For the love of India: the life and times of Jamsetji Tata by R M Lala

For the love of India: the life and times of Jamsetji Tata by R M Lala
Viking Penguin Books India 2004; 247 pp

Making India his business

India’s strong economic growth, as well as China ’s, may be seen as both a challenge and opportunity to Western business interests. But it was less than a century ago that India entered the industrial age, when her first steel ingots rolled out in Sakchi, some four hours west of Calcutta , in 1912.

That event ‘heralded a major shift in Indian business from trading into manufacturing. It was an epoch event for the entire nation because it signified our first step towards self-reliance in manufacturing,’ according to Azim Premji , India ’s leading software entrepreneur.

The man who drove India ’s industrial revolution, more than any other, was Jamsetji N Tata, the founder of the Tata industrial conglomerate. Lord Chelmsford had Sakchi renamed Jamshedpur in 1919 in honor of Tata and the city remains the headquarters of Tata Steel and Tata Motors.

It is hard to overstate the reverence with which J N Tata is held in India to this day. He was a towering pioneer and visionary, whom Russi Lala sympathetically brings to life in this biography, timed to coincide with the centenary of Tata’s death in 1904. The President of India attended the book’s launch in Bangalore . Anyone wanting to understand the development of India should read this book.

J N Tata didn’t live to see most of his visions fulfilled. The first steel rolled out almost a decade after his death. It was a mark of Tata’s greatness that he built an able team of family and friends around him to carry forward the tasks he set in motion for the development of India and, indeed, ‘for the love of India’ of the book’s title. As Lala puts it, while the Indian National Congress gave the impetus towards freedom, ‘Jamsetji Tata was to lay the foundations for the economic freedom of India .'

Tata would have been remarkable had he only laid the foundations in steel. But he is renowned for four great achievements: the steel industry, the development of India ’s hydro-electric power, the foundation of the Indian Institute of Science , India ’s première center of scientific learning and excellence in Bangalore , and the creation of the magnificent Taj Mahal Hotel in Bombay (now Mumbai). This latter, which celebrated its centenary in 2003, was the only one of the four that Tata lived to see to completion, though he had already pioneered the cotton industry in central India , and the revival of southern India ’s flourishing silk industry.

Born in 1839 at the height of the British Empire , Tata came from a long-standing lineage of Parsee priests of the Persian Zoroastrian faith. His father, who was only 17 when Jamsetji was born, had him inducted into the priesthood, and the tenets of the faith—Humata, Hukta, Huvarsta (good thoughts, good words, good deeds)—had a profound influence on the young man.

Lala emphasizes that Tata as an adult had a ‘disciplined habit of reading and contemplation at set times of the day’, particularly in the library of his splendid Bombay residence on Malabar Hill. ‘It is in these moments of quiet and contemplation that his ideas for India ’s future were to take shape,’ Lala writes.

He was also one of the most traveled Indians of his generation, spending over 15 years outside the country. When he heard Thomas Carlyle lecturing in Manchester in 1865, a remark particularly stayed in his mind: ‘The nation which has the steel will have the gold’.

But he made his initial wealth in the cotton industry. He opened the Empress Mills in Nagpur on 1 January 1877 , the day that Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. It was the first major industrial enterprise in the cotton-growing Central Provinces . Right from the start he saw the health and welfare of employees as ‘the sure foundation of our prosperity’. Lala writes that Tata ‘gave undreamt of facilities to his workers and staff… For him man was not meant as a tool of industry. Industry was meant for the good of man.’ With this philosophy Tata laid the foundation for the company’s renowned social ethos, including housing, education and company hospitals.

By the age of 50, Tata could have continued to open textile mills and amass a fortune, like his American contemporary the oil tycoon John Rockefeller. But Tata ‘appears to have decided that business was no longer his main business,’ writes Lala. ‘The nation was his business. Slowly within him was developing a passion which was to fructify in years to come. His passion was to uplift the poor of his country… And so he focused on enabling India —an agricultural country—to develop an industrial base, as was happening in the West.’

As well as steel and hydro-electric power, which Tata pioneered near Bombay , he saw a post-graduate university for scientific learning, as ‘one side of his three-dimensional strategy’, in order to provide the ‘intellectual infrastructure’. Tata’s sons, Dorabji and Ratan, ensured the opening of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore in 1911, thanks to Tata’s generous endowment in his will. Today India produces some of the world’s most skilled software engineers, and the foundation for this success can be traced back to Tata’s emphasis on scientific excellence.

An intriguing aspect of Tata’s story is his persistent battles with the ambitious and ever skeptical Viceroy, Lord Curson, to whom Tata had to seek ratification for all his projects. Yet Tata was gracious enough never to be embittered and always endeavored to see the positive side of human nature, even Curson’s.

Lala writes as a Tata insider who chaired, until recently, the Sir Dorabji Tata charitable trust. He had unique access to Tata papers. His earlier best-seller on the house of Tata, The Creation of Wealth, has been reissued in its fourth edition in 2004. He is also the author of Beyond the Last Blue Mountain (1992), a splendid biography of J R D Tata, who founded India ’s airline industry and became the head of the Tata corporation. In For the love of India , Lala fills in our gap of knowledge of perhaps India ’s most influential figure outside politics.

With business pioneers of such breadth of vision one is left wondering how much India ’s bureaucracy subsequently held back the nation’s economic development. For Azim Premji, Tata gave a boost ‘to the confidence and psyche of the entire nation. I will always remember Jamsetji, not just as a visionary industrialist but as a man who helped a nation believe in itself.’