New Delhi, May 2 -- Most companies are built to survive a generation. A few endure longer. One helped shape the industrial foundation of modern India. That company traces its origins to Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, who can claim to have laid the industrial architecture of a nation.

To walk through modern India is to walk under the long shadow of a Parsi visionary from a Gujarati backwater who overcame what his British biographer Frank Harris called "those curious impediments which dog the steps of pioneers who attempt to modernise the East."

JN Tata was born on 3 March 1839, in the narrow lanes of Dasturwad in Navsari, into a family that had served the Zoroastrian priesthood for 25 generations. His father, Nusserwanji, broke with that lin...