave recounts dozens of names of prominent Gujaratis who have done the community proud, to the vigorous applause of his delighted audience.

But there are exceptions within us. Not all of us are vegetarians. Indeed, one of the most comprehensive surveys of Gujaratis ever undertaken shows increased meat eating among Gujaratis. Only 76 of the nearly 300 Gujarati communities surveyed by the Anthropological Survey of India in the 1980s said they ate only vegetarian food (a substantially higher proportion than the national average of 16 per cent), but some 130 communities, or nearly half, said they ate meat occasionally (far higher than the national average of 37 per cent). Not all of us are good at making money either, and as the long list of corporate scandals shows, not all Gujarati business people are necessarily ethical. Nor are all of us Gandhian ascetics; many of us love our gold and diamonds—the fancy jewellery shops at Zaveri Bazar and Opera House in Mumbai have Gujarati owners, Gujarati staff, and many patrons are Gujarati.

We have run motels in America, fought apartheid in South Africa, been expelled from Uganda, formed trade unions in London, sold opium to China, and financed Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army in Southeast Asia. We dominate the list of India’s wealthiest and yet our poor break ships and clean drains. Hospitable yet calculating, mercantile and pragmatic, pious and yet tolerating violence, worldly-wise while claiming to be spiritual, cheerful and transactional. We see nothing wrong with our contradictions.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Adi Marzban, the famous Parsi theatre director who also edited his family newspaper, Jam-e-Jamshed, hosted an extremely popular television show in Gujarati in Bombay. It had humorous gags, magic tricks, musical performances, skits, jokes, and homilies that never failed to entertain. Aavo Mari Sathe, it was called. Come with me.

And come with me, I too say, as I explore the complexities of my people—how we earn, how we politick, how we create, how we pray, how we pray, how we eat, how we play, and how we kill.

Excerpt shared with permission from the author and the publishers of The Gujaratis- A Portrait of a Community by Salil Tripathi (Aleph Book Company, 2025).

About the Book

Gujaratis are an uncommonly industrious and resourceful people. In India alone, there are some 55 million people who consider Gujarati to be their mother tongue, and possibly 6 million more of them abroad, on every continent, if not in every country. They are known for their entrepreneurial spirit, and their love of business and the profitable deal. After all, paiso bole chhe—money talks. No wonder then, that some of India’s greatest industrial houses—Tata, Reliance, Wipro, and scores of others—owe their existence to brilliant Gujarati businessmen. Beyond business, Gujaratis have made their mark in politics (Mahatma Gandhi was Gujarati as was Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel; there have also been two Gujarati prime ministers, Morarji Desai and Narendra Modi— three, if Rajiv Gandhi, whose father was Gujarati, is counted), science, culture, cricket, and many other fields of endeavour. Some of them have also become notorious as conmen, swindlers, and rioters—Gujarat ranks high among states in which communal riots have taken place. Gujaratis are renowned for their delicious vegetarian snacks (often mispronounced as ‘snakes’), stringent dietary restrictions, and love for the garba, natak nights, and sugam sangeet.

But beyond these stereotypical representations of the community, who are the Gujaratis, really? Where do they come from? Why are they the way they are? How do they earn, politick, pray, create, make merry, and even kill when they feel threatened? How do they build a sense of self and community and then take it too far, making ‘others’ out of Dalits, Muslims, and denotified tribes? No study of the Gujarati people has yet attempted to answer all these questions and more. Until now. In The Gujaratis, through wideranging scholarship, original research, and a lifetime of observing the community he was born into, and is proud of belonging to, distinguished journalist and writer Salil Tripathi crafts an engrossing account of the community.

From the holy town of Somnath, steeped in incense and distorted histories, to the high-octane corporate boardrooms of Mumbai, down the bustling avenue of Hovenierstraat, the heart of Belgium’s diamond trade, to lonely American highways dotted with Patel-owned motels, Tripathi dissects the Gujarati presence in India and across the world and observes the strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies of the community with acuity and wit. We learn about asmita, the essence of being Gujarati, and understand what it means to be ‘Gujarati’ as the author traces the epic story of his people through centuries of social, political, and cultural upheavals.

About the Author

Salil Tripathi was born in the city once known as Bombay and studied at New Era School and Sydenham College, and later, at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in the United States. He is an award-winning journalist and has written three works of non-fiction, including The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and its Unquiet Legacy. He has been a foreign correspondent in Southeast Asia, and a human rights researcher in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. He chaired PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee and is now a member of its board. He is also on the panel of the Vaclav Havel Center Disturbing the Peace Award. He lives in New York.