"Wisdom before riches" was city father’s motto

Times of India - Mumbai Edition Thursday, 7 December, 2006
Anjali Joseph

Mumbai: ‘Wisdom before riches’. The motto is still in the mosaic flooring at Premchand Roychand’s Matheran Bungalow. As Sharada Dwivedi shows in a new biography of the 19th century broker who made and lost a colossal fortune in the cotton boom. Roychand lived his life by the maxim.

Roychand is important to the city both because of his reputation and the influence he wielded in his career and because of his philanthropy. Yet no status were ever commissioned to commemorate him, and no street bears his name, for the substantial donations he made to educational and other institutions were usually quiet and anonymous.

Among the recipients of Roychand’s generosity was Mumbai University. He donated a total of over Rs. 6 lakh toward building the library and the clock tower, asking only that the library and the clock tower, asking only that the library become “an ornament to the city… a storehouse of the learned works not only of the past but of many generations to come”.

Unlike another donor, Sir Cowasjee Jehangir, who donated Rs 1 lakh for the university convocation hall and stipulated that the government should not accept money from any other donor for the project, Roychand’s name or statue do not grace the library.

The sole continuing reminder of this gift is in the clock tower, named after his mother Rajabai. She was blind by the time he offered the university the money to build it in 1864, and he said the grant was on her behalf and asked that the clock includes chimes that could allow her to keep track of the hours so that she was able to eat before 6 pm, according to the Jain custom.

A new exhibition about to open at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vaastu Sangrahalaya, ‘Bombay Bonanza’, which focuses on the years between 1850 and 1910, when much of the city as we know it was built, now aims to put the self-effacing Premchand Roychand back in the limelight.

Roychand’s own story is typical of Mumbai as a city. He was born in Surat in March 1831 into a family belonging to the Bania Caste of Shravak Jains. When he was a child, his parents took him and his siblings to Mumbai, where business people from different areas of Gujarat and were settling to carry on trade.

The family took a flat in the crowded ‘native town’ at Kalbadevi. The young Premchand was sent to Elphinstone Institution, a school founded by the Bombay Education Society and later amalgamated with other institutions to form Elphinstone College. As a result of his education, Premchand was one of the few Indian share brokers of the time to be fluent in English.

Premchand went to work for a banker and soon joined the brokerage firm that his father founded. In the mid 19th century, share deals still place on the Cotton Green, large meadow is the place of present-day. Horniman Circle. The share dealers worked in the shade of a large banyan tree that still exists.

Premchand’s first biographer, Sir Dinshaw Wacha, records that Premchand was successful in his work because of his “manners, his deep insight and quick calculation”. The young broker was sought out by British firms who wanted advice on which Indian businesses they could trade with. Premchand, with his command of English, decisive manner and sound knowledge of local business, was able to help. Such was his influence that, Wacha wrote, “to 1865 the history of brokerage is the history of Premchand Roychund (the spelling during his life). All enterprises in Bombay are either promoted by him, or promoted by others by his goodwill and help”. Such was Premchand’s influence that people collected outside his Kalbadevi house to be allowed an audience with the great man, hoping that some of his success would rub off.