Tata Group Chairman N Chandrasekaran has resigned. How did the group start its ‘swadeshi’ business?

Early in 1864, a young Parsi merchant from Bombay named Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata set sail for ­ England, carry­ing a set of bills of exchange backed by a consignment of Indian cotton. By the time the ship docked in Liverpool, the price of cotton had fallen so quickly that the bills became worthless. Un- expectedly forced to manage the liquidation of his ­ father’s firm, Jamsetji took time to observe the workings of the textile mills in Lancashire, the heartland of the Industrial Revolution. When he returned to India a few months ­ later, he found Bombay in the grip of a disastrous financial crisis. The ­ whole of the city, Jamsetji’s first biographer ­ later recalled, “was sitting on the stool of repentance, with sackcloth and ashes; while the disconsolate creditors held Dharma at the door of their ruined debtors.” Out of this chastening experience arose India’s own Industrial Revolution, more modest and ­ limited in scope than its British counterpart but all the more impressive for the constraints it had to overcome.

The outbreak of the Civil War in the United States in 1861 launched a speculative frenzy among Indian merchants ­ eager to supply Britain’s cotton needs following the...

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