Corporate Philanthropy between Empire and Nation-State: Tata and the Making of Modern India

From their beginning as cosmopolitan merchants during the ‘high noon’ of the British Empire, the Tatas grew into India’s largest industrial conglomerate, firmly embedded in an emergent national economic space by the time of independence in 1947. In the process, a unique mode of capitalist governance was made possible by a nexus of philanthropic bequests, educational initiatives, welfare programs, urban planning, and social scientific research. My broader project uses Tata to explore the ethics of modernizing industrial capital in twentieth-century India. This paper seeks to explain more particularly the changing character of Tata philanthropy from community-based charity to ‘constructive’ projects on a national scale, and to account for the expansive set of actors brought together by Tata patronage. I examine this process through the settlement of founder J.N. Tata’s will in 1909. The settlement has, this paper argues, several broad implications that can be teased out by tracing the institutions it supported. First, it demonstrates the link between institutions initially funded by the Tata Trusts (the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Bombay, etc.) and justifications for ‘nation-building’.  Second, it demonstrates the ways in which Tata capital continued to structure the workforce even in death. This was most evident in the work of the Department of Social Science and Administration at the London School of Economics, established in 1912 with Tata support and tasked with making recommendations on welfare policy at Jamshedpur. In highlighting these legacies, the paper situates corporate philanthropy in India at the intersection of two flows of migration at different scales: the transnational movement of experts and technocrats, and the creation of new internal labor markets.