John L. Keenan

When Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata announced his plan to set up a steel plant in India, sceptical Englishmen immediately proclaimed that they were ready to eat all the steel that India would produce. This is the story of how Tata made them eat their words – told by the man Tata hired to make it happen. Tata, Keenan declares, was a man with a vision, who saw that India must produce steel to be free and to survive in the modern world. With American engineers and Indian capital, he transformed a corner of the old feudal India into the new industrial India, and Keenan did a great deal to help him. Now a business classic, A Steel Man in India is a riveting account by a man of parts: who, in between his ‘chota pegs’, horse racing and elephant fights, soaked up Hindi and Urdu, and was a typical representative of the spirit that contributed to the making of a modern India.