Jamsetji Tata

Shapurji Saklatvala, the First British MP to Uncompromisingly Refute Imperialism

An excerpt from Priyamvada Gopal’s book ‘Insurgent Empire’.

This is an excerpt from Priyamvada Gopal’s Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (2019), published with permission from Simon and Schuster India.

There are not two ways of ruling another nation. There is not a democratic and sympathetic way, and also an unsympathetic way.
Shapurji Saklatvala

On 17 June 1927, a heated debate was underway in the House of Commons on a controversial proposal to send to India a commission that would review the provisions of the India Act of 1919, with a view to possible further limited constitutional reforms. To be headed by the right-leaning Liberal Sir John Simon, a cautious proponent of gradual changes, the proposed consultative body would have no Indian representative. The Simon Commission’s blatantly racist composition – especially egregious given that it was a body set up to discuss the issue of political representation for Indians – was manifestly inflammatory, and the protests that rocked India a few months later surprised many political observers by their ‘sheer ferocity’. When the commissioners did arrive in India, they were greeted by a sea of black flags and placards reading ‘Go back, Simon’. In Britain itself, however, it would be left to the member for North Battersea to voice outright criticism of the commission, in an indignant and characteristically direct parliamentary peroration:

It is absolutely impossible for one country to hold another in subjection and pretend to offer them measures of reform giving them a partnership in the commonwealth. That is all humbug. I see that a new Commission is going to be appointed, and I would like to ask what is going to be the scope of that Commission and its terms of reference. Everybody knows, whether it is put in black and white or not, that the first thing that will be put in the terms of reference is how this country can keep a stranglehold over India.

Priyamvada Gopal
Insurgent Empire
Simon and Schuster India (2019)

A fellow MP had had quite enough. Launching into an ad hominem attack on his prolix colleague’s personal history, George Pilcher, member for Penryn and Falmouth, noted that, while the honourable member for Battersea had ‘made some very cruel and unjustifiable charges against the European population in Bombay’ in relation to poverty, low wages and slums, he himself belonged to the wealthy community ‘most responsible’ for Mumbai’s industrial development. It was ‘high time’, Pilcher sneered, for parliament to ‘know who the hon. Member for North Battersea is and what is his relationship with that great industrial community in Bombay’.

During another fractious debate on the Simon Commission that autumn, it was the turn of the Tory under-secretary of state for India to get personal about his Battersea colleague, who had once again attacked the mission. No one with ‘the remotest knowledge of India’, snarled Earl Winterton, ‘could possibly accept the hon. Gentleman as an exponent of Indian opinion. As far as I know, he has absolutely no authority of any sort. He is repudiated by every responsible organisation in India.

The focus of this sniping was Shapurji Dorabji Saklatvala, the lone Communist member of the House. Saklatvala was a Parsi from Bombay, who had first come to Britain in 1905 in his late twenties for medical treatment. After marrying an Englishwoman, Sally Marsh, he had settled down in London, where the couple would raise a large family. Saklatvala was indeed related to the great industrial dynasty inaugurated by Jamsetji Tata, and had worked for several years in the family concern. He was not quite culpable of being an ‘heir of the industrial system which he attacks’, however, having been a paid employee and a poor cousin rather than a direct descendant of the main branch of the business dynasty.

Also Read: How Colonialism Actually Worked

Responding to Pilcher’s broadside, Saklatvala replied simply that he had no greater stake in defending his own natal community than he had in attacking Bombay’s elite European milieu:

“The Parsee capitalist class is just as abominable and as much to be avoided as the class to which the hon. Member and his friends belong in this country.”

Responding to Winterton’s charge that he was not taken seriously by any Indian organizations, he pointed out that he, who had been officially welcomed in nine Indian cities during a recent tour, could speak of matters Indian with far greater legitimacy than the ‘unrepresentative Indian Princes on the League of Nations’ placed there by the earl in his capacity as colonial secretary.

At this point, Saklatvala had been in the House for three years, elected first in 1922 as a Labour MP, and then again in 1923 as a Communist (after the Labour Party expelled Communist members). So he noted that while he spoke in this debate as ‘one of the conquered and enslaved subject races’, he was also ‘representing the interests of the British electors who sent me’.

It is this sense of carrying a dual but intertwined representational responsibility – and his persistence in identifying common ground between the two sides – which makes Shapurji Saklatvala a figure of transnational significance in thinking about the relationship between colonial insurgencies and British anticolonialism in the interwar period.

Deemed ‘one of the most violent anti-British agitators in England’ by state espionage agencies, Saklatvala sought actively to forge a language of opposition to empire that would at once undo the pretences and prevarications of gradualist reformism and make clear that resistance to empire was in the interests of both the Indian and British working classes. Where Hardie, MacDonald and others who visited India during the Swadeshi years came back to make the case for reforms that might defuse the ‘unrest’, Saklatvala was arguably the first MP to make a sustained case in parliament against reformism and ‘liberal’ approaches to colonial governance in themselves.

His biographer, Marc Wadsworth, argues that Saklatvala was also responsible for putting empire and anti-imperialism firmly into the view of liberals and progressives at a time ‘when the British left was by no means committed to anti-imperialism’; he invited campaigners from the colonies to speak at meetings and wrote on the topic in such organs as the Labour Leader. At meetings of the Independent Labour Party, which he joined in 1909, ‘Saklatvala raised the issue of Indian independence and chided the ILP on the need to be more internationalist’.

The subject of three biographies – one by his daughter, Sehri – Saklatvala, Britain’s third Indian MP after fellow Parsis Naoroji and Mancherjee Bhownagree, is usually mentioned only in passing in studies of early twentieth-century relationships between English dissenters and Indians, which have tended to focus on more reformist figures such as Annie Besant, C.F. Andrews and Mirabehn (Madeleine Slade), who appear less Manichean in their approach to colonial questions.

Annie Beasant (Public domain image), Mirabhen (Photo: Encyclopaedia Britannica) and C.F. Andrews (Photo: Howard Coster/National Portrait Gallery, London CC BY NC ND 3.0)

Yet Saklatvala – who described the likes of Besant as ‘white men and women’ who ‘pass as India’s friends and pretend to be almost Indianised’ – himself emerges in some ways as the consummate hybrid, deeply rooted in British political and social life while equally committed to the Indian anticolonial struggle. To the later dismay of the British Communist Party, he was also committed to retaining something of his Parsi cultural and religious heritage.

Described later by George Padmore as the ‘most independent-minded Communist ever’, during his parliamentary career Saklatvala produced the first truly uncompromising refutation of imperialism in the House, one which put in place an unbridgeable antagonism between empire and democracy, refused to accept that reforms or ‘trusteeship’ were possible in the context of political subjugation, identified the centrality of capitalism to the imperial project, and stressed the revolutionary agency of the oppressed out of which common ground would emerge.

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In doing so, Comrade Sak’ crafted a unique political voice for himself, at once Indian and British, speaking out candidly and passionately on many causes, but most especially against imperialism, which, for him, was inextricable from capitalism. Known for ‘a striking and original manner of speaking’, he would tell his British audiences that ‘he could not help it that his accent was a little foreign but his heart was not foreign’.

One contemporary, the journalist Herbert Bryan, described Saklatvala as possessed not of ‘the mock eloquence of the demagogic wind-bag, but the deep sincerity of the man finding expression in flaming words’, also noting: ‘His command of English is infinitely superior to that of the average Englishman.’ The over 500 interventions he made in the House of Commons during a relatively short but packed parliamentary career certainly ranged over domestic issues such as housing conditions, unemployment, wages and trade unionism, but the majority were on India and imperial matters, earning him the sobriquet of ‘Member for India’.

While it is true that he ‘was only one of many personalities operating in the West from a variety of Indian political tendencies’, few were able so deftly to negotiate – and make a polemical virtue of – colonial subjecthood as a form of dual citizenship. The fact that Saklatvala was at once influential and reviled had much to do with his ability to navigate artfully – though never without integrity – between the pronouns ‘you’ and ‘we’ when addressing British politicians and lawmakers; the ‘you’ was a source of irritation to his political opponents.

British House of Commons. Photo: Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons

Unsurprisingly, not a little racism came his way, with some on the ‘pink’ left allegedly wanting to get ‘this bloody nigger off our backs’. Saklatvala’s synchronic identification with both fellow Indian colonial subjects and ordinary British citizens appears to have been completely sincere; certainly there is nothing in either his private communications or his public pronouncements to suggest otherwise. Indeed, the insight that subjects of the British Empire and ordinary Britons had more in common with each other than with their respective ruling classes was one that he attempted to elaborate from his earliest years in British politics, and which he later parlayed into the language of communist internationalism.

Intervening in Commons debates and playing an active role in organizations ranging from the British Socialist Party and the Independent Labour Party to the Workers’ Welfare League of India and the League against Imperialism, Saklatvala made significant public contributions that tell us something about how British criticism of empire was shaped and reformulated, particularly after the October Revolution, by the growing presence and pedagogical impact of Asian and African campaigners and intellectuals in the imperial metropolis.

Also Read: Digging Up British Empire’s Bloody Legacy in India

Certainly, he was responsible for adamantly bringing resistance to the imperial project – particularly, though not only, in India – firmly into both parliamentary view and public hearing, which was no mean feat. Close readings of his speeches and writings indicate the extraordinary extent to which Saklatvala was preoccupied with the project of channelling a democratic ‘voice’, both for the subjects of colonialism and for ordinary Britons; he also wanted each of these constituencies to hear the other. Later in his political career, Saklatvala, with what fellow MP Philip Snowden described as ‘volcanic eloquence’, would also become a prominent spokesman in Britain for another juridical crisis of empire that became a cause célèbre in Britain – the infamous ‘Meerut Conspiracy Case’.

Priyamvada Gopal is University Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures in the Faculty of English and Fellow, Churchill College, University of Cambridge.

An Institute for the Nation: Vivekananda and Nivedita’s Role in the IISc’s Making

An idea that perhaps took shape in conversations that Jamsetji Tata and Swami Vivekananda had on a voyage in 1893 would not come to fruition before their deaths.

It was in the summer of 1893 that two Indians, very different in their vocations, happened to travel together on a ship from Yokohama in Japan to Vancouver in Canada. One of them was a young 30-year-old unknown monk and the other a very successful trader-industrialist. In their conversations, which they undoubtedly had sufficient occasion of, the monk passionately impressed upon his companion of the need to transition to manufacturing than merely taking the easy way of trading raw materials or semi-finished goods. The former approach would help create jobs, add much greater value to the products then to be sold, and take the country ahead on the road to self-sufficiency and development. He also talked of training Indians not just in science, but also technology, so that the country’s requirements could be significantly fulfilled by its domestic manufacturing. Both of them knew it was not an easy dream in the days of a hostile regime. These conversations surely had a strong resonance with the industrialist, who was probably already nursing the same ideas.

They alighted at their destination and bade each other goodbye, probably thinking that this would be their last meeting. It is quite likely that the industrialist did not pick up the monk’s name as the latter, till then, had the wont of introducing himself just as a Sanyasin, without a name.

Five years passed. The monk returned from the West after four years. He was given a stupendous welcome across several towns and cities throughout the subcontinent.

It was then that the industrialist wrote a letter to this old co-passenger:

Esplanade House,

Bombay.
23rd Nov. 1898

Dear Swami Vivekananda,

I trust, you remember me as a fellow- traveller on your voyage from Japan to Chicago. I very much recall at this moment your views on the growth of the ascetic spirit in India, and the duty, not of destroying, but of diverting it into useful channels.

I recall these ideas in connection with my scheme of Research Institute of Science for India, of which you have doubtless heard or read. It seems to me that no better use can be made of the ascetic spirit than the establishment of monasteries or residential halls for men dominated by this spirit, where they should live with ordinary decency and devote their lives to the cultivation of sciences –natural and humanistic. I am of opinion that, if such a crusade in favour of an asceticism of this kind were undertaken by a competent leader, it would greatly help asceticism, science, and the good name of our common country; and I know not who would make a more fitting general of such a campaign than Vivekananda. Do you think you would care to apply yourself to the mission of galvanizing into life our ancient traditions in this respect? Perhaps, you had better begin with a fiery pamphlet rousing our people in this matter. I would cheerfully defray all the expenses of publication.”

With kind regards, I am, dear Swami

Yours faithfully,
Jamshedji Tata

Tata, was referring in the letter to his pledge of a gift of 200,000 in pound sterling (about Rs 30 lakh then), widely reported nationally towards setting up a research institute to “induce the students of this country to undertake researches on the problems of tropical diseases or tropical chemistry, to investigate the vast and neglected materials of our national history and Indian philology” and “to found laboratories and libraries, where students may work under the direction of great teachers.”

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The Swami, of course, could not directly take up the leadership of this venture due to his own preoccupation of setting up of a new, dynamic monastic order aimed at channelling the traditional ascetic spirit of spiritual practioners towards service of humanity. But he wished it well and, more importantly, also transmitted his enthusiasm regarding the project to some of his disciples.

Swami Vivekananda at the Parliament of Religions in 1893. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Tata takes it up with the viceroy

Meanwhile Tata met the viceroy, Lord Curzon, immediately after the latter took office. The viceroy dismissed the idea as impractical. He thought Indians did not have the temperament of engaging in research in science, that the institute would not get enough competent candidates, and also expressed doubt regarding the employability prospects of students after such a training.

Following this, the Swami’s pre-eminent disciple, Sister Nivedita, began to actively campaign for the actualisation of this scheme by this great patriot-industrialist and wrote several articles in the English press championing it. As early as 1899 she wrote:

“We are not aware if any project is at once so opportune and so far-reaching in its beneficent effects was ever mooted in India, as that of the Post-Graduate Research University of Mr Tata. The scheme grasps the vital point of weakness in our national well-being with a clearness of vision and tightness of grip, the masterliness which is only equalled by the munificence of the gift with which it is ushered to the public.”

In due course, the government appointed an inquiry into this proposal by Sir William Ramsay in 1900. Ramsay, eminently well-known as a scientist, was to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry four years later, for his discovery and separation of what he called the ‘inert gases’. His discovery led to the addition of a new column to the periodic table. Though brilliant as a scientist, Ramsay could not rise above the coloniser’s prejudice. In his submission, he shot down the proposal. One of his observations was the infeasibility of an institute which would combine scientific research with streams of humanities, as intended by Tata.

The viceroy and others also suggested that Tata make the gift and leave it to the best sense of the government to do what if felt was appropriate. Thus the matter remained in a deadlock.

Jamsetji Tata. Photo: via Tata Group

Nivedita’s efforts to get the green light

Nivedita, while she was in London in 1901, also took up the issue with Sir George Birwood, an eminent official of the education department. She met with the same lack of will towards any initiative leading to avenues being opened for India’s self-reliance in science and research. Sir Birwood reiterated the establishment’s prejudice with regard to the Tata scheme as, in his opinion, even the three universities in the presidency towns had failed to produce an original mind since 1857, a remark that left Nivedita furious.

At this time Nivedita thought of rallying a wider public opinion on the subject and wrote to several leading world-thinkers, many of whom she was personally in touch with, requesting them to voice their thoughts on the desirability of such an institution. Among others, she got the leading American psychologist and philosopher of the day, William James of Harvard, who had the privilege of meeting and spending time with Vivekananda and used to address him as master. William James wrote, “With regard to Mr Tata’s scheme for promoting higher education in India, I am of the opinion that for the attainment of his object ….the management ought to be conducted entirely on national lines.” He suggested equal representation of all communities of India on the governing body of this institution, and freedom from government control.

She could also get the valuable advocacy of Patrick Geddes, arguably the greatest Scottish intellectual of last few centuries – a polymath with seminal inter-disciplinary work as a biologist, sociologist, environmentalist, and town-planner. It was to Geddes, when the former was troubled with a sore eye in Paris in 1900, that Vivekananda had said, “Professor, be mind-minded, not eye (I)-minded.”

Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. Credit: @iiscbangalore

Tata passed away in 1904, two years after Vivekananda did. His dream did not see the light of day during his lifetime. But the proposal was finally approved by Lord Minto in 1909, who succeeded Lord Curzon as the viceroy. Though Tata’s choice for the venue of the institute was his own city of Bombay, later circumstances led it to be set up in Bangalore, following a gift of 370 acres by the ruler of Mysore state, Maharaja Krishnaraj Wadiyar. It is notable that the Maharaja’s father, H.H. Chamaraja Wadiyar, had been a devoted disciple of Vivekananda, and was instrumental in sending him to the West.

Also Read: The Little Known Maharani of Mysore Who Seeded the IISc

Though its final shape was not exactly in the form that Tata may have wanted (of having both science as well as humanities as its areas of focus), the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore (as the Tata Institute later came to be known as) has been at the forefront of scientific research in the country and, to a considerable extent, acted as the knowledge-incubator of a host of specialised institutions that came in its wake, like the Indian Institutes of Science and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

While the fact of Vivekananda’s inspiring force behind the institute is rather less-known among the public at large, the contribution of that great selfless lover and servant of the country, Sister Nivedita, is almost completely forgotten and unacknowledged.

Vinayak Lohani is a humanitarian worker and the founder of Parivaar.org

In This Epic Tata War, the Real Tatas Are Missing

As the battle between Cyrus Mistry and Ratan Tata escalates, it will be interesting to see which way other Tata family members will go.

The Taj Mahal hotel, iconic property of the Tata group, silhouetted against the Arabian Sea. Credit: The Wire Staff

With the dispute at the Tata empire now spilling over to the Tata Trusts from Tata Sons, the epic battle in the $103.51 billion empire spread across many continents now shows all signs of escalating to the next level.

Tata Sons is the holding company of all Tata companies and therefore the chairman of Tata Sons seems to be pretty much the boss of the group. It is from this position that Cyrus Mistry was evicted in October around four years after he was appointed. Cyrus had taken over from Ratan Tata, who exited after turning 75. After Cyrus was axed, the public came to realise that 66% of the shares of Tata Sons are held by a motley group of trusts which are called the Tata Trusts. Thus, whoever controls the Tata Trusts controls Tata Sons and, through the latter, the entire conglomerate.

Whereas in the past the chairman of Tata Sons was the chairman of the Tata Trusts, this was not the case during Cyrus’s tenure. While Cyrus was the chairman of Tata Sons, the chairman of the Tata Trusts was Ratan. It is by using this position that Ratan sacked Cyrus.

When J.R.D. Tata was chairman of Tata Sons between 1938-91, he was also chairman of the Tata Trusts. Between 1991-2012, when Ratan was chairman of Tata Sons he was also chairman of the Tata Trusts. Now Cyrus is lobbying that Ratan should step down from the Tata Trusts and this is the latest episode in the new corporate modern age Mahabharata, where it is difficult to figure out who the Pandavas are and who are the Kauravas.

Jasmsetji Tata. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Jamsetji Tata, who laid the foundation for the group and lies buried outside London, must be turning in his grave. The fact is that none of the men fighting for the top honours, have in any way descended from him. Ratan, who is now back as the interim chairman of the group, is the grandson of Hormusji Tata, a master weaver who joined the Ahmedabad Advance Mills in the first decade of the 20th century. Hormusji belonged to the same clan as Jamsetji but was not related by blood. When Hormusji suddenly died in 1908, he left behind his penniless widow and three children. The widow started to do embroidery work even as the sons were put in an orphanage-cum-school for Parsis in Surat.

In 1918, Sir Ratanji Tata, the younger son of Jamsetji died. Jamsetji himself had passed away in 1904. Ratanji had no children and the same was the case for his elder brother, Sir Dorabji Tata. These were the only two sons that Jamsetji had. Navajbai, the wife of Ratanji was pushed at a family meeting to adopt a ‘son’. That’s how Navajbai went to the orphanage and picked up 13-year-old Naval, attracted by his beautiful eyes. Naval was the son of Hormusji and despite his adoption, continued with the old name of Naval Hormusji Tata for life (instead of Naval Ratanji Tata). But having lived his early life in penury and want, Naval somehow lacked the killer spirit and could never push his interest forward. Thus he rose up to the largely titular position of deputy chairman of Tata group.

The man Naval lost to was a competent man: JRD. But JRD was not directly linked with Jamsetji. He was the son of Ratanbhai Dadabhoy Tata, who was a cousin of Dorabji and Ratanji. He used to do his independent business earlier but after the death of Jamsetji, joined the two bothers as his partner. After Dorabji Tata, who was the chairman of Tata Sons, died in 1931, JRD wished to be chairman of Tata Sons. But at 29 he was too young. Moreover Dorabji, in his last days, had differences with JRD. Apparently JRD’s father, Ratanbhai Dadabhoy, who had died earlier, had borrowed money from Dorabji. After his death, Dorabji insisted the money be paid back immediately. So JRD had to sell off his family home to repay his father’s debts. Dorabji also pulled out a will of Jamsetji and insisted that after his death, a nephew of Jamsetji should succeed him at Tata Sons. That’s how Nowroji Saklatvala (son of Jamsetji’s sister) became chairman of Tata Sons. He died after six years in 1938 and JRD now became the chairman of Tata Sons.

J.R.D. Tata. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

JRD had a very long innings but he had no children. That’s how the baton was passed on to Ratan, the son of Naval. Ratan is not married but his father Naval had married twice. Ratan has a half-brother, Noel, who is 59 years old. Since the retirement age for senior levels in the Tatas is 75, Noel can become the chairman of the group and continue for another 16 years. But it seems that Noel, though he is in the race, is not favoured by Ratan. Noel is presently chairman of Tata International, a smaller Tata company that is in retailing and Ratan thinks he has not had such great business exposure.

In the early 1920s, the Tata group was in trouble because of its capital-intensive investments in steel and hydro-electric power. As such, it required capital infusion and a Parsi financier, Framoze Edulji Dinshaw, infused Rs 1 crore into Tata Sons. The Tatas could not pay back the loan so it got converted to equity in Tata Sons. This was equal to 12.5% of the equity of Tata Sons. When Edulji Dinshaw died in 1931, his successors sold off this equity to builder Shapoorji Pallonji Mistry, though the Tatas tried to persuade them to put it in a trust. Shapoorji Pallonji also mopped up shares of Tata Sons from folks like JRD’s brothers and sisters (against JRD’s wishes) to take up the equity he owned to 18.5%. Shapoorji Pallonji came on the board of Tata Sons followed by his son Pallonji Shapoorji Mistry. The representative of this family on the Tata Sons board has been described as a ‘phantom’ whose presence could be felt invisibly, in Bombay House – headquarters of the Tatas – where they would influence policies. In 2006, using this equity power, Cyrus came on to the Tata Sons board after the retirement of his father Pallonji Shapoorji.

Though JRD ultimately chose Ratan as his successor, the choice doesn’t seem to have been easy. This was because Ratan was not seen as a great performer. Nusli Wadia of Bombay Dyeing, and grandson of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, was the godson of the childless JRD Tata, leading to speculation that he would be the successor to the group. Wadia’s family is one of the most prominent Parsi business families of Mumbai and came to prominence even before the Tatas. Russi Mody of the Tata Iron & Steel Company also saw himself as the successor to Ratan.

Cyrus Mistry and Ratan Tata. Credit: Reuters/Files

Ratan’s initial years as Tata Sons chairman were not great, facing as he did, rebellions from satraps in the group. In 1997, Pallonji Shapoorji initiated informal moves to ease out Ratan but nothing happened. Thus it was surprising how Cyrus managed to get appointed as Tata Sons chairman in 2012.

Now as Cyrus fights Ratan, Wadia has joined forces with him in a do or die battle. It will be interesting to see which way Ratan’s neglected step brother Noel will go. He is married to Aloo, the sister of Cyrus. Whatever this promises to be a mega battle and the spirit of Jamsetji wherever he is must be totally flummoxed by what’s happening.