Pierre Lachaier

Objects and Methodology

            In India, I have been particularly studying the Hindu business communities, mostly the Gujarati speaking Lohanas and secondarily the Tamil Nadu’s Nadars; in Europe, I have been studying the Shia Twelver Khojas originating from Gujarat, who came recently from Madagascar to settle in Paris area, and in Lisbon the Lohanas who came from Mozambique. Lohanas and Khojas have formed worldwide communities’ networks. They are mostly traders, and some of their families may control large commercial or industrial business houses.

            I have tried to understand the ways the networks, that the firms or enterprises tend to built up, are formed and organized while studying them at three complementary levels: the primary social relations (family, lineage and caste), the technical-commercial linkages (integration, subcontracting, clientelism…) and the religious and ideological representations. The methods of investigation which are usual in social anthropology have been adapted to the observation in urban setting and in industrial areas, and completed by the study of the documents the communities’ associations are producing and by the literature published in professional circles. The comparative approach implies that a common conceptual frame be constructed where the networks of firms and of enterprises may be situated: this has been one of the challenges of this endeavor to build a Contemporary Anthropology of Indian Merchant and Industrial Worlds.

            Many research projects have been designed and worked out in collaboration with members of the EFEO, of the French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP), of the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH) of New Delhi, and of the CEIAS in Paris.

Present state of the projects and works, June 2013

Research Program N°1: Anthropology of Indian Merchant and Industrial Worlds

            Project 1: The Indian Twelver Khojas: completed, a book is to be published by the EFEO in 2013.

            Project 2: The Hindu Lohanas Merchants in Lisbon: completed, an article is to be published in the Bulletin d’Études Indiennes (BEI), Paris, in 2014.

Research Program N°2 : Ethno-architecture: houses and communities’ quarters in the commercial town of Ahmadabad, Gujarat.

            This second program had been progressively started by listening to conferences given to the working group Études Gujarati et Sindhi : sociétés, langues et cultures by architects and by an art historian, by the publication in the Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient (BEFEO) of two reviews of books written by architects, by a study of the temple built by Lohanas in Lisbon and by research seminars given at the EHESS about the traditional houses and the communities quarters in Ahmadabad.

            Project 1: The communities’ quarters of Ahmadabad. Capital of the Sultana of Gujarat and metropolis of the actual State of Gujarat, Ahmadabad has about 5-6 million inhabitants. The ancient walled city counts 350 000 people who are distributed in many hundreds of closed and interlocked quarters called “Pols”, where they tended until recently to congregate according to castes and religious persuasions. A main survey (1^st Mission, 2010) has been run in the Moti Hamamni Pol (MHP), where exclusively members of the Kadva and Leuva subdivisions of the Patidar caste are living. It has been completed in the MHP itself as well as by a contextual exploration of the urban fabric (2^nd Mission, 2012) and then (3^rd Mission, 2013) enlarged by a new short investigation of the Padma Pol (Kadva Patel), and by the exploration of complexes of cloth and garments merchants (hundreds of associated merchants having their shops in common buildings). Because the sociological theories of the castes system have proceeded almost exclusively from investigations in rural areas, very few sociological studies exist today on these urban community quarters.

            Project 2, going on : Commercial urban areas and merchant associations.