We all know the basic facts. J R D Tata was the first Indian to fly, started Air India in 1948, and ran the Tata business empire for 52 long years till 1990. He got the Bharat Ratna, the highest civilian honour in the country, in 1992. He was born in Paris to a Parsi father (R D Tata) and French mother (Sooni) in 1904; he died in Geneva in 1993 and was buried in Paris. For about a year in his youth, Tata had served in the French army.
What is not so well known is that Tata was an avid writer of letters — his was an age unspoiled by email and SMS. The Tata archives in Pune contain about 40,000 letters he wrote to family, national leaders, friends, business associates and ordinary men and women. Rupa & Co had published in 2004 some of these letters (J R D Tata: Letters, Rs 495). The letters also form the basis of R M Lala’s seminal work, Beyond the Last Blue Mountain (Penguin, 2000).
The letters Tata wrote to his father are poignant. The father died when Tata was just 21. That was when he was inducted on the board of Tata Sons. Four years later, he was made chairman. The interesting section is his letters to political leaders. Unlike other businessmen, he found little need to suck up to them. He did not hesitate to join issue with Jawaharlal Nehru and even Mahatma Gandhi. Way back in 1951, he wrote to Jaiprakash Narayan, then a firebrand Marxist (he was earlier an employee of the Birlas), about how communism would not last for long. It collapsed in less than four decades, way before it could lend history a helping hand.
It was perhaps his refusal to mince words, and his insistence on doing things the right way, that affected his business in the 1960s. His proposals to the government to set up a car plant and an integrated fertiliser complex were stymied. The unkindest cut was served in 1978 by Prime Minister Morarji Desai when he surreptitiously removed him as the chairman of Air-India — it was nationalised in 1953, though Tata continued to serve as its chairman. Desai replaced him with P C Lal who worked for Tata at Jamshedpur (then in Bihar, now in Jharkhand).
A letter he wrote to Simone Tata when she had sent him a sample set of Lakme toiletries for men is insightful. He liked some products, found others not up to the mark, and exhorted her to come up with deodorants for men — something Indians had not begun to use at that time!
That is the masala bit. What really brings out the man that he was is his letters to common men and women. He was an icon and young people wrote to him frequently for guidance. His replies were written in full earnestness, though it is not clear if he replied to all the letters he got. A young woman of the Indian Institute of Science, when she saw a job advertisement from Tata Motors which specified that women need not apply, shot off an angry letter to Tata that this was unbecoming of a progressive group. Though she had forgotten about it, she soon got a telegram to go for the interview. Sudha Murthy, the wife of Narayana Murthy of Infosys, got the job.
His advice to the young is kind as well as practical. He can be found counselling men to improve their English, to give up harebrained schemes and learn the dignity of hard work. In spite of leading the largest business empire in the country (till the 1970s when the Birlas stole a march over Tata; Dhirubhai Ambani was still working his way up the ladder), he had a Spartan life. He would often offer lifts to people on the roadside in his car. Tata had said before he died that he wanted India to be a happy country more than he wanted India to become an economic superpower. That some parts of the country are torn between modernity and deprivation today shows that he was aware of the pitfalls in the journey India had embarked on in the early 1990s.
