British killed Indian business and made us chase salaries: Saurabh Mukherjea explains how

India’s rich legacy of entrepreneurship, once vibrant under Mughal rule, was systematically dismantled by the British from the mid-19th century onward — a process that sidelined Indian business talent for over 150 years, says Saurabh Mukherjea.

In a compelling account, investor and author Saurabh Mukherjea draws from Lakshmi Subramanian’s book India Before the Ambanis, which documents the flourishing commercial scene during the Mughal era. “For 200 years, from the 16th to 18th century, India had stable law and order under the Mughals. Commerce thrived across the Indian Ocean. We were the dominant trading power in the Middle East and Southeast Asia,” Mukherjea noted in a recent video.

He highlights forgotten business titans from that time — Virji Vora, Shanti Das Zaviri, Mullah Abdul Gafar, Jagat Seth — who functioned as billionaires of their age, dealing in shipping, cotton, finance, and trade. “There were many unicorns in that era,” he remarked.

But the tide turned in the 19th century. “The British realized that Indian entrepreneurs were outstanding. So they decided: ‘Inko hatana padega agar hamare walo ko chance dena hai.’ They began dislodging Indian businesspeople through discriminatory policies,” Mukherjea said.

Subramanian’s book, he adds, recounts how elite Parsi merchants in Bombay and figures like Dwarkanath Tagore in Bengal were actively discriminated against. Yet, Mukherjea believes what came next was even more calculated: “They spread a narrative that portrayed Gujarati, Marwadi, Parsi, and Sindhi businessmen as cunning or distasteful — eroding the Indian entrepreneur’s stature in Indian society itself.”

That cultural undermining, he argues, persisted even after independence. The Indian Civil Service bureaucrats trained under British rule inherited their skepticism of homegrown business and carried it forward. “That mindset stuck till 1991,” he said, when reforms under Manmohan Singh and P.V. Narasimha Rao began dismantling the legacy.

Only now, Mukherjea says, is India truly recovering. “The number of companies being opened today is three times what it was a decade ago. We’re finally breaking through 150 years of suppression — first by the British, then by our own babus.”