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Sir Ratanji Tata | |
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| Born | (1871-01-20)20 January 1871 Bombay,British India |
| Died | 5 September 1918(1918-09-05) (aged 47) |
| Alma mater | University of Bombay |
| Occupation(s) | Industrialist, philanthropist |
| Spouse | |
| Children | Naval Tata (adopted) |
| Father | Jamsetji Tata |
| Relatives | Dorabji Tata (brother) Ratan Tata (grandson) |
Sir Ratanji Jamsetji TataJP (20 January 1871 – 5 September 1918) was an Indian industrialist and philanthropist during theBritish Raj. He was the younger son ofJamsetji Tata, the founder of theTata Group.
Ratanji Tata was born in Bombay inBritish India as the son of the notedParsi merchantJamsetji Tata. Ratan Tata was educated atSt. Xavier's College inBombay and afterwards entered his father's firm. On the death of the elder Tata in 1904, Ratanji Tata and his brotherDorabji Tata inherited a very large fortune, much of which they devoted to philanthropic works of a practical nature and to the establishment of various industrial enterprises for developing the resources ofIndia.
An Indian institute of scientific and medical research (Indian Institute of Science, IISc) was founded atBangalore in 1905, and in 1912 theTata Steel began work atSakchi, in theCentral Provinces, with marked success. The most important of the Tata enterprises, however, was the storing of the water power of theWestern Ghats (1915), which provided Bombay with an enormous amount of electrical power, and hence vastly increased the productive capacity of its industries.
Sir Ratan Tata, who wasknighted in 1916, did not confine his benefactions to India. InEngland, where he had a permanent residence at York House,Twickenham, he founded in 1912 the Ratan Tata department of social science and administration at theLondon School of Economics, and also established a Ratan Tata Fund at theUniversity of London for studying the conditions of the poorer classes. In 1909, he donated a sum of Rs. 50,000 (equivalent to approximately Rs. 40 million in 2022) toMahatma Gandhi to aid the struggle of Indians' right to work in theTransvaal. This donation helped in securing the finances of Gandhi's protests against the Anglo-Boer rulers.[1]
He was a great connoisseur of arts. TheChhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (formerlyPrince of Wales Museum) has a section displaying the collections of Sir Ratanji Tata (acquired in 1923) along with two other sections that of SirDorab Tata (acquired in 1933) and Sir Purushottam Mavji (acquired in 1915).[2]
He married Navajbai Sett in 1893 and left for England the final time in 1915. They adoptedNaval Tata from the family of a distant relative. Naval's father, Hormusji, was Ratanji's third-cousin's son, making Naval his distant grandnephew. Naval was also the son of Ratanji's first-cousin Ratanbai Rao (daughter of his mother Hirabai's sister Cooverbai). He died on 6 September 1918 atSt Ives in Cornwall, England and was buried atBrookwood Cemetery,Woking, near London, by the side of his father (Jamsetji Tata).[3]
Through an aunt, Jerbai Tata, who married a Bombay merchant, Dorabji Saklatvala, he was cousin ofShapurji Saklatvala who later became aCommunistMember of the British Parliament.[4]
After his death theSir Ratan Tata Trust was founded in 1919, with a corpus of Rs. 8 million.[3]
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