Folio 06 · about 3 minutes

The Munim and the Gaddi

Behind every seth sat a munim: the accountant and agent who kept the books, ran distant branches, and was trusted with far more money than he was paid.

What did a munim ji do?

Jain describes the great banking houses of his day, Marwari, Jain and Nattukottai Chettiar, as having offices and branches in centres such as Calcutta, Bombay, Delhi and Rangoon. Each was run by munims and gumashtas, the firm's agents. They held very wide powers, sent regular returns and reports to the head office and took instructions from it. They were not highly paid. Jain calls their industry, integrity and efficiency remarkable and proverbial.¹ He notes that the word could mean an agent, a correspondent or simply a clerk.² A seth's gumashta also did civic work: when a guild met, he was the one who called the meeting.³

How did a boy learn the books?

He learned partly at school and mostly at the counter. As chapter three describes, merchant boys across northern India learned Mahajani in catashalas, along with the writing a business needed. Printed primers taught accounts and letters, and even how to write a hundi.⁴

Jain's account of the Nattukottai Chettiars is the most detailed. When a son was born, a sum was often set aside to grow at compound interest for his education. From about ten or twelve he learned accounting and the principles of banking, applying them at once as an apprentice in his father's office.⁵ On marriage he took a share of the family estate and had to live on it, gaining or losing by his own decisions, though he stayed in the joint household.⁶ Rudner adds the next stage. Young men were apprenticed to family firms with agency houses across South and Southeast Asia for a three-year tour of duty. On a second tour a man might become the principal agent, the mudali, of an agency house.⁷

Of Marwari boys, Jain claims that they picked up arithmetic and accounts quickly in the family shop. He says a boy could work out compound interest to the nearest pie in his head faster than a university graduate could on paper.⁸ That is Jain's own impression, not a measurement.

How much was a munim trusted?

A great deal. Jain describes Chettiar agents being handed sums as large as a lakh of rupees on the security of an unstamped receipt written on a palmyra leaf, though he notes that paper receipts were then replacing the palm leaf.⁹ An agent's pay rose with distance from home: about Rs 100 a month in Madura against Rs 300 in Burma. Terms ran for three years, and a successor was sent out six months early to learn the work alongside him. A capable agent also earned a share of the profits and in time often started his own firm.⁹ Markovits found the same pattern in the Sindhi networks, where employees typically went abroad under contract to a principal in India.¹⁰

A career path like this one, apprentice, then agent, then partner, then proprietor, helps explain the trust. The munim's future depended on the same reputation as the firm's.

What was the gaddi?

The गद्दी (gaddī) is the cushioned seat on the floor where a proprietor sat with his books, and by extension the firm itself. [unverified — needs source] The frontispiece of Jain's 1929 book is an illustration titled “A Banker's Office”.¹¹ It is a candidate for a future edition of this page, once its rights are checked.

What we don't know

The sources are almost silent about women. Rudner says plainly that he had very little information about how girls were brought up.¹² Kochar's family memory points to a parallel world of books: women kept their own household expense ledgers, which were locked away like the firm's.¹³ Who taught them, and what those books recorded, is a question for future research.

The last chapter asks what survives of all this in a kirana shop today.