Namrata reviews Running behind Lakshmi- The Search for Wealth in India’s Stock Market by Adil Rustomjee (Hachette India, 2025), calling it a cultural history of Indian capitalism that understands the stock market.
For a country that has long mythologised its enterprise, ambition, and near-spiritual faith in fortune, the Indian stock market has remained oddly under-narrated in mainstream literary and historical discourse. It has flickered at the edges of novels, been caricatured in popular cinema, and occasionally chronicled in dense economic histories, but seldom granted the sweeping narrative canvas that its cultural significance deserves. Adil Rustomjee’s Running Behind Lakshmi arrives, therefore, as both an anomaly and a corrective, a work that insists the subcontinent’s financial past is not peripheral to its modern identity but central to understanding the ways in which aspiration, anxiety, and capitalism have shaped its collective character.
Rustomjee traces two centuries of market evolution with the deliberate pacing of a historian and the inside-track intuition of someone steeped in financial practice. This dual vantage offers the book its unusual texture: part archival excavation, part practitioner’s meditation. The result is a study that moves beyond the predictable contours of financial history into the terrain of cultural biography. India’s stock market emerges not as an institution merely, but as a restless organism that is alive, temperamental, prone to exuberance and despair, and forever chasing Lakshmi with a fervour that is at once devotional and reckless.