The lion in winter: the defiant life and fading empire of Nusli Wadia

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For the last 50 years, Nusli Wadia has been corporate India’s ultimate samurai—an uncompromising patrician who never backed down from a fight. Armed with an enviable pedigree, an aristocratic spine and a legendary temper, he built the Wadia Group, whose antecedents trace back to 1736, into a diversified Indian conglomerate.

He has looked the part too, with piercing eyes and an immaculate sartorial presence. But at 82, the legendary corporate warrior who spent a lifetime defying the odds finds himself in the winter of his life, presiding over a group with revenues of roughly $2.7 billion that, for all its historical heft, is no longer among the country’s largest conglomerates.

The pedigree itself is almost impossibly layered. On his father’s side, Nusli belongs to the ancient Parsi Wadia shipbuilding dynasty founded by Lovji Nusserwanjee Wadia. His mother, Dina Wadia, was the only daughter of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. Not that it mattered, for Wadia has always been fiercely and defiantly Indian. It is perhaps the most extraordinary biographical footnote in Indian corporate history, and one he has always worn with dignified silence.

Educated at Cathedral and John Connon School in Bombay and later at Rugby School in England, Wadia returned to India determined to build something enduring. In 1970, he married Maureen, a former air hostess who carved her own identity heading Gladrags magazine and organizing the Mrs. India pageant.

First rebellion

For a sense of Wadia’s will and grit, one must go back to 1971, when he was just 26. His father, Neville Wadia, the Cambridge-educated chairman of Bombay Dyeing, had grown weary of India’s suffocating socialist economy and signed an agreement to sell the company to takeover tycoon Rama Prasad Goenka.

Nusli responded with a brilliant rearguard action—pooling family resources, persuading employees to buy shares and turning to his mentor J. R. D. Tata for backing. After acquiring an 11% stake in the company, he went to London to confront his father, delivering an ultimatum that he intended to stay in India and run Bombay Dyeing.

Neville capitulated, requesting Goenka to reverse the deal, which the quixotic tycoon did for the price of a bottle of Royal Salute Scotch.

Ambani wars

That victory set the template for a career defined by spectacular, high-stakes combat. In the 1980s, Bombay Dyeing’s dominance in synthetic fibres came under assault from Reliance Industries, led by the rapidly rising Dhirubhai Ambani.

What began as a raw material rivalry escalated into a ferocious corporate street fight under relentless media glare. Wadia, allied with Ramnath Goenka, the crusading publisher of the Indian Express, used investigative journalism and state machinery to counter Ambani’s political influence.

It became an ideological war between the old Parsi elite and the unbridled new money of post-independence India. Reliance eventually prevailed, but Wadia earned lasting respect as perhaps the only titan who dared to look Dhirubhai in the eye and refuse to blink.

Tata fallout

Decades later, that same unyielding streak pitted him against one of his oldest allies. For years, Wadia was a Tata insider, helping Ratan Tata consolidate power in the 1990s while serving as an independent director on boards including Tata Steel, Tata Motors and Tata Chemicals.

However, when Ratan Tata abruptly ousted Cyrus Mistry as chairman of Tata Sons in 2016, Wadia’s sense of corporate governance overrode personal friendship. He broke ranks, defended Mistry publicly and was stripped of his directorships in return.

He responded with a multi-crore defamation lawsuit, though he eventually withdrew it after Tata clarified there had been no intent to defame.

Twilight years

Beyond a point, however, defiance alone cannot sustain a large business. For Wadia, succession has proven deeply problematic.

Ness, the elder son, co-owns the Punjab Kings IPL franchise but has been dogged by legal and personal controversies. Younger son Jeh built GoAir into a promising budget airline before it collapsed into bankruptcy in 2023, grounded with debts exceeding ₹11,000 crore.

Bombay Dyeing, once a textile powerhouse, has quietly transformed into a real estate play. Only Britannia Industries, the group’s crown jewel, remains a spectacular cash generator, run largely under professional management rather than family control.

Nusli Wadia carries one of history’s most contested legacies in his blood. Yet he spent his life trying to build something quintessentially Indian. Today, he watches parts of that inheritance diminish around him.

Still, he remains the last of corporate India’s old monarchs—a magnificent, solitary lion surveying an empire in twilight.

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