Folio 01 · about 4 minutes

The Book Wrapped in Red

A bahi-khata is a merchant's account book, and for many trading families in western India it is also a calendar and an object of worship: a new one is opened, and blessed, at Diwali.

What is a bahi khata?

In the plainest sense, the बही-खाता (bahī-khātā) is the books: the bound record of what a firm received, what it gave and who owes whom. When Anshuman Pandey surveyed surviving records in Mahajani, the commercial script of northern India, he found that most of them were account books of exactly this kind, alongside merchant diaries, letters and bills of exchange.¹ The object, though, is what people remember. It is tall and narrow, wrapped in red cloth, tied with cord, and its pages are folded rather than printed with rules.

Very little scholarship treats the bahi as an object. Most of what is written down comes from people who grew up with it, and this chapter leans on one such account, by the writer Priyanka Kochar, who watched her elders update the family ledgers every afternoon.² Read her description as one family's practice in Rajasthan and Gujarat, not a rule for all of India. She calls the method of keeping these books Desi Nama.²

How is a bahi made?

Kochar lists four materials: red cotton cloth, coarse white thread, cardboard and paper.² The cardboard is sandwiched between layers of red cloth and stitched, loosely and unevenly, on a sewing machine. The paper is cut and folded into eight equal sections, which she calls sal.²

The folds do the work that printed lines do in a Western ledger. In her family's books the four sections on the left were for jama, money received, and the four on the right for udhaar, money owed. In each set the first fold held the amount and the next three named the account.² A finished book was wrapped in white muslin and kept in a wooden cabinet. Even household expense books kept by the women of the family were locked away, the keys held by the head of the house.²

What is written on the first page?

A new bahi does not begin with numbers. Kochar describes a swastika drawn by hand in red vermilion and turmeric, with nine dots for the nine planets. Silver coins, betel leaves and flowers are placed on it before the year's first entry. The word श्री (shrī) is written in a pyramid, and an invocation such as श्री गणेशाय नमः opens the page.²

The invocation was so common in merchant writing that Mahajani had a single sign for it. When the script was encoded in Unicode, one of its 39 characters was a ligature for shri, needed because Mahajani lacked the letters to build the word the Devanagari way.³ The words शुभ-लाभ (shubh-lābh, auspiciousness and profit) belong to the same vocabulary: the Drik Panchang notes that firms that now keep their accounts on computers draw a swastika, Om and Shubh-Labh on the laptop instead.⁴

What is chopda pujan, and when is it in 2026?

Chopda pujan is the worship of the account books at Diwali. The Drik Panchang says that in Gujarat the Diwali Lakshmi Puja is better known as Chopda Puja, and that Hindu business communities in Rajasthan and Maharashtra perform it as well. The new chopda, or account books, are consecrated to bless the coming year's business.⁴ Kochar adds that families across Gujarat, Rajasthan and Maharashtra still buy fresh bahis at Diwali.²

In 2026 Chopda Puja falls on Sunday, 8 November. The Drik Panchang's New Delhi listing gives an evening window of 5:31 pm to 10:27 pm, with shorter morning and afternoon windows.⁴ Auspicious times are calculated for each city, so check a local panchang.

The tie between books and the calendar shows up on the documents themselves. The specimen hundi in the Reserve Bank of India's museum is dated not by the Gregorian calendar but Sambat 1990, Miti Mangsir, a Vikram Samvat date, roughly 1933 CE.⁵

The bahi has also become a national symbol. In 2019 Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman carried her budget papers in a red bahi-khata instead of the leather briefcase inherited from the colonial era. When she moved to a tablet, the tablet travelled in a red pouch made to look like a bahi.⁶

Why red? Why that shape?

The answer most often given is that red is auspicious, the colour of prosperity. It is a reasonable guess and it may well be how merchants themselves saw it, but treat it as tradition. I have not found a historical study that tests it. [unverified — needs source]

On the shape, Kochar's description suggests a practical reason for the folds. They give eight columns without printed rules, and a book of folded sheets can be stitched by hand from plain paper.² Why the format is long and narrow rather than square is not explained in any source consulted here. Any confident answer you hear is folk explanation.

The next chapter opens the book and asks what was written in those columns, and whether it amounted to double-entry bookkeeping.