Immersion in the Tata 'black box'

Book review of Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism

A long time ago, I wanted to read more about Warren Buffett. There were quite a few biographies available in the library. For me, a biography was a biography. I was confused about which one to pick. My immediate boss, a man of books, scholarship, and impeccable manners, told me in his soft and thoughtful voice, “There are biographies and there are authorised biographies.” That got me thinking. I hadn’t known the difference until then. Subsequently, I read the authorised biography of Buffett, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder, and then the others. Having access to the man himself definitely made a difference to the insights in Ms Schroeder’s book.

This experience has helped me differentiate between the latest book on the Tatas authored by a historian of global capitalism and modern South Asia, Mircea Raianu, and other books on the group that I have read over the years. Many of the popular books on the group are written by Tata insiders, for example R M Lala, Mukund Rajan and Harish Bhat. A few others are written by outsiders but are primarily internally focused. Examples include books by Girish Kuber, which chronicles the Tata family and group, Shashank Shah, which provides an insight into the people practices and culture at the Tata group, and Peter Casey, which is the work of a fanboy. Don’t get me wrong. Each of these books has something unique to tell, for the Tata group is such a giant that no one book can capture all aspects of the family and the group.

This is where Professor Raianu’s book makes a unique contribution. His is a book by an outsider that extensively integrates the activities of the group with the external environment, using internal resources (archives), clubbed with his own research about the global and Indian events and economies. The journey of the Tatas is immersed deeply in colonial, socialist, and capitalist India and the confluence of politics, economics, and society. On the one hand, the Tatas have challenged the Schumpeterian “creative destruction” view by traversing salt, soap, and steel along with software and sky (Tata Sky as well as the group’s airlines); on the other, it has traversed the corporation and the state mostly with aplomb, barring a few cases of resistance and inadequate measures and slips. Professor Raianu has been able to extract valuable information from the Tata and other archives that throw light on how each of these aspects played out in the group.

Tata: The Global Corporation That Built Indian Capitalism

Author: Mircea Raianu; Publisher: Harvard University Press

Pages: 304; Price: Rs 699

At this point, it is important to mention the relevance of archiving for corporations. The book and the plethora of information in it points towards the gold mine that archives are and can be if maintained well. The archives should be impartial, accurate, and as far as possible, complete. Corporate archives are often either poorly maintained, or even if maintained well, are closed to scholars. The Tatas must be congratulated and credited for leaving “behind a longer paper trail than any other Indian business” and opening the archives to the public. Other large corporations with long histories must follow suit.

These archives have perhaps been used for the first time for putting together a comprehensive academic history of the Tatas. The 62 pages of references in the book are testimony to the monumental number of records that the author has gone through. As often happens with a haystack of information, organising it can be daunting.

In the words of the author, “This is not an elite story of great leaders imposing their vision from above, nor a tale of subaltern resistance that looks up at the corporation from below, but an eye-level immersion in the “black-box” of information exchange within the group.”

The challenges for the reader, and perhaps the author himself, stem from these lines. As a historian, Professor Raianu, digs into the meticulously preserved archives of the Tata group, and tries to “reconstruct the conversations, deliberations, and decisions made by several categories of actors….” As a reader, I am left feeling in a “black-box” occasionally. Sometimes, the book is like an abstract painting, left to the imagination of the reader. At other times it is like what we in India call an “art film”. There is information, sometimes too much of it. It is intellectually stimulating. But too tiring to read for the average reader. Now and again, though, it is good to denounce popularity (commercial cinema) for reality (art movies), even as a reader. Isn’t this the real world? Too much information. The good and the bad. Go make sense of it.

The reviewer is Associate Director, Thomas Schmidheiny Centre for Family Enterprise, Indian School of Business. Views are personal