Hindu Capitalism #11. How Max Weber got it TOTALLY wrong

Here’s a note from an article entitled, “Udipi Hotels: Entrepreneurship, Reform and Revival”, by Stig Toft Madsen and Geoffrey T. Gardella, published in Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia  By Krishnendu Ray, Tulasi Srinivas (May 2012, University of California Press).

EXTRACT
Max Weber was disinclined to believe that capitalism would have any future in India. Indians, he argued, would be incapable of running modern industries in an efficient and nonpredatory manner on account of the Hindu “law of rituals.” 

When Milton Singer studied Madras entrepreneurs, he realized that Weber was wrong. According to Singer, modernization among these entrepreneurs was helped along by a series of adaptive strategies. These strategies enabled industrial leaders to thrive in the modern world without unbearable mental strains resulting from a failure to conform to inherited notions of purity.

To account for the coexistence of Hinduism and capitalism, Singer developed the notion of “compartmentalization.” The industrialists in Madras, he argued, did not experience a clash between their identity as Hindus or Brahmins and their identity as industrialists because these two roles were compartmentalized or separated into different life-worlds (Singer 1972: 320-25).

In 2000, when John Harriss restudied some of the same entrepreneurial families that Singer had interviewed, he found the notion of compartmentalization misleading (Harris 1003). Instead, Harriss observed a similar interpenetration between capitalism, Hinduism, and Hindutva politics that we have drawn attention to, namely, politicized Hindu capitalism without compartmentalization. Thus, a Great Tradition that modernizes, globalizes, and secularizes is also likely to Brahmanize and revitalize as it stands forth.

[Sanjeev: I believe all these writers are confused since they are using either statist (Weberian) or Marxist paradigms about Hindu capitalism. They are looking for something that simply doesn't exist. These perspectives on Indian capitalism and business classes are fundamentally flawed. The Indian businessman is rooted in an ANCIENT culture that values (even worships) wealth, particularly gold, and believes that wealth is just one of the many things needed in life. There is NO CONTRADICTION between Hinduism and capitalism. There is nothing to explain!]

References

Harriss, John, 2003, “The Great Tradition Globalizes: Reflections on Two Studies of ‘The Industrial Leaders’ of Madras” in Modern Asian Studies 37, 2: 327-62.

Singer, Milton, 1972, When a Great Tradition Modernizes. An Anthropological Approach to Indian Civilization, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.