Antwerp, Belgium — The streets of Antwerp’s Diamond Quarter are lined with jewellers, pawn retailers and eating places. Balls of gefilte fish glisten invitingly within the window of Hoffy’s, a beloved and longstanding Jewish diner. Across the nook, a lunchtime queue is gathering outdoors Aahaar, an Indian restaurant catering to Antwerp’s Jain neighborhood, the place I meet Akash Jain for lunch.
“You can enjoy nice things in life, but it’s about doing it in a good manner, and being a gentle human being,” says Akash, seated at a desk reverse me, as he tucks right into a plate of curried greens. “It’s the difference between cutting something’s hair or nails and cutting its throat. Control yourself. Take only what you need. That’s the Jain philosophy.”
Akash’s humble vegetarian food plan is a mirrored image of his religious religion. The Jain dedication to non-violence is so extremely tuned that monks and nuns sweep the bottom earlier than them to keep away from stepping on bugs. Spiritual figures and lay individuals alike – Akash included – comply with a strict vegetarian food plan, catered for by eating places like Aahaar. Even root greens are prohibited, as a result of harvesting them kills the plant.
‘Purely business’
Nearly all of Antwerp’s Jains have their roots within the metropolis of Palanpur within the western Indian state of Gujarat, though Akash himself grew up in Udaipur, a metropolis well-known for its palaces and lakes within the desert state of Rajasthan. The Jains’ causes for transferring to Belgium, he tells me, had been solely business-based.
“In India, the diamond business is commanded by the Jain community, so when they found opportunities here in Antwerp, or in Hong Kong, New York, Tokyo – they moved,” he says. “It all depends on business conditions, and Antwerp is the diamond business hub. Here they found that the government, the facilities are favourable for business. Purely business.”
Antwerp’s Jains are a quiet neighborhood who preserve themselves to themselves, largely mixing with outsiders solely to do enterprise. Most of them reside within the suburb of Wilrijk, within the neighborhood of the town’s Jain temple.
Alcohol is forbidden, so Jains are unlikely to be discovered having fun with Antwerp’s bustling nightlife scene; moderately, their social lives are centred round residence, the temple, and Jain-friendly eating places akin to Aahaar and Sangeetha, one other widespread vegetarian place.
The skilled world during which Akash works, nonetheless, together with a lot of Antwerp’s 1,500-strong Jain neighborhood, is something however humble.
Jains dominate Antwerp’s diamond business, essentially the most profitable and influential on the earth, having slowly taken over from the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood over the previous 60 years. So how does a religion based mostly on moderation and non-attachment to materials issues, have come to dominate this most glittery and profane of professions?
“Jewellery and diamonds are in my blood,” says Akash with a self-effacing smile. “My parents and grandparents were in the business of precious metals, bullion and pearls in India. The Jain community is traditionally very highly educated; they are mostly in business, management, finance and accounting. Since ancient times, Jains have been trading in gems, diamonds, spices and clothes.”
Buying and selling, not manufacturing
Jainism originated in India hundreds of years in the past, and is likely one of the oldest extant religions on the earth. Jains solely make up about 0.4 % of the Indian inhabitants however are disproportionately influential throughout the nation, particularly on the earth of enterprise. Many, like Akash, bear the surname “Jain”, however many others don’t.
Gautam Adani, India’s second-richest – and the world’s twenty third most rich – individual is Jain, as is Amit Shah, the nation’s highly effective residence minister who’s broadly seen as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s second-in-command.
“Our main teachings are: truth; ahimsa (non-violence); and aparigraha (non-possession) – not taking what you don’t need,” says Akash. “Don’t get attached to physical things; money, land, things like that.”
“In Jainism you have these big ethical injunctions which have led to rules about which jobs are acceptable,” says Professor Tine Vekemans, an skilled in Jainism at Ghent College. “They would never work as butchers or leatherworkers, nor traditionally in agriculture – there’s a lot of potential violence with pulling things out of the ground, damaging little creatures in the soil.”
Mining diamonds isn’t precisely eco-friendly both, after all. “That’s why Jains are into trading, not manufacturing,” says Akash. “Less direct.”
Jains have additionally taken steps to counter the unethical components of the business and to stymie the circulation of “conflict diamonds”.
“Jain diamond firms have done a lot of work looking at the source of their diamonds and for anything in the supply line which may be unethical,” says Vekemans. They had been influential within the growth and software of the Kimberley Course of; India, the place the diamond commerce can be dominated by Jains, was one of many founding members of this worldwide certification scheme which goals to eradicate battle diamonds from the business. Moreover, Dilip Mehta, the Jain CEO of Rosy Blue, considered one of Antwerp’s largest diamond firms, has advocated for increasing the definition of “conflict diamonds” in his position as a director of the World Diamond Council.
Hushed conversations in marble corridors
Tucked away within the shadow of Antwerp’s grand Artwork Nouveau railway station, the Diamond Quarter is an unprepossessing cluster of boxy, gray and brown buildings courting again to the Nineteen Sixties and ‘70s. It’s a modest setting for the capital of the world diamond business – a title Antwerp has claimed since 1456 when jeweller Lodewyk van Bercken infused his sprucing wheel with olive oil and diamond mud to invent the scaif, a revolutionary device which allowed for the slicing of completely symmetrical diamonds. In the present day, Antwerp processes 100 million euros ($106m) of diamonds every day.
On the centre of all of it is Antwerp’s diamond change, the place Tom Neys, a consultant of the Antwerp World Diamond Centre, which oversees the town’s diamond commerce, works. He will be present in a sublime, cavernous room lined with buying and selling desks, the place hushed conversations echo off marble columns and parquet flooring.
Orthodox Jews had dominated Antwerp’s diamond commerce for tons of of years earlier than Jain merchants started arriving within the mid-Twentieth century. “The first diamonds ever found were in India, but historically they didn’t trade much internationally,” says Neys. That each one modified within the Nineteen Sixties, when Jain merchants from Gujarat started shopping for small, tough diamonds at a low worth, outsourcing slicing and sprucing to craftspeople again in Gujarat, after which promoting them in Antwerp. “Today, 95 percent of the diamonds sold here are cut and polished in India,” he says.
That provide chain offers Jain merchants an edge over everybody else. About 80 % of Antwerp’s diamond merchants are actually Jains, most of them tracing their roots to the Gujarati metropolis of Palanpur. The Jain and Jewish communities in Antwerp are well-suited to the diamond commerce for a similar causes: they’re small, close-knit and constructed on belief.
A closed membership with ‘Wanted’ posters
At one level, a person in a go well with walks over and consults with Neys in involved tones; he’s frightened about me taking footage on my telephone, which I’m holding to document our interview. In an business based mostly on belief, outsiders are considered with suspicion; this can be a closed membership. Even those that agreed to share different particulars of the business didn’t consent to having their pictures taken.
On the wall, Neys reveals me a rogues’ gallery of people presently suspected of impropriety or untrustworthiness, their footage lined up above their names like “Wanted” posters in an Previous West saloon. Their alleged misdeeds are listed in obscure however heavy phrases: fraud; theft; cash laundering. Their names – some English, some Dutch, some Arabic, some Cantonese – replicate the worldwide hubs of the world diamond commerce, though, tellingly, none look like Jewish or Jain.
It’s all performed this fashion, Neys explains, based mostly on rumour and fame, moderately than via on-line databases – there are, the truth is, no computer systems in sight on the buying and selling ground. “In the diamond industry, nothing is on paper – it’s a handshake, and you say ‘Mazal’, a Yiddish phrase meaning ‘good luck’,” says Neys.
This linguistic legacy, he explains, displays a unbroken cooperation and respect between the Jewish and Jain communities in Antwerp, based mostly on equally religious non secular beliefs and entrenched values of honesty and transparency.
A query of belief
The Jain rise to dominance over the Antwerp diamond commerce over the previous couple of a long time doesn’t appear to have created lasting rigidity between the Jain and Jewish communities right here; moderately, it has seen the 2 communities give attention to completely different sides of the business.
Whereas Jains now overwhelmingly dominate the wholesale commerce, the highest-quality stones are nonetheless polished right here in Antwerp’s Jewish workshops. The Jewish neighborhood has transitioned from dominating all areas of the Antwerp commerce to specialising on the highest finish of the market.
Akash expresses an identical sentiment later whereas displaying me round Antwerp’s Jain temple. “Trust – that’s the main part of the diamond business,” he says. “You will never see any business run only on trust, except diamonds and gemstones.”
Antwerp’s Jain temple is located within the leafy suburb of Wilrijk, on the southern fringes of the town – an unassuming place, the place essentially the most thrilling occasion on the cultural calendar is the Geitenstoet, a procession of goats which passes via as soon as each 5 years.
It comes as one thing of a shock, then, amid the charity retailers and automotive garages, to see the rising towers of a powerful temple, hewn from snow-white marble, exquisitely carved with scenes from Indian mythology and topped with the technicolour flag of the Jain faith. It was paid for by the Jain neighborhood, and whereas its beautiful craftsmanship actually seems to be costly, it’s an train in good style and restraint.
“You should have a satisfaction factor for everything – for money, for eating habits, everything,” says Akash.
Finally, Akash believes Jains’ non secular grounding makes them good businesspeople. “We believe in karma and we are transparent, honest people. If you have good karma, your life will be good.”
