The-Polyester-Prince

Junagadh named Rathibhai Muchhala and Narottambhai Doshi. Dhirubhai alsoenlisted the services of old acquaintances from Aden, including Liladhar GokaldasSheth, who had been a dealer in textiles, coffee and foreign exchange in Yemen,Burma and Aden (suffering several bankruptcies along the way) before settling backas a foreign exchange dealer in Bombay in the 1950s.Dhirubhai quickly became a familiar figure around the streets of Pydhonie, thesynthetic yarn trading district of Bombay where Gujarati merchants then did theirbusiness sitting on spotless white canvas gaddi floor-coverings, entering trades incompendious ledgers, and consuming endless cups of tea thick with sugar, spicesand hot milk. From late morning until about 4 pm, Pydhonie was busy with tradingas dealers made forward trades, trying to guess the future price of yarn of this orthat micron size.If cotton and silk had been the materials of India’s textile industry right from the oldhandloom days to the industrial looms of the early 20th century, by the 1950s theindustry and its consumers were hungry for the artificial threads created by modernchemical science. Nylon, viscose and polyester were cheap, hardwearing, quickdryingand crease proof, and could imitate both cotton and silk.The problem for yarn dealers at Pydhonie was not usually to find buyers but tosecure supplies. The tightening of industrial controls and import quotas sinceIndependence had choked supply of these luxuries as the economic Brahmins of NewDelhi channeled national resources towards new complexes making capital goodssuch as power stations and steel mills-what Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru calledthe ‘Temples of modern industry’.India had one viscose factory owned by the Birlas, and one government owned nylonplant. The first polyester fibre plant did not open until the 1970s. These domesticfactories supplied only a small fraction of local demand from textile weavers.Smugglers supplied some of the demand, bringing in yarn by either misdeclaringcargoes at regular ports or simply running small ships to the numerous creeks andbeaches of India’s west coast. Made-up textiles were also smuggled as well, viaDubai or Singapore. Indian visitors to Japan’s artificial textile industries, then in theirgreat postwar expansion phase, recall seeing vast production of sari-length material,for which officially there was no open market in the subcontinent at all.The other source came from the strictly controlled import licences given to registeredexporters of textiles, allowing import of raw materials worth a certain percentage oftheir export earnings. Like many others, Dhirubhai realised that these import orreplenishment licences (known as REPS) were as good as money, even though someof them were officially not transferable and imports had to be made by the actualuser’s of the materials. By paying higher margins than any other traders, Dhirubhaisoon became the main player in the market for REP licences. The margins were tinyin the trade itself - but his dominance also put him in the position of being able toturn on and off much of the supply of yarn into the Indian market.Suresh Kothary, whose family business was importing agent for Du Pont productsincluding textile fibres, chemicals and dyes from 1958 to 1993, and also active inyarn trading, remembers first meeting Dhirubhai in 1964 at the Masjid Bandar office.Dhirubhai would often drop by at Kothary’s shopfront at Pydhonie thereafter,lounging on the white cotton mattress and drinking tea or coffee. They were in effectrivals, as Dhirubhai mostly imported his yarns from Asahi Chemicals in Japan or Ital