Dr.Ashish Kaul
Let us begin with a truth most business histories prefer to bury. The Tata story, and by extension the Titan story, was never about setting up a business. The world has always produced businessmen: opportunists, arbitrageurs, men who read the wind and positioned themselves cleverly in its path. That is commerce. What the House of Tata did, repeatedly and across generations, was something categorically different, something that belongs not in the vocabulary of enterprise but in the vocabulary of civilisation. They built industries from bare earth. Against regulatory regimes designed to punish ambition, against market forces openly hostile, against an establishment that did not merely doubt them but smiled politely and waited for the collapse. The Tata response was never fury, never political manoeuvring. It was the one weapon the establishment had no defence against: grace, humility, and a standard that would not bend.
Most Indians know the Titan story only in its triumphant final chapter, the elegant watch on the wrist, the Tanishq showroom on the high street, the brand synonymous with aspiration across a billion households. What they do not know is what it actually took. What was fought? What was refused? What was built from nothing, by people told, in terms both polite and brutal, that nothing was all they would ever produce.
Our parents did not walk into a store to buy a quality watch. They walked into a back alley. They asked for Mastan’s men.
In the Bombay of the 1970s, the smuggler’s network was not the shadow of the market; it was the market. A Citizen watch arrived through coastal darkness, stripped of customs duty, priced where no honest manufacturer could follow, handed across a counter with the quiet authority of something the whole country already wanted but could not yet make. No receipt. No warranty. Just desire, perfectly supplied by an economy operating entirely outside the law.
That single, humiliating fact contains the entire Titan story
The India of 1984 was not a country that made precision instruments. It was a country that made do on inherited know-how, government protection, and the low expectations that colonial history had installed into the national psyche like a slow, invisible leak. When the Tata Group, in partnership with TIDCO, announced it would build a world-class watch company from raw earth, the establishment did not erupt in outrage. It smiled politely and waited for the failure. Into this landscape stepped Xerxes Desai, and nothing about India’s industrial history would ever be quite the same.
He did not step into a gap in the market. He stepped into a war on three simultaneous fronts.
HMT was not merely dominant; it was definitional. The Janata, the Pilot, the Rekha: not product names but household words. A father gifting his son an HMT watch on board exam result day was not making a commercial choice he was performing a national ceremony. Since 1961, HMT had operated under rigorous technical collaboration with Citizen Watch of Japan, absorbing manufacturing discipline that was, for its era, genuinely world-class. To challenge HMT was not to challenge a government enterprise. It was to challenge a factory that Japan’s greatest watchmaker had shaped from within.
That same Citizen was simultaneously flooding India’s streets through smuggling networks of stunning efficiency, arriving at Crawford Market and Palika Bazaar at prices a tax-paying manufacturer could not legally match. Titan was caught in a vice before it had produced a single watch.
The third front demanded clairvoyance. Seiko’s quartz watch in 1969 detonated across the global industry. HMT, so thoroughly oriented toward mechanical movements by its Citizen collaboration, missed the transition entirely. The very alliance that had made it formidable had made it immovable. Titan bet its entire existence on quartz from day one, because the watches Indian consumers were already smuggling in were quartz watches. The market had already decided. Titan was simply choosing, with open eyes, to answer.
Before a single movement could be assembled, came a rejection that would have ended lesser men entirely.
JRD Tata personally approached André Jeube, the celebrated Swiss watchmaker, seeking a technical collaboration. Jeube refused. The Swiss establishment’s verdict was delivered without ceremony: India could not make precision watches. The ambition was, in their considered opinion, delusional.
It was the most expensive mistake the Swiss watch industry ever made.
JRD and Xerxes did not hear a door slamming shut. They heard a challenge being issued. They would build the capability themselves in Tamil Nadu, on their own terms and send the finished product back to Switzerland to be sold on Swiss counters. The refusal became the fuel.
Tamil Nadu, 1984. No watchmaking schools. No horological tradition.
Titan did not hire experienced factory workers. It went to the schools, fanning out across villages in Namakkal, Krishnagiri, and beyond, asking principals for their students. Young people aged seventeen and above, most of whom had never left their villages, sat competitive aptitude tests. For every hundred who applied, three were selected. Many were young women from rural communities with no industrial tradition whatsoever; asked to master one of the world’s most demanding precision crafts, in a factory itself being built from scratch.
Foreign specialists from Switzerland, Japan, and Germany pushed these workers toward tolerances that felt, initially, physiologically impossible. And then something no management textbook had predicted , the workers began to master the techniques. Not approximate them. Master them. The foreign specialists acknowledged, with undisguised astonishment, what they were witnessing. Young women from Tamil Nadu villages who six months earlier had never held a watch movement were now assembling precision timepieces to standards that Swiss factories would not have been ashamed to claim.
Today, ninety per cent of Titan’s watch assembly workforce is women. That number is not a diversity statistic. It is the living monument to a founding conviction: capability has nothing to do with pedigree, and everything to do with the standard you hold and the trust you extend.
While the factory rose, the Licence Raj made war from a different direction.
FERA, import licensing, the MRTP Act, each instrument of state industrial policy consumed resources, rewarded caution, and left the black market entirely unbothered. The MRTP Act, ostensibly designed to prevent economic concentration, functioned in practice as a ceiling on legitimate enterprise while leaving the smuggler completely untouched. It was, in effect, a subsidy for the criminal and a tax on the builder. Titan paid that tax every year, without complaint, and built anyway. Liberalisation in 1991 arrived just in time; Titan entered European markets the same year the barriers fell, an alignment that felt less like coincidence than long-overdue justice.
Europe delivered its verdict without equivocation. It disagreed with every assumption the Swiss had made. A Tamil Nadu factory, staffed by the children of villages, produced watches that stood on Swiss counters without apology, without asterisk, without qualification. The argument had been won through craftsmanship. Not rhetoric.
None of this survived without JRD Tata, and here the story becomes irreplaceable.
His trust in Xerxes Desai was not a performative delegation with escape clauses attached. It was trust in the full, unconditional force of the word. He understood what most leaders never grasp; that Xerxes was not building a product. He was building Indian industrial capability itself. And you cannot build proof of that magnitude on a quarterly reporting cycle. JRD did not manage Titan. He protected it from the impatience of markets, the anxiety of boards, and the thousand individually reasonable arguments for why the standard should be lowered, just this once.
In 1994, Titan launched Tanishq, announcing that the capabilities forged in watchmaking were not watch-specific. Precision, design, the disciplined creation of aspiration: now applied to gold and gemstones, disrupting a jewellery market the same way the watch market had been disrupted, with the same refusal to compromise.
But here is what should trouble every Indian business school, every management conference, every corporate training room in this country.
In an age of globalisation, when Indian industry is finally asserting itself on the world stage, when Make in India is a national ambition and not merely a slogan, we still open our strategy textbooks to Philip Kotler. We still quote Michael Porter. We still fly in foreign consultants to tell us what to think. We have built our entire intellectual architecture of business on Western frameworks, Western case studies, Western heroes.
And yet, right here, in Tamil Nadu, forty years ago, a man named Xerxes Desai with JRD Tata standing steadily behind him did something no Western business school case study has ever fully captured. He took a country that could not make a watch and turned it into one that could stand in Zurich without apology. He took village girls who had never held a precision instrument and forged them into the benchmark of world-class manufacturing. He faced a black market, a government monopoly, a hostile regulatory state, and the organised contempt of European industry and he answered every single one of them. Without compromise. Without theatrics. Without noise.
Xerxes Desai is not a footnote. He is a masthead, the kind of benchmark that entire business cultures should be built around. In a globalised world that increasingly demands indigenous models of excellence, India has one. It has had one for decades. We simply chose, inexplicably, to keep looking elsewhere.
The watches told us who we could be. We just weren’t listening.
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