Investors and commodity traders will know this company today as Hindustan Copper, a government-owned company.
An explanation first: the ashtray is an heirloom of sorts, since it was acquired when Indian Copper was a subsidiary of Gillanders Arbuthnot, then a large-ish diversified company for which my father worked. The reason for digging up this hoary past on New Year's Day is to marvel at how much the business environment has changed as India enters its 24th year since the end of the licence raj.
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Gillanders then was partly owned by London-based shareholders, descendants of the Gladstone family of prime ministerial fame, though the company is now entirely Indian owned. The company's antecedents are rather less exalted, being rooted, as many colonial businesses were, in the slave trade and indigo (in his memoirs former Commonwealth secretary general Shridath Ramphal says his grandmother was shipped to the West Indies through the Gillanders agency). By the mid-20th century, though, it had acquired respectability with businesses such as insurance, copper mines, tea and real estate, and it was also one of the leading managing agencies of the time.
Post-independence economic policy gradually chipped away at its businesses and competencies as it did for many of the big names that dominated Clive Row at the time (though many drove themselves to irrelevance, too). First, the government abolished the managing agency system, then it nationalised insurance, the business in which my father started out. By the late 1960s, the company's major businesses were copper and tea, both imbued with cultures redolent of the extractive colonial era. But more than the King Solomon's Mines ambience of the Ghatshila mines, Indian Copper was one of several markers of an economic policy of nationalisation that was to have fateful consequences for India. The profitable company was merged with Hindustan Copper in 1972 as part of Indira Gandhi's muscular economic policy soon after my father was appointed Gillanders' first Indian managing director. The merger was partly to cover for losses that Hindustan Copper was making from its mines in Rajasthan. At the same time, some of the company's prized tea gardens in Assam were also nationalised.
This was the note on which the 1970s started, one of the worst periods for independent India just as Korea, Taiwan and Southeast Asia's economies were achieving the kind of growth that has forever been labelled "miracle". In India, these were the heydays of Hindustan Motors and Premier Motors, symbols of the export substitution mindset that helped Indian industry forget the art of competition and learn the skill of lobbying.
Corporate culture also began changing, but mostly for the better as more Indians started getting more opportunities to rise up the ladder. One quaint aside: the 1970s was the era of the global oil shock, so my father replaced the high-maintenance, gas-guzzling Vauxhall and Morris Oxford station wagon provided for our use by the company by Premier Padminis. Calcutta, as it was known, was then in the grip of ultra-left political orthodoxies yet, strangely, the decision to downgrade prompted a visit from the company's union leaders to my father. Why was the bodo shaheb replacing foreign cars, which they deemed befitted his status, with Indian ones? Was the company making losses?
The context here is that this was also the time when managerial directorial salaries were capped at absurdly low levels (those limits remained in place, ironically, till the year my father retired). To compensate, companies heaped perks on their chief executives (CEOs) so they could live in the kind of luxury (including foreign cars) that less than one per cent of Indians could enjoy in those days. In retrospect, it was a doubtful benefit since both the meagre salary and the generous perks were heavily taxed - unless you were willing to explore convoluted but legal loopholes to avoid the taxman - so that the change in the quality of lifestyle after retirement was rather abrupt.
After 1991, the wheel slowly began to turn. By the end of that decade, the managing agency system started making a comeback in the form we recognise as the Private Equity and Venture Capital Funds. The private sector re-entered insurance. By the next century, the Ambassador and the Padmini exited the stage, and former prime minister Manmohan Singh could be hard making a dignified appeal for restraint on CEO pay and perks at an industry lobby event (to the comical dismay of the business community). Only Hindustan Copper remains a government company - in 2013, the government divested a minuscule 9.59 per cent to fulfil a regulatory mandate - despite occasional interest from private buyers.
For many years, Indian Copper retained an attachment to Gillanders because the managing directorial bungalow was part of a semi-detached complex with a shared garden, so the nationalised portion became a government guest house that went by the old name of Copper House. By the 1990s, the entire property was sold, the British-era mansion demolished and in its place came two separate jerry-built monstrosities called Tamra Bhavan and Rishikesh, a striking contrast to Antilla, that symbol of a new epoch of business and lifestyle on another coast of India. Meanwhile, the now slightly battered copper ashtray remains a reminder of India's many missed opportunities.