Shikarpuri and Hyderabadi merchants exemplify in two different ways the tie-up which existed between local capital markets in India and markets for financial services and goods situated outside the sub-continent. The extent of capital resources and expertise vested in bania communities can easily explain how even small towns in South Asia could exercise a measure of economic control over vast areas outside the subcontinent. In this chapter we shall look in some detail at the precise forms of this tie-up so as to arrive at a better understanding of the business of the merchants. The lack of documents from firms is a severe limiting factor in this exercise and we shall be able to offer only a glimpse of the complex operations performed by the merchants of these two towns. They fell into two broad categories: finance and trade. Shikarpuris combined the two in varying proportions but were primarily financiers, while Sindworkies, although not eschewing finance, were specialized traders. The divergence in the trajectories of these two sets of merchants owes nothing to the existence of different predispositions, but is entirely due to a disjunction in the time sequence and to the specific nature of the economic environment in which each group had to operate.

The Shikarpuri shroffs as financiers

There is some broad similarity between the role performed by the Shikarpuri shroffs in relation to Central Asia between 1800 and 1920 and that fulfilled by the Nattukottai Chettiars in South East Asia between 1870 and 1940.