The Tatas: how a family built a business and a nation

The nineteenth century was an exciting time of initiative and enterprise around the world. If John D. Rockefeller was creating unimagined wealth in the United States that he would put to the service of the nation, a Parsi family with humble roots was doing the same in India. In 1822, a boy was born in a priestly household in Gujarats Navsari. Young Nusserwanji knew early on that his destiny lay beyond his village and decided to head for Bombay to start a business. He had neither higher education nor knowledge of trade matters, just a burning passion to carve his own path. What Nusserwanji started as a cotton trading venture, his son Jamsetjiborn in the same year as Rockefellergrew into a multifaceted business, turning around sick textile mills, setting up an iron and steel company, and building a world-class hotel. Stewarded ably over the decades by Jamsetjis sons Dorabji and Ratanji, the charismatic and larger-than-life JRD, and thereafter the more business-like Ratan, the Tata group today is a 110-billion-dollar empire. The Tatas is their story. It is also a chronicle of how each generation of the family invested not only in the expansion of its own business interests but in nation building as well. A tribute to a line of visionaries who have a special place in the hearts of ordinary Indians, this is the only book that tells the complete Tata story spanning almost 200 years.