The most important moment for Indian business was the inter-war period, between late 1918 and mid-1939, when Britain was forced to give up the industrial agenda and gave Indian industries space to manufacture for the World War II effort, said author and business historian Lakshmi Subramanian.
Speaking at the recent MOG Sundays talk at Museum of Goa, Pilerne, about her latest book, ‘India Before the Ambanis’, which explores the history of Indian business over three centuries from the 1750s during the Mughal rule to the 1950s, Subramanian stated that the inter-war period, which was seen as the high noon of Indian industrial development, allowed Indian industries within the colonial dispensation to be able to manufacture, which is when Tata Steel, Birla Jute, and other businesses flourished.
“Long before this occurred, there was a strong sense among Indian business groups to go ‘swadeshi’ (produce goods within the country) and boycott English goods. The real shift took place between 1914 and 1935, when there was a surge of development,” said Subramanian, who has also had a long and distinguished research and teaching career, with experience as a professor of History from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata, and as a visiting professor of history from BITS Pilani, Goa.
In her book, Subramanian highlights the pioneering contributions of Indian businessmen like Dwarkanath Tagore (Rabindranath Tagore’s great-grandfather), Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, T. V. Sundram Iyengar, the Kirloskar and Bajaj families, and others, who radically transformed the country’s business-scape.
“I wanted to highlight people who are under-represented in conventional business history. Each of them had something to contribute to the idea of modern business in the way they organised their businesses as a social, public good or public utility, such as Godrej vouching for responsible consumption, responsible business practices followed by Tata and Godrej, or a paternalist form of labour management employed by all of them,” she stated.
Subramanian spoke about her writing process, which was driven by her aesthetics as a historian and an urgency to tell the story of Indian business, which was largely erased from conventional accounts, as they were viewed as collaborators of the British Raj and not working with the national movement.
“I decided to write ‘India Before the Ambanis’ partly after I had offered an in-depth course on business in politics in the 19th and 20th centuries in India at an undergraduate level to engineering students at BITS Pilani – Goa, and also because of the ubiquity of certain products like the Godrej chair which made us get comfortable with a particular imagination of India, which historians call ‘austere modernism’. I wanted to understand how Indian business groups strategised, coalesced and thought about manufacturing and technology, and remind the current generation of the rich, productive period of experimentation in the 19th and 20th centuries,” stated Subramanian.
Impressively, Subramanian wrote ‘India Before the Ambanis’ in only seven months. “The material collection occurred over the years due to my interest in business, and the book was written in my head while I taught. Some business houses, like Tata, Godrej, Bajaj, have made their businesses’ material available to the public in the form of comprehensive archives, and the Harvard Business School has uploaded online open-access detailed interviews of important interviews through their ‘Creating Emerging Markets’ interview archive, which helped tremendously as I needed to anchor my work in a repository of material that was reasonably reliable,” she said.
