THREE

Pride

My grandfather has always had a thing for tweed blazers, embellished with leather elbow patches and, if the evening is important, a silk pocket square. He sometimes adds a tie clip or cuff links. I have never seen him wear Indian clothes apart from when he sleeps. India is a tropical country, and the common man on the street tends to leave his shirttails hanging loose. Not Nanu: I think he would consider that uncouth. In the tardiest of nations, he is highly punctual; if left to his own, without my grandmother’s delays, he would probably turn up early when invited out. He spends his mornings like an English gentleman, sitting on the veranda sipping tea in a floral cup, leafing through the newspapers, pausing now and again to fret about how corrupt and criminal this country—his country—is becoming. He says these things in an elegant Anglo-Indian accent that only widens the seeming distance between him and the land whose citizenship he proudly holds.

Nanu is, in other words, what the British statesman and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay had in mind when in 1835, at the height of the Raj, he proposed an educational regime that would groom a local elite of brown-skinned Englishmen. “We must at present do our best,” he said, “to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.”

It was testimony to the dramatic success of this idea that, in the first hours of August 15, 1947, as a new Indian republic won freedom from the British, the speech by its leader heralding that freedom was uttered in English—a language that most Indians, huddled around their transistor radios, did not understand. But Jawaharlal Nehru, who approached India with a foreigner’s sense of romance, was Harrow- and Cambridge-schooled and, like Nanu, an Englishman at heart. Mohandas Gandhi, who seemed less English in his homespun cloth, was a London-trained barrister who wrote in the colonizer’s language more eloquently than most of the colonizers. And, if Nehru and Gandhi could be respectable Englishmen and still held up as passionate, patriotic Indians, then surely their countrymen could follow their lead.

What I saw of India as a child was homogeneous and whole. I had no idea as yet of the country’s different worlds, no sense that my reality was only a partial reality. Looking back, though, I realize how British my relatives’ India was. Alongside the spiced food and family devotion and chilling poverty that were specially Indian was so much that was borrowed. At parties, my relatives favored triangular sandwiches (with crusts removed); they spoke without embarrassment of convening “high tea.” Their English was perfect, though peppered occasionally with choice Hindi and Punjabi and Tamil words. They had their own eating restrictions, with some of them vegetarian, but they were never of the typical Indian level of complexity or obsessiveness, and they never prevented my sister and me from eating what we wanted. There was never talk of our caste, a notion that seemed beneath their cosmopolitan air. There was no feet touching that I saw, although feet touching was almost as universal in India as gravity. They didn’t do the typical Indian things: didn’t seek to involve us in religious rituals, didn’t constantly ask how much things cost, didn’t cut in line.

Back in America, our membership in this Anglicized class was impressed upon us in only the subtlest ways. My mother would use such phrases as “our kind of people,” “educated people,” and “good upbringing” from time to time. These seemed like perfectly nice, perfectly banal things to say, and it took a while for me to discover their deeper connotations. All they meant at the time was that, unlike so many other Indian-Americans, we bought into the American ethos, believed in the American dream, did not make snide comments about “the whites,” as many other Indians did, and harbored none of the overwrought nostalgia for the motherland that prevailed in many immigrant communities. My parents had no problems with American girlfriends and boyfriends. We rarely ate Indian food outside of the home, so as to taste others’ cooking. My parents rejected the survivalist ethics that could sometimes prevail in India, making a point of teaching us to pay our taxes happily and in full and to inform the waiter when we were undercharged in a restaurant, not just when we were overcharged. When summer came, and my mother recommended books for me to read, they were almost always English or American titles, not Indian ones.

It was only many years later, with my arrival in India, that I began to understand that our ways were not the ways of the Indian mainstream, but of a particular class of Indians. This class called itself “middle class” but formed something of a benign cultural aristocracy. It was made up of Anglophiles whose children had attended school at J. B. Petit and Campion and Cathedral and St. Xavier’s and St. Stephen’s and Elphinstone. Our grandfathers had worked as civil servants, or boxwallahs, British-behaving salarymen in big, respectable companies; they had resisted the grime of actual commerce. Our parents spoke Hindi but had grown up reading and writing and reasoning in English. Our relatives in India loved their country, but their affection was an idea more than a visceral emotion. And, because it is impossible to define who is in without defining who is out, there lurked in our self-appraisal an unconscious dismissal of those whose families were different: those who spoke in emphatic and syllable-hugging Indian accents, who prayed and fasted all the time, who talked constantly of money, who displayed their wealth but lacked what we thought to be taste.

I came of age in the interstices of two civilizations, with the inevitable confusions of identity. On the more difficult days, it was possible to feel that I didn’t quite belong anywhere and that the burden of winning a place was heavier for me than for the other American kids. And, even though I did not love India, I suppose that I extracted a certain comfort from the knowledge that I belonged to this rooted, rarefied Indian breed. My parents had education, bearing, and class. They spoke in sparklingly enunciated English that made the neighbors marvel. My family had a longer history of education than many of the established American families around us. I knew in the back of my mind that we were somebody somewhere—insiders, not outsiders; proud, respected. And so when I returned to India, I took for granted that it still existed, that country—a place that belonged to our kind of families, to Indians who dressed and thought, dreamed and talked, as we did.

Except that it didn’t anymore.

*   *   *

Arriving in the city my parents had left, I insisted on calling it “Bombay.” Its official name had been changed to “Mumbai” some years earlier by a political party intent on purging the colonial legacy. But I had grown up hearing tales of Bombay, and I refused to switch. My insistence on this matter was aided by another of my insistences. I brooked no option but living in the southern sliver of Bombay whose geography my parents had passed down to me—the world of Churchgate, Colaba, Marine Drive, Oval Maidan, the Taj Mahal hotel. And because South Bombay was home to the descendants of Macaulay’s Anglicized elite, I heard no complaint from my neighbors about my choice of nomenclature. They, too, called it “Bombay.”

It was silly to insist on living in South Bombay: I was making a modest salary, and so it was the equivalent of a newcomer to New York demanding to live on Park Avenue for $200 a month. That was how I ended up sleeping on a bed shorter than my body, above teams of hardworking cockroaches: the neighborhood was prestigious, but all I could afford within it was a glorified closet in someone else’s home. And it was silly, too, because I had come to India to venture beyond my comfort zone, to encounter the world, not to replicate my family’s worldview and geography.

As I settled into my new surroundings, it was possible to believe that the world of Anglicized South Bombay remained intact. I spent many weekend evenings at Indigo, an elegant restaurant that attracted the city’s prosperous young. The atmosphere was new, but the people I met there were, I realized, the children of my parents’ former peers: the people I might have grown up with had my parents stayed in India. They spoke in the South Bombay accent that I knew so well. They remarked every few minutes at the smallness of the world. When they gave directions, they relied not on landmarks but on the whereabouts of other families like them: “You know Anju’s house, na? Take a left there. Pratap’s mother’s house is on the right. Go past that and take a left at Bunty’s sister-in-law’s place…” And they walked and talked with that careless swagger of people who know that a society is theirs: that there are people they can call, connections they can use; that the world operates and will always operate according to laws conceived by and for them.

There was something immediately familiar to me about the members of this class, but there was also something unsettling about their remoteness from India. The poet Langston Hughes once wrote of black Americans who wished that they were white. It required the death of that wish, he wrote, for blacks to be “free within ourselves.” I wondered whether Indian Anglophiles were free in that way. In the sepia-tinted photographs of grandparents and great-grandparents that hung on their walls, the men were almost always wearing Western clothes. Anglophile parents, seeking an edge on the matrimonial markets, described their daughters as “convented,” meaning that they had received a British-style convent education. These Indians rarely read Hindi novels, not even in English translation. The categories of their imagination, the habits of their logic, and their literary reference points were all Western. They judged arguments by the crispness of their articulation, rather than in the way familiar to more Indians—by their narrative and emotional force. The octogenarian grandmother of friends of mine put it this way once: she had realized only as an adult that everything she had learned in childhood had taught her to hate the Indianness within. What is it like to grow up in a society and be told from the beginning, in a thousand unconscious moments, that the ways of its streets, the cut of its gestures, the rhythms of its speech are beneath you?

But I realized, as I sunk into the society, that things were changing, both within the Anglicized community and beyond it. I tried in my early days in Bombay to mix my social circles, to bring together my McKinsey friends and my Anglophile Indigo friends. But I grasped very quickly that I was causing a collision between old and new elites who had little interest in or regard for each other. My Indigo friends seemed to find my McKinsey friends, who were products of the new meritocracy in India, uncool, unsophisticated, raw, ignorant of the world outside McKinsey, moralistic, and boringly averse to merrymaking. The animosity was mutual. When I mentioned my movements on the weekends, I would see judgment creeping across my colleagues’ faces: a blend of jealousy and scorn. They seemed to think of my Indigo friends as shallow, pretentious, loose, unprincipled, spoiled brats, members of a lazy and effete ancien régime whose hearts were not truly in India.

My colleagues were not the tweed-draped Indians remembered from childhood. They tended not to come from privilege; their parents were almost uniformly less well-off and less educated than they now were, although hardly poor. In everything from their food habits to their way of speaking to their cultural preferences, they were the Indians that the Anglicized dismissed for being too Indian. And now they were the Indians rising into influence, getting the best banking and consulting jobs, anchoring television shows, winning elections, and defining the new code of manners.

They had none of the old guard’s escapism. They might try this or that cuisine in a restaurant, but they spoke openly and unapologetically about preferring their ghar ka khana, their “home food,” in the authentic regional style, to everything else. They preferred Bollywood music to Western sounds. And they spoke very differently from my Indian relatives. My colleagues’ accents had the exaggerated, staccato tone of the India that Macaulay never reached, lurching from one intensely stated phrase to the next, punching every syllable, from the rigorously rolled “R” to the heavily thwacked “T,” singing all the while. They clicked their tongues when arguing to express frustration or incomprehension. They gestured in ways that were familiar from travels in small-town India, rotating a hand back and forth to say, “I don’t know,” or performing a gradual outward drift of the arm punctuated by a sudden wrist flick to dismiss an idea.

It might not seem remarkable today to find Indian behavior among Indians in Bombay, but a generation ago it would have been. Elite Indians had not been just a more moneyed version of regular Indians; they had been a different kind of Indian, produced in an encounter between East and West, not fully of their own country. A generation ago, the ways of the common Indian would not have been visible at a place as rarefied as McKinsey; and so to find everyday, everyman manners expressed so confidently in the cafeteria of this elite company, by the hands and mouths of a new elite, was to witness a great subversion.

It was not only how they spoke but also the words they used. They had a new language, popularly called “Hinglish,” a fusion that involved stirring spicy Hindi words into English sentences, conjugating Hindi verbs with English suffixes, and appropriating the pidgin English of the less-educated classes.

“Arre, don’t give her any bhav. Boys always lagao chakkars around her.”

“Chhod, yaar. He is like that only.”

“He was just line-maro-ing.”

“Chal, timepass karte hain. Shall we pucca meet at seven?”

“Come jaldi se. Nahin to the booze will finish.”

“My boss is really acting pricey. All I did was prepone the meeting, ya.”

Such mixing was not entirely alien to the Anglicized old guard of an earlier generation. But it had been something to put on with friends occasionally, if at all, and not to use in official situations. Status depended on polish, which required a smoothing out of what the colonizers might have seen as rough Indian edges. My colleagues belonged to a generation that was turning the rules around, embracing Hindi and Indianness more generally. And their own speech was echoed in the language of newspapers and entertainment and advertising: Bollywood films were emerging with titles such as Jab We Met, Right Ya Wrong, and U Me Aur Hum; Domino’s Pizza was selling pies with the delightful tagline “Hungry, kya?”—you hungry or what?

Consider that tagline for a moment more. Domino’s was coming to India; it was nudging traditional fare from contention; globalization was on the march. But these advertisements, and the advertisements for indigenous products as well, were more likely to include Hindi or Telugu or Bengali than they were a generation ago. So was India becoming more Westernized or less?

One way to regard the country’s evolution, especially by detractors, was as a process of pseudo-Americanization. After all, to tell Ravindra’s story is to channel the familiar American vocabulary of self-making, transposed to unfamiliar terrain. But, in fact, a more complex process was unfolding in India: there was the liberation of the self, the fragmenting of the society, the coming of modernity, but there was also, with that freeing, a revival of pride within and a new comfort in brown skin. Ravindra was defying one kind of repression: the traditional repression of a thousand layers, of the landlords who had taunted his parents. But for many Indians, it was not the village betters who had reined them in, who had deprived them and the world of the fullness of themselves. It was, rather, the colonial stain, that residual longing to be someone apart from yourself. But India was now living through an upheaval in the laws of manners. Millions of Indians strove to learn English, but fewer and fewer strove to be English. And so India’s revolutions were not merely about success and growth. They were also about a new self-confidence and new liberty to be Indian without apology.

In the eyes of many of the old Anglophiles, the rise of the indigenous was a return to older, coarser days. In some ways, Bombay was becoming less permissive than it had been, even as it became, in another sense, more globalized and connected to the world. When the old guard remained in charge, you could eat and drink everything everywhere; you could stay out all night listening to Ravi Shankar in concert. But with the equations of power now changing, the provincialism of the new middle class was asserting itself in Bombay. New ideas of right and wrong held sway in a city where money and clout had come into the hands of a new breed of Indian. Whole zones of the city had been declared off-limits to meat, in order to satisfy pious upper-caste Hindu residents, even as other parts of the city were sprinkled with sushi restaurants and gelato parlors—and this restriction had a further, and quietly desired, effect of excluding Muslims from the neighborhood. The late concerts were gone, too, a casualty of new “moral policing,” as it was called in the press: the values of the small town applied to the city, by people for whom such towns offered a framework for making sense of new times.

I began to see the people who had always shaped my idea of India, in whose universe my parents had been brought up, to whose company I had returned, as relics of a passing age. It was an unpleasant truth to accept. I began to see their lethargy. In many families, someone, generations earlier, had earned their berth. For long years after that, life had often been lived on cruise control. But now the children of the Anglophiles were struggling to win admission to the same colleges that their parents had attended. Many of them had wealth but no cash flow in an increasingly meritocratic society that had fewer and fewer slots for the untalented. They ate at the country club instead of at restaurants, because the club provided food at cost; memberships could be inherited, and so to live as if wealthy required only that an ancestor of yours was actually so. They clung to whatever connections they still had. Connections mattered less and less; you no longer needed one to get a telephone or plane ticket. But at their parties they would brandish their connections anyway, pretending that they still lived in a closed system of five thousand acquaintances.

They still sat in their old bastions—the Bombay Gymkhana, the Willingdon Sports Club, and the like. They still sipped their whiskeys and their fresh-lime sodas and traded gossip about this one’s marriage to that one and how the venue was way too small and for 10,000 rupees a head, you know, the food should have been a little better than that. They still used language like “chap” and “attaboy.” They still boasted of their lack of fluency in Hindi. The rich among them would tell anyone who would listen that they buy Louis Vuitton only “abroad.” They still clung to the sense of their own superiority, calling ordinary Indians by condescending names such as “vernie,” for “vernacular.” And yet they could no longer deny the gathering evidence that their country was passing into new hands.

*   *   *

In the last years of the 1940s, two men from the merchant castes, my Punjabi grandfather and a young Gujarati named Dhirubhai Ambani, were embarking on their careers. They were both born as banias, traders, a caste-bounded community that instructed its sons right from childhood to understand risk and working capital and net profit—and a community that, under the cultural regime of that time, in a new era of public-spiritedness, was regarded as crass and uncouth, trafficking in the vulgarity of actual commerce, with no tie clips or cuff links or tweed to distinguish them from the masses.

Nanu and Dhirubhai had another thing in common: their fathers (and, in Nanu’s case, his grandfather, too) had broken with the caste heritage, working with papers and books, not money and goods. Nanu’s father, who died when Nanu was twelve, was a lawyer; Dhirubhai’s father was the headmaster of a school. Neither man left his son with a business and so, as they prepared to make their lives in the young new republic, each man faced a choice: follow his father’s path toward the respectability of the coat and tie or revert to the ways of the trader caste.

For Nanu, it did not even register as a choice. Born in 1924, he was a bright, handsome student in Lahore. Everywhere around him he saw professionals. His father’s father had been a well-regarded estate officer for an important landlord. His father was an authority on municipal law who fought cases and wrote books on the field. Everyone he knew had climbed through education. The family name was Agarwal, a bania subcaste whose name decorates many grocers’ awnings in the country’s north. But “business,” as it was defined in India—the buying and selling of things, as opposed to “service,” the work of a professional who cerebrally manages—was not for Nanu.

His education through eighth grade was in Urdu, with English only a second language. He switched to an English-language program in high school. As graduation neared, he fell in with a group of friends planning to study commerce, with a view to becoming an accountant. He was the highest-ranking student in the college when he graduated in 1944. Now he dreamed of England. He wanted to do the three-year apprenticeship required of accountants in London, so as to return to India a more prestigious manager, a gentleman. But, with war raging in those years, London was in turmoil and tickets for sea passage were scarce. Nanu enrolled in a program for a master’s degree in economics instead. By the time the possibility of a boat ticket resurfaced, he was a year into the program and had missed his chance.

One year after his economics course, Nanu was doing his apprenticeship at a firm in Lahore when the partition of the subcontinent came. His native city would now be part of Pakistan. As a Hindu, he needed to make his way south to India, and, luckily, his firm had an office in Delhi, to which he transferred once the dust of those days settled. In 1949, at twenty-five, with his accounting apprenticeship—known as “articles”—complete, he needed a job. On a whim, he traveled with a friend to Calcutta, then the commercial capital of the country and the former headquarters of the colonial administration, where a new Indian aristocracy was in the making.

The colonizers had gone but the companies they had managed remained. A handful of Britons were still at the top, but Indian managers now filled the intermediate rungs. In choosing these managers, the British had been drawn to those Indians who most reminded them of themselves—the boxwallahs. At their best, they were Macaulay’s stepchildren, the sons of civil servants and lawyers and clerks who had educated their boys in English, taught them how to dress like Englishmen, perhaps even taken them to the club for golf and sent them to boarding school in England. They were little Nehrus, and they were the new business elite. Despite the visible business talent of the Indian street, of the banias and the millions more who were banias at heart, the British firms preferred managers of a certain gentility, who saw business as a gentleman’s game and shared their contempt for tawdry moneymaking.

Nanu began his career at McLeod & Company, a trading firm (engaged in a form much elevated in its practitioners’ eyes from bania trading) whose interests spanned jute, tea gardens, insurance, shipping, and engineering. Until a few years earlier, the most important social division in Calcutta would have been brown versus white. But it was now covenanted versus noncovenanted. A covenanted officer, brown or white, was like a commissioned officer in the army: he was on a fast track to upper management, receiving perquisites such as six-month vacations in England every third year, even if he was not English. In some cases, the covenanted had use of a separate elevator.

Nanu was covenanted and so whisked into a world that was bewildering to a child of the middle class from Lahore. The work was stimulating. The office was air-conditioned. He and his covenanted colleagues ate side by side in a private dining room. “It was not a buffet,” he stressed sixty years later, the distinction still mattering to him: they were served Western food in plated courses. A coat and tie were required in the office. In the summer, however, it was permissible to carry the coat over your shoulder.

The boxwallahs finished their work around five each evening and met managers from other companies for tea. On weeknights, Nanu and his friends met at Flury’s, which served pastries and cakes. On weekend mornings, they convened at a local eatery on the Chowrangi Road, where they would sip beer and “gossip and chitchat,” as he later put it. Business was gentle and gentlemanly. Some managers used to tuck in a round of golf in the morning, reaching the office only at eleven. Subtracting, then, the two-hour gin-and-tonic-soaked lunch that was also customary, the actual working time could be a very manageable four hours. There were evenings at the club; there were cocktail parties at which Indian managers sought to compete at scotch drinking with their burlier British colleagues.

Nanu was further immersed in Englishness when he was assigned to audit the company’s tea gardens in Assam and West Bengal. He would travel for six-week stretches, spending a week at each garden. Most of the garden managers were Englishmen, with whom he would interact for twelve hours a day and learn how to talk, carry himself, and even think. They ate breakfast together with the manager’s wife. They worked together during the day, punctuated by lunch, again with the manager’s wife. There was afternoon tea immediately after work. Then they would retire to their rooms, bathe, and return to the drawing room for a chat before dinner and, in wintertime, a fire. After dinner, there might be a bit of brandy.

“From the unruly chap in Delhi doing my articles, I became a little more polished chap,” Nanu said. “I learned a lot of things: behavior, etiquette, attitude, meeting people and talking to them. I picked up how one should behave—how to eat, how to use forks, fish knives. I picked up all those things by observation.”

He was now on his way to the upper reaches of Indian society. He was the picture of respectability in those days, with his neatly parted hair, a trim mustache, and shirts and pants to which he paid great attention. He worked for a brief time with Dunlop, then switched to Hindustan Lever. In 1954, he married my grandmother; my mother was born a year later. They remained in Calcutta until 1959, when he moved to the company headquarters in Bombay. He would eventually become the company’s chief internal auditor.

He remained sensitive to the contempt for banias in that age. It was the time of Gandhi, himself a tradition-breaking bania, and a time of causes nobler than the pursuit of profit. “High thinking, simple living” was the phrase of the hour. Ideas mattered, values mattered, causes mattered. Money carried the taint of an imperialism just vanquished; it was greed, after all, in whose service the colonizers had come. In these times, Nanu never dreamed of starting his own business, nor even of knocking people over to rise within Hindustan Lever. The quiet bureaucrat, whether in government or in business, was the picture of respectability. “I felt that I had reached a very honorable, comfortable position,” he said. “I never was interested in or involved in running a business. I always wanted to be a professional.” He compared himself to some of his bania relatives who had actually lived the bania life, and he was satisfied by the comparison: “They had a lot of money; I didn’t have a lot. But I still felt I was one leg up on them. My education, my background, my knowledge—I was probably more sophisticated in my attitude, behavior, manners.”

And it was this worldview that was responsible for a small quirk in our family history. My mother, before she was married, had a different last name from her father. “Agarwal referred to the bania community, and I somehow didn’t like this bania-hood,” Nanu explained one day. “So I thought, I can’t drop Agarwal from my name, which says that I’m from a bania family. But at least for my children I can drop the name and give them my middle name, so they’re not associated with banias.”

*   *   *

Dhirubhai Ambani was born eight years after Nanu, in 1932. His portal into the world was a village in Gujarat called Chorwad, which happens to translate as “settlement of thieves.” It was, in fact, a settlement of merchants. The Ambanis were modh banias, from the same trading subcaste as Gandhi, and, unlike Nanu, Dhirubhai had a number of role models in the mercantile life. But, as in Nanu’s case, Dhirubhai’s father was a professional man. Working as a teacher and headmaster, he had never found his footing in business, owing (it was whispered) to an excess of honesty. It was a mistake that his son and later his grandson would never be accused of making.

Dhirubhai had the same choice as Nanu, to follow in his father’s footsteps or to try his hand at the bania life. His decision was made for him when he bungled his high school examinations. He would later joke of having an MABF degree—“matriculation appeared but failed.” With no credentials to ride and no family trade to enter, Dhirubhai decided to do what many young Gujaratis were doing in the late 1940s: he set out for the Arab port of Aden to make some money and build some connections, with the hope of eventually starting his own business. In an age of massive government enterprises, secure salaried jobs, and asphyxiating controls on private enterprise, Dhirubhai swam against the current.

Aden was in those days a city of the world, a popular way station between East and West that teemed with British soldiers, Arab traders, and enterprising Indian migrants. There Dhirubhai found work selling products for Shell Oil, crossing to the Horn of Africa in wooden dhows. Family photographs from that time show a pudgy but handsome man, dapper in his boxy suit, with something of the used-car salesman in his eye. He was fearless and confident. It was said that he paraded stark naked in the shared bathrooms of the employee quarters, while the other Indians walked around coyly in their towels.

He was working for the white man, just as Nanu was doing in those days. But he seemed much less concerned with learning their ways than with giving expression to his own. Colleagues in Aden remembered his bania penchant for risk taking and self-confidence. Frustrated with his staid salary job, he prowled the Aden souk after work, taking out positions in future deliveries of commodities, creating his own personal derivatives market. One day, officials in the government treasury noticed that the main unit of exchange, a pure silver coin called the rial, was vanishing from the money supply. Investigators traced the disappearance to Aden and eventually to Dhirubhai. He had discovered that the coin’s metal content was worth more than its exchange value and had been melting coins to sell the silver.

In 1954, the year Nanu and Nani were married, Dhirubhai married a young woman, Kokila Patel, selected by his family from within the caste, and returned with her to Aden. They had a son, Mukesh, three years later. As time wore on, Dhirubhai tired of Aden. He was not built to take orders and work for others, as his constant freelancing suggested, and so he decided to return to India and start a business of his own. In the coming years, he and his wife had a second son, Anil, and two daughters, Dipti and Nina.

Dhirubhai returned to his village and recruited as his partner a cousin whose father was willing to supply seed money for a business. Together they set out for Bombay, the bustling commercial capital. Reliance Industries, as it would eventually be called, started in a small office in a packed market, with one table, one telephone, and three chairs. Dhirubhai and his cousin began as simple traders. They bought spices in India and sold them to contacts in Aden. Then they got into trading yarn.

In an age of public purpose, private capital was still held in contempt in India. Taxes were high, regulations were tight, licenses were required to produce anything or even to change the amount of something that you produced. India’s leaders remained enamored of homespun cotton, the fabric favored by Gandhi, and used the power of the law to restrict large-scale production of textiles, which had been a principal trade interest of the British. There were also severe limitations on the imports of raw materials, unless you had special ways of dodging them. And it must be noted that the class of men who implemented these regulations, who needed to be pleaded with by business owners, who lorded imperiously over industries they scarcely understood, was largely the same class of men with whom my grandfather dined at Flury’s in Calcutta: the Anglicized professionals who, when they didn’t enter the boxwallah companies, entered the civil service, in those days among the most prestigious lines of work.

Dhirubhai would have been a canny, corrupt, vernie trader in their eyes, beneath their refinement. But he began to display a talent for getting what he wanted. It would become a truism of Indian life within the company’s first years that Reliance could bribe, cheat, and steal its way out of anything—although it showed a remarkable ability to prevent these allegations from reaching the pages of newspapers and the verdicts of courts: what was widely suspected was rarely proven. What was apparent was that Dhirubhai managed to secure licenses and special exemptions and forgiveness that few other companies could. He managed to have politicians do his bidding as if they were on his payroll. He made problems go away, over and over again. And he built a reputation for never forgetting the people who helped him. He had a talent for relationships—on Bombay’s streets, where he sipped thousands of cups of tea to ingratiate himself with the merchants who mattered, and in Delhi, where coveted licenses were on sale to the highest suitcase-carrying bidder. He quickly emerged as a don of the Indian yarn trade.

It was not business as my grandfather thought of business. It was a no-holds-barred, bottom-up approach that refused to accept “no,” that defied the stuffy Anglicized stickler for rules, that put human relationships above everything: commerce as it was played on the streets, not as a parlor game.

*   *   *

The Ambanis lived back then in a modest two-bedroom apartment in the Bhuleshwar neighborhood of Bombay, in a building called Jai Hind Estate. It is part of what is known, somewhat disparagingly, as the chawls, the tenements.

I visited Jai Hind Estate one day. It stood in a cluster of buildings with grated windows and balconies among which pigeons ricocheted all day. Dhirubhai’s children would have stared out of the windows at other people’s laundry flailing in the breeze. In a country where having a housemaid was a hallmark of being stably middle class, Jai Hind Estate was decidedly below that line, then as now. Everywhere homemakers flogged their mattresses clean and plunged soiled clothes into soapy buckets as children scampered around. Bollywood songs wafted through the halls. These were the people to whom Bollywood catered: Indians whose dreams outstripped their grinding realities, who took shelter in the big-screen projection of their fantasies.

I was, of course, encountering the chawls through my own eyes. Shortly after visiting the house, I asked Dhirubhai’s son Mukesh about those years. He saw them differently, as a time in a special urban space where the warmth of the Indian village endured. Lives were lived in the open. Doors stayed ajar. A single balcony was shared by multiple families. People cooked for others’ children, who moved in snack-seeking cohorts from one household to the next. (When Mukesh was a boy, he lost half of his pinky finger on one of these snack missions, when a door slammed in a friend’s house.) The noise and chaos of Indian family life—everyone yelling at everyone, a never-ending stream of tasks to perform—had its drawbacks if you liked privacy, quiet, and space. But its blessing was the power of perpetual miniature drama to drown out the deeper, paralytic drama so endemic to modern societies: angst, depression, soul-searching. The chawls bred sturdy people, immune somehow to the larger dilemmas of tradition and modernity, Indianness and Westernness, that were confounding another class of Indians coming of age just a few miles away.

Several times a day, Mukesh ran down dark stairwells and out into the streets. Immediately outside were street-food vendors, selling the tamarind-laced chaat that he loved. All around was vital, throbbing business: not the genteel business of the boxwallahs, but kill-or-be-killed commerce: shops selling saris and jewelry and grain. Every inch of space, every moment of time, counted. Pushcarts ferrying cloth and food rolled past every minute. Indian politeness vanished here. Laborers who would bow meekly elsewhere in the city would ram their carts into a person’s leg if he did not move. In the chawls a child would have drunk in the mythology of the merchant and his sense of battle. Business was a street fight.

By the late 1960s, Reliance was thriving. It had begun to manufacture its own polyester and sell its own Vimal brand of clothes in a chain of retail outlets. Before Mukesh’s tenth birthday, Dhirubhai changed the family’s surroundings overnight, moving into a lavish apartment in one of Bombay’s finest addresses, the Usha Kiran building on Altamount Road. The city’s boldface names lived in Usha Kiran; despite the import controls, the parking lot overflowed with Mercedes sedans. It was not far from where my mother was growing up, in Nanu’s company-owned apartment. But even as Nanu sought to hide his children’s bania origins, Dhirubhai had an opposite fear: that money would somehow sap his children’s sense of bania-hood and deprive them of the street smarts that had propelled him to success. To address this worry, he turned to a man named Mahendra Vyas.

Vyas was a science teacher at the New Era School in Bombay. Dhirubhai hired him for an unusual assignment: to keep his children close to the streets for two hours a day. Other families on Altamount Road sought to insulate their children from the Indian reality and to groom them academically above all. But Dhirubhai told Vyas that academics was off-limits. Formal education is fruitless, he would say; just look at me. He wanted Vyas to take the children on the municipal bus and to public cricket games, to show them how to ride the train in third class and how to buy tickets in the station, one of the rare spaces where the rich were pushed and pulled and made to feel as impotent as everybody else. Once a year, Vyas took the children to live in a village for ten to fifteen days. Mukesh later described these tutorials to me as “one of the best things that happened to me in my life.”

This training in the rustic left an impression. In 1979, when Mukesh went to Stanford University for an MBA, he remained steeped in his working-class ways. Upon arriving, he latched on to an Indian classmate, Akhil Gupta, and asked Gupta to accompany him on an urgent mission: to find the perfect plastic mug. Traditionally, most Indians outside the Westernized elite have viewed toilet paper as insufficiently thorough, cleaning themselves instead by hand and water poured from a mug. Mukesh had grown up with this custom and now, arriving at Stanford, insisted on driving around Palo Alto for hours to find a suitable mug, with the handle and spout just so.

Mukesh was remembered on campus as generous, retiring, and chronically homesick. There was a sweetness in his nature that his friends admired. Knowing that Gupta was short of money, Mukesh would suggest that they go food shopping together, pay for the groceries, and casually leave them in Gupta’s apartment. He never really settled into Stanford or showed much interest in his surroundings. His heart and his thoughts were always in India. “He was there at Stanford, but he was also not there,” Gupta said. “After class, he used to be on the phone with his sister for an hour. He missed home. He missed the food and his family a lot.”

On Friday evenings at Stanford, a group of students would go out for ice cream. Gupta, feeling adventurous, picked a new flavor every time. Mukesh never wavered from chocolate. Gupta would turn philosophical, arguing that evolution required the trying of many things and then the selection of the best. His friend’s smiling reply still resonates in his ears: “He used to say, ‘You keep evolving, I’ll keep getting what I want, and we’ll see what happens to each other,’ ” Gupta said.

Mukesh’s fidelity to his indigenous manners never left him. Many other Indian business leaders donned finely cut suits and flaunted fussy tastes. Ratan Tata cruised down Marine Drive on Sundays in fast cars and favored Hermès ties with matching pocket squares. Vijay Mallya was said to be trailed in his home by a butler holding a silver tray with a cigar and a scotch. Adi and Parmeshwar Godrej were famous for soirees that attracted Hollywood stars. Mukesh Ambani behaved differently. Among family and close friends, he preferred speaking Gujarati to English. He was openly pious, asking colleagues to stop with him at a temple during business trips to partake in a ritual Hindu prayer. He loathed business suits, preferring a white short-sleeved shirt and black trousers in the style of Indian bureaucrats. His idea of entertainment was not the Jazz Yatra concert series that my mother had relished but Bollywood; he was said regularly to watch films late at night in his private theater. He had a legendary appetite, but mostly for the food of the bustling Bombay streets. He was known to walk out of fancy restaurants in search of dosas, south Indian crepes, sold by the roadside. One evening, many years after Stanford, he and Gupta had dined together in New York at Nobu, the well-known Japanese restaurant. Mukesh picked at the fare, finding it bland. At the end of the meal, Gupta recalled him saying, “That was nice. Now should we go have dinner?”

Nandan Nilekani, a friend of Mukesh’s and a pioneer of the Indian software industry, put it to me this way: “If you look at his interests, they’re very rooted in India. He likes movies; he likes street food. He’s very comfortable with himself; he’s not trying to impress anyone else. It’s part of a broader shift in self-confidence that is happening, where people are no longer looking at Westernized symbols of having arrived.”

I asked Mukesh, when we met one afternoon in his office, if he saw himself as part of this larger turning: the ascent of a class of Indians unburdened by the colonial past, more rooted in their own land, less battered by the sense of inferiority that came with trying to emulate another culture: another facet of the Indian opening, another form of release. The thought seemed alien to him. “Now as you’re saying it, I relate to what you’re saying,” he said, thinking aloud as he spoke.

“One thing which I learned from my father,” he said, “which is very important to pass on to multiple generations, is to say”—and here he repeatedly thumped the sofa for emphasis—“never have an inferiority complex, never think that this guy is great and I can’t do it and all the other stuff.” In his college days, he went on, “there was a lot of emulation, and my own view was that that itself compounded the inferiority complex. My view was, ‘What the hell, ya. We can do what we feel like.’ I think what has changed now, and it’s changing in multiple generations, is this self-confidence and self-belief. And sometimes we’ve got too much of it, without proving ourselves. But the right amount of self-belief, the right amount of self-confidence, the right amount of faith in oneself is important. And that’s changed.”

The success of the Ambani family reflected the rise of the indigenous not just in cultural terms but economically as well. The boxwallah firms had operated in a comfortable, closed game of capitalism. It was an era of production ceilings, when more was demanded than could legally be produced. Funds came from banks staffed by fellow boxwallahs. Permits were granted by civil servants who dressed and spoke like they did. The companies could survive without doing battle; with no incentive (or permission) to expand, they focused on products that all but ignored the hundreds of millions of Indians who lived in villages such as Ravindra’s Bhiwapur and Dhirubhai’s Chorwad, Indians who could not dream of buying the creams and toothpastes that Nanu’s company produced.

From the beginning, Reliance marketed itself differently, as a company of, by, and for the Indian masses. It bypassed the clubby world of Indian banks and became the first major Indian firm to raise capital from millions of public shareholders. It then used the popular clout of its shareholders, who were, of course, also voters, to bully politicians into cooperation. At company meetings, Dhirubhai Ambani spoke of being a simple man, a middle-class man, just like his investors. The company devoted itself to producing things that would touch every Indian, starting with yarn and polyester and, over the years, moving into oil and gas, petrochemicals and plastics, cell phones and groceries. The Ambanis were ruthless in their tactics but sweetly patriotic at the same time, with no interest in industries in which success would not seep into the Indian layers.

Mukesh’s first project of his own was to set up a plant to produce polyester filament yarn in a rural area called Patalganga. He had been summoned home one year into his two-year Stanford program by a father with little patience for book learning. This MBA stuff was fine, but it was now time for business, Mukesh was told. The plant was completed on schedule and to widespread acclaim, and Mukesh began to emerge as a respected business leader in his own right, with his own style of management: part visionary and part taskmaster, big thinking but achingly detailed. The business burgeoned, entering one new line after another, its reputation for daring and government manipulation growing in tandem.

In the intervening years, India changed. The sun set on the world in which my parents had been born, in which money was tawdry and sacrifice was noble and the professional was exalted. In the early 1990s, India was on the verge of bankruptcy. Command economics and import restrictions and autarky had not worked, and so the doors of the economy were flung open. Controls were stripped away, caps abolished, quotas dispensed with, permissions and licenses banished into history. The market was allowed to remake India. There was an explosion of credit cards and refrigerators and soft drinks; the number of television channels multiplied several hundredfold; choices flowered; new wants emerged out of thin air. Wealth as an end in itself became sanctioned in law and socially acceptable.

In 2002, Dhirubhai Ambani died. Arun Shourie, a politician and former cabinet minister who in earlier decades as a journalist had crusaded against Reliance’s behavior, declared that he had made a “180-degree turn” in his assessment of the company. His turnabout spoke in many ways for the country itself. In a speech a year after Dhirubhai’s death, he said, referring not just to the Ambanis but to the larger class of bania industrialists that they represented, “Dhirubhais are to be thanked not once but twice over. First, they set up world-class companies and facilities in spite of those regulations; and, second, by exceeding the limits and restrictions, they created the case for scrapping those regulations. They made a case for reforms.”

Two years after Dhirubhai Ambani’s death, the aftershocks began. The company was doing well, with Mukesh as chairman and his brother, Anil, as vice chairman. But now a power struggle broke out, with an only-in-India plot: two brothers, living in the same house, lobbing accusatory firebombs against each other through the press, while a pious Hindu mother labors behind the scenes to divide the multibillion-dollar spoils.

After months of battle, the mother cleaved the empire. Mukesh, cast in this drama as the sober older brother, got the old-economy industries: chemicals, textiles, energy. Anil, cast as the flamboyant smooth talker married to a Bollywood star, got the new-economy firms: electrical power, financial services, and mobile phones. It was agreed that both brothers could use the Reliance name but under separate brands. Meanwhile, they would continue to live in the same house, on different floors of the building, until Mukesh’s new house was completed some years later.

Both Reliances outstripped expectations after the split. Anil’s slice of the empire grew massively. He now ran one of the largest phone networks in India, and his entertainment firm made inroads into Hollywood, signing several deals with American stars. Anil was said to be the more personable of the two; many who knew both brothers said that it was easier to work for him. And yet it was Mukesh who emerged as his father’s true successor—by the scale and daring of his projects, by his conflation of the nation’s imperatives with his own, by his childlike and deadly effective gall. Mukesh not only proposed to build a bigger enterprise with greater profits; he also began to speak of his projects as if he were a national leader, describing a raft of challenges that were India’s deep, existential concerns—from its energy crisis to its village poverty to its crumbling infrastructure—and proposing for each of them a Reliance solution.

“If we say, ‘Can we really banish abject poverty in this country?’—Yes, in ten, fifteen years we can say we would have done that substantially,” he told me when I came to see him. “Can we make sure that we create a social structure where we remove untouchability? We’re fast moving to a new India where you don’t think about this caste and that caste, and you can differentiate yourself between young and old, what you stand for and what you don’t stand for. These changes are happening.”

*   *   *

The curtain of dusk fell on Bombay, and the stadium lights glared in the darkness. As Mukesh Ambani’s cricket team warmed up for its match, the roads leading into the stadium clogged with municipal buses, Mercedes sedans, and Indian-made motorcycles with names such as Hero, Glamour, and X-treme. The air thickened with their fumes. Heat curled up from the ditch-dimpled streets. Those tuned in to their radios were encountering the cognitive dissonance of Bombay’s traffic: light, flighty, hopeful Bollywood show tunes pitted valiantly against the hopeless, immovable gridlock of the streets.

One by one, the cricket fans abandoned their rides. The prosperous could pop out without a care because they employed drivers. The slim-waisted, sandal-wearing poor could leap just as easily from their buses into the traffic, wriggling like dancers to dodge car mirrors. The burden was heaviest on the swelling Indian middle class, affluent enough to shun the grimy, fluorescent-lit buses, but not rich enough to hire their own drivers. They stayed in their cars, in groups of four and five, inching forward, honking, waiting.

A few hundred yards away, the stadium compound was jumping with the sweat-slicked bodies of those prudent enough to have come early. It was an orgy of the newly moneyed classes: loud, brash, confident, overweight, aggressive. Each cluster was its own private world, bumping obliviously into the other clusters with little apparent concern. There were paunchy young software types, with their trademark blue shirts and dark pants and plastic-wrapped identity cards at their waists; sprawling three-generation clans, whose fathers and children rushed ahead while arthritic grandmothers waddled behind, attended by their daughters-in-law; raucous bachelors draping arms around one another. In a society not long removed from famine, the size and ubiquity of bellies were striking: the marks of a new urban plenty. The crowd spoke in lush, emphatic Hinglish.

Cricket was once a game for the Anglophile gentry, its matches played over several days and watched by the kind of people who had days to spare, people genteel enough to appreciate the sport’s genteelness. It then became the defining sport of independent India. And now, on this steamy evening in the Bombay suburbs, cricket was being reinvented again with a new intercity Indian league. Having passed from the colonizers to the colonized and from the gentry to the people, it was now being repackaged as a commodity to be sold to the hopeful masses with cheerleaders (on loan from the Washington Redskins football team), shrill announcers, and over-the-top glimmer more redolent of Bollywood than of Lords. To attract “the man on the street,” a phrase with sad literality in India, the league had trimmed the matches to three hours, no longer than a Bollywood film.

The Chairman was late. That was what everyone in the box called Mukesh Ambani, all the handlers and press agents and anxiously waiting guests. His box was the size of a tennis court, divided between an air-conditioned interior and terraced seats outdoors. It was encased in glass, to separate his guests from the crowd beyond. The unboxed were loud and fierce and sweating in the heat, squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder outdoors on white plastic chairs. Mukesh’s guests in the box sat on chairs upholstered with magenta faux-ostrich pleather. They sipped beer and wine, which those beyond were denied.

Presently Mukesh and his family entered, ringed by boxy security men in gray safari suits. A sense of their arrival spread virally through the crowd. People began to turn around, to stand up, to shake their heads from side to side and smile, to clasp their hands together in greeting and—if they were lucky enough to stand along the Chairman’s path—to shake the hand of one of the family members as they descended to their front-row seats.

Mukesh was dressed in his usual villager-made-good style: a long-sleeved Hugo Boss windbreaker and fading navy chino pants. His hair was neatly parted and moist. His largeness was accentuated by pants too short for him, not quite reaching his feet, and a little too tight, riding up between the bulges of his thighs. The Chairman’s wife was the more decorous and sociable of the two. She wore a beige salwar kameez emblazoned with pink roses and was spotted with a mine’s worth of diamonds—on her eyeglasses, on her ring, on her earrings, on the rim of her watch. These shimmered visibly every time she turned around to wave and smile and blink her eyes at her invited guests. To the couple’s left, one of their sons was slicing the air with a team flag and leading the crowd in a call-and-response Hindu chant: “Ganpati Bappa Morya!”

Mukesh stared ahead at the game, unmoved by the mingling around him. But his obliviousness was not reciprocated. When people are around Mukesh, they change. They flit around at a respectful distance, their eyes never leaving him, their minds never ceasing to dream up ways to engage him in conversation. A minor bureaucrat stood on the steps several rows behind him, strategizing with his aides about the best way to buttonhole the Chairman. Tuxedo-clad waiters took turns venturing to the front of the box to offer Mukesh a snack, but they would become too nervous to seek his attention when they approached.

His awestruck devotees had no mysterious purposes. They wanted only to speak a few flattering words to the Chairman, to call him “sir” and nod reverently, to tell him what an honor it was to meet him. People craved such moments not necessarily because they needed anything from him right now, but because they knew that they would need the Chairman someday.

Mukesh Ambani was now the most powerful private citizen of India since Gandhi. He had become more than a man, more than a businessman, more than the billionaire he was. He was a system to which others felt obliged to belong. Everyone agreed that he had few real friends; they would tell you this, then claim that they were one of them. They derided and praised him in the same sentence. An old friend of his told me that Mukesh reminded him equally of Mother Teresa and a nonviolent Don Corleone. The Chairman would squelch any rival who hindered his business interests, and do it while smiling into the rival’s eyes, another friend told me.

Such fear and trembling were by themselves a kind of influence. But Mukesh’s more vital power lay in how his story could be interpreted, not by his rich friends in the cricket box but by the Indians beyond the glass, peering in. He was, in many ways, one of them. He would not have had such a box in the India that my parents left. But the world had turned, and with it the hierarchy of manners; now a new kind of Indian, rooted in the local soil, mentally uncolonized, fanatical about his own country, unconstrained by an abstract British-taught morality, was in charge.

The cricket match reached halftime, and the Ambanis rose to eat. As Mukesh approached the buffet, two suited businessmen were brought to him, one a foreigner, one an Indian. He welcomed them warmly and asked them to eat. They demurred. He insisted and pointed them toward a stack of plates, several feet away. They resisted again. So he walked over himself and picked up two plates and handed them to the men, who still seemed shy, until Mukesh pressed the plates into their chests.

Throughout the game, a few privileged souls had been ushered into a conversation with the Chairman. Each one strained to find something to say that would stick. The secret to succeeding in those encounters, his friends had told me, to make him listen and perhaps invite you at a later date to his office, was to give him a “tip-off,” in Ambani-speak. Mukesh’s currency was information: hot, exclusive, actionable information. He tended to greet visitors with “To kya ho raha hai?”—So what is going on?—rather than “How are you?” The question was an invitation to offer Mukesh a valuable tidbit: which stock offering would soon be canceled, which bureaucrat would soon be transferred, which oil company would announce a find.

Information protected an empire that had risen against the system and had then become the system in its own right. Reliance operated like a small country, with an in-house “intelligence agency,” as some called it, that was the envy of its rivals. It was said by its admirers and rivals alike to maintain exacting biographical files on everyone who mattered or could one day matter to its business, along with a vast database of the schedules of officials in the Indian government. Reliance executives denied all of this.

A man who worked for Reliance for many years, and left amicably, gave me an illustration of the uses of such information. In the 1990s, when the brothers were still together and Enron still existed, an Enron executive had come to India seeking to set up a power plant. She met one of the brothers in a hotel lounge. She boasted that Enron was now as powerful in India as Reliance. His reply, as it was recounted to the former Reliance manager, went something like this: “Yesterday, at two nineteen p.m., you arrived at the Finance Ministry to meet so-and-so official. You talked about this issue and that issue. You left the office at two thirty-five.” The Enron executive was stunned. “OK, maybe almost as powerful,” she said meekly.

Reliance maintained a network of hundreds of “moles” and “stringers,” as people who had worked for the company described them: people who had full-time jobs in government ministries or some excuse for hanging around them and leaked important information to Reliance. There was another set of spies within the company, reporting directly to the Chairman, giving him unfiltered facts about the deeds of his own people.

In its various spying activities, and in its suspicion and anxiety, Reliance seemed a throwback to an earlier time, still assuming scarcity in an age of abundance. “Remember, these guys all grew up in the License Raj,” a close friend of both brothers told me, referring to the 1970s and ’80s, when licenses from the government were required for all economic activity, stunting the growth of enterprises like Reliance. “They grew up as lotuses from the filth. It makes them tough, it makes them suspicious, it makes them vindictive at times, and it makes them come out in a hurry. They always see life as ‘Oh God, better not miss an opportunity.’ When they were growing up, you didn’t get a second chance.”

The heart of their manipulation was, of course, money. Reliance paid, and paid well. Nothing was unique about spending money in India to this end. But a longtime veteran of the company told me that two things distinguished Reliance from its rivals. The first was that many Indian companies were often compelled to pay for what they were already entitled to under law. Reliance did that, of course, but, more than others, it also paid for bureaucratic decisions to which it was not entitled, the executive said. Second, although the company used money to secure influence, it had invented many other creative ways to garner leverage.

Among them was its power over the press. Journalists covering the company were made part of the family, as some editors and reporters told me. It was not uncommon for reporters to receive DVD players, mangos, digital cameras, and sometimes even cash as gifts. If a journalist or bureaucrat rode the Ambani gravy train for a while, and did his part in return, he might enter what one of Mukesh’s friends called the “nursing home.” Those who had been helpful, who had understood the Ambani way, were rewarded not with fruit and gadgets but with foundation grants and consultancy retainers in retirement, in a country where pensions were meager and the support of children was no longer ensured.

“Reliance is like the government of India,” a friend of Mukesh’s told me one day over Chinese food in Bombay. “Once you join, you’re there for life.”

Foreign correspondents were normally spared such tactics. But I sensed in dealing with Mukesh’s people that they were accustomed to getting their way with reporters. I could feel it in the gentle, coaxing tone they used when asking me not to write something or to let something go. It had no hint of authority in it. It was the tone of a stern but loving father who is telling you what is best for you. When I came to meet Mukesh, for what we had agreed was an on-the-record interview, he began with the tone: “Why don’t we leave this—you can leave it as a freewheeling conversation, and you can figure it out between you and—” he said, pointing to his press aide, seated nearby. This was code language. It meant that I should not write anything from the interview that could injure him, that I should check afterward with his people for what I could and could not use. I ignored this.

My favorite Reliance influence-peddling tactic, revealed by the former executive and confirmed by other Ambani associates, was its financing of the American college tuitions of Indian bureaucrats’ children. The tactic was invented because some honest bureaucrats simply refused to take bribes. Reliance was not sure how to deal with the truly honest, but it soon found a vulnerability: Indian parents will do anything for their children, and even some honest bureaucrats would allow themselves to be bought just once, for the sake of their children’s security. The former executive once conducted the transaction himself. He donated a large sum to an American university. He specified to university officials that the money was not a general gift but was to be channeled into a scholarship for a particular student. The university raised no objections.

When I met Mukesh in his office, I asked him about the tuition payments. And what began as a simple denial opened into a revealing glimpse of his moral reasoning.

“Nah, these are all fables. Not true,” he said.

I pressed him: did the company do anything of the sort or didn’t it?

“Well, I don’t think it’s doing or not doing. It’s the question of saying, ‘Have I used Reliance’s money to pay for some of this?’—which I don’t think we’ve ever done. I don’t know. If you work for Reliance and you help somebody get admission, that’s a different thing. That’s what I call a ‘relationship.’ ”

I persisted.

“Would we have paid fees for somebody? The question doesn’t arise—never,” he said. He paused and recalibrated. “Some foundation would have given some scholarship maybe, but that’s all out in the public domain. So we would have never said that ‘Here’s a check’ and all the other stuff.” And then he seemed to come around: “A foundation—like, some scholarships that we run openly—those would have happened.”

The tuition example, brazen though it was, illustrated something for which Reliance was admired. Unlike many other large Indian companies, Reliance was never called transactional. Its fixers, lobbyists, and executives did not call only when they needed something. They cultivated and nurtured relationships just as Dhirubhai Ambani used to do, just as he had seen his relatives do in the village. They cared genuinely about a person’s family and remembered the names of spouses and children. If a bureaucrat known to the company needed a complex surgery that he could not afford, he might be sent to a place like the Mayo Clinic in America at Reliance’s expense, even if the company had not had business before him in years.

“Mukesh is not opportunistic,” said a friend of the two brothers. “I know of several industrialists—I deal with them every day—if you’re a joint secretary in the government of India, they will treat you differently. The day you retire, you’re forgotten. With Mukesh, you’re friends for life.”

As I continued my conversation with Mukesh, asking him about corruption more generally, he began, once again, with a denial. And then his answer evolved. He drew a distinction between corrupt and upright behavior, with Reliance on the upright side. But even he seemed to realize that there was something ridiculous about his denial, and he now attempted another, finer distinction: between the transactional and relational ways of securing influence.

“Our philosophy was very simple, not complicated at all, in terms of saying we believe in relationships and relationships are critical.” Pause. “Believing in what I call a cause is important.” Pause. “So at all times, if you have relationships and somebody says, ‘OK, why don’t you do this political deal for me,’ I say, ‘No, our cause is to build industry, and we will build industry.’ ”

I said that I had heard of Reliance’s reputation for not being transactional, but for maintaining long-term financial relationships with those in power.

“The easier way to think about that is, we never got involved in anything that is transactional,” he began. “Also, this whole business of trying to—I don’t think that payments per se work. I personally think that money can do very little. And this has been my experience all across. We would never—we would run away from any kind of transactional stuff. What we mean by relationships is to effectively stand by. That happens pretty much everywhere else in the world. It’s not transactional. If you and I have a relationship, and you need to go to Tirupati and need to have darshan”—Tirupati being an important place of Hindu pilgrimage, and darshan referring to a coveted spot in line to visit the temple there—“then surely if we have that, you can have that, or if you need an introduction to somebody. That’s a faith framework that you have. And then you develop that individual rapport where you can say you can trust the guy.”

This word “relationship” was important. It had come up again and again in conversations with Mukesh’s friends. Mukesh was a man of relationships. His father understood relationships. A relationship with the Ambanis was a relationship for life. A favorite story that the family’s admirers told was that Dhirubhai Ambani had gone to see Indira Gandhi on the day she lost the election of 1977; in some versions of the story, he came with a suitcase of cash. But the cash was beside the point. He had gone to see the loser on the day when no one else would, when every other industrialist was scrambling to schedule tea with the incoming prime minister. And it turned out to be prescient: she would eventually return to power, and Reliance was none the poorer for it.

But Dhirubhai had not gone to meet her simply because he expected her to retake power one day—and understanding this was essential to understanding the story’s meaning. It took a special instinct on that election day to gravitate to the loser, and it was an instinct passed down from the villages. Relationships for the Ambanis were not unlike the relationships of their caste ancestors in Gujarat. A shopkeeper or cloth trader in Chorwad did not borrow from the bank that offered the best interest rate at this very hour, or sell to the customers paying today’s highest price. In that universe, a living was made through a webbed community of suppliers and partners and patrons whose children married your children, whose taboos were your taboos, who prayed in the same temple, attended the same weddings, and looked after you when you fell ill.

Now the village was far behind them and the world had changed. But the idea of building up a tribe around you and nurturing it, giving limitlessly to it, trusting it with your fortune, had been transplanted to the new landscape. The bureaucrats and politicians were Mukesh’s friends. He had an “individual rapport” with them. They had a “faith framework” together. What was wrong if he let them use his private plane to go pray at the temple in Tirupati? What was wrong if he helped their children go to college in America?

*   *   *

Consider the following morality test. Ask yourself which two of the following four statements best reflect your own ideas of right and wrong.

1. It is wrong to cut ahead of someone in line when you’re in a hurry.

2. It is wrong to let your parents spend their last years in a nursing home.

3. It is wrong to use your influence to help your nephew get a job in your company.

4. It is wrong to let relatives visit your home without serving them a meal.

Let us imagine for a moment how my grandfather would answer and how Mukesh Ambani would answer. I have not had the chance to administer this test on either, but I am reasonably certain that Nanu would pick one and three, that it is wrong to cut in line and wrong to use influence for a nephew; and that Mukesh would pick two and four, that it is wrong not to tend to one’s parents and wrong not to serve visiting relatives a meal. And, before you puzzle over this strange test, let me contend that it distills two visions of morality that are at war in India—a war that Mukesh’s vision is now winning.

The first vision, Nanu’s vision, is more concerned with a universal fairness, no matter who the person, no matter what the context. It is always wrong to cut in line, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re in a hurry or not. It is always wrong to give an unfair advantage to your own family member in your company’s hiring process, even if you care a great deal about him. The second vision, which I ascribe to Mukesh, is not entirely blind to such norms, but its emphasis is on applying such norms in family situations more than in the public square; it is the ethics of dharma, duty, not of abstract rules. It is wrong to slight your parents, relatives, or guests—those in your fold—but it is pragmatically understandable when lateness requires that you break the usual rule of not cutting in front of a bunch of people you do not know. It is understandable to help a nephew rather than upholding some abstract principle that everyone else is probably breaking anyway.

These two visions mingle and compete and combine in Indian life, but the first emphasis has echoes of the Western Judeo-Christian tradition of thought, and the second emphasis is more rooted in the Hindu worldview. A. K. Ramanujan, a distinguished Indian linguist and folklorist, argued in his brilliant essay “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?” that these different emphases define the fault line between the Indian and Western minds. In the Hindu moral system, there may be different punishments for the same crime of defaming a Brahmin, depending on who defamed him: 100 panas for a member of the warrior caste, 150 or 200 for a merchant, and corporal punishment for a laborer. Murder punishments vary in similar fashion. Other sources of Indian philosophy provide instances under which lying is forgivable and even advantageous (such as when an upper-caste Hindu might face death as a result of telling the truth).

Ramanujan wrote of the ancient Indian sage and lawgiver Manu, whose teachings form the basis of much of this context-sensitive morality: “One has only to read Manu after a bit of Kant to be struck by the former’s extraordinary lack of universality. He seems to have no clear notion of a universal human nature from which one can deduce ethical decrees like ‘Man shall not kill’, or ‘Man shall not tell an untruth’. One is aware of no notion of a ‘state’, no unitary law of all men.” Ramanujan contrasts this with Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative: “Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a Universal Law of Nature.” What he concludes is that traditional Indian thinking, moral and otherwise, is “context-sensitive,” as opposed to the “context-free” orientation of mainstream Western thought, which aspires to universal principles and norms: “Universalisation means putting oneself in another’s place—it is the golden rule of the New Testament, Hobbes’ ‘law of all men’: do not do unto others what you do not want done unto you. The main tradition of Judeo/Christian ethics is based on such a premise of universalisation—Manu will not understand such a premise. To be moral, for Manu, is to particularise—to ask who did what, to whom and when.”

Once you begin to see through this prism, it has the power to explain much observed Indian behavior. It is the small Anglicized elite, my grandfather’s India, that clings to its firm ideas of right and wrong, sits at cocktail parties and frets about the maddening corruption. They have possessed a disproportionate influence in the years since independence, and so it has seemed at times that their way is the respected Indian way. But the truth is that a more flexible morality is common on the Indian streets, in the villages, among the rising middle class.

In India, the context for moral reasoning has traditionally been one’s caste or class or family circle, not the society at large, not the civic commons. Caste laws dictated how one human being was to treat another or be punished for mistreatment, not universal declarations of rights. The important question in deciding whether to extend ethical consideration to someone is “Do they belong to our fold?”

The boundedness of this ethical system explains certain paradoxes of Indian daily life. You could be in a train station and pushed and shoved by the traveler behind you; then, aboard the train, if you strike up a conversation with the same person, there is a good chance that he will offer you food, make space for you where there is none, help you in any way he can. Before you have met, you are anonymous, and the rule of the jungle applies. As soon as you have created a connection, you are part of his extended universe and circle of consideration, and his moral calculations now factor you in. I saw it, too, when I spent ten days in a silent meditation retreat outside Bombay. I noticed that the more Westernized students would practice civic behavior, such as holding doors open for others, waiting patiently in line, and refraining from pushing. The more indigenous Indians tended instead to jump the queue or slip through a just-closing door without propping it open for the next person. And yet I knew from experience that, if I met the same people in the towns or villages where they came from and went to them in need of food or shelter or a phone call, it would be they, more than the Westernized lot, who would rise to the occasion, feed me, clothe me, give of themselves without limit.

For Indians, these Western and Indian moral tendencies have competed for generations. The Western tendency had seemed to dominate in the years before and after independence, in the hands of men such as Nehru and Gandhi, whose writings reveal their own grounding in the Western universalist way. But now things were changing, and one way to construe the rise of Mukesh Ambani and so many others like him, and to make sense of their morality or amorality, was to see their deeds as another aspect of the indigenous reassertion, of the revolution from below. Their influence-peddling, mango-giving, mole-retaining behavior was not simply amorality. It was an alternative morality of the family, a context-sensitive morality that also served to work around the inflexibility of the British-given, Anglophile-staffed bureaucracy. It was a pattern of moral reasoning in which the calculus of right and wrong was made based on the effect of one’s choices on those one cared about. And it seemed to be the pattern of the looming future.

Mukesh Ambani was a topic of conversation wherever I went in India, but the conversation took two very different forms. In the cities, the educated old guard would bemoan his ethics over and over again: that he had the government virtually working for him, that he manipulated the law with impunity, that public servants used his private plane as if it were their own. “What is becoming of our country?” the critics would fret, assigning Mukesh a considerable portion of the blame for coarsening the system. Then I would find myself in Umred and other small towns, where young strivers worshipped the Ambani family like gods: their ability to defy smug civil servants, their use of connections, their single-minded focus, their belief that anything could be done in India, their rapid social ascent, the garish twenty-seven-story apartment tower that Mukesh was building for his family in Bombay. For the old rich, Mukesh’s skyscraper was a symbol of his lack of taste. For the rising, it was a hint of a changing of the guard.

On one of my visits to Umred, I had mentioned to Ravindra my encounters with Mukesh, and he insisted that I sit beside him and show him every photograph of the Ambani family that I could find on my laptop. For Ravindra’s generation of strivers, Mukesh’s success telegraphed the coming of a new India that rewarded the gritty and the impatient; an India where the pursuit of wealth overwhelmed all other pursuits; an India whose elite was more frequently refreshed, fortified by the rigors of having to earn the lives they enjoyed; an India anchored, much to the chagrin of the old guard, in India.

I had grown up with the image of Nanu sitting on his bed, knees up, writing up a letter to this or that bureaucrat or politician, mourning, one sliver at a time, the decline of his country. He was a committed citizen, and I never gave his letters much more thought than that. But I realized now that something larger was at work.

Nanu had been born into what felt to him like a society of propriety and principles and ideals. But the abstraction of these ideals, their universal and civic nature, had given them an alien and borrowed quality, and in time the soil below had begun to assert its claims. And, though he faulted those he read of and wrote to, the real trouble was within. It was his idea of India that was, when you came down to it, out of the mainstream. He didn’t just loathe corruption. Something in him simply could not understand it, could not understand the burning hunger for advancement, could not grasp why someone would not be content to do his assigned duty and do it well. The letters he wrote to those officials were articulate and elegant, but they had in them an almost willful denial of the country that India actually was. The ideas of right and wrong to which his letters appealed, the summons to uphold principle at any cost, belonged to a worldview that many of his countrymen did not share. His morality was not the only, or even the dominant, Indian morality. He didn’t understand hiring someone because he was your cousin’s son—but many Indians would. He didn’t understand taking a little kickback on a contract because you wanted to give your daughter a truly splendid wedding—but many Indians would.

And all those letters seem now like the last gasps of a dying regime. A new regime had come, eager after waiting so long to sweep in and sweep the earlier truths away.