Back to Barbara Harriss-White index Forward to Religions Section 2 Forward to Religions Section 3   India's Religions and the Economy by Barbara Harriss-White Ch 3 from India's Market Economy, 2005, Three Essays Press, New Delhi   Section 1   Religion and the Economy: the Background of Ideas   Indian secularism and the economy   Notes to Section 1   Section 2 (on separate page)   The religious minorities in India's economy 1. Muslims The case of Siliguri Small Town Muslim Commerce The economic bases of communal violence The material base of the Gujarat Pogrom 2. Christians Caste, Christianity and economic change 3. Sikhs Religious Plurality and Class Formation 4. Jains Religion, accumulative and reproductive practices 5. Parsis   Section 3 (on separate page)   Religious plurality and small-scale accumulation in south India (the case of Arni)   Conclusions Religious Plurality and the Economy (1) Why religion has not dissolved as a force in the economy (2) How far is the role played by India's plurality of religions in the contemporary economy conducive to efficiency? (3) How far do the conditions of production in India accentuate or even require religion and/or the plurality of religions?   Tables (on separate page) Bibliography (on separate page)   "It is too easy to call one form of exchange economic and one social. In real life all types are both economic and social." (Braudel, 1985, p227) "Religious sentiment is itself a social product." (Marx on Feuerbach; Feuer 1959, p245)   Anyone setting out to explore the reasons for the indispensibility of religions to the Indian economy immediately confronts a paradox. Nowhere are there more powerful and conflicting theoretical propositions and practical predictions to be found than with respect to the relations between religion and the economy. And yet while the history of the relation between religion, politics and the construction of the nation is well established (1), the relationship between India's religions, the market economy and the process of accumulation is so strikingly under-researched that one might be forgiven for thinking it to be of no importance. The relationship would at best be an indirect one, mediated through politics. This essay is a journey of reconnaissance into the ways in which religions structure Indian capitalism. For the most part the terrain is the larger part of the Indian economy which is out of the direct reach of the state - the so-called " informal" economy. Before embarking, it is necessary to outline the contours of some of the debates surrounding religion and capitalism - despite their ambitious scope. These debates might seem dated. In fact they are very relevant - not the least because they provide context for the ideas surrounding the political regulation of religion in the Constitution. The debates also provide elements of an explanation for the scholarly neglect of a subject which is the stuff of daily life - other, that is, than the obvious neglect caused by high disciplinary walls. They invite an interpretation of the question which is feasible to address using the meagre existing literature. The term "religion" will be taken to mean the institutional arrangements and modes of living to which sacred status has been given by a complex of beliefs and values. (2) These give legitimacy to the models of behaviour which shape social life.   Religion and the Economy: the Background of Ideas Far from being remote from the economy, or rooted in distant and irrelevant history, religious ideas were argued famously by Weber to be effective forces - although far from being the only effective forces - in economic activity. (3) In particular, the ethic of Calvinism, or English Puritanism - in inducing the ascetic deferral of satisfaction and transforming the acquisition of wealth from being a temptation to being a moral duty - was uniquely catalytic in creating the moral and political conditions favourable to capitalist accumulation. There are at least five ways in which this proposition has been developed. One school has criticised Weber's focus on the transformative role of protestant ideas, despite the fact that Weber's focus on the role of ideas was far from exclusive. There are many strands to this criticism. A focus on Calvinism cannot account for legal preconditions to the social practice of capitalism. These long predate the Calvinism which in turn predates the expansion of protestant entrepreurialism. They have a separate, though intertwined historical evolution. (4) A focus on economic and social thought neglects the economic and social organisation of capitalism, the early history of which had much to do with Southern European city-port-states which were nominally catholic. (5) It also ignores intellectual movements which were favourable to business but had nothing to do with religion. Weber is finally argued to have seriously oversimplified his model of Calvinism, in particular to have glossed over its early collectivist discipline and the range of its views on redistributivist obligations. (6) "It would be as one-sided to say that capitalist enterprise cannot appear until religious ideas produce a capitalist spirit as to say that religious change is purely the result of economic movements" concluded Tawney (1926, p320). A second school of criticism evaluates religions other than Christianity for spiritual ideas conducive to capitalist accumulation. Judaism for one example, is argued to have a much more straightforward moral code for the creation and regulation of capitalist enterprise than that embodied in protestant Christianity and one moreover consistent with the early history of capitalism. (7) A careful search of Islam has failed to find any serious obstacle to capitalist activity - even the prohibition of the taking of interest. (8) A third kind of critique compares ideas in other religions which are very close to the catalytic protestant ones but, contrasting their outcomes, shifts the burden of explanation for the development of capitalism to other conditions. Laidlaw for instance traces how both a this-worldly ascetism and a private individual uncertainty about the fate of the soul (9) are now institutionalised by Jains in ways exactly the opposite of Weber's portrayal. Laidlaw points to a range of kinds of accommodation "like the constant motion of a pendulum" in which diligent work and the accumulation of wealth are but one, and one moreover confined to a certain stage in the life cycle and not necessarily generalised throughout lay Jain society. "In so far, which is quite far, as the Jains have been one of India's major cadres of entrepreneurs, there is no compelling reason to attribute this to the ascetism of their monks and nuns or to the laity's respect for and emulation of this" writes Laidlaw (1995, p362-3). A fourth intellectual development works backwards from successful capitalist groups to seek predisposing moral ideas in their religions. Apart from the dissenting scholarship on Jainism, commerce is found to convey religious merit in Islam; (10) exploration, enterprise, honest and hard work are seen as values central to the Sikh religion (11); and a pragmatic resourcefulness and effort are found to be central to the spiritual philosophy of Vaishnava sects. (12) In none of these intellectual expeditions, however, was it shown that these values were capable of requiring the new kinds of economic or social action that would have been needed to create capitalism. The final neo-Weberian school explores the implications of other religions being wanting in the ideological resources favourable to the genesis of capitalism, despite the existence of many other predisposing institutions. In India's case the latter was thought to include the science of calculation, a deep division of labour and acquisitiveness. (13) In its proof, Weber's occidentalist project requires India to carry what Munshi has called a "double burden". Not only did India lack a rational ethic appropriate to capitalism but also it was steeped in magic. (14) Weber himself put emphasis on Hinduism as an assimilative social system in which the spirit of caste "in which every change of occupation, every change of work technique may result in ritual degradation is certainly not capable of giving birth to economic and technical revolutions from within itself" (Weber, 1962, p112). His conclusion on the worldly indifference of Hindu thought reinforced the one he made on caste. These are of no small importance, because, as will be seen later in this essay, ideas about the relationship of Hinduism to the economy have been influential in shaping social and legal institutions that also affect other religious groups. In Asian Drama, the economist Gunnar Myrdal examined the role of religion in the economy, covering the major religions of Asia, each of which he associated with a different nation. (15) Following Nehru, Myrdal pointed to religion in general and "Hinduism" in particular as "a tremendous force for social inertia" (1968, p103). Nehru, Myrdal and the elite post-Independence modernising sociologists pursued what David Gellner has condemned as the most vulgar of the misinterpretations of Weber (his question of the specific religious foundations of modern capitalism being translated into the question of the way the ideas of Hinduism are responsible for India's economic backwardness) (16) but at least the question is refutable. There are two aspects to what is also quite an essentialist argument, one that was in any case incompletely developed by Myrdal. First, Hinduism was said to be quite uniquely devoid of a core of egalitarian doctrine, it was uniquely based upon principles of inequality, relative purity and exclusion. The implications of these principles for the economy are that stratification and its consequent limits to free competition and economic mobility are tolerated. (17) Second, a Weberian correlate which seems to have been overlooked by Myrdal though consistent with his argument - the enduring beliefs in reincarnation and compensation with their unique ultimate objectives of renunciation and non-existence - also had implications for the economy since social and economic mobility would then depend on the obedient acceptance of the relativistic social order. (18) The recruitment and discipline of labour would be shaped by it. (19) As a peculiarly Indian principle which might dominate initiative and industry, it has come in for severe criticism. (20) That Hindu values might be obstacles to development had already been refuted by scholars like Singer and Morris before the completion of Asian Drama, though their work is not mentioned. (21) Singer, in particular, had concluded that industrial leaders borrowed selectively from Western industrial culture as well as from Hinduism. This enabled them not only to maintain a distinctive Hindu culture, but also to define Hinduism, rather than secularity, as the cultural basis of Indian (capitalist) modernity. (22) Myrdal, by contrast, used a conception of Hinduism which distinguished a "higher", "reformed" form compatible with modernisation from a "ballast of irrational beliefs", the superstitions of the majority responsible in part for their poverty. Myrdal nonetheless saw that religion was "part and parcel of a whole complex of belief and valuation, modes of living and working and their institutions" such that higher forms could not be isolated from the "ballast" and both needed "reform". However, even in the 60s he saw that "practically no-one is attacking religion" and economists have subsequently ignored his invitation to research the changing relationships between secularisation and the development of the economy. (23) We might mark this as an obscure point of little consequence, were it not for the fact that the way in which the need for "reform" had already been conceptualised was to have profound consequences for Indian development. The domain in which obstructive religious ideas prevailed was to be reduced through the way the economy was managed. "Business", "the state" and "planned development" were expected to change society, dissolve distortions to the economy and push religion back into the "private sphere". Further, the number of casualties caused by the "blind energy of capitalism" was to be deliberately limited by the state provision of social welfare. So both the state and the market were expected to encourage the replacement of the obscurantist beliefs held by the mass of people by a unified rationalism. "[T]he real thing ... is the economic factor. If we lay stress on this and divert public attention to it, we shall find automatically that religious differences recede into the background and a common bond unites different groups" (Nehru quoted in Madan, 1987). (24) Now, the reversal of causality commonly associated with Marx and Engels becomes relevant. (25) Engels - antedating Weber - also found in Protestantism a creed which fixed on the individual in a manner appropriate to the anonymous commodity exchange characteristic of capitalism. In Calvinist predestination, he found a parallel in the realm of ideas for the unpredictability of competitive, market-based exchange. Even though he thought that religion stood further from material life than other social practices (since religious ideas originated in a distant past), when it came to changes in religious ideas, for Engels the direction of causality was from the economic to the cultural. What needed to be developed was an analysis of the conditions making religion indispensible. (26) A strong prediction emerges from Marx's famous description of religion as the "opium of the people" - what would be understood in contemporary times as an analgesic, a means of "veiling" the pain caused by the irrationalities of production. (27) The prediction has already been alluded to in our discussion of Nehru and Myrdal's views on the relationship between religion and the economy. Both must have been influenced by it. Marx argued that when social relationships had been pervaded by the rationalities of commerce, capitalism would see the incubus of religion rooted out. Workers would be in the vanguard of this process, the first class to understand the role played by religion in masking the alienation of labour and the first to emancipate itself from this form of illusion and to relegate it to private life. That this has not happened in India is because of - rather than despite - the secularist ambition of its constitution. (28)   Indian secularism and the economy One of the reasons why "no-one is attacking religion" - while the practitioners of certain religions are being attacked by those of others - and why in India religions remain indispensable is the way religions are treated in the constitution. Paradoxically, it is because of - not despite - the secular constitution that distributive politics are organised in part around religions. In India, secularism is a state policy of equal public respect for all religions, rather than the state promotion of a public culture opposed to or sceptical of religion. (29) According to many observers, in the early years of independence the Indian state did not attach sufficient priority to controlling communal tendencies, or encourage - let alone enforce - atheism, partly because of "inhibitions in the planners" (rooted in their complicity or sheer cowardice), and partly because they, like Nehru, expected an inevitable "decline of the hold of religion on the minds of people". (30) Hansen concludes "secularism became in the post-colonial mass-democracy a privileged signifier of equal accommodation and competitive patronage of social groups and cultural communities through state and party" (1996, p.607). At any rate it is a fact that the fragile constitutional principles of equal status for all religions, and of state distance from them, were alchemised into a principle of toleration (in which inequality between religions was accepted and in which Hinduism was held to be the "only religion which is national and secular"). This in turn has provided the nutrient base for more or less xenophobic political campaigns calling for Indian nationhood to be based on the dominant religion - the precise opposite of the originally intended outcome. (31) The privileged signifier of equal accommodation was actually nothing of the sort - it stimulated unequal responses. Competitive patronage (rent seeking and rent protection based on religion) has had profound implications for the economy as well as for politics. Indian secularity has produced this perverse political outcome as the result of the operation of the very institutions designed to eliminate the influence of "irrational restrictions" on both capital and labour. Two propositions in Weber's later writings on the foundations of capitalism help to make sense of this paradox. First, along with private property, free labour and the weakening of "irrational restrictions" on the economy, (32) he argued two other elements as being particularly important : a rational accounting procedure, and a rational, regulative law (under which the scope and limits of "economic avarice" are defined), together with a public administration to implement it. (33) These were important both in themselves and for the impact they would have on "irrational restrictions". In India, while an extensive body of universalistic laws, rationalist in spirit, has been created to regulate the economy, its implementation is far from being universal, its rationale is heavily contested and its practice instituted through local power structures. (34) Equality of citizenship is also actively contested - notably by propertied, high status, men. (35) Regulation on the ground is shaped by local interests, particularly those of India's numerous intermediate class. So it is reasonable to ask whether, and if so how, religions may shape regulative practice, in the same way that caste does in some parts of India. (36) What is more, a large body of customary and of personal law, not usually considered to have a bearing on the economy, is organised on religious lines. This law certainly affects the way resources acquired by inheritance, marriage alliances and family partition are concentrated, divided and gendered. It affects the rights and powers of individuals to allocate resources between uses and between people. Religious law, in effect, shapes the terms of economic participation of the business family. (37) Hinduism also affects the way cattle function as an economic asset and as a force of production, (38) and in general religiously based law and custom violates the principle of the state's neutral distance from all religions. That Hindu personal law has been more modified than has Muslim personal law over the years since India's independence flouts the secularist principle of equal respect to all religions. There is also a massive regulative void in this pluralist body of personal law in the rights of women belonging to classes with no property. However, as with laws of economic regulation so with personal law, there is a large slippage between the laws pertaining to ownership on the one hand, and the day to day management rights of members of the propertied classes on the other. In practice, there is thought to be far less diversity in the practice of personal laws than is allowed for in their letters. "The burden of regulating control [in the occupation of niches in the structures of economic power] shifts [and] seems to fall to persuasion and perhaps to raw coercion" is Dwyer's significant conclusion (1987, p.525). It is reasonable to ask what is the role of religion in the forms of authority on which this "raw co-ercion" is based. Weber's second fertile idea, in his later writings, is that, paradoxically, a "big religion" may be the institutional solvent of the obstacles to development posed by numerous smaller ones and Hinduism is by any account a very big religion. Weber does not suggest that a big religion is either necessary or sufficient as a solvent. It may be necessary to break down the ritual barriers to citizenship and participation that exist between localised religiously-based groups, and may encourage a more unified system of authority; but it may be insufficient because, in the absence of other predisposing factors, a big religion may hinder the "spirit of capitalism". In the case of Hinduism Weber thought this hindrance worked through "the seal set on particularistic groups". (39) He had castes in mind, with what he saw as their overriding of any particular ethic and their inhibiting impact on the mobility of capital and labour. (40) In fact, neither caste nor its impact on capital and labour has prevented capitalism from being developed in India. Nor has religious plurality. So what is the impact of India's "big religion" on the way India's other religions affect economic life ? To sum up the argument so far, the Indian economy has failed to drive religions out of the public domain because - at the least - the Indian state treats religions in a way that is flawed in both its formal and its practical rationality. Its approaches to secularism and to regulation, instead of desacralising the economy, impair its capacity to do this. And if it had implemented universal regulative law, the state could still not have prevented religious competition because, by its own definition of secularism - equal treatment of all religions and state independence from them - such competition would have been beyond its reach. So religions continue to compete in the economy if only because they have been made one of the informal bases for the distribution of rents. The impact of religious plurality on the economy through its regulative and distributive politics is thus inescapably an important issue, crying out for research. It is not only that religions exist for reasons other than the economic, and that the economic and political superstructures make religions indispensable. We must also ask what role production conditions play in reproducing religions; and try to disentangle that question from the related question of what role religions play in production. By no stretch of the imagination is India purely Hindu. It has sizeable minority religions which have evolved, alongside the dominant Hindu religion, over many centuries. (41) Some of these other religions are conventionally seen as members of the "Hindu family", having been created on South Asian territory: Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism. Others are extremely long-established in the South Asian peninsula: the religions of tribal people, the religions of the scheduled castes (whose separate existence from brahminical Hinduism remains highly controversial) (42), Christianity, Islam and the Parsi faith. (43) In total, counting in Scheduled Castes and Tribes, minorities practising religions other than Hinduism may well comprise as much as 45% of India's population. (44) Even if we exclude the Scheduled Castes and Tribes, 17% of the population practised minority religions in 1991. Yet, simple facts about the economy, such as the contribution of the minorities to GDP, are unknown. In Table 1, it can be seen that non Parsi, non Jain minorities controlled but 2% of the assets of the top 52 business houses in 1996. (45) Counting in the minority members of the "Hindu religious family" they may have controlled as much as 40%. (46) Given the current state of knowledge, one must begin by simply trying to situate the minority religions in India's informal economy. From this review, I try to extract some working hypotheses and tentative conclusions about the persistent influence of India's various religions on the process of capital accumulation.     Notes   (1) See Ali, 1992; Corbridge and Harriss, 2000, p173-199; Hansen, 1996 and Hansen and Jaffrelot, 1998 for reviews of the history of this relationship. Back (2) Paraphrased from Myrdal, 1969, p103 (3) Weber, 1965 (4) Rodinson, 1987 (5) The question then concerns the conditions preventing the development of industrial capitalism in catholic Europe. (6) Tawney, 1926 , pp212-221, 319-21 (7) Sombart, 1951, pp191-251 (8) The practice of riba condemned in the Koran is not interest but the doubling of principal and interest if the debtor cannot repay when due. The prohibition of usury never had any but "little practical effect" and is understood by scholars as a response for particular circumstances not intended for all time. See Rodinson, op.cit. pp73-76 Back (9) These are central Puritan traits of the "capitalist spirit" according to Weber and assumed by him as determinant in Weber's own treatment of the Jain religion. (10) Mines, 1972 (11) Dass, 1998, p172-178; Kaur, 1990 (12) Khandwalla, 1995, p147; Gellner, 1982, p540 Back (13) Weber, 1962, pp1-4 (14) Munshi, 1988, p29-31 (15) Myrdal, 1968, vol 1, pp 78-80,103-108 with extensive footnotes; see also Houtant and Le Mercinier, 1980 (16) Gellner, 1982 (17) Myrdal, op.cit. p104 (18) Weber, 1962, pp 162-3 (see the quotations in Munshi, 1988, p7-9) Back (19) Munshi, 1988, p15 (20) Munshi, op.cit. pp18-21.The principle of obedience, whether to capital or to religious duty is in sharp tension with indifference to worldly life. (21) Singer, 1961; Morris, 1967. If this social order is also divisive then such beliefs discourage the widespread co-oordination of movements of social and economic reform. They help to explain not only the formidable difficulties faced until very recently by challenges to the social order by the exploited lower castes but also the fact that the political assertion of low caste people is not yet a co-ordinated class project for labour - see Ilaiah, 1996. (22) Singer, 1972, discussed in J. Harriss, forthcoming. Singer found that religion was permitting a plurality of norms, one for private life and another for work. In the latter sphere he found an abbreviated and relaxed religiosity where the religious foundations for ethical conduct were of active use to industrialists. Back (23) Myrdal , op.cit., p 107-9 in which there is the prescient conclusion that the tactical policy of the Indian elite to relegate religion to private life " could bring about a violent reaction that could spell disaster for all the efforts toward modernisation and development". (24) And quoted again by Ali, 1992, p.42. Back (25) Even though Weber himself acknowledged the two sides to the causal chain (Weber, 1965, p27) quoted by Munshi, 1988, p4 (26) Engels : Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Section III: Religion and Ethics in Feuer, 1959, pp216 -42 (27) Marx: Toward the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right in Feuer, 1959, p263 (28) Secularism in India is a state policy of equal public respect for all religions rather than a public culture opposed to or sceptical of religion in general. It has been conjectured that the Indian state in its early independence did not place priority on the control of communal tendencies or the encouragement - let alone the enforcement - of atheism because of the belief among the political elite and notably Nehru himself in the progressive "decline of the hold of religion on the minds of people" (Madan, 1987 , p757 quoted in Corbridge and Harriss, 2000, p197). In fact the constitutional principle of equal status has been watered down in practice to toleration (in which the inequality of religions is accepted), which in turn has provided the basis for xenophobic campaigns for separate or dominant religious nationhood (which is the precise opposite of the outcome originally intended) - see Gardezi, 2000. Back (29) The word "secular" was introduced into the Constitution in the 42nd Amendment. In Articles 14 to 17 the equality of minorities before the law is affirmed. In Articles 25, and 26 the right to freedom of religion - and in Articles 29 and 30 those to the conservation of language to education and freedom of education - are guaranteed. Of this kind of secularism Aijaz Ahmed says: " It is best to treat it as a certain kind of multidenominational tolerance and decency" (1996, p.xi). Desai's reaction: "The Government has defined secularism in a very pernicious and cunning manner." (1984, p.18). Back (30) Madan, 1987, p.757 quoted in Corbridge and Harriss, 2000, p.197.Back (31) Desai, op.cit., p.25; Gardezi, 2000. (32) In these, as Randall Collins observes in his review of the field of economic sociology, late Weber converged with Marx (Collins, 1992). (33) Weber, 1923, (34) Harriss-White, 2003, see chapters 2 to 8 for labour, capital, the state, gender, caste and space. (35) Chatterjee, 1997, p.244. (36) In any case, an examination of the extensive amendments of fundamental economic laws such as the Companies Act, the Industrial Disputes Act and the Essential Commodities Act, shows that they have been made increasingly less formally coherent and rational over time. See Mooij, 1998 on the Essential Commodities Act and Banaji and Mody, 2001 on the Companies Act. Back (37) Diwan, 1978, pp.633-653. Personal law, the oldest part of the composite Indian legal system is composed of Hindu and Muslim law. Both claim divine status but the Hindu law has been amended so many times that its claim to divinity is unsustainable! Each has schools: those of Hindu personal law being regional (Dayabhaga in Bengal and Mitakshara elsewhere) and those of Muslims varying according to sect. The rules of inheritance of Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists are as in Hindu law (the Hindu Succession Act of 1956) while those of Christians and Parsis derive from the 1925 Succession Act. In addition there are caste-and sect - specific regional variations in certain kinds of personal law (Diwan and Diwan, 1991; Dorin et al, 2000, p 11 et seq.). Sunni Memons, for instance, have retained in law their Hindu inheritance practices (Pierre Lachaier, 2001, Pers. Comm.). Back (38) Desai, op.cit., p.28-9. The holiness of the cow has been reflected in the widespread distribution of its ownership, the social organisation of butchery, the disposal of carcasses and meat marketing and the social profile of demand for livestock products and meat. On reasons for the overstocking and poor quality of cattle, see Moore, 1974. The cow is an extreme example of the sacred status of certain commodities, most notably food. (39) Collins , 1992, p.93. Back (40) On the debate over the reification of caste under colonialism see Corbridge and Harriss, 2000, p.176 especially footnote 4. (41) Minorities is a crude category. In practice the differentiation of sects in certain "minorities' is so intense that some amount to minorities within minorities, e.g. the Memons of Hindu origin within the Sunni sect of Islam; the Ghogari Lohana within the Gujurati merchant branch of the Lohana caste originating from Sindh (Pierre Lachaier, 2001, Pers. Comm.). Back (42) There is evidence from the ranking of dalits of their being a subordinated but assenting part of the Hindu universe. There is also evidence of their being defined in opposition to Hinduism (as a "folk culture" and as propertyless people), and of their being distinct from Hinduism (in egalitarianism, gender roles, attitude to defilement, governance and political mobilisation); and of their being a complex mixture, the balance depending on context. The interpretation of much of the ethnographic evidence is contested. These controversies are well reviewed in Armstrong, 1997. (43) Varshney (1993, p.230-1) suggests that the Hindu nationalist criteria of Hindu-ness as embodying territory, a concept of fatherland and holy-land, means that Christians, Muslims, Parsis - and Jews - with holy lands outside South Asia meet only two of the three criteria. Certain it is that Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs are covered by Hindu family law while Muslims have their own, as do other smaller minorities (Diwan, 1978). (44) Weber's project in The Religion of India was to demonstrate how the irrationalities of religions made it impossible for capitalism to have originated there. Although he conceded that capitalism was well established by 1921 when his research was published, the logic of his intellectual project meant that he was incurious about the impact of co-existing religions on it (1962, p.325). (45) Parsis are a minute proportion of the population - some 76,000 - but rank second in All India in their economic power with a fifth of the assets of the top corporates. (46) The difficulty in making this calculation stems from the fact that some marwaris are Jains and some Hindus.