GIPE-PUNE-OIIOI2 - DSpace@GIPE

THE BANK CAPITALISM OF YOUNG BENGAL 163
Jor India. 'We are forced to understand that banking as a
category of "modern" economy is not yet well established
in India. Like modern industry and commerce,
modern' banking also has but just commenced its career
of conquest among the Bengalis and other Indians. It is,
then, as a limb of the larger socio-economic transformation
that we have to approach the problem of modern credit
. institutions. The full-fledged "banker" continues still
to be as novel a person in the societal structure of Bengal
and other parts of India as he was in France and Germany
about 1848-1875 or in Italy and Japan about 1875-1900.
And technically speaking, the banking business will have
to pass through the same types of difficulties in our
country as in those which a generation or two ago
possessed more or less the same social institutions as ourselves
but which to-day are marked by ljgh co-efficients
in banking, industry, commerce and what not.
Modern banking has with us as with all semiindustrialized
and mediaevally-structured peoples its'most
formidable rival in the traditional money-lending business
of the mahaians and banias and to a certain extent also
of the Zemindars (landholders). Those who have
fluid capital are used to invest it in personal
loans to ryots, householders and other persons
10 need. Money-lending has in every country
been for a long time one of the most profitable
and economically very fruitful fields of investment. India
is not an exception in this respect. It is by competing
with' this traditional investmellt method that the pioneers
of modern industry and commerce, say, in Germany and
France, have bee~ able gradually to establish the new
institutions of credit. India today finds herself in exactly