This stamp shows the biggest steel mill in the British Empire and the man that imagined it but did not live to see it. It belonged to independent India now and was sure to be a building block of a great future. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your family beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
Here is a stamp that cries out for better printing. Perhaps the concern was a huge steel mill on a river will just come across as a gross polluter. Hence the strange orange tint at twilight. I think a better job could have been done. I do like that they included Mr. Tata, it helps to show the person as part of the inspiration that is trying to be imparted.
Todays stamp is issue A124, a 15 Naye Paise stamp issued by India on March 1st, 1958. It was a single stamp issue celebrating 50 years of the steel industry in India by showing the largest steel mill in the British Empire in Jamshedpur. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 30 cents used.
J.M. Tata was born into a Zoroastrian Parsee family in Navsari, India. The Parsees were Persians no longer welcome there because they weren’t Islamic. His father owned an import/export firm in Bombay and Tata attended the British founded Elphinstone College. After graduation Tata was sent to China to examine the prospects of getting involved in the opium trade. Lucky for the Tata family name, they don’t issue stamps to remember the exploits of those who soil themselves in the drug trade, Tata discovered a greater opportunity dealing in cotton. By leaving Bombay for cheaper rural land still served by the British trains, the first of many cotton mills was established. As with today, low wage rates and plentiful labour were fully utilized and soon Tata was exporting all over the world. Tata was an early part of the Swadeshi Movement, that believed that Indian goods should be supported and foreign goods boycotted. It may seem a strange stance for an exporter to take, but perhaps a useful reminder of how predatory it all was.
This Swadeshi attitude lead to the founding of the iron and steel division of Tata. This would have seemed so high tech at the dawn of the 20th century. It took a long while to get going and was under son Dorabji that steel output got underway in 1912 in Jamshedpur. This was another smaller city well served by British built infrastructure and offering low wages. Once it got going it really went, the largest steel mill in the British Empire by 1939 that at it’s height employed 40,000 people.
Tata is still one of the largest conglomerates in India and has taken to buying trophy assets including Jaguar/Land Rover and steel mills in Great Britain. No doubt they are having much fun replacing the British that built things with Indians willing to work for less, now even at home. In that predatory lust, they seem to be loosing their way. I mentioned Jamshedpur steel mill peaked at 40,000 employees. Now Tata Steel employs less than 33,000 people in it’s worldwide operations. In the 70s, there was a push to nationalize the steel mill. If that had succeeded employment if not productivity could have been protected.
Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast British citizens being laid off at Tata’s spoils. No good deed goes unpunished after British India did so much for Parsee refugee Tata. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2019.