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It was in 1822 that one Nusserwanji Tata was born in humble circumstances at Navsari and five years later he was betrothed in accordance with the Parsee rites. While he was still a child a fortune teller singled him out and said : "This boy will travel, he will become rich and build a house with seven storeys". At the time the family thought this prophecy absurd, but to mock it was to reckon without the man; shrewd and enterprising as he was, his success ultimately enabled him to fulfil the prophecy. For he did travel, become rich and infact did buy a house in Bombay with seven storeys .

On the 3rd March,1839, when Nusserwanji was no more than seventeen years old, his only son Jamsetji was born. The only thing that we know of Jamsetji's early life is that he was initiated into the various religious rites and ordained as a priest. Jamsetji did not receive any formal education during those years due to the country's underdeveloped policy for education. However at thirteen years of age, his father took him to Bombay where he arranged for the boy to attend a few classes held by local pundits. In January 1856, as he showed exceptional promise, he was awarded a free studentship at Elphinstone College where he underwent a liberal education and developed a passion for reading which remained with him all his life. While still at college, he married a Parsee girl called Heerabai, five years younger than he and the daughter of a priest. In 1858, Jamsetji obtained his degree and left college.

Planning to pursue one of the learned professions Jamshetji joined a solicitor's office. But this association was not to last long. In 1859 when he was only twenty years old, his first son Dorabji was born at his mother- in- law's house. This event at once increased his financial responsibilities and he left the solicitor's office to join his father's business. Equipped with a sound academic background and receiving guidance from his father, Jamshetji very quickly acquired a good knowledge of trade and commerce.

Early in 1864 , still young man of twenty-five, Jamshetji left for England to represent his firm which was exporting large quantities of cotton to Liverpool. During his stay in England, Jamshetji had paid several visits to Manchester. On one such visit Thomas Carlyle, the famous Scottish author, came to the city and delivered a lecture there. It was at this lecture that Carlyle expounded his famous thesis that "the nation which gains control of iron soon acquires the control of gold". Jamshetji attended this lecture and heard this argument. Young though he was, he was deeply impressed, and years later he was to give a vivid and practical proof of this truth.

But more immediately, his many visits to Manchester and Lancashire taught him much about the cotton and textile industry. A man of substance and maturity at the age of thirty-five, Jamshetji returned from England in 1874 and immediately devoted himself wholeheartedly to the problems of textile industry in the country.Animated by a spirit of enterprise and adventure and inspired by patriotic fervour he went on to pioneer India's textile industry.

In the next thirty years of his life among his many achievements he had built Bombay's first modern hotel (The Taj Mahal, 1903), planned a hydro-electric scheme which was to make India among the first countries in the world to exploit its natural resources for this pupose, inaugurated an institute of science, set up fruit-farms, experimented with horticulture, advanced the production of silk and yes, conceived the then revolutionary idea of a modern iron and steel industry in India.

It was in 1899 that Major (later General) R. H. Mahon, previously Superintendent of the Government Ordnance Factories, Cossipore, issued a valuable report on the possibilities of the manufacture of iron and steel in India. Apart from the question of size, Major Mahon laid down certain principles for general guidance. First, the plant should be "thoroughly modern in every detail"; the management must "consist of persons combining expert knowledge with local experience"; and "economy in methods of collecting and assembling the raw material" must also be "insisted upon as a necessary element of success". Lord Curzon, the Viceroy, made efforts to persuade the prominent English capitalists to come into the country and set up the first steel works, but with no results. Jamshetji volunteered to undertake the task. Even at the age of sixty, his astounding energy undiminished with the passage of years, he was to devote himself tirelessly to the foundation of India's first modern steel works.

Unperturbed by Government Policies of those days which discouraged private enterprise ( the general dislike for businessmen, who were disparagingly called "box-wallahs", was said to go back to the period of wild speculation in the country in the 60's which ended so disastrously at the end of the American Civil War), Jamshetji went on to capitalise on the revised mining and prospective rules framed by Lord Curzon. And as time would witness, his practical genius was to breathe life into a sleepy little village called Sakchi and transform it into a bustling city called Jamshedpur.

In spite of failing health, Jamshetji left for the U.S. for a short visit on the 24th September, 1902. There he enlisted the services of Charles Page Perin, a famous consulting engineer, to carry out a thorough and scientific investigation of the local conditions, raw materials and the Indian markets.Though Perin did not set sail for India immediately, he sent his partner C.M.Weld, a geologist. Exploration for a suitable site for the steel company led to a jungle covered tongue of land between the rivers Subarnarekha and Khorkai and Sakchi, a small village, was chosen as the nucleus of what was predicted would be a great city someday.

It was now February 1904, Jamshetji was on his way to San Remo, to consult the well-known specialist, Dr.Nothnagel for his illness when he recieved the tragic news of the death of his wife. She had been ill for sometime and had suffered a paralytic stroke. Jamshetji bore the tidings bravely but his health deteriorated. He knew his end was near. But death held no terror for him. His was an indomitable will to achieve and he had already accomplished what only a few could dream of.

On the 19th May, 1904, Jamshetji died peacefully in his sleep.

In 1911, the first iron flowed from the blast furnace of The Tata Iron and Steel Company at Sakchi. Around the steel works has grown a great city.

The great city of the prophecy bears the proud name of Jamshedpur, so called after Jamshetji Tata. It was upon his dreams that its foundations were laid and it is a fitting memorial to this great man. Today his bronze statue, heroic in size as Jamshetji was in spirit, gazes out over the rose-filled park of the city where the workers stroll and take their pleasure and where the children play among the dancing fountains. Behind the statue loom the gaunt structures of the Works. The Works dominate the landscape for miles - a column of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night - as the mind and work of Jamshetji still tower in the industrial landscape of India. His work was outstanding not by virtue of the profits he made, nor by the wealth he accumulated, but by the simplicity and directness of his pupose. Each of his enterprises was an answer to the question that was forever in his mind - what does India need now?.

So the brooding statue, the stark works and the flowered park stand together above the river - the man himself, the industry he concieved and founded, and the park which symbolises the happier land of which he dreamed.

And on the base of the statue are the words:

" If you seek a monument, look around!"

Jamshetji Nusserwanji Tata

1839 - 1904