"The wealth gathered by Jamsetji Tata and his sons in half a century of industrial pioneering formed but a minute fraction of the amount by which they enriched the nation. The whole of that wealth is held in trust for the people and used exclusively for their benefit. The cycle is thus complete. What came from the people has gone back to the people many times over."
— J.R.D. Tata
Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, the legendary founder of the Tata Group, was born on 3 March 1839 in the then princely state of Baroda to a Parsi Zoroastrian family.
Jamsetji came from a family of priests from the Gujarati town of Navsari. His father, Nusserwanji, was the first person in the clan to enter trade in the port city of Bombay (now Mumbai). Jamsetji studied at the city’s Elphinstone College and joined his father’s firm in 1858.
He went to Britain in 1865 and stayed there till 1868. His education in the cotton industry began here and included visits to the Lancashire cotton mills. He got to know a number of prominent Indians living in England. He was also introduced to the works of thinkers and scholars like John Stuart Mill and John Ruskin.
After returning to India he married Heerabai Daboo and founded a trading company with a capital of just over Rs 20,000 in 1868. In 1869 he purchased a near-defunct oil mill on the outskirts of Mumbai. He converted it into a cotton mill and sold it for a profit within two years.
Jamsetji often travelled to Europe and America as well as other Asian countries to get a sense of business trends in the modern world. Together with his father and others he established the Central India Spinning, Weaving and Manufacturing Company in 1974. The firm built a mill in Nagpur, which was called Empress Mill in honour of Britain’s Queen Victoria who was declared empress of India on 1 January 1877.
“This business did well, in part because Tata had hired two talented subordinates: a former railway official named Bezonji Mehta, who despite having no experience of cotton milling soon became a highly effective mill manager, and the Englishman James Brooksby, hired as a technical adviser, who helped the mill acquire the best and most advanced milling technology,” Morgen Witzel writes in the book ‘Tata: The Evolution of a Corporate Brand’.
Jamsetji was closely associated with the Indian National Congress and shared a strong bond with the party’s founding leaders such as Dadabhai Naoroji and Pherozeshah Mehta. Though the independence movement did not take off in his lifetime, Jamsetji was convinced that in future India needed to be economically self-dependent and industrialisation and scientific education were the key to achieve that. Many of his pet projects saw the light of the day after his death and were taken to their logical completion by his successors. These included setting up of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, a steel plant in Jamshedpur and a hydroelectric company.
An early biography of Jamsetji titled ‘The life and life work of J. N. Tata’ (1915) by D.E. Wacha, states: “No academic person, his [Tata’s] motto was action, action, action. Action was the key to all his enterprises…The abstract had to be translated on the terms of the concrete. A practical man, he showed the way to his countrymen how wealth acquired may be put to the best productive uses which might benefit the country and advance the people a stage forward in their struggle for material prosperity. By 1895, Mr. Tata had amply proved his credentials as a great man of action, courageous enterprise and the most brilliant pioneer of indigenous industrialism on well ordered and sound lines.”
Jamsetji’s friendships were, however, not limited to business and political figures. He had great respect for people like the religious leader Swami Vivekananda. In an inspired letter to the seer dated 23 November 1898, Jamsetji wrote: “I trust, you remember me as a fellow traveller on your voyage from Japan to Chicago. I very much recall at this moment your views on the growth of the ascetic spirit in India, and the duty, not of destroying, but of diverting it into useful channels… I am of the opinion that, if such a crusade in favour of an asceticism of this kind were undertaken by a competent leader, it would greatly help asceticism, science and the good name of our common country; and I know not who would make a more fitting general of such a campaign than Vivekananda….”
There’s a fascinating tale behind the construction of Mumbai’s Taj Mahal hotel in 1903, the only luxurious hotel of its kind in the country at the time. A miffed Jamsetji decided to build it, the story goes, after he was told that he, being an Indian, was not welcome at Pyrke’s Apollo Hotel where he had gone for a meal.
Jamsetji Tata died in Germany on 19 May 1904. The trading company which he founded in 1868 is today’s Tata Group with operations in over 80 countries and revenues of $100 billion (2012-2013 figures).
In a tribute to the group’s founder, India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru once said: “When you have to give the lead in action, in ideas — a lead which does not fit in with the very climate of opinion — that is true courage, physical or mental or spiritual, call it what you like, and it is this type of courage and vision that Jamsetji Tata showed. It is right that we should honour his memory and remember him as one of the big founders of modernIndia.”
Also on this day:
1926 — Ravi Sharma, Indian film music director, was born
1955 — Jaspal Bhatti, Indian television personality and satirist, was born
1967 — Shankar Mahadevan, music composer and playback singer, was born
