The best biographies of Indian business founders start with three books: R.M. Lala’s life of J.R.D. Tata, Hamish McDonald’s The Polyester Prince on Dhirubhai Ambani, and Verghese Kurien’s I Too Had a Dream. One had the subject’s help. One was written against his wishes. One is in his own words.
Below are fifteen books in all. For each one I say what it is, who wrote it, how much access the writer had, and who it suits. A biography is only as good as what the writer was allowed to see, and what they chose to leave out.
How to read a founder’s biography
A founder’s biography is shaped first by access: who opened the door to the writer, and who kept it shut.
There are five kinds of book on this list:
- Authorised. The subject or family cooperates. You get letters, journals and long interviews. You also get a book the family has read before you do.
- Unauthorised. The writer works from the outside: court papers, rivals, former staff. Sharper, sometimes, and sometimes fought in court.
- Independent biography. Written by a historian or journalist with interviews and records, but without the subject’s sign-off.
- Autobiography or memoir. The founder’s own account, often written with a professional writer, which is what a founder story is. Closest to the voice. Least likely to judge.
- Insider history. Written by a family member or a board member. Deep knowledge, with a natural loyalty you should read around.
None of these is better than the others. They answer different questions. I write authorised biographies myself.
The best biographies of Indian business founders, one by one
1. Beyond the Last Blue Mountain: A Life of J.R.D. Tata
R.M. Lala (Viking/Penguin, 1992)
The standard life of JRD, from his birth in France in 1904 to his decades running the Tata companies and Indian aviation.
Why read it: Lala wrote it with JRD’s cooperation, and it came out a year before JRD died. So you get a life told while its subject could still check it. The book gives real space to the private man, his friendships with Nehru and Gandhi included, not only the chairman.
Who it’s for: anyone who wants one book on the Tata patriarch, and anyone curious about how India’s airline began.
2. The Maverick Effect: The Inside Story of India’s IT Revolution
Harish Mehta (HarperCollins India, 2022)
How NASSCOM was set up in 1988, and how India’s software industry grew around it, told by one of its founding members and its first elected chairman. Mehta also founded Onward Technologies.
Why read it: Every other book on this list is about one founder and one company. This one is about founders who competed with each other and still built an industry body together, through the licence-raj years. It is written from inside the room.
A disclosure: I was part of the team that worked on this book. So I am not a neutral reader. Read this entry knowing that.
Who it’s for: readers interested in India’s IT industry, and anyone who wants to know how rivals learn to work together.
3. The Polyester Prince: The Rise of Dhirubhai Ambani
Hamish McDonald (Allen & Unwin, 1998)
An outsider’s account of how Dhirubhai went from yarn trader to the head of Reliance, and of the licence-raj politics around that rise.
Why read it: McDonald was a foreign correspondent in Delhi. He worked from the outside and spoke to Reliance’s rivals. Reliance went to court, and HarperCollins India pulped the printed pages, so the book never went on sale in India. A revised version, Ambani & Sons, came out in India from Roli Books in 2010 with the most contested passages taken out.
Who it’s for: readers who want the critical view, and anyone interested in how a biography can be stopped.
4. I Too Had a Dream
Verghese Kurien, as told to Gouri Salvi (Roli Books, 2005)
Kurien’s own account of building the Anand milk cooperative, Amul and Operation Flood.
Why read it: It is a founder story with no private fortune at the centre of it. Kurien built an institution owned by farmers in Gujarat. He told the story to the journalist Gouri Salvi rather than writing it himself, which is how many of the best memoirs get made.
Who it’s for: readers interested in cooperatives, rural enterprise, or how a single stubborn person can move a whole industry.
5. Ratan Tata: A Life
Thomas Mathew (HarperCollins India, 2024)
The authorised biography of Ratan Tata, from his childhood to his chairmanship of Tata Sons and the years at the Tata Trusts.
Why read it: Mathew, a retired IAS officer, had known Tata for about thirty years and started the book in 2018. He had Tata’s personal letters and journals, and the group’s records. It was announced for November 2022 and came out in October 2024.
Who it’s for: readers who want the inside account of the modern Tata Group.
6. The Life and Times of G.D. Birla
Medha M. Kudaisya (Oxford University Press, 2003)
A scholarly life of Ghanshyam Das Birla, from the Kolkata trading world to industrialist, backer of the freedom movement and host to Gandhi.
Why read it: It grew out of a Cambridge doctorate, and Kudaisya had open access to Birla’s private papers.
The writer Gurcharan Das, reviewing it, welcomed a book about an Indian industrialist that was not a hagiography. He also wished it said more about Birla’s business instinct. Read it for the history.
Who it’s for: readers who like history and politics more than business tactics.
7. Rahul Bajaj: An Extraordinary Life
Gita Piramal (Penguin Random House India, 2022)
The authorised biography of Rahul Bajaj: five decades at Bajaj Auto, the building of Bajaj Finserv, his years in the Rajya Sabha and his habit of saying what he thought to governments.
Why read it: Piramal is one of India’s best-known business historians, and she has sat on the boards of Bajaj companies. That makes her an insider biographer. She had unrestricted interviews, and the book reads warmly. Knowing where the writer stands lets you read it properly.
Who it’s for: readers who want India’s journey from licence raj to liberalisation through one family.
8. The Making of Hero: Four Brothers, Two Wheels and a Revolution that Shaped India
Sunil Kant Munjal (HarperCollins India, 2019)
The story of the four Munjal brothers, from Kamalia before Partition to Ludhiana, and how they built the world’s largest bicycle maker and then its largest maker of motorcycles.
Why read it: The author is Brijmohan Lall Munjal’s youngest son. He chose to tell all four brothers’ story, not only his father’s, which is how his father talked about the business. It is a good model for a family book that has to be fair to more than one branch.
Who it’s for: readers interested in manufacturing, Punjab, and family businesses far from the metros.
9. An Uncommon Love: The Early Life of Sudha and Narayana Murthy
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (Juggernaut Books, 2023)
The Murthys from the 1970s, when Sudha was TELCO’s first woman engineer, through the founding of Infosys to the late 1990s.
Why read it: It is a marriage story and a company story at once, written by a novelist rather than a business journalist. Divakaruni spent many days with the couple, and the book reads like it. It shows how much of a company’s founding happens at the kitchen table.
Who it’s for: readers who want the human side of a tech founder story.
10. Azim Premji: The Man Beyond the Billions
Sundeep Khanna and Varun Sood (HarperCollins India, 2020)
Premji taking over the family vegetable-oil business at 21, turning Wipro into a software major, and giving much of his wealth away.
Why read it: Two journalists built it from interviews with hundreds of people: current and former Wipro executives, competitors, analysts and family friends. It weighs his strengths against his shortcomings instead of picking one.
Who it’s for: readers who want Wipro and the philanthropy in one book.
11. It Happened in India
Kishore Biyani with Dipayan Baishya (Rupa & Co., 2007)
Biyani’s own story of building Pantaloons, Big Bazaar and Central, and his reading of the Indian shopper.
Why read it: It was written in 2007, in the middle of the building years, and reads that way. The founder’s confidence is on every page. Read it as a record of how he thought then, not as the whole story.
Who it’s for: retail and consumer-business readers.
12. The Z Factor: My Journey as the Wrong Man at the Right Time
Subhash Chandra (HarperCollins India, 2016)
From a grain trading family in Hisar, Haryana, to launching Zee TV, India’s first private Hindi channel.
Why read it: Chandra writes about his failed bets as well as his wins, satellite phones and a cricket league among them. Autobiographies that admit failure are rarer than they should be.
Who it’s for: readers who like the outsider founder story, told by the outsider.
13. Healer: Dr Prathap Chandra Reddy and the Transformation of India
Pranay Gupte (Penguin India, 2013)
The life of the cardiologist who founded Apollo Hospitals in Chennai.
Why read it: Most lists of business biographies skip healthcare. This one is a founder story from a hospital, written by Pranay Gupte, a former correspondent for The New York Times. As the subtitle says, it sets one man’s life against how India changed around him.
Who it’s for: readers in healthcare, and anyone curious about how private hospitals in India began.
14. For the Love of India: The Life and Times of Jamsetji Tata
R.M. Lala (Viking/Penguin, 2004)
The founder of the Tata group, a generation before JRD.
Why read it: Lala drew on archive material from the India Office Library and on Jamsetji’s own letters. Read it with his life of JRD and you have the founder and the builder, by the same biographer.
Who it’s for: readers who want to know where the Tata story began.
15. Taking the High Road
Ram Buxani (Dubai, 2003; updated 2018)
A Sindhi boy arrives in Dubai in 1959, at 18, as a clerk at ITL, and rises to run the group and own half of it.
Why read it: Buxani didn’t found ITL. He joined it as a clerk and rose to own half of it, while Dubai grew from a small town into a city alongside him. It is one of the few book-length life stories of an Indian business builder in the Gulf. It sold well in Dubai and was translated into Arabic, Hindi and Malayalam.
Who it’s for: Indian families in the Gulf, and anyone who wants a diaspora business story in a builder’s own words. I am based in Dubai, and I write life stories for families there too.
Free printable: Before the handover
39 questions to record with a founder, in eight sessions, so the next generation inherits the reasons, not just the rules. The PDF comes to your inbox.
All fifteen at a glance
| Book | Writer | Year | Kind | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Beyond the Last Blue Mountain | R.M. Lala | 1992 | Authorised | The Tata patriarch in one book |
| The Maverick Effect | Harish Mehta | 2022 | Memoir and industry history | How India’s IT industry was built |
| The Polyester Prince | Hamish McDonald | 1998 | Unauthorised | The critical outsider’s view |
| I Too Had a Dream | Verghese Kurien with Gouri Salvi | 2005 | Memoir | Cooperatives and rural enterprise |
| Ratan Tata: A Life | Thomas Mathew | 2024 | Authorised | The modern Tata Group |
| The Life and Times of G.D. Birla | Medha M. Kudaisya | 2003 | Independent biography | History and politics |
| Rahul Bajaj: An Extraordinary Life | Gita Piramal | 2022 | Authorised, by an insider | Licence raj to liberalisation |
| The Making of Hero | Sunil Kant Munjal | 2019 | Insider history | Family business beyond the metros |
| An Uncommon Love | Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni | 2023 | Authorised (with the couple’s help) | The human side of Infosys |
| Azim Premji: The Man Beyond the Billions | Sundeep Khanna and Varun Sood | 2020 | Independent biography | Wipro and giving |
| It Happened in India | Kishore Biyani with Dipayan Baishya | 2007 | Autobiography (co-written) | Indian retail |
| The Z Factor | Subhash Chandra | 2016 | Autobiography | The outsider founder |
| Healer | Pranay Gupte | 2013 | Biography | A founder in healthcare |
| For the Love of India | R.M. Lala | 2004 | Biography | Where the Tata story began |
| Taking the High Road | Ram Buxani | 2003 | Autobiography | Indian business in the Gulf |
How I chose them
Every book here is a life story, not a management book. I checked each title, author, publisher and year against the publisher’s page, a library record or a news report from the time.
I wanted a mix: old and new, authorised and unauthorised, the founder’s own voice and an outsider’s.
I also wanted cities other than Mumbai and Bengaluru, so Kolkata, Anand, Ludhiana, Hisar and Dubai are here. Two books I left out on purpose. Cold Steel, on Lakshmi Mittal, is mostly about a single takeover fight, not a life. Gita Piramal’s Business Maharajas is a well-known book, but it is a set of profiles rather than one founder’s story.
I was part of the team that worked on The Maverick Effect, number 2. That is said in its entry.
What these books mean for a family business
Most founders are never written about while they can still be asked. The founder’s reasons are the first thing a business family loses.
Most of the books that last here come from long conversations, real papers and a writer who was let in. The Making of Hero exists because a son decided the brothers’ story needed telling. Beyond the Last Blue Mountain exists because JRD sat down with Lala while he still could.
Your family’s founder won’t need a bestseller.
But the next generation will need to know why he did what he did. That is what a business family history book is for, and what an authorised biography does when the founder is still here to talk.
Questions people ask
Which is the best biography of an Indian businessman?
For a first read, R.M. Lala’s Beyond the Last Blue Mountain on J.R.D. Tata. It is well sourced, written with JRD’s cooperation, and covers both the businessman and the man. For a sharper, outside view, read The Polyester Prince next.
What is the difference between an authorised and an unauthorised biography?
An authorised biography is written with the subject’s or family’s cooperation: access to papers and people, and usually a chance to read it before it’s published. An unauthorised biography is written without that, from public records and other sources. Ratan Tata: A Life is authorised. The Polyester Prince is not.
Is there a biography of Dhirubhai Ambani available in India?
The Polyester Prince (1998) was never sold in India after Reliance went to court. A revised version, Ambani & Sons, came out from Roli Books in India in 2010.
Are there biographies of Indian business people in the Gulf?
Very few are book length. Ram Buxani’s autobiography Taking the High Road, first published in Dubai in 2003 and updated in 2018, is one of the best known.
If you are thinking about a book for your own family’s founder, begin the conversation.
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