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The ongoing high-stakes boardroom rift between Tata Sons and its majority owner, Tata Trusts, has become the centre of intense media scrutiny. The circumstances may be particular to Tata, but the underlying question is centuries old: how does a great business institution survive changes in leadership and generations?
Family businesses are built on the assumption that wealth should pass from one generation to the next. Their greatest danger often begins when it does. The founder leaves behind companies, property, a valuable name—and several descendants with different ambitions. The instinct is to keep the inheritance intact. Some of India’s most enduring business families discovered that survival sometimes requires precisely the opposite: learning how to divide the family silver.
At the height of their power in the mid-eighteenth century, the Jagat Seths were bankers to Bengal’s rulers and financiers of the East India Company. Their political gamble at Plassey did not secure the dynasty’s future. Two leading members of the family were executed on Mir Qasim’s orders in 1763, while the British progressively shifted Bengal’s treasury, mint and financial power to Calcutta. Later generations inherited a diminished fortune and fought over property, pensions and claims associated with the title of Jagat Seth. By the early twentieth century, a banking house once powerful enough to influence who ruled Bengal had faded into obscurity.
Another great merchant-banking family, the Jhaveris of Ahmedabad, had stumbled upon a principle that modern family-business advisers would recognise immediately: a family need not remain financially indivisible to preserve its commercial inheritance. After the death of Vakhatchand in 1814, the family business was partitioned into six branches. His sons continued in banking and trade while maintaining friendly relations. One branch later prospered in the nineteenth-century cotton trade. Dalpatbhai Bhagubhai became a cotton trader, and his son Lalbhai moved into textile manufacturing, establishing Saraspur Mills in 1896. Later generations built the Lalbhai industrial group, including Arvind Mills. The family silver had been divided; the commercial inheritance survived.
Independent India produced a new generation of family-controlled business empires. Economic liberalisation after 1991 dramatically expanded their opportunities, scale and wealth. But greater fortunes also raised the stakes of succession. In some of India’s most powerful business houses, the question of who would inherit ownership and control eventually spilled from the family drawing room into company boardrooms and courtrooms.
The spectacular family battles are familiar. Reliance was divided between Mukesh and Anil Ambani after their father Dhirubhai died without a will. The Singh family behind Ranbaxy fought over inheritance and control despite an earlier family settlement. At Chettinad, M.A.M. Ramaswamy publicly disowned the adopted son chosen to continue the dynasty.
At Raymond, Vijaypat Singhania transferred his controlling stake to his son Gautam in 2015. Father and son subsequently fell out publicly, including over property. Another family dispute followed when Gautam and his wife Nawaz Modi separated in 2023 and negotiations over a settlement involving family wealth spilled into public view.
The K.K. Modi family offers an even sharper example. After K.K. Modi died in 2019, his widow Bina became managing trustee of the family trust. Lalit Modi, founder of the Indian Premier League, argued that disagreement among the trustees triggered provisions requiring the assets to be sold and distributed. Bina maintained that the businesses should remain together. A trust intended to manage succession had itself become the subject of the succession battle.
Less noticed are the families that acted before disagreement became warfare. TVS, Godrej and Shriram chose three strikingly different ways of answering the succession question.
At TVS, the problem was complexity. More than a century after T.V. Sundram Iyengar founded the business, different branches of the family were already managing different companies. In 2020, the family formalised that reality. Cross-holdings were disentangled and ownership reorganised so that individual branches controlled the businesses they managed. Venu Srinivasan’s branch, for instance, retained TVS Motor, while Suresh Krishna’s retained Sundram Fasteners. Yet the family did not divide everything. The valuable TVS name continued to be used across the businesses without royalty payments. The companies separated; the family identity survived.
Godrej took the idea further. In 2024, the 127-year-old group was divided between two sides of the family. Adi and Nadir Godrej’s branch took the listed businesses under Godrej Industries Group, while Jamshyd Godrej and Smita Crishna’s branch took Godrej Enterprises Group, including Godrej & Boyce. But the settlement did more than allocate existing assets. It also drew boundaries around the businesses in which each side could use the Godrej name in future. The family had not merely divided its inheritance; it had tried to forestall the next dispute.
Shriram Group chose the most radical solution. Founder R. Thyagarajan largely removed bloodline from the succession equation. In 2006, he transferred his shareholdings to the Shriram Ownership Trust, an irrevocable trust whose beneficiaries were senior executives involved in managing group companies. Instead of asking which child should inherit control, Shriram created a structure through which stewardship could pass to successive professional leaders. TVS divided ownership. Godrej divided ownership and future territory. Shriram separated succession from heredity.
None of these arrangements guarantees perpetual harmony. No legal document can anticipate every ambition of generations yet unborn. But they recognise something the descendants of Shantidas Jhaveri discovered two centuries ago: preserving a commercial inheritance does not require preserving it intact.
The real art of succession lies not in deciding who inherits the family silver, but in knowing what must remain together—and what should be divided before the family begins fighting over it.
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.
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