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In 1868, Robert Napier, a British commander in colonial India, hired local suppliers to provide a force ready to crush the Emperor of Abyssinia across the Arabian Sea.
They scammed him, cornering markets and raising prices “for everything from mules to camels to charcoal.” Endemic “insider trading and corruption†even sparked a parliamentary inquiry.
Among the suppliers was a Parsi opium dealer, Nusserwanji Tata. How her family built today’s Tata group is the subject of a new book by historian Mircea Raianu.
The centrality of the Tata group in modern Indian history, suggests Raianu, goes beyond other business empires such as Swire in Hong Kong or Anglo-American in South Africa.
He pioneered domestic heavy industries such as steel and is present in dozens of businesses, from tea to technology. It has navigated India’s turbulent politics, from colonial rule to socialism, and remains India’s largest conglomerate. It is also, thanks to its ownership of manufacturers like Jaguar Land Rover, the largest industrial employer in the United Kingdom.
Tata embodies contradictions. Its formidable philanthropic record, unmatched by other Indian companies, has made Tata “a synonym of integrity and excellence in a corrupt society”. Yet for much of its history it was a monopoly acting as a “quasi-sovereign power”. A trade unionist in the 1920s memorably nicknamed him the “blind king” in a “city of darkness”.
Raianu’s book, the first by an academic historian exploring the company’s records, attempts to explain its rise and longevity without resorting to its own myth-making.
Members of India’s former Parsi minority – the Zoroastrians who migrated from Persia a thousand years ago – families like the Tatas flourished during British rule thanks in part to their early place in the Indian caste and the social system.
Anecdotes like the Abyssinian Affair do not fit in with Tata’s modern self-image, but reveal the messy 19th-century mercantilist imperial world from which they emerged.
The group flourished, Raianu claims, through its own state-like apparatus, building corporate towns, staffing universities and even setting up Tata administrative services, a subtle replica of the function. Indian public.
This helped him build up enough power to shield him from the shifting political winds. Tata maintained uncomfortable accommodation with the British Raj and responded cautiously to the ascendant nationalists of Mahatma Gandhi. It operated in the socialist state of Jawaharlal Nehru, although it was burnt down when India’s first prime minister nationalized the airline Tata Air India in 1953.
The most interesting passages deal with the chimerical construction of Tata of Jamshedpur, a city built by the company for steel workers in the rural interior of India that embodied its sovereign aspirations.
Inspired by the garden city movement, Tata hoped to provide good housing and a good quality of life, by innovating industry best practices such as the eight-hour work day.
Yet like all utopian quests, it hid dark instincts, and the colonialist undertones of the project shine through in the book. Tata relocated the local adivasi, or tribal, people to build the city. Its efforts to engender a capitalist work ethic among them were rife with racial supremacy. Jamshedpur was “engulfed in violence and political intrigue”, with managers harassing Adivasi women and police shooting strikers.
In the end, the company’s records prove too narrow a lens to truly capture the world in which Tata operates. The most interesting times come when it goes beyond the top-down accounts of business executives, such as from an adivasi perspective, but there are few of them.
Raianu himself recognizes the limitations of corporate records, including the possibility that the records have been “destroyed or deliberately hidden” to hide uncomfortable facts, such as Tata’s roots in the opium trade. And yet the book ends up skating on these fascinating and instructive episodes.
Pieces deal with historiographical debates that would be of limited interest to the general reader, and the narrative ends at the end of the 1970s with an unsatisfactory and brief epilogue bringing us to the present.
Raianu notes that Tata is no longer at the entrepreneurial vanguard of India. Groups like Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries and Gautam Adani’s eponymous group, with their investments in telecommunications and renewable energy, are further claiming the status of today’s “nation buildersâ€.
These tycoons represent a different way of doing business, which has caused a great deal of consternation. They lack Tata’s ambivalence towards the state, shamelessly aligning themselves with Narendra Modi, and share little of the Tatas conservative scruples about “creating wealth for herself.”
But the tale of how a conglomerate has come to dominate the Indian economy for much of the past 150 years is a timely read for those wondering if capitalism and corporate power in India is entering a new era. .
Aunty: The global society that built Indian capitalism by Mircea Raianu Harvard, $ 39.95 / £ 31.95, 304 pages
Benjamin Parkin is the FT correspondent in Mumbai
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