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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 April 2014
The noted British historian G. M. Trevelyan observed that “without social history, economic history is barren and political history is unintelligible.” The autobiographical volumes of Prakash Tandon, one of twentieth-century India's great business leaders, have been hailed as extremely important works of social history. The Times Literary Supplement had this to say about Tandon's Beyond Punjab (1971): “Everyone who is interested in factors which have shaped India today should read this book.” But business historians have rarely cited Tandon's work. This is not entirely surprising, given the state of business history in India. Apart from a few scholars, including Dwijendra Tripathi and the authors in this special issue of Business History Review, research on business history has been limited. To some extent, politics has been the all-consuming passion in India. Yet Tandon's work contains remarkable insights into important aspects of business history, both in India and globally.
1 Trevelyan, George Macaulay, Illustrated English Social History, vol. 1 (London, 1964)Google Scholar, 11.
2 Blurb on the back cover of the 2003 impression of the paperback edition of Tandon, Prakash, Punjabi Saga, 1857–1987: The Monumental Story of Five Generations of a Remarkable Punjabi Family (New Delhi, 1988)Google Scholar, quoting from the Times Literary Standard review of Beyond Punjab (New Delhi, 1971).Google Scholar
3 Tripathi, Dwijendra, The Oxford History of Indian Business (New Delhi, 2004)Google Scholar; Kudaisya, Medha, The Oxford India Anthology of Business History (New Delhi, 2011).Google Scholar
4 Misra, Maria, Business, Race, and Politics in British India, c.1850–1960 (Oxford, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 5.
5 Tandon, “Beyond Punjab,” in Punjabi Saga, paperback edition (New Delhi, 2003), 234.Google Scholar
6 Misra, Business, Race, and Politics, 8.
7 Tandon, Punjabi Saga, 233.
8 For the early history of Unilever, see Wilson, Charles, The History of Unilever, 2 vols. (London, 1954)Google Scholar. For the history of the firm in India, see Fieldhouse, David K., Unilever Overseas: The Anatomy of a Multinational, 1895–1965 (London, 1978)Google Scholar, ch. 4. Fieldhouse discusses the localization of management and the role of Tandon on pages 191–97.
9 Tandon, Punjabi Saga, 233–35.
10 Ibid.
11 Misra, Business, Race, and Politics, 130.
12 Jones, Geoffrey, Renewing Unilever: Transformation and Tradition (Oxford, 2005), 169–70Google Scholar. See also Jones, Geoffrey, Entrepreneurship and Multinationals: Global Business and the Making of the Modern World (Cheltenham, 2013), 172–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Jones, Renewing, 170–72.
14 Ibid., 174.
15 Misra, Business, Race, and Politics, 210, 126, 129.
16 Tandon, Punjabi Saga, 395.
17 Ibid., 318.
18 Ibid., 318–19.
19 Ibid., 379–80.
20 Ibid., 245.
21 Ibid., 246.
22 Ibid., 334–35.
23 Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, 2010.