This book review was first published in the Business Standard on November 19, 2021; https://www.business-standard.com/article/beyond-business/immersion-in-the-tata-black-box-121111801571_1.html
Price: 699/-
Pages: 304
Year: 2021
Publisher: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts
A long time ago, I wanted to read more about Warren Buffett. There were a few biographies available in the library. For me, a biography was a biography. I was confused about which one to pick. My immediate boss, a man of books, scholarship, and impeccable manners, told me in his soft and thoughtful voice, “There are biographies and there are authorized biographies.” That got me thinking. I hadn’t known the difference until then. Subsequently, I read the authorized biography of Buffett, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder, and then the others. Having access to the man himself definitely made a difference to the insights in Ms Schroeder’s book.
This experience has helped me differentiate
between the latest book on the Tatas authored by a historian of global
capitalism and modern South Asia, Mircea Raianu, and other books on the group that
I have read over the years. Many of the popular books on the group are written
by Tata insiders, for example R.M. Lala, Mukund Rajan, and Harish Bhat. A few
others are written by the outsiders but are primarily internally focused.
Examples include books by Girish Kuber, which chronicles the Tata family and
group, Shashak Shah, which provides an insight into the people practices and
culture at the Tata group, and Peter Casey, which is the work of a fanboy. Don’t
get me wrong. Each of these books have something unique to tell, for the Tata
group is such a giant that no one book can capture all aspects of the family
and the group.
This is where Professor Raianu’s book makes a
unique contribution. His is a book by an outsider that extensively integrates
the activities of the group with the external environment, using internal
resources (archives), clubbed with his own research about the global and Indian
events and economies. The journey of the Tatas is immersed deeply in colonial,
socialist, and capitalist India and the confluence of politics, economics, and
society. On the one hand, the Tatas have challenged the Schumpeterian “creative
destruction” view by traversing salt, soap, and steel along with software and
sky (Tata sky as well as the group’s airlines), on the other, it has traversed
the corporation and the state mostly with aplomb, barring a few cases of resistance
and inadequate measures and slips. Raianu has been able to extract valuable
information from the Tata and other archives that throw light on how each of
these aspects played out in the group.
At this point, it is important to mention about
the relevance of archiving for corporations. The book and the plethora of
information in it points towards the gold mine that archives are and can be if
maintained well. The archives should be impartial, accurate, and as far as
possible, complete. Corporate archives are often either poorly maintained, or
even if maintained well, are closed to scholars. The Tatas must be
congratulated and credited for leaving “behind a longer paper trail than any
other Indian business” and opening the archives to the public. Other large corporations
with long histories must follow suit.
These archives have perhaps been used for the
first time for putting together a comprehensive academic history of the Tatas.
The 62 pages of references in the book are testimony to the monumental number
of records that the author has gone through. As often happens with a haystack
of information, organizing it can be daunting.
In the words of the author, “This is not an
elite story of great leaders imposing their vision from above, nor a tale of
subaltern resistance that looks up at the corporation from below, but an
eye-level immersion in the “black-box” of information exchange within the group.”
The challenges for the reader, and perhaps the
author himself, stems from these lines. As a historian, Professor Raianu, digs
into the meticulously preserved archives of the Tata group, and tries to
“reconstruct the conversations, deliberations, and decisions made by several
categories of actors…” As a reader, I am left feeling in a “black-box”
occasionally. Sometimes, the book is like an abstract painting, left to the
imagination of the reader. At other times, it is like what we in India call an
“art film”. There is information, sometimes too much of it. It is
intellectually stimulating. But too tiring to read for the average reader. Now
and again, though, it is good to denounce popularity (commercial cinema) for
reality (art movies), even as a reader. Isn’t this the real world? Too much
information. The good and the bad. Go make sense of it.
