Bombay’s Parsi Opium Dons

Bombay’s Parsi Opium Dons

Mangalore Today News Network

By Dr. G. Shreekumar Menon

Mangaluru, July 11, 2026: How many of us would be knowing that the ancestors and relatives of some of the famous names in Indian history were “Opium Smugglers”? Opium traders would have been a milder term but since most of the opium that was exported went to China and it was illegal to sell opium in China, this trade was more of a smuggling rather than trade.

The business house of Tata, the famous space scientist Vikram Sarabhai and the Nobel laureate Rabindra Nath Tagore had a relation to this infamous trade. Ratanji Dadabhai Tata ran an opium importing business in China under the name Tata & Co. He was the father of the noted businessman J.R.D. Tata. Although Rabindra Nath Tagore was against the opium trade and he had great affection for the Chinese, his family had a long historical involvement in the opium trade. His grandfather Dwarka Nath Tagore was involved in the opium trade. At the height of the opium trade, he became one of the leading business leaders.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Parsi merchants in Bombay (now Mumbai) dominated the highly profitable, but illicit, opium trade between British India and China. This immense wealth partly helped build modern Mumbai and laid the foundation for global Indian business dynasties, like the Tatas.

The Parsi active participation in the opium trade constituted an important component in the rise of Western capital in Asia, the development of the Indian and Imperial economies, and the development of Bombay and other colonial centers. The Parsi community’s involvement in the opium trade was a cornerstone of their economic rise in the 18th and 19th centuries. While the British East India Company (EIC) held the monopoly on production, Parsi merchants acted as sole intermediaries, shippers, and financiers in the "Country Trade" between India and China.

The EIC controlled the production of opium in India but, to avoid direct diplomatic conflict with the Chinese government (where opium was illegal), they licensed private merchants—known as "Country Traders" to transport the drug to Canton (Guangzhou).

Parsis were master shipbuilders and owners. They controlled a significant portion of the fleet that carried Malwa opium (from Central India) and Bengal opium to China. Malwa opium became a rage in China.

By the late 1700s, Parsi firms were among the first non-European commercial houses established in Canton. The Ready money brothers (Hirji Jivanji and Mancherji) opened the first Parsi firm in Canton in 1756.

The opium trade came to be known as the ‘Triangular Trade’. This trade was vital for the British Empire, and economy. Opium from India was sold in China for silver; that silver was then used by the British to buy tea and silk for Europe. Parsis were the "middlemen" who made this trade possible. The wealth generated from the China trade transformed Parsi traders into "Merchant Princes" who became the elite of Bombay (now Mumbai).

Jamsetji Jejeebhoy was the most famous and successful Parsi opium merchant. He owned a massive shipping fleet and amassed a fortune that he later used for extensive philanthropy, especially in hospitals, and schools. 

The Wadias made a mark as shipbuilders who constructed many of the vessels used in the opium and cotton trade, with China.  The Banajis were one of the earliest Parsi families to settle in Canton and dominate the shipping routes. 

The Camas Established major trading houses in both London and Canton, specializing in the exchange of opium and Chinese goods. Thus, narco-trafficking, especially in Bengal and Malwa opium, became a source of easy capital aggrandizement, for the emerging Parsi entrepreneurs. 

After the British government restricted the opium trade in the mid-to-late 19th century (and after the Opium Wars), Parsi merchants began to divert their opium generated capital into legitimate industries.

Much of the capital used to build Bombay’s early textile mills—which earned the city the nickname "Cottonopolis" came directly from opium profits. Dynasties like the Tatas (though Jamsetji Tata himself was more focused on cotton and later steel) emerged from a merchant class that had been fortified by the opium generated wealth of the 19th-century.

The story of the opium trade between colonial India and China dramatically changed the course of history. Trade in opium though posed high risks, similar to modern day drug-trafficking, and created opportunities for immense profits, but raises many uncomfortable questions of the ethics and morality of the Parsi traders. The trade dramatically altered the fortunes of a few communities in India and China and relations between the two nations while also spurring the growth of international trade networks globally. 

The Parsis succeeded because they operated from Bombay, where the East India Company had less control. In Calcutta, where the East India Company, was a formidable power, Indian businessmen like Dwarkanath Tagore made investments in opium, but failed.

The Dutch were based in Surat, which is where most Parsis lived till Bombay was developed as an alternate port-city. The first Parsis to land in Canton were the brothers Readymoney, who set themselves up in premises rented from the Dutch East India Company. The Ching dynasty had allocated a strip of riverside land in Canton to foreigners, where the various European nations and America had ‘factories’, which were essentially large buildings where the traders lived and conducted their trade.

On the flip side, the insidious opium trade, while converting Parsi brokers into global capitalists, reduced Hindus and Chinese Buddhists into abject penury and ultimately slavery. More than a quarter million Chinese Buddhists and over half a million Hindus from India were shipped to the New World between the 1840s and 1870s under a "new system of slavery" where mostly Hindus from India and Buddhists from China replaced African slave labour.

Chinese villagers, mostly Buddhists, were lured, kidnapped, tricked with sham contracts, and loaded onto coolie ships modelled on African slave ships, suffering the same "middle passage." Their bare chests were painted with letters to mark their destinations: "P" for Peru, "C" for Cuba, and "S" for the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). Upon arrival in the sugar plantations of Cuba or in the toxic guano pits off the coast of Peru—where they faced brutal exploitation without rights, and worked long hours, lashed and shackled—the lives of the "indentured coolies" differed from that of slaves in name only.

Hindus were forced from their home areas in coastal Calcutta and Madras and sent to the plantations of other British colonies - Trinidad, Jamaica and British Guiana. The role of Christian missionaries in the Hindu slave trade is complex. While they ultimately became champions of abolition, their history involves active participation and profiteering in the local slave trade. Many Christian missionaries in Kerala even used local church buildings as warehouses to store and auction Hindu slaves. Some early Protestant missionaries relied on donations or transport from major opium trading firms like Jardine Matheson. Wealthy merchants of the British Raj donated portions of their massive opium fortunes to build Christian churches, schools, and hospitals. While this allowed the Church to expand its activities, it also tied church funding directly to the profits of the illegal drug trade. The opium trade generated immense wealth for the British Empire. This wealth stabilized the colonial government’s finances. Because the government had a stable revenue, it could provide land grants, protection, and sometimes financial "grants-in-aid" to missionary schools.

“Opium presented a problem to Christian missionaries in China from the moment the first of their numbers disembarked, because it was not uncommon for the ships on which they travelled to the Middle Kingdom to carry the drug as cargo. As the years passed many Chinese came to associate opium with the missionaries, with many of the clergy reporting occasions when they attempted to preach only to be shouted down by cries of “Who brought opium to China?” (Missionaries and Opium by Kathleen L. Lodwick; Handbook of Christianity in China).

The British officially abolished slavery in India in 1843 through the Indian Slavery Act. This law banned buying and selling people and made it illegal for courts to recognize or enforce ownership of a slave. This also impacted the opium related slave trade in India. 

If Britain and the Parsis of Bombay made enormous fortunes from the opium business, similar was the position in America. Professor Dilip Basu says "Great family fortunes were made from the opium trade. Their names read very much like a who’s who in America: the Cushings, the Cabot family, Delano, as in Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Perkins, as in the Perkins Hall at Harvard." 

Britain had the wealthiest of opium traders – the Keswick family (Jardine Matheson), the Sassoon family (By the 1880s, the Sassoons controlled an estimated 70% of the opium flowing from India into China), the Dent family, and some historians call Queen Victoria “the biggest drug dealer in history” because, during her long rule, Britain forced huge amounts of opium on China and profited immensely. 

The amazing dexterity of the Parsis in serving opium to the Chinese and Tea to the British, and profiting from both sides, is a feat unparalleled by any other community in the world.

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Dr. G. Shreekumar Menon, IRS (Rtd), Ph.D. (Narcotics)

Former Director General of National Academy of Customs Indirect Taxes and Narcotics & Multi-Disciplinary School Of Economic Intelligence India; Fellow, James Martin Centre For Non Proliferation Studies, USA; Fellow, Centre for International Trade & Security, University of Georgia, USA; Public Administration, Maxwell School of Public Administration, Syracuse University, U.S.A.; AOTS Scholar, Japan. He can be contacted at shreemenon48@gmail.com