In Lahore, Sir Herbert Emerson was reading reports from London.
The Governor's private secretary had placed them beside the afternoon dispatches, separating them from the ordinary business of the Province.
There were summaries of the visitors' meetings, observations from commercial acquaintances, and several private letters written by men who believed their opinions would remain within the comfortable boundaries of government correspondence.
One described Jinnah as an exceptionally capable advocate whose industrial ambitions appeared to exceed the financial resources available to him.
Another praised Chhotu Ram's knowledge of rural Punjab but doubted that a provincial agricultural politician could appreciate the difficulties of modern industrial finance.
A third was less restrained.
The two gentlemen, he wrote, appeared to believe that Indian villages could be converted into miniature Manchesters simply by installing second-hand machinery and issuing cooperative shares.
Emerson put the letter down.
The remark annoyed him.
It was precisely the sort of foolish arrogance that made Englishmen underestimate capable Indians, and underestimating Jinnah was an exceptionally dangerous habit.
Yet the letter also confirmed that events were proceeding much as he had intended.
He had selected his introductions carefully.
The first invitations had gone to established engineering firms, conservative financial houses and gentlemen whose social standing was beyond question. Some were capable of supplying machinery. Some possessed substantial capital. Several, however, had little reason to take commercial risks in unfamiliar rural enterprises.
Emerson knew that.
He also knew that those men would receive his guests with courtesy.
And that their refusals would be more instructive than any warning delivered at Government House.
His secretary, Ainsworth, was standing beside the desk.
"They seem to be encountering considerable resistance, Your Excellency."
"Of course they are."
"The City appears unconvinced."
"The City has been unconvinced of most interesting propositions until somebody else has made money from them."
Emerson took up another report.
"They have secured serious technical interest. That is something."
"But no investors."
"Not yet."
Ainsworth hesitated.
"Mr. Jinnah may be rather disappointed."
Emerson looked at him.
"Mr. Jinnah is not a schoolboy whose disappointment requires our attention. He is one of the cleverest political men in India. That is precisely the difficulty."
The secretary remained silent.
Emerson rose and walked towards the window.
Outside, the lawns of Government House lay bright beneath the Punjab sun.
He had spent enough years in Indian administration to recognize a change in the balance of authority when he saw one.
Jinnah's Sandalbar undertaking was no longer an eccentric improvement scheme attached to a country estate. It had acquired offices, workers, accounts, distribution networks, training programmes and a remarkable capacity to draw ambitious young men away from the old political associations.
Chhotu Ram had given the undertaking something even more consequential: access to Punjab's agricultural communities and a degree of legitimacy among cultivators that neither official patronage nor urban political speeches could easily manufacture.
Together they were becoming formidable.
Emerson welcomed the reduction in communal agitation. He welcomed the possibility of increased revenue. He particularly welcomed an industrial programme that might generate British manufacturing orders while relieving unemployment in Punjab.
But he did not welcome the possibility of Jinnah returning from London with independent capital sufficient to establish an economic power beyond the comfortable reach of provincial administration.
A man who required nothing from the Governor might eventually decide that he required no Governor.
Emerson turned.
"Have we received replies from Pemberton and Fenwick?"
"Both, sir. Pemberton is interested in examining an initial industrial group. Fenwick remains cautious."
"Naturally. Fenwick was born cautious."
"He wishes to know whether the provincial authorities will cooperate with the necessary arrangements."
"They will cooperate within the law."
"And if he seeks a guarantee?"
"He shall not have one."
Ainsworth made a note.
Emerson returned to his chair.
"Write to both gentlemen. Make it clear that the Province regards the first group of installations as a matter of practical importance. We will facilitate the examination of suitable sites, consider the required permissions promptly, and coordinate the relevant public works where properly authorized."
"Shall I communicate this to Mr. Jinnah?"
"Not yet. Let the commercial gentlemen decide whether they have a proposition worth making."
The secretary closed his notebook, but did not leave.
"May I ask something, sir?"
Emerson looked up.
"Go on."
"Would it not have been easier to introduce Mr. Jinnah to these two firms at the beginning?"
"Considerably easier."
"Then why—"
"Because, Ainsworth, I should prefer Mr. Jinnah to understand the difference between entering a room on the strength of one's reputation and obtaining money on the strength of His Majesty's Government."
The secretary nodded slowly.
Emerson's expression softened.
"I wish him to succeed. Punjab needs the employment, and I have no intention of strangling a useful enterprise. But I also wish him to remember that good relations with Government House are worth preserving."
He signed the letters.
"Ten installations would be a respectable beginning. Let us see whether the gentlemen can make ten work before they become rulers of two hundred."
Ainsworth collected the correspondence.
Emerson returned to the provincial reports.
He had not instructed anyone to laugh at Jinnah. That would have been vulgar, and unnecessarily dangerous.
He had merely arranged for Jinnah to meet the kind of gentlemen whose scepticism would be expressed with perfect manners.
The distinction pleased him.
By the beginning of their fifth week, Chhotu Ram had stopped reading the letters aloud.
Their hotel room had become an improvised office. The table was crowded with correspondence, revised estimates, maps and schedules of appointments. A clerk engaged locally spent most afternoons typing replies and arranging documents for the next round of meetings.
Money was not yet a serious concern, but time was.
Every additional week in England was a week during which the political struggle in Punjab continued without them. Ahmed Khan's reports spoke of growing recruitment, new applications from villages seeking inclusion in the industrial programme, and increasing pressure from local interests demanding to know when construction would begin.
Meanwhile, the British investors declined to invest.
Jinnah remained composed in public.
In private, he was becoming impatient.
One evening he stood beside the fireplace reading a letter from a City firm that had examined the accounts for eleven days before deciding that the venture lay outside its customary sphere of investment.
"Outside its customary sphere," he repeated.
Chhotu Ram was seated near the window, examining a telegram from Punjab.
"At least they have a sphere."
Jinnah looked at him.
"The same gentlemen have interests in plantations in Malaya, mines in Africa, shipping in the Gulf and trading companies from Bombay to Shanghai."
"Then perhaps our wheat is insufficiently exotic."
"They understand all those businesses perfectly well, apparently."
"Of course. Someone else established them before they purchased the shares."
Jinnah placed the letter upon the table.
"We have made the investment structure unnecessarily difficult to appreciate."
Chhotu Ram looked up sharply.
"No."
Jinnah turned.
"No?"
"They appreciate it well enough. They simply do not believe we shall be able to proceed without the Crown protecting their interests."
"That is partly a question of legal structure."
"It is a question of power."
Jinnah said nothing.
Chhotu Ram rose and walked towards the table.
"Your accounts show profit. The engineers have identified a possible technical path. The manufacturers will sell us equipment. We have real villages, real production and real markets. Yet the investors continue asking who stands behind us."
"Because they want assurance against political risk."
"And because they do not yet believe an Indian institution can provide that assurance."
Jinnah looked at the Governor's introductory letter lying among the correspondence.
Both men were quiet for a while.
Then Chhotu Ram said something neither had previously said aloud.
"Perhaps we have been invited to London to learn who holds the purse."
Jinnah lifted his eyes.
"You believe Emerson arranged this?"
"I believe he knows his countrymen rather well."
Bilal had been unusually quiet through the day's disappointments.
Now he spoke.
Sir, Chhotu Ram may be seeing the political structure behind the commercial one.
Jinnah folded the letter.
"I have been considering the same possibility."
Then why are we still here?
"Because the machinery is useful, the capital is available, and I have not crossed half the world to allow a Governor's vanity to decide the future of Punjab."
Chhotu Ram watched him for a moment.
Then he smiled.
"Good. Tomorrow we shall continue."
The first serious investor did not receive them in the City.
Henry Pemberton preferred his company's warehouse near the railway yards in northern England.
He was a broad-shouldered man in his late fifties, with heavy hands and a face whose weathering suggested that he had spent as much of his life in workshops as in offices. His business had grown from engineering supplies into machinery brokerage, exports and a modest collection of manufacturing interests.
The depression had left him with equipment he could not sell at the prices he had once expected.
It had also left him with a determination not to let perfectly serviceable machinery perish in storage.
He walked Jinnah and Chhotu Ram between rows of motors, pumps, presses and miscellaneous equipment, pointing out machines whose former owners had closed their works or reduced production.
"There's nothing wrong with half of it," he said. "The machines outlived the businesses that bought them."
Chhotu Ram stopped beside an oil press.
"What would you take for that?"
Pemberton named a price.
Chhotu Ram looked at him.
"At that price, I understand why it is still here."
Pemberton laughed so loudly that one of the warehouse men turned around.
"You're a hard customer."
"I haven't purchased anything yet."
"Fair enough."
They spent the morning examining machinery and the afternoon examining numbers.
Pemberton was not interested in grand plans for two hundred settlements. He wished to understand six.
Six centres in districts with adequate agricultural production, established markets and technically suitable power arrangements. He wanted machines that could earn money quickly, not impressive installations awaiting customers.
His instincts appealed to Chhotu Ram.
Pemberton, however, insisted upon tying his investment to machinery supplied through his own business.
Jinnah objected.
The arrangement created an obvious conflict of interest. If Pemberton could value his own machinery without independent examination, he could recover much of his supposed investment before the enterprises had begun producing.
The discussion became sharp.
At one point Pemberton struck the table with his open palm.
"Good God, man, do you think I'm trying to cheat you?"
"I think you are trying to make a profit," Jinnah replied. "That is entirely proper. I intend to prevent you from making it twice on the same transaction without disclosure."
Pemberton stared at him.
Then he laughed.
"Emerson warned me about you."
Jinnah became still.
"What did His Excellency say?"
"That you would demand the precise value of the ink before signing the cheque."
"How perceptive."
They ultimately agreed that any machinery contributed as investment capital would be independently valued and subject to technical inspection. Pemberton could supply other equipment at competitive rates. His return as an equity participant would depend on the actual performance of the productive undertakings.
It required several further discussions and a considerable exchange of revised documents.
Then Pemberton agreed in principle to finance the productive equipment for six initial Class I centres, provided the engineering assessments and legal arrangements satisfied him.
Six.
Not two hundred.
But six for which a British businessman was prepared to risk his own capital.
When the conditional undertaking was signed, Chhotu Ram examined it carefully before returning it to the table.
Pemberton watched him.
"Still suspicious?"
"Naturally."
"Even now?"
"Especially now. Until this morning you were only a man attempting to sell me machinery. Now you may become my partner."
Pemberton grinned.
"God help us both."
The second investor proved more difficult.
Frederick Fenwick's firm operated from offices in the City, where the carpets swallowed footsteps and the clerks possessed the solemn expressions of men entrusted with secrets whose importance they did not always understand.
Fenwick had interests in trading, shipping and colonial securities. He had made money slowly and lost it reluctantly, and he approached new opportunities with the caution of a man who regarded enthusiasm as an expense.
He studied the Sandalbar accounts without making jokes.
That alone distinguished him from several of his acquaintances.
His interest lay not in electricity but in the movement of products. If the proposed cooperative centres could generate steady quantities of flour, oil, textiles, soap and other finished goods, he saw opportunities in purchasing, distribution and export finance.
He was prepared to consider four centres.
In return, he wanted preferential access to a substantial portion of their output.
Chhotu Ram rejected the first proposal.
Fenwick was astonished.
The terms, he explained, were customary in many colonial trading arrangements. An investor advanced capital and received commercial advantages in return.
Chhotu Ram had encountered the principle often enough.
He had seen cultivators accept advances before harvest, only to discover that the purchaser who financed the crop also controlled the price at which it could be sold.
He did not intend to reproduce that arrangement within Sandalbar.
For two days the negotiations stagnated.
Jinnah proposed defined purchasing rights at prices measured against independent market quotations. Fenwick insisted that such terms offered insufficient protection for his capital.
The disagreement might have ended the negotiation.
Then a private letter arrived from Government House.
It confirmed that the Governor regarded the proposed first-stage programme as important to provincial employment and would facilitate the prompt consideration of the necessary administrative arrangements within the powers of his office.
It guaranteed neither dividends nor commercial debts.
But it carried the political reassurance Fenwick had been seeking.
When they met again, he was noticeably more flexible.
He abandoned the demand for broad exclusive purchasing rights. In their place he accepted a limited right to make the first offer for defined quantities, provided the price met an agreed market-based standard.
The structure preserved his opportunity to earn commissions and trading profits without binding the cooperatives to sell below a defensible price.
Jinnah drafted the provisions.
Chhotu Ram examined the commercial consequences.
Fenwick's solicitors examined both.
There were still objections, revisions and a prolonged argument about whether the investment company should be entitled to interfere in the appointment of local management.
The final arrangement permitted defined financial oversight without giving the outside shareholders unrestricted control of the productive societies.
At length, Fenwick authorized his conditional participation in four initial sites.
Four more.
And when he signed, he said something that confirmed Chhotu Ram's suspicions.
"His Excellency has taken a most personal interest in seeing this matter brought to a practical conclusion."
Jinnah closed his pen.
"So I understand."
Fenwick looked pleased.
"He believes the development may become a valuable instrument of provincial stability."
"That is one of its purposes."
"He also made it quite clear that the project would benefit from maintaining the closest possible relationship with Government House."
For an instant Chhotu Ram looked towards Jinnah.
The barrister's face remained perfectly composed.
"We have always valued His Excellency's cooperation," he replied.
But the meaning had not been lost on either man.