Tata History

I caught an interesting discussion on Lok Sabha TV (DD still produces some of the most in depth hysteria-free discussions in drab studios) about the naxals and grabbing of tribal lands in which Dr.Amita Baviskar of the Institute of Economic Growth mentioned some startling facts about the Tatas - that the group had it's origins in the opium trade with China. I googled a bit and sure enough, it turns out to be true.

And indeed, if you spend any amount of time delving through the voluminous online archives of the Tata Group, you cannot help coming to the conclusion that J.N. Tata was a strange brew of Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates, with a dash of Jesus Christ and Franklin Roosevelt thrown in for good measure.

If only it were so simple. For a dissenting view of the legacy of the Tata family and the good name of the Tata conglomerate, one can turn to the manifestly uncorporate-friendly International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, which details an egregious list of abuses. One detail that had been conspicuously absent from the glowing biographies I had been clicking through caught my eye: The family's money, it was alleged, originally came not just from the cotton trade, but also from shipping opium to China in cahoots with the British East India Co.

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Ask of the Web, and the Web shall provide. It turns out that Hong Kong's governing body, the Legislative Council, has uploaded to the Web official records dating back to 1884. Included there are the minutes to a Legislative Council meeting held on Friday, March 25, 1887.

During the meeting a group of Hong Kong-based merchants, among whom were included Shellim Ezekiel Shellim, "of the firm of David Sassoon, Sons & Co," and Ruttonjee Dadabhoy Tata, "of the firm Tata & Co.," presented a petition "for and on behalf of the Opium Importers and wholesale Opium Merchants of the said Colony."

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Ruttonjee Dadabhoy Tata was J.N. Tata's first cousin, and the father of J.R.D. Tata, who helmed the family business well into the 20th century, before giving way in 1991 to Ratan Tata, his nephew, the current CEO. As primary source documentation of (legal) drug dealing activity goes, the LegCo minutes strike me as fairly definitive.

In the annals of globalization, there are few contemporary crimes committed by either transnational corporations or modern governments that match the scale of the 19th century enterprise in which the British Empire fought two wars against China to ensure its right to profit off Chinese citizens addicted to Indian-grown opium. Indeed, the first Opium War was kicked off when Lin Zexu burned 20,000 chests of opium, a hefty proportion of which belonged to Sassoon & Co., one of the above-named petitioners. It gives one pause to think that members of the same family peripherally involved in that enduring stain upon history, whose echoes inform Chinese resentment of the West to this day, are now involved with overseeing the expansion of software outsourcing operations in the former extraterritorial concessions of the West.

From opium to outsourcing by Andrew Leonard

Hmm, all saints have a past you say ? So cut these corporate buccaneers some slack, eh ? But old habits die hard. Dr.Baviskar also mentioned the land grab by the Tatas in Kalinganagar in Orissa; some of the protesters reportedly got their breasts removed. Searching for "Kalinganagar massacre" turns up quite a few results.

For most Indians who never hesitate to invoke karmic retribution in the event of any natural disaster, accidents or just anything plain bad happening elsewhere (like Hurricane Katrina), the Indian angle in the Chinese opium trade should give some food for thought. Maybe 1962 wasn't enough.