‘Diamonds are in my blood’: The Jain jewelry merchants of Antwerp | Business and Economy | USAEMALL.com

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. Around the nook, a lunchtime queue is gathering exterior 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 regimen 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. Religious figures and lay individuals alike – Akash included – observe a strict vegetarian food regimen, catered for by eating places like Aahaar. Even root greens are prohibited, as a result of harvesting them kills the plant.

‘Purely business’

The majority 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 town’s Jain temple.

Alcohol is forbidden, so Jains are unlikely to be discovered having fun with Antwerp’s bustling nightlife scene; reasonably, their social lives are centred round dwelling, the temple, and Jain-friendly eating places resembling Aahaar and Sangeetha, one other well-liked vegetarian place.

The skilled world through which Akash works, nonetheless, together with lots of Antwerp’s 1,500-strong Jain neighborhood, is something however humble.

Jains dominate Antwerp’s diamond trade, probably the most profitable and influential on the planet, having slowly taken over from the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood over the previous 60 years. So how does a religion primarily based 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.”

Trading, not manufacturing

Jainism originated in India hundreds of years in the past, and is without doubt one of the oldest extant religions on the planet. Jains solely make up about 0.4 p.c of the Indian inhabitants however are disproportionately influential inside the nation, particularly on the planet 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 – particular person is Jain, as is Amit Shah, the nation’s highly effective dwelling minister who’s extensively 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 University. “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 trade and to stymie the movement 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 improvement and software of the Kimberley Process; India, the place the diamond commerce can also be dominated by Jains, was one of many founding members of this worldwide certification scheme which goals to eradicate battle diamonds from the trade. Furthermore, Dilip Mehta, the Jain CEO of Rosy Blue, one in every of Antwerp’s largest diamond corporations, has advocated for increasing the definition of “conflict diamonds” in his function as a director of the World Diamond Council.

Hushed conversations in marble corridors

Tucked away within the shadow of Antwerp’s grand Art Nouveau railway station, the Diamond Quarter is an unprepossessing cluster of boxy, gray and brown buildings courting again to the Sixties and ‘70s. It’s a modest setting for the capital of the world diamond trade – a title Antwerp has claimed since 1456 when jeweller Lodewyk van Bercken infused his sharpening wheel with olive oil and diamond mud to invent the scaif, a revolutionary instrument which allowed for the slicing of completely symmetrical diamonds. Today, Antwerp processes 100 million euros ($106m) of diamonds every day.

At the centre of all of it is Antwerp’s diamond trade, the place Tom Neys, a consultant of the Antwerp World Diamond Centre, which oversees town’s diamond commerce, works. He may be present in a chic, 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 all modified within the Sixties, when Jain merchants from Gujarat started shopping for small, tough diamonds at a low value, outsourcing slicing and sharpening 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 p.c of Antwerp’s diamond merchants at the moment are 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 fearful about me taking photos on my cellphone, which I’m holding to file our interview. In an trade primarily based on belief, outsiders are seen with suspicion; this can be a closed membership. Even those that agreed to share different particulars of the trade didn’t consent to having their images taken.

On the wall, Neys exhibits me a rogues’ gallery of people at the moment suspected of impropriety or untrustworthiness, their photos lined up above their names like “Wanted” posters in an Old West saloon. Their alleged misdeeds are listed in imprecise however heavy phrases: fraud; theft; cash laundering. Their names – some English, some Dutch, some Arabic, some Cantonese – mirror the worldwide hubs of the world diamond commerce, though, tellingly, none seem like Jewish or Jain.

It’s all finished this manner, Neys explains, primarily based on rumour and status, reasonably than by on-line databases – there are, in truth, 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, primarily based on equally religious spiritual 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 many years doesn’t appear to have created lasting rigidity between the Jain and Jewish communities right here; reasonably, it has seen the 2 communities give attention to totally different sides of the trade.

While 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 the same sentiment later whereas exhibiting 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 town – an unassuming place, the place probably the most thrilling occasion on the cultural calendar is the Geitenstoet, a procession of goats which passes by 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 an impressive 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 appears to be like 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.

Ultimately, Akash believes Jains’ spiritual 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.”