Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata’s life has been chronicled as early as 1914, in the first decade since he passed away in May 1904. The author of The Life and Life Work of J N Tata, Sir Dinshaw Wacha, was a former employee of Jamsetji’s Svedeshi Mills, who later became president of the Indian National Congress. The 1925 biography, J N Tata: A Chronicle of Life, though, was by a lecturer in history at the London School of Economics, F R Harris.

Obviously the native, who a newspaper editor described as the man "who looked boldly into the future and peering beyond the hand-to-mouth practice of his competitors discerned the possibility of an India which would embrace the complete economic cycle" had made an imprint on British minds. And why ever not? Jamsetji thought of harnessing hydro electric power for his textile mills as early as 1873. He gave Empress Mill workers ventilation and dehumidifying plants and a Provident Fund Scheme as early as 1886. Most of Jamsetji’s bequests to industrialising India, though, really saw the light of day after he passed away in May 1904.

The Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, (born out of a long-drawn-out battle of will with Lord Curzon, who had asked "where are the students qualified enough to enter such a university?") opened its doors in 1911. The Tata Iron and Steel Company plant in Bihar rolled out steel in 1912 and the city of Bombay switched on hydro electric power in 1915. Only the Taj Mahal Hotel reared its dome on the Bombay horizon during his lifetime.

Russi M Lala, author of The Creation of Wealth and other tomes on the Tata empire, attempts to go beyond a chronicle of events in For the love of India. He etches the entrepreneur in his political surroundings. In the 1880s, Lala points out, "The intelligentsia realized that a lot of the wealth of India was being funnelled to England, and the need to patronize Indian goods was important." Jamsetji had to fence with the powers that be, for tariffs that affected the competitiveness of Indian cloth, on rates levied on houses in the new suburbs of Bombay and over higher rates for shipments from India to the Far East.

True, the Empress Mills opened on January 1, 1877, the day Queen Victoria was proclaimed ‘Empress of India’ and Jamsetji had many friends among the British. Yet, says R M Lala, Jamsetji really shared Dadabhai Naoroji’s craving for "self-rule under British Paramountcy". "Dadabhai and Jamsetji," Lala writes, ‘‘were also critical of the impact of British rule on the Indian economy." He tells us that Jamsetji was present at the first session of the Indian National Congress in Bombay, supported it financially and remained its member all his life.