The Bania has a very distinctive caste character. From early boyhood
he is trained to the keeping of accounts and to the view that it
is his business in life to make money, and that no transaction
should be considered successful or creditable which does not show
a profit. As an apprentice, he goes through a severe training in
mental arithmetic, so as to enable him to make the most intricate
calculations in his head. With this object a boy commits to memory a
number of very elaborate tables. For whole numbers he learns by heart
the units from one to ten multiplied as high as forty times, and the
numbers from eleven to twenty multiplied to twenty times. There are
also fractional tables, giving the results of multiplying 1/4, 1/2,
3/4, 1 1/4, 1 1/2, 2 1/2, 3 1/2 into units from one to one hundred;
interest-tables showing the interest due on any sum from one to
one thousand rupees for one month, and for a quarter of a month at
twelve per cent; tables of the squares of all numbers from one to
one hundred, and a set of technical rules for finding the price of a
part from the price of the whole. [129] The self-denial and tenacity
which enable the Bania without capital to lay the foundations of a
business are also remarkable. On first settling in a new locality, a
Marwari Bania takes service with some shopkeeper, and by dint of the
strictest economy puts together a little money. Then the new trader
establishes himself in some village and begins to make grain advances
to the cultivators on high rates of interest, though occasionally on
bad security. He opens a shop and retails grain, pulses, condiments,
spices, sugar and flour. From grain he gradually passes to selling
cloth and lending money, and being keen and exacting, and having
to deal with ignorant and illiterate clients, he acquires wealth;
this he invests in purchasing villages, and after a time blossoms
out into a big Seth or banker. The Bania can also start a retail
business without capital. The way in which he does it is to buy
a rupee's worth of stock in a town, and take it out early in the
morning to a village, where he sits on the steps of the temple
until he has sold it. Up till then he neither eats nor washes his
face. He comes back in the evening after having eaten two or three
pice worth of grain, and buys a fresh stock, which he takes out to
another village in the morning. Thus he turns over his capital with
a profit two or three times a week according to the saying, "If a
Bania gets a rupee he will have an income of eight rupees a month,"
or as another proverb pithily sums up the immigrant Marwari's career,
'He comes with a _lota_ [130] and goes back with a lakh.' The Bania
never writes off debts, even though his debtor may be a pauper, but
goes on entering them up year by year in his account-books and taking
the debtor's acknowledgment. For he says, '_Purus Parus_', or man is
like the philosopher's stone, and his fortune may change any day.