Paramita Sen’s Batanagar: A Personal History of India’s Forgotten Company Town opens with a claim that is sure to give the discerning reader pause. Bata, she writes, was a “multinational corporation with global operations” that people “across the world identified with”. This is generous even by the standards of jacket-copy hyperbole. Sure, Bata in the 1930s was a fast-growing Czech shoemaker with ambitions, but it was certainly not a household name. The exaggeration sums up a book that reaches for scale and significance but fails in the attempt, and in doing so, buries a genuinely interesting subject under too much of the mundane.
That subject is the company town, a form of urban paternalism that early Indian industrial capital, and later post-independence governments, built across India in the first half of the 20th century. Sen sets up Batanagar, built on the marshy edges of Calcutta (now Kolkata) from 1934, as part of this story though it was in no way singular.
By the time Tomas Bata’s men arrived in Bengal in the 1930s, Tatanagar had existed for over two decades, and the Kirloskars had already established Kirloskarwadi in western India as a purpose-built industrial township. Indeed, the company town was by then a well-established Indian institution, not an imported novelty.
Its Indian template had been drawn a generation earlier by Jamsetji Tata who, in 1902, five years before a site for his steel plant had even been chosen, wrote to his son Dorabji with instructions for the city that would become Jamshedpur. It should, he said, have wide streets shaded by fast-growing trees, ample lawns and gardens, grounds set aside for football and hockey, land earmarked for temples, mosques and churches. It is a vision of industrial life as something closer to civic trusteeship than employment, and it set the model that many others, including Bata, would follow.
What these towns offered employees is easy to romanticise and it is worth resisting the urge to do so. For workers who might otherwise have lived in urban slums, subsidised housing, medical care and a guaranteed wage were transformative. But the paternalism cut both ways.
Much like the British colonial cantonments that preceded them, these company townships used spatial segregation, manicured order, and self-contained amenities as a means to isolate their population and enforce social discipline. Companies like Bata, as Sen herself notes in one of the book’s better passages, vacillated in their conduct between “expediency, conflict and discord”. It is a line worth dwelling on, because it captures something the book otherwise fails to explore: that welfare and control were the same instrument. The violent strikes through the 1970s at many of the jute mills in Calcutta, sites for several such townships, showed how the exterior calm often concealed resentments and anger within.
The company township was not, incidentally, a phenomenon confined to the socialist or underdeveloped world, though it took different shapes in other countries. American capital invented its own version earlier and more brutally in the form of George Pullman’s 1880 railcar town outside Chicago, which triggered a national strike in 1894 when the company cut wages without lowering rents. The term stems from the US Public Land Survey System, where six-mile-square “township” grids were bought by corporations for remote settlements.
In Britain, industrialists George Cadbury and William Lever built model towns like Bournville and Port Sunlight for their workers. These towns reflected the social values of Quakers and other Protestant reformers, emphasising workers’ well-being through better housing and thoughtfully planned communities.
What distinguished the Indian and the wider colonial and post-colonial examples was scale and durability. After 1947, the newly independent Indian state became a builder of company towns, at places like Bhilai, Rourkela, Bokaro and Durgapur, extending the private sector’s model into the public sector.
The model did not survive the century. By the 1970s, the company town as a going concern was in retreat almost everywhere it had flourished. In India, one reason was that rising unionisation made the old paternalist bargain of housing and welfare in exchange for loyalty and quiescence harder to sustain. In addition, state labour laws increasingly mandated benefits that companies had once offered as favours, eroding their value. What’s more, townships that had been built for a few thousand workers strained under populations that had grown several fold, turning them into overcrowded municipalities that parent companies could no longer manage as private fiefdoms.
Bata itself began shedding leather manufacturing at its Western outposts through the 1960s, and Batanagar’s fortunes tracked the group’s broader decline as cheaper Asian manufacturing and changing retail economics undercut the old integrated factory-town model. The public-sector steel townships lasted longer, propped up by state ownership, but even these eventually lost their exceptional status as cities and towns around them urbanised and grew faster.
Bata’s own template was forged not in India but in Zlin, the Moravian town where Tomas Bata built his first factory and alongside it, workers’ housing, a hospital, and eventually a 77-metre skyscraper that served as company headquarters. Sen’s book, quite reasonably, keeps returning to Zlin but the book never really turns this fact into an argument about how the Zlín model travelled.
The more interesting story, in fact, is Tomas Bata’s early scepticism about India, hardened by unfamiliarity and colonial caution, and his gradual conversion, through travel and expanding trade contacts, into treating the country as a pillar of overseas expansion. India’s absorption into the imperial trading bloc after the 1932 Ottawa Conference sharpened the commercial logic further, tying colonial markets closer to metropolitan and Commonwealth capital.
J.R.D. Tata caught the underlying spirit of the age in a 1943 talk on aviation, predicting that flying would make the world “one neighbourhood” and accelerate the pace of business and cultural contact; an early premonition of the globalising impulses that were already reshaping firms like Bata.
Not every country welcomed this expansion equally. When Bata tried to build a plant at Belcamp, Maryland, in the late 1930s, it ran into hostile American manufacturers, suspicious labour unions, and an immigration bureaucracy uneasy about a foreign company importing its own workforce and company-town template to US soil. No comparable resistance greeted Bata in Bengal, where colonial administration and a compliant local elite made land acquisition and labour recruitment easier. It is a telling contrast which the book hints at but never interrogates.
Sen’s best material lies in the chequered corporate history of the firm and its fractious founding family, including the bitter feud between the founder’s line and his half-brother that split control of the Bata empire after Tomas Bata’s death. Sadly, it is far too briefly treated, crowded out by pages on the author’s grandmother, the family tailor, a chance meeting with author Vikram Seth, and a detour into British playwright Tom Stoppard’s Darjeeling childhood and later career. These anecdotes connect to Batanagar only tangentially, leaving the book’s subtitle—feeling like false advertising for what is more a personal memoir with a company town as backdrop.
Sure, beneath the clutter, there are sharp observations: Sen’s point that urban spaces conducive to community are a matter of “intent and design rather than coincidence” is profoundly true with evidence of it all around us in our crumbling megapolises. No lessons were learned, no tips taken from these mini-cities, which clearly created a unique and almost indescribable bonding with their occupants.
The company town has passed into history. Zlin, its factories mostly gone, survives as a university town organised around a management school bearing the founder’s name is a quiet epitaph for the idea of such a place. As for Batanagar, it was ruthlessly pulled down to make way for a private developer’s fantasy of a new gated community, complete with a “golf course, a promenade and a marina on the sacred river Hooghly.” But the new builder was no Tomas Bata, and his fantasy remained just that. The author’s “heartbreak of seeing the colony in ruins” is shared by the reader, but her nostalgia remains personal.
Sundeep Khanna is a regular Mint columnist and author of the recent book Made in India: The Story of Desh Bandhu Gupta, Lupin and Indian Pharma.