Jamsetji, the Pioneer

On the northern steppes of Turkestan, at the estuary of the Oxus, one mighty branch of the Indo-European family lingered for centuries before the birth of Christ. It split and moved eastward and westward. The eastern wing crossed the Hindukush and founded the great Indian civilisation. The western peopled the Iranian plateau and burgeoned into the Persian Empire. The rise of Islam towards the eighth century culminated in a predatory militarism; Arab armies tramped across the Iranian corridor, conquering and proselytising. Religious persecution ran high. The Zoroastrian Persians cowered before the Arab onslaught. Some few crossed the Gulf and fled in panic to distant Gujarat. There they lingered, took root, and flourished.

The zealous refugees had carried to their land of exile invaluable fragments of a treasured scripture. On the Zend-Avesta was built a liturgy which fostered a hereditary priest-class.

For over eight hundred years the modest little town of Navsari had been the seat of the priestly dynasties. One stock attained pre-eminence. Sheriar, its progenitor, was the founder of an opulent genealogy and his worthy scions filled with distinction the office of the High Priest of the Navsari see. One hot-tempered descendant emphasised the family trait and earned for his progeny the immortal nick-name of Tata, which means ‘peppery.’ And Tatas they have remained ever afterwards.

The fire that kindled a once mighty empire which overran Asia and Egypt, and only recoiled from the European continent at Salamis, smouldered beneath the placid contentment of the Tata dynasty. Heritage will out.

In 1839 a child was born and a new chapter was written in the industrial history of India. It was the advent of Jamsetji¹ Nusserwanji Tata.

The Bar is at once the pitfall and the pinnacle of secular careers, and it was by a veritable chance that Jamsetji stumbled out of the solicitor’s chambers. For, to the aspiring Elphinstonian–Ramakrishna Bhandarkar and Dinshaw Wacha were there with him–the learned profession seemed clearly marked out. But the parental firm of Nusserwanji Tata was expanding beyond the seas; the China trade brought unprecedented gains and there was need of an ardent assistant. Jamsetji stood at the cross-roads and with striking decision embarked the ship to Hongkong. The profession of law had lost another star.

Then President Lincoln was waging his noble battle for enslaved humanity. The gigantic cotton-fields of the South lay waste. Lancashire placed an embargo upon the American raw material. It was India’s opportunity. The price of staple shot up; gold came pouring in. A hectic fever of speculation seized the cotton chiefs. Money overflowed crazily into lavish concerns. Premchand Roychand, a cotton-broker of genius, was the arch-angel of this mad careering. He spread his business nets far and wide. The firm of Tata had cast their lot with this soaring adventurer. And then the bubble burst. In 1865 General Lee surrendered the South. Shares fell and the web of speculation was torn in shreds. Mighty commercial houses tottered to their fall. The Tatas were nearly swept away. But on the high seas of disaster they encountered succour. Sir Robert Napier’s god-send expedition to Magdala made commissariat contracting a handsome concern, and the Tatas took fortune by the fore-lock. Jamsetji had served his commercial apprenticeship.

A striking era in the cotton industry was opening out. Towards 1850 one Cowasji Nanabhai Davar had established the first cotton mill in Bombay and some fifteen years afterwards the city was bidding fair to become the Indian ‘Cottonopolis.’ Yet, the industry was still in its infancy; only a dozen murky chimneys projected into the sky. The great Indian textile traditions had long died out. India, once the cotton manufactory of the civilised world, had become the agricultural farm of England. Industry stirred again, not indeed in the ancient manner, but after Western example. Colossal fortunes were being piled in the Occident.

But the Indian factory industry was primitive and clumsy. Out-dated mills worked at the caprice of fitful labour. An ‘industrial’ population was yet to be born. The dispossessed artisans had fled to the land for a scrambling existence. Transport was sluggish. The Railways were yet straggling across the peninsula. Heavy ships lugged wearily on the ocean. Steam navigation was unknown. Haulage was rudimentary. India was a century behind.

Jamsetji was thirty-five. His prescient genius was fired by the immense possibilities of the cotton trade. At Manchester he had watched the rolling mills pour out the vast fabric that clothed the tropical peoples. Japan was rearing herself on a solid textile tradition. The vision of an industrial India rose in his mind tier on tier. It was no chimera. Behind that impressive form, behind those deep-set eyes, the man of action was shaping.

Tata struck out an epoch-making path. Bombay, remote from the cotton tracts, had been clung to in superstitious veneration. For the first time he saw, if the industry was to flourish, it had to be within reach of the raw material and the channels of distribution. Nagpur suited excellently. The city was a cotton centre, the Warora coal mines were not far off, and the manufactured product could be dispersed at once by the radiating railways. There was much scepticism of the choice. People said that Tata was sinking gold. But they were wrong. He had sunk earth and taken out gold. The Empress Mills were a roaring success.

Jamsetji’s expert mind had a special facility in mastering manufacturing systems. He made endless researches. He was quick to take up a new idea or a new process. He adopted the ring spindle while yet it was struggling into its own in England and America. He had an uncanny instinct for the choice of the right subordinates. His discovery of Bezonji Dada-bhai was a stroke of genius; the assistant goods traffic superintendent was sublimated into the facile princeps of the cotton industry.

One of the marvels of industrial alchemy was the ‘Swadeshi’ Mill. When Tata took up the ‘Dharamsi’ it was a ramshackle concern. The machines creaked. Labour came and went, stole, struck, and rioted. The parasitic agents flourished on a disastrous commission. Tata had committed a blunder. The thoughtless venture brought his firm into jeopardy. But he took the helm at once. He scrapped the machinery, he scrapped the men and he scrapped the commission. He staked his all. Out of the debris a magnificent structure was reared. The caterpillar had turned butterfly. Those that had shaken their heads hung them down in abashment.

But a ruinous handicap constricted the cotton trade. India was not her own carrier; the Peninsular monopolised the merchant fleet. Their rates were excessive and grossly preferential. Tata dreamed of an Indian mercantile marine. Even in 1800 it was thought that we could still offer models to Europe in the art of ship-construction, and a century earlier Indian shipping sailed to the Thames under the convoy of British frigates. But those days had gone by. Tata decided to run his own ships. He contracted with the Nippon Yusen Kaisha for the Far Eastern trade. Then began the nefarious ‘war of freights.’ The Peninsular cut rates to a ruinous level. They went further and discredited Tata’s merchantmen in the insurance market. Tata flared up. He protested and he complained. But the Government refused to intervene. His Indian friends betrayed him and fell off one by one. Tata retired from the combat beaten clumsily. The adversary had hit below the belt. The ‘Tata line’ was rudely scrapped.

The cotton mill industry was the magnum opus of Jamsetji’s life. It is his signal title to recognition. It brought him the mine of his colossal benefactions. His later projects matured in after years; they were posthumous fulfillments. In the opening years of modern Indian industrialism, Tata looms a lone, titanic figure. He has had no commensurable successor. He was imbued with the missionary spirit in industry. He sought to broaden the economic bases of Indian advancement. He strove to free our industry from its primitive empiricism. His genius functioned in the epic style. He scrawled vast designs on the eternity of Time. He was lured by the giant strides of Western mechanisation. The allurement was irresistible. He essayed to outrival the West.

Almost before Tata’s eyes our splendid industrial heritage was becoming extinct. The smothered artisan writhed and fell to the soil. Millions of looms were crumbling because of disuse. The famished craftsmen looked pitifully at the deluging foreign cheap stuff that was taking their bread away. Their fingers itched while a torment seized their stomachs. Their gorgeous workmanship of better days mocked at them in tatters. Their faithless patrons had cruelly divorced them and were courting the tinsel material from across the seas. The scramble on the soil was a fragmentation of sustenance, and life was becoming in-supportable.

But Tata thought of mills, of tons of fabric, and the foreign dumping. He conceived of the artisans as labour for his factories. But he thought of them kindly; his eyes welled up with tears when he spoke of their hardships. He thought of them in terms of sick benefit funds, co-operative societies, creches, recreations and emulative rewards. The web was woven round the flies. The fact was, then in India, the industrial ‘bourgeoisie’ was swelling its grizzard. It was the dawn of the capitalist era. The masses were just ‘labour.’

Man in the midmost ocean of Time foams for a moment and is gone. The transmitted impetus of the expiring wave fringes the shore by a succession of existences. But we are obsessed by our little systems. Our truncated lives in supreme egotism circumscribe the magnitude of our aspiring endeavours. Jamsetji was exempt from this infirmity of noble minds.

By 1895 his business was moving like a well-oiled machine. Though in the industrial firmament ‘certain stars shot madly from their spheres’ the firm of Tata shone steadily and bright. His son Dorabji had become an invaluable co-adjutor. His trusty lieutenants, Bezonji and Padshah, did their appointed work. Jamsetji had set the stage and the play was moving with splendid precision. He was merely content to hold the strings. He was the engineering force, the conceiving genius. His mighty mind never paused to lounge by his achievements; it marched. For, vast projects were oppressing his mind. This idea-intoxicated man felt a fever in his blood.

The commercial revolutions of the nineteenth century were born of the application of science to industry. America, Germany and Japan were rising upon this twin foundation. The vast undeveloped resources of India, Tata saw, needed scientific investigation. So could the resultant industrial expansion broaden the avenues of occupation. Money he had in abundance. But he did not let in ‘empty buckets into empty wells.’ Patch-work philanthropy was not his line. There is a service which ministers at the bottom of the social pyramid; there is another which functions at the top. To lift up the best and the most gifted was to Tata the greatest service to the country. The culmination of this ideology was the establishment of the Indian Institute of Science.

In 1889 the Indian colleges were cramming shops, perniciously examinational. Tata strove to transplant in our institutions the spirit somewhat of the German seminar. The intellect of Europe was ransacked for suggestions. In Burjorji Padshah Tata discovered an astute investigator. Lord Curzon was Viceroy and he was setting his mind to the reconstruction of Indian education. Sir William Ramsay, the celebrated chemist, was commissioned to thresh out the immense project.

But the Institute was in the main a posthumous accomplishment. At the entrance to the classical structure in grey granite stands a monument by Bayes. The figures of Jove, Vulcan, Minerva and Calliope are cast in relief. In the centre is the lamp of learning. On the top of all is a commanding statue in bronze of the modest benefactor. That man had done good by stealth.

By a contemporary logic Jamsetji perceived that iron was the first link in production. Without iron there could be no tools, and without machinery there could be no industry. The iron deposits of India lay immense and unexplored; their utilisation was Tata’s haunting passion. Time was when the reputed Damascus blades were fashioned out of Indian steel. The famous Iron Column at Delhi is an astounding monument to our metallurgical skill. In 1888 the iron trade was mounting rapidly throughout the world. The railways had broken up India and the beginnings of large-scale industry looked eagerly towards iron and coal deposits. Tata’s mind was quick to act. But private enterprise then was a hazardous activity; in Lord Lawrence’s significant phrase it meant robbing the Government! Tata forged notwithstanding. The frigid bonds were slowly relaxing and a wiser policy had reformed the scandalous mining regulations. With his habitual thoroughness Tata examined the project. He made a pilgrimage of investigation through Europe and America. America hailed him as the ‘Pierpont Morgan of the East.’ He was an object of adulation, of flaring head-lines. An enterprising periodical christened him ‘John N. Tata!’ He was a lavish shopper, but he always bought with a high purpose, that India might know of the products abroad. American salesmen smiled knowingly on the Indian magnate. In Cleveland, the pivot of American steel, Senator Hanna extended to Tata a gorgeous welcome. He moved restlessly from one iron centre to another, wholly immersed in the iron idea. He did not go out even sight-seeing. He straightway returned to India to launch the scheme. But, already his strength was ebbing and the colossal charge was committed to Dorabji. Tata stood by and watched the project. He gave it life, he gave it funds, and he gave it brains. The good that men do sometimes lives after them. Beyond the rice-fields ofBengal, across the ferruginous mountains of Chota Nagpur, the steel city of Jamshedpur rises a wondrous phenomenon, a lasting triumph of the prescient genius of Jamsetji Tata.

In 1860 the city of Bombay was a ‘squalid Venice of sewage canals.’ The streets closed in, narrow and congested. Houses towered haphazard flanking the filthy gullies. Dingy chawls were huddled beside scrambling cattle-sheds. But a generation of public-spirited citizens arose who saw the birth of a new city. The immense fortunes made during the cotton boom, indeed, overflowed crazily but coursed sometimes through substantial veins of civic improvement. The Fort, an erstwhile neglected tract, blossomed into a magnificent quarter of imposing structures. On the heights, splendid residential estates were carved out.

When the speculative fever was on, Premchand Roychand launched the Bay Reclamation Scheme. But in the general dissolution following the cotton debacle, the Company collapsed. Tata sighed wearily at the waters sweep the beautiful coastline of unredeemed marsh. He was as yet on the threshold of his momentous career; but once on the pinnacle he applied himself unstintedly to municipal progress. He loved the city with an intense civic pride. He strove ceaselessly to beautify Bombay. He made of building construction a fine art. He had an impeccable architectural taste and he was self-willed. But he built wisely, combining exquisitely business with service. The Taj Mahal Hotel was reared primarily out of patriotic motives; it was a commercial proposition in the second instance. To Tata, the Taj was a national investment.

Jamsetji was a visionary, imaginative essentially in mould. But then he did not write his aerial visions or sing them; he built them concretely, in brick and mortar. But some of his projects did not concretise; they ended in shreds or died still-born in his mind. Tata’s reclamation schemes are tinged with a frustrated pathos. His aesthetic mind endeavoured to reconstruct Bombay on the Venetian model. Salsette, Bandra and Mahim with their intersecting creeks were to be the studded jewels of his artistic city. To convert those low-lying malarial swamps into inhabitable tracts, he battled manfully against a series of building fines and official imputations. He was marked out as the spokesman of a guild of ‘capitalist investors.’ There was no helping. It was a thankless task. A broken arc of his rounded ambition was at last accomplished at Juhu. A splendid fore-shore of finely divided sand runs some four miles by a splashing sea across a variegated landscape, and somewhere on those sands is the invisible impress of Jamsetji Tata.

The great business adventurers, says Laski, "have the big conceptions, the restless temperament, the un-wearying experimentalism, of the great scientist and the great explorer." They are eager to satisfy the creative urge. They respond to the impulse of power, not of profit. Tata went further. He responded foremost to the impulse of service. He experimented ceaselessly, ever seeking new ranges. No project was too small for his titanic mind. He introduced the Japanese silk industry into Mysore. He strove to acclimatise the long-stapled Egyptian cotton in India, to send the mango to the London market, to develop artesian wells and cold storage. To Tata, the visionary, life showed but half.

The Western Ghats rise an impressive rampart, all but fringing the coast-line of the Arabian Sea. On the summit of the hills falls, perhaps the heaviest rainfall in the world. The strip of basin is a splendid catchment area with immense hydraulic possibilities. For thirty years Tata revolved the hydro-electric project in his mind; it only needed a David Gostling to give form to his dream. The enormous waterfall was to be collected in storage lakes and conducted to the Kandala plateau, then forced through a descent of eight hundred feet to the bottom of the valley at Khopoli, so generating a colossal electrical energy which could be transmitted to Bombay to drive the commercial world. It was a giant scheme; it lay through vast mountains and valleys. It needed a mind as vast to see it through. But the project was spread among two generations of the Tatas; it was given to Sir Dorabji to fulfil the ‘inestimable legacy’ of his great father.

Jamsetji lived and died Nature’s modest gentleman. He received no title. He shunned the footlights. He never made a public speech in his life. He matured during those momentous years when the Indian nation was rediscovering her soul. The Indian National Congress was being born. Tata was present at its inception and blessed it. He supported our political aspirations in his own reticent way. Indeed, his life was one patriotic endeavour. Wealth with him was never an end in itself, Sir Dorabji said of him; it was a by-product of his gigantic schemes for national advancement. He had the good of India foremost at heart; he laboured for it in his inimitably grand way. He was a premature off-spring of the Indian national genius, precocious and prescient. "He united the daring courage of the American captain of industry with the German passion for details." He had an excellent head for statistics; a formidable army of stored-up figures issued forth to do service in the Bimetallic War. He thrashed sycophancy with the same relentless rigour. He was abhorrent of political discrimination or caste domination. His ample mind overflowed national frontiers. He was a citizen of the world. He traveled its highways with a passion for knowledge and curiosity. Yet he traversed unobtrusively.

The "merchant prince, manufacturer, and importer, and likewise philanthropist, scholar and philosopher" passed away at Nauheim on May 19th, 1904. His esurient indiscretions brought on an early end. "If you cannot make (the family name) greater," was the Patriarch’s last injunction, "at least preserve it."

Jamsetji is not dead. Men like Tata never die.

"Somewhere, surely, afar,
In the sounding labour-house vast
Of being, is practised that strength,
Zealous, beneficent, firm."

1 I have adopted Tata’s own spelling.