A Year After His Death, Ratan Tata’s Legacy Remains Complex

Ratan Tata’s death exposes our collective discomfort with moral complexity, writes Devrupa Rakshit.

We can grieve Ratan Tata's death while acknowledging the empire’s long history of human rights violations, especially against marginalised communities.

(Photo: Kamran Akhtar/The Quint)

I grew up in Jamshedpur, a small town in Jharkhand that was founded by Ratan Tata’s ancestor, JN Tata, and formally known as Tatanagar.

So, when the news of Ratan Tata’s demise broke amidst Durga Puja celebrations there, many puja committees cancelled cultural events, refrained from playing music, and even included images of him on their marquees in pandals as a way of paying tribute to the man they so revere.

Every year, JN Tata’s birthday is celebrated like a festival in my hometown. In fact, as a kid, I mentally grouped 3 March with 26 January, 15 August, and 2 October. Parks glowed with laser and light shows that continued well into the night, while the entire city came alive in the spirit of celebration.

Like much of Jamshedpur’s middle class, my grandfather worked for the Tatas. After him, so did my father as part of the company’s inter-generational employment policy. As a Tata employee’s daughter, my schooling was subsidised and my healthcare free till I turned 18.

Even when the company was compelled to downsize, it worked with unions to design a separation policy that still paid employees their salaries — and sometimes 1.5 times that — until retirement. That’s how the company avoided mass layoffs. And that’s how I grew up relatively stable, despite my father’s declining health.

Still, my experiences are just that: mine.

It’s true that the Tatas’ industrial entrepreneurship enabled my family to afford financial stability. That doesn’t negate the fact, though, that my family’s prosperity, no matter how indirectly, came at the cost of the generational impoverishment of tribal communities who were displaced by the company’s ambitions.

Between Hero Worship and Hostility

Ratan Tata was often described as one of the most ethical billionaires on the planet — a phrase that many argue is an oxymoron. Naturally, then, the news of his death last October was met with a predictably polarised frenzy online.

On one side, there were people propping up the legacy of the industrialist into something just short of a divine figure. To them, he was the man who had not only pioneered corporate social responsibility in India, but also worked extensively for the welfare of animals — so much so, that besides allowing free entry to stray dogs at Mumbai’s iconic Taj Mahal Hotel, which is owned by the Tata Group, he’s also rumoured to have cancelled a meeting with Prince Charles once to care for his pet who fell ‘terribly ill’ unexpectedly.

He was a guy who only did good, they said, declaring anyone whose opinion of the man didn’t coincide with theirs as 'abhorrently inhuman.'

On the other side were the people arguing that all billionaires, without exception, were parasites on society’s lifeblood. They reminded everyone how the Tatas’ fortune was built on the backs of environmental degradation and displacement of tribal populations in India, and underpaid workers abroad. In the Noamundi hill of the Saranda Forest in Jharkhand, Tata Steel displaced people from the Ho Adivasi community from Chirubeda, Balijor, and Kodta villages to mine ore, allegedly earning billions mining the 1,160.06 hectares.

Then, there's the matter of the Mundra project by Tata Power in Gujarat, which has economically displaced the the Wagher fishing community—a Muslim minority—with hot water plumes expelled as waste by the power plant destroying the region's ecology that otherwise acted as a natural barrier against cyclones. The ash from the factory, too, settles on the fish, rendering them inedible.

These are facts. But, to this faction of people, anyone mourning Ratan Tata’s loss was hardly better than a war criminal.

The only thing common between both sides was their belief that theirs was the only ethical way to react to Ratan Tata’s death.

So, was Ratan Tata a benevolent hero who empathised with the masses and had a soft corner for stray dogs? Or was he an elite capitalist who inherited a business based on oppressing those less privileged than him, and chose to perpetuate the systemic exploitation of the marginalised even further?

What if he was both… and neither?

The Danger of Purity Politics

For a man who spoke about ethics and corporate social responsibility, critics argue that Ratan Tata didn’t do enough to fix capitalism's structural inequalities. They’re right. And that’s precisely why, in the messy reality of the capitalist system we inhabit, moral clarity is a luxury we can rarely afford.

Can someone truly be ethical within a system that, by design, creates winners and losers? Can one run a multi-billion-dollar empire, give to charity, and call it square? It’s a paradox that we prefer to ignore because to face it is to face our own complicity in this system. Ratan Tata, in many ways, embodied this paradox. He did good things, no doubt, but could he ever do enough good to offset the harm?

When we deify someone, our refusal to reckon with the messy bits of their existence leaves us with a one-dimensional view of a three-dimensional life that conditions us into forgetting that the system that made them rich is one that depends on wealth extraction from the many to benefit the few.

But if the hero worship of billionaires overshadows their failings, villainising them erases their positive contributions and clubs them with industrialists who are ruthlessly exploitative, thereby disincentivising any form of goodness at all.

Grief, Memory, and the Complexity of Legacy

We can grieve the man’s death while acknowledging the empire’s long history of human rights violations, especially against marginalised communities.

Ignoring this due to the idea that we must only speak good of the dead — de mortuis nil nisi bonum — because they can’t defend themselves, undermines accountability and makes us complicit in whitewashing history. More so in the age of social media, where grief becomes a public performance and the narratives we choose to put forth shape collective memory.

Silencing people speaking about Ratan Tata’s violations, simply because it challenges the dominant image of him as a great man, also denies those who were systemically wronged under his watch a chance to tell their stories, especially at a time like this when those buried truths have the best chance of being favoured by the algorithms, and finally, being heard.

Conversely, demanding that others suppress their grief because of the Tatas’ wrongs is equally reductive. Human emotion is complex, and denying that only serves to alienate people who feel differently.

We crave for simplicity to make sense of the world, and in the process, become suckers for a good hero-villain story. It’s indeed comforting to either celebrate or tear someone down because admitting someone was both, a visionary leader and complicit in the deterioration of the already broken society we live in, doesn’t fit neatly in 280 characters. Ratan Tata’s death exposes this collective discomfort with moral complexity.

In that sense, perhaps, his death isn’t just about him, but about us and our desperate need to believe that one can be rich and good, so we can feel less guilty about living in a world that routinely sacrifices the vulnerable at the altar of profit.

Maybe Ratan Tata was a man who did a lot of good in his life. And maybe, at the same time, he didn’t do nearly enough to challenge the system that enabled him to amass such massive wealth, in the first place. Both things can be true.

In accepting that, maybe we can start having more meaningful conversations about what real change looks like.

(DevRupa Rakshit is a queer, autistic individual, ARTivist and independent multimedia journalist based in Bangalore. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)