Tata- The Global Corporation that Built Indian Capitalism

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In this sweeping history, Mircea Raianu tracks the fortunes of a family-run business that was born during the high noon of the British Empire and went on to capture the world's attention with the headline-making acquisition of luxury car man- facture Jaguar Land Rover. The growth of Tata was a complex process shaped by world historical forces: the eclipse of imperial free trade, the intertwined rise of nationalism and the developmental state, and finally the return of globalization and market liberalization. Today Tata is the leading light of one of the world's major economies, selling steel, chemicals, food, financial services, and nearly everything else, while operating philanthropic in- situations that channel expert knowledge in fields such as engineering and medicine.

Based on painstaking research in the company's archive, Tata elucidates how a titan of industry was created and what lessons its story may hold for the future of global capitalism.

is a historian of global capitalism

We all watch Tata Sky, we surf the net with Tata Photon, we ride ‘in Tata taxis, we stay in Tata Hotels; we sip our Tata tea in Tata pone china and stir it with teaspoons made of Tata Steel. We: buy Tata books in Tata bookshops. Hum Tata ka name hate hail. We're under siege.

These two snapshots of everyday life in early twenty-first century India mirror each other.' Both describe the products and services of one corporate group, Tata, as inescapably ubiquitous. Both speak directly to middle- class urban citizen-consumer (Doongaji's "you," Roy's "we"), the prototypical neoliberal subject of an economy unshackled by market reforms since 1991.

After all, only a select few Indians can afford to have lunch at Bombay's ma- justice Taj Hotel, built by the founder of the Tata dynasty during the colonial period, or ~o sip .tea from bone china. But the ubiquity of the Tata brand is invoked to starkly different ends. For Doongaji, a faithful servant of the group, what matters is the ethical compact of "trust and commitment" between the corporation and the citizen-consumer. Indians trust the quality of Tata products and value the group's dedication to social responsibility. Roy, a sharp critic of contemporary capitalism, draws the opposite conclusion. The Hindi phrase Hum Tala ka namak ki bate hain literally translates as "We eat Tara's salt." The metaphor of "eating the salt" has a long history in the political culture of the subcontinent, connoting loyalty and patronage. During the Mughal period, its use functioned as a "ritual of incorporation" binding conquered subjects to TATA the emperor. It also featured in a television advertisement for Tata Salt, "Maine is desh ka namak khaya hai" ("I have eaten the salt of this country"), as a way to celebrate the group's nation-building role." Roy's usage of the phrase suggests that the private corporation has become a sovereign power in its own right. Citizen-subjects are "under siege," their relationship to capital no longer mediated by the welfare state and its promise of a more just and egalitarian future.

Why is the scene of a life lived entirely in a Tata-branded world so easily depicted and as intimately familiar to audiences in India as to require little explanation or justification? What accounts for the gulf between the celebration of corporate giants like Tata as stewards of a prosperous economy and the condemnation of corporate greed as suffocating democracy? These questions are, of course, not unique to India. The spectacular ascendancy of corporate power is a truly global phenomenon. Corporations care for us, feed us and clothe us; surveil us and discipline us, ever more intensively. Yet, they also appear increasingly unstable and vulnerable, coming under severe public scrutiny in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, widening income and wealth inequality, the harvesting and misuse of private data, and the ongoing climate and pandemic crises." India stands out as an extreme case, having seen the explosive emergence of a billionaire class of "crony capitalists" and a fraying social fabric .over the past few decades. For many Western observers, India has now entered its own "Gilded Age," unfolding much as its namesake in the United States once did." However, there is one major difference in kind that often goes unnoticed. The companies that dominate the economies and societies of North America and Western Europe today are not the same as the monopolies of bygone eras. In India, Tata has been at the top of the corporate pyramid for the better part of a century. It is as though the Vanderbilt’s and the Rockefellers themselves, not simply their modern equivalents, owned Amazon, Apple, and Google. The "creative destruction" posited by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter as the driving force in the history of capitalism seems to have stalled in India.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages