Nation pays tribute to the 183rd birth anniversary of the founder of Tata group
Mumbai, NFAPost: The Founder of the Tata group Jamsetji Tata began with a textile mill in central India in the 1870s. His vision inspired the steel and power industries in India, set the foundation for technical education, and helped the country leapfrog into the ranks of industrialised nations.
Today is the Shri Jamsetji Tata Jayanti, the 183rd birth anniversary of the founder of Tata group. Industrialists and entrepreneurs are giving rich tribute to the glorious contribution of the founder of the Tata Sons, the holding group of Tata group companies.
The industrialist in Jamsetji was a pioneer and a visionary, possessed of a spirit of entrepreneurial adventure and acumen never seen before or since in a native of colonial India.
The nationalist in him believed unwaveringly that the fruits of his business success would enrich a country he cared deeply about. These attributes, by themselves, would have been enough to mark him as an extraordinary figure. But what made Jamsetji truly unique, the quality that places him in the pantheon of modern India’s greatest sons, was his humaneness.
It is this characteristic from which stemmed Jamsetji’s generosity of heart and his compassion for a citizenry labouring under the twin realities of oppressive foreign occupation and overwhelming poverty.
The distinctive structure the Tata group came to adopt after Jamsetji’s passing, with a huge part of its assets being held by trusts devoted to ploughing money into social-development initiatives, can be traced directly to the empathy embedded in the Founder’s philosophy of business.
Born on March 3, 1839, in the sleepy town of Navsari in Gujarat, he was the first child and only son of Nusserwanji Tata, the scion of a family of Parsee priests. Many generations of the Tatas had joined the priesthood, but the enterprising Nusserwanji broke the mould, becoming the first member of the family to try his hand at business.
Raised in Navsari, Jamsetji joined his father in Bombay when he was 14. Nusserwanji got him enrolled at Elphinstone College, from where he passed in 1858 as a ‘green scholar’, the equivalent of today’s graduate. The liberal education he received would fuel in Jamsetji a lifelong admiration for academics and a love of reading. Those passions would, though, soon take a backseat to what Jamsetji quickly understood was the true calling of life: business.
It was a far-from-opportune time for a young native to take his first, tentative steps into the volatile world that was business in the subcontinent. Jamsetji’s entrepreneurial career began, in the words of JRD Tata, “when the passive despair engendered by colonial rule was at its peak”. The Indian Mutiny of 1857 was but two years past when Jamsetji joined the small firm that his father, a merchant and banker, ran. He had just turned 20.
In 1868, aged 29 and wiser for the experience garnered by nine years of working with his father, Jamsetji started a trading company with a capital of Rs21,000. His first expedition to England soon followed, where he learnt about the textile business.
He was convinced that there was tremendous scope for Indian companies to make a dent in the prevailing British dominance of the textile industry. Jamsetji made his move into textiles in 1869. He acquired a dilapidated and bankrupt oil mill in Chinchpokli, in the industrial heart of Bombay, renamed the property Alexandra Mill and converted it into a cotton mill.
Jamsetji Tata seeded the company’s journey in textile, steel and then came up with vision to form muiltiple product based company. Besides his philanthropic principles, Jamsetji Tata is rooted in the belief that for India to climb out of poverty entire nation has to harness the capabilities of its finest minds.
Jamsetji’s business successes shrouded the assortment of passions and commitments that he carried and nurtured across a fascinating life. He had an abiding love for Bombay, for travel and, most of all, for new ideas. His was a mind constantly seeking knowledge and daring to push the frontiers of achievement, right up to his demise in Germany in 1904.
“Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralising as earth, air and water,” said the American essayist Lewis H Lapham. “Men can employ it as a tool, or they can dance around it as if it were an incarnation of God.” Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata employed the wealth he created to enrich India and her people.