Artisan or Merchant Industrialists? Small-Scale Entrepreneurs in the Countryside of West India

Abstract

Small-scale industrialists in India appear to have little interest in making productive reinvestment of the profits earned from an enterprise in the same unit. Instead, they seem to have greater propensity to promote, successively and simultaneously, a wide range of disparate undertakings. This, according to most observers of the Indian industrial scene, is due to a basically commercial orientation among Indian entrepreneurs which places high premium on quick profits. This paper questions this notion through a close, hard look at an industrial centre in western India and stresses that the reality can be better understood by analysing the interconnection between agriculture, trade, and industry on the one hand, and the Indian social system on the other.