New vaisyas: entrepreneurial opportunity and response in an Indian city

A book on entrepreneurship must please a widely variable audience. If the author is an anthropologist, he is criticized for his shallow grasp of psychology; if he is a psychologist, he is taken to task for his superficial understanding of the social context. The present study by an anthropologist and a psychologist will no doubt draw fire for taking insufficient account of economics, even though the community was previously studied in depth by an economist who also shared with us his data and acted as our consultant. We have tried to make peace with our prospective critics by an extensive analysis of economic considerations-historical and contemporary - though we have certainly not carried out the study that might be expected of a practitioner of the "dismal science". Collaboration involving such diverse vantage points is not easy, and through out the study, we have felt the strain of collecting and analysing data in a way satisfactory to our different perspectives. To some degree we have merely presented somewhat parallel approaches to the same data, hoping to correct thereby the excesses of a one-dimensional approach. We like to believe that this has in the analysis of one of the most complex ranges of anthropological variables ever considered in a psychological study of entrepreneurship and, conversely, some of the most elaborate psychological analysis contained in an anthropological study of the subject.