I. THE VILLAGE BEHIND THE DUNES
In the dry, stony tract where the Sikar and Jhunjhunu districts of Rajasthan meet, there stood — and still stands — the village of Beri. It was not a grand place. A cluster of havelis with carved wooden doors, a small fort remembered locally as Bajangarh, narrow lanes that stayed cool even in the fierce Shekhawati summers, and at its heart, a Jain temple whose bells had rung through generations of the same families passing beneath its arch to pray before setting out on journeys, and to give thanks on their return.
This was Marwari country in the truest sense — a land too dry to feed the ambitions of its people through farming alone, but rich in something else: a centuries-old instinct for trade, credit, and the courage to leave home in search of opportunity. Within a short ride of Beri lay the villages that would give the world some of India’s most formidable business dynasties. Beri’s own sons and daughters were cut from the same cloth — Jain families for whom trade was not merely a livelihood but something close to a religious discipline: honest ledgers, careful credit, and a willingness to go wherever opportunity called, however far.
By the account preserved within the community itself, Beri in this period was home to roughly a hundred households — some thirteen hundred people in all. It was large enough to be a proper village, with its own internal economy of kinship and credit, but small enough that a single family’s fortune made or lost far away would have been known, discussed, and remembered by nearly everyone in it.
By the latter half of the nineteenth century, opportunity was calling from a place few in Beri could have pointed to on a map — a green, hidden valley more than a thousand miles to the east, ringed by hills, ruled by its own king, and known to the wider world as Manipur.
II. WHY THEY LEFT
No single reason sent the men of Beri walking east. It was, as it always had been for Marwari families, a combination of push and pull.
The push was the land itself. Shekhawati’s soil was thin and its rains unreliable; a family could not multiply for generations on what the fields alone could give. The old economy that had once sustained Marwari fortunes — financing Rajput courts and armies — was fading as British power settled over northern India and the courts’ extravagance, and their need for merchant capital, declined with it.
The pull was the British peace. Wherever the Company’s and then the Crown’s authority extended, it brought roads, river steamers, and — crucially for men whose entire trade rested on trust and contract — courts of law that enforced a debt or a deed. The British were, in these decades, actively encouraging trade into the remote frontier tracts of the northeast, and word travels fast along a trading network built on family and caste. Somewhere along that network, a rumor reached Beri: in the valley kingdom of Manipur, an ambitious Raja and a British Political Agent were both eager to see external trade develop, and neither much cared who did it — so long as it got done.
For a Jain trading family in Beri, this was an old story with a new setting. One son, perhaps two, would go first. If the venture prospered, others would follow.
III. THE ROAD THAT WAS NOT A ROAD
What the men of Beri could not have known, setting out, was just how far “far” truly was.
There was no continuous road to Manipur — not for wheeled carts, not for anything faster than a walking pace. The first stretch, across the plains of Hindustan and into Bengal, could increasingly be covered by rail as the network crept eastward through the century, and by river steamer along the Brahmaputra and its tributaries — a mercy, compared to what lay ahead.
Beyond Assam, the roads gave out. The route into Manipur ran through the Cachar hills, a corridor of forest and ridge that separated the plains from the hidden valley beyond. Here, a trader’s goods — bolts of cloth, boxes of provisions, whatever capital could be converted into portable trade goods — went onto the backs of porters and pack animals. The path, where it existed at all, was maintained by forced local labour under the old Manipur system of lallup, cut and re-cut each season against the encroaching jungle. Rivers that ran dry in winter became roads of their own, their sandy beds walked by caravans that could not have crossed them in the monsoon.
For the very first of Beri’s men to make the journey, family memory preserves the last, hardest leg exactly: from Dimapur to Imphal, entirely on foot — pedal Chalke, as it is still said — a trek of some fifteen days through hill and forest track before the valley finally opened out below them.
It would have taken weeks in total, counting the distance from Rajasthan itself. A man from Beri, however sure-footed in the bazaar, would have found himself instead crossing hill passes on foot, sleeping in wayside villages whose language he did not speak, carrying with him not just his trade goods but, quite possibly, small items of his faith — for he was walking toward a land that, as far as he knew, held not a single other Jain.
Only once the traveller descended from the last ridge and the hills opened into a wide green valley, ringed by mountains and threaded by slow rivers, did the going become easy again — flat ground, at last, where a bullock cart could run.
IV. ARRIVAL IN THE VALLEY
Family memory names the first of them: Giga Singh Shekhawat, of Beri village, Jhunjhunu district, who reached Manipur in 1875 — walking the last stretch, Dimapur to Imphal, in those fifteen days on foot. This places him among the earliest Marwari settlers in the valley by a wide margin, arriving sixteen years before Manipur’s incorporation as a British-paramount princely state in 1891. He came, in other words, to a still fully sovereign kingdom — dealing directly with the Manipur Durbar under its own Maharaja, with no British Political Agent yet standing between trader and throne. Whatever opening existed for an outside trader in 1875 Manipur, it existed on the Durbar’s own terms, likely as a matter of the court’s ordinary interest in encouraging commerce, rather than the deliberate colonial trade policy that would shape things later.
When he walked down into the Imphal bazaar for the first time, dust from the Cachar road still on his clothes, he found a welcome of sorts — cautious, transactional, but real. A plot for a shop. A degree of protection from the Durbar. Freedom, within limits, to trade.
He would not have been alone for long. Community memory records a second name not far behind him: Kalachand Patani is remembered as having joined him in Manipur around 1880 — a detail that matters, because it marks the shift from lone men testing the ground to families beginning to actually settle. Arrival of the Kalachand Patani group meant that trading in the kingdom was prospering with the blessing of the King.
It is only from 1891 onward — after Giga Singh and Kalachand had already put down roots — that the political ground beneath their feet shifted. Manipur became a princely state under British paramountcy, and the King and the newly installed British Political Agent arrived at a shared policy: actively favouring Marwari firms with the external trade of the kingdom, above all the export of rice and import of manufactured goods. Men who had arrived earlier, on the older kingdom’s own terms, now found themselves operating inside a very different, colonially-shaped system — one that would, in time, make their community’s fortunes and its notoriety alike. By the early twentieth century, this had grown into a recognized and organized community — established enough that in 1919, a trader named Sadasukh Saraogi could lead a formal petition of Marwari merchants to the Political Agent over a matter of food-supply regulation. Around the same years, other communities — Nepali cultivators, Bengali clerks and priests, Teli oil-pressers — were also arriving and settling, some given land outright by the king. Manipur’s valley, so long a world nearly unto itself, was slowly becoming a meeting place of many Indias.
Giga Singh, and Kalachand after him, opened their shops. They extended credit, cautiously at first, to the cultivators and smaller traders around them. They wrote letters home — carried, like everything else, along that same hill road — reporting on the venture, asking that a brother or a cousin be sent to help.
V. ROOTS IN UNFAMILIAR SOIL
What grew in Imphal over the following decades was, in its shape, a familiar Marwari story transplanted into unfamiliar soil.
The rice trade became the backbone of it. Marwari firms — Jain families from Beri among the broader Hindu Marwari majority — came to dominate both the export of Manipur’s rice and the import of the manufactured goods the valley increasingly depended on. It was profitable. It was also, in time, deeply resented — a resentment that would erupt famously in December 1939, when a group of Manipuri women led by Aribam Chaobiton Devi physically blocked the bullock carts carrying paddy out of the valley for Marwari traders, in the uprising remembered as the Nupilan. It marked, by most accounts, a turning point in Manipur’s own political awakening — and a reminder that the community’s prosperity had been built, in part, on a bargain the valley’s own people had never fully accepted.
Within the trading community itself, though, life took on its own rhythm. Wherever numbers allowed, a small prayer space was found or built — the beginning, however modest, of a Jain presence in a valley that had none before. Marriages continued to be arranged back toward Shekhawati, sons sent home to find brides, capital and news travelling both ways along the route their fathers and grandfathers had first walked. The label “Marwari,” as it always had elsewhere in India, came to cover Jains, Agarwals, Maheshwaris and others together in the eyes of Manipur’s people, even as each group quietly kept its own customs, its own temple, its own account of where exactly in Rajasthan its people had come from.
For those tracing their roots to Beri specifically, that account would have included the particular things that mark one Shekhawati village off from its neighbours — its own temple, its own families, its own version of the same larger story of departure and arrival that so many villages across the region were living out at once.
VI. THE COST BORNE BY THE VALLEY
No honest telling of this story can stop at the counting-house door. What built the fortunes of Beri’s sons in Imphal came, in real measure, at the expense of the people among whom they had settled — and the record of that cost is unusually well documented, because it was Manipur’s own women who refused to let it pass unanswered.
The mechanism was simple and, for the valley’s cultivators, punishing. The Raja and the British Political Agent had between them granted Marwari firms an effective monopoly over Manipur’s external trade: the export of rice out of the valley, and the import of manufactured goods into it. As export volumes climbed through the early twentieth century — accelerated once motor transport supplemented the old bullock carts — rice grew scarcer and dearer at home even as it left the valley in greater quantity. By 1939, following a poor harvest, this had tipped into near-famine conditions. Cheap imported cloth and goods, moving down the same trade channels, undercut Manipur’s own handloom weavers and cottage industries, which had no comparable network of capital and credit to fall back on. Manipur, one contemporary account notes, had never developed an organized merchant caste of its own — leaving the field to outside traders almost by default once external trade opened up at all. In places, land itself changed hands into Marwari ownership, and lucrative state functions like the collection of cart tax on rice shipments were handed to Marwari firms directly, deepening their hold on the valley’s cash economy.
The settlement itself was administratively set apart from the people around it. Marwari traders concentrated in what were designated as “British Reserve” areas of Imphal — the Sadar Bazaar and Paona Bazaar quarters — which lay outside the jurisdiction of the Manipur state police, and their residents were formally classed as foreigners. It was a status that offered the traders protection, but it also marked them, visibly and legally, as apart from the kingdom whose economy they had come to dominate.
Because Manipur’s markets were, and had long been, run entirely by women — the famed Ima Keithel of Imphal — it was Meitei women who felt this squeeze most directly, and who led the resistance to it. A market boycott in 1920 refused to sell rice and paddy to the exporting traders. It did not stop the exports. Then, on 12 December 1939, thousands of women marched from the Khwairamban keithel to the Durbar itself, demanding an end to rice export and the closure of the rice mills — the uprising remembered as the Second Nupi Lan, or Women’s War. It was met, in the end, with force, and the market was shut for the better part of a year in reprisal. But it worked: the Maharaja ordered rice exports halted, and the movement is remembered today as a genuine turning point in Manipur’s path toward political and constitutional change.
None of this erases the other half of the story — that for the family from Beri, this was simply how Marwari trade had always operated, the same pattern of credit, export, and import that had built fortunes from Kolkata to Bombay, conducted here as it had been conducted everywhere else the community had settled, and initially invited in by Manipur’s own rulers rather than imposed against their wishes. But it sits alongside the ledger of profit as its necessary counterweight: a prosperity that a family from a small Rajasthan village could remember with pride was, for the cultivators and market-women of the valley, something closer to a grievance — one they eventually rose, twice, to resist.
VII. EPILOGUE: BERI, 2022 — A PERSONAL WITNESS
The narrative above is written in a reconstructed, third-person voice. This closing section departs from that — it is a first-hand account, set down as it was witnessed.
In 2022, I visited Beri myself. The village these men left behind is not gone, but it has emptied. I counted roughly a hundred houses still standing — the same rough number, by coincidence or not, as the households once remembered living there — but every one of them abandoned, their courtyards silent, their families long since scattered to Imphal, Kolkata, Bombay, and elsewhere, the way Giga Singh Shekhawat and Kalachand once scattered east themselves.
What remains is stone. The pillars of these old havelis are carved from the red sandstone of Rajasthan, quarried and worked in the region’s own distinctive style — the same deep, warm-red stone seen across Shekhawati’s forts and merchant houses, cut into slender columns and detailed with the carved brackets and floral motifs typical of the tract. I saw this pattern still intact on pillar after pillar, a century and more of sun and disuse not having erased it. They stand now as the only witnesses left in Beri itself to the households that once sent their sons walking east toward Dimapur, and beyond it, toward a valley kingdom none of them had ever seen.
It felt, standing there, like a fitting and melancholy close to the story’s Rajasthan half: the village that could not hold its own sons prosperous enough to keep them, standing empty now in the same red stone that once watched them leave.
VIII. WHAT THE STORY STILL NEEDS
Family memory has now supplied what documented history alone could not: the name of the first man to come — Giga Singh Shekhawat, in 1875 — his exact route and its length on foot, the size and shape of the Beri he left behind, and the name of the second settler, Kalachand Patani, whose arrival around 1880 marks the moment the community stopped being a handful of lone traders and started becoming a settlement.
What remains open is everything below the surface of these facts: what trade each man first entered, and where exactly in Imphal — Sadar Bazaar, Paona Bazaar, or elsewhere — they set up shop; whether Giga Singh Shekhawat and Kalachand were kin, partners, or simply fellow villagers who happened to follow the same road; what became of their descendants across the generations that followed, through the 1939 Nupi Lan and beyond; and the moment, if it can be recovered, when the first prayer was offered in a Jain household in the valley so far from home.
The writer is a former Member of Parliament and a former Union Minister of State External Affairs and Education, Government of India.
