The Tata Paradox

Abstract

Business firms in india have not received much atten-tion from economic historians. Most of the literature available belongs to the genre of firm histories, the writing of which has generally been commissioned by the firms themselves and is therefore often apologetic in nature, if not hagiographical. Of modern Indian business firms, however, the house of Tata is undoubtedly the one which has received the most extensive coverage. One might well ask why add a few more pages to the already abundant literature on this best-known and most studied of all Indian firms. I cannot claim to have discovered anything really new about the Tatas. However, I find the existing literature, although informative and often insightful, either too much informed by a ‘heroic’ conception of entrepreneurship, or too exclusively preoccupied with microanalysis of the specific growth process of particular companies, like the Empress Mills or Tata Iron and Steel Co. (TISCO). It is not my intention to belittle the extraordinary feat of entrepreneurship represented by the emergence of such a firm in the specific context of colonial India. But I think one has to go beyond that kind of statement. Some synthetic survey of the firm across a time span of over a century, aiming at situating it within the general context of Indian entrepreneurial history and attempting to link it to macroeconomic trends appears to be needed.

From B. Stein and S. Subrahmanyam (eds), Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 237–48.