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Shapurji Saklatvala (1874-1936), the first and one of only two Communist members of Britain’s parliament.
His grandfather was both related to and a business partner of Nusserwanji Tata, father of the famous Jamsetji Tata whose 182nd birth anniversary was recently commemorated by Ratan Tata. Saklatvala was born in Bombay and spent much of his youth in Jamsetji’s (J.N. Tata’s) home.
As late as 1926 Saklatvala felt his own father Dorabji and his immediate family had been done out of a substantial part of the fortune that went to the Tatas. His father, he wrote in a letter from that year, ‘had to lead all his life in want and from this age (14) was dispossessed of all wealth as well as business rights in the firm’. He referred in the letter to ‘the most cruel wrong done to my father and through him to our future stock’, and of how his father died ‘after years of injustice and suffering’. He explained how the Tatas found his father (a lad of 14 in 1868 when his father, Shapurji’s grandfather, died) ‘disobedient, vicious and uncontrollable’ and later extended no support for the education of his younger brother Beram. Saklatvala’s daughter states in her biography that he ‘was convinced that his uncle, Jamsetji Tata, had virtually destroyed his father’ and caused the de facto separation of his parents.
This is the background against which one should situate the otherwise remarkable trajectory of an upper-class Parsi moving progressively to the Left once he left India.
Here’s an extract from John Hinnells’ book on the Zoroastrian diaspora, from the pages dealing with Saklatvala.
‘He [Jamsetji] turned the young Shapurji against his own father and favoured him to the extent that his own son [Dorabji, b.1859] was jealous, something which caused Saklatvalla problems later on. He studied at the Catholic St. Xaviers’ College…In the early years of the twentieth century he and some friends worked with a bacteriologist, Prof. Vladimir Haffkine, immunizing Bombay’s poor against bubonic plague. Haffkine had left Russia to escape Tsarist surveillance, and it is reasonable to suppose that his socialist views influenced Saklatvalla. After this experience he spent time depressed in a sanatorium. He joined Tatas in 1901, and in 1902 began prospecting for iron and coal in Central India with Dorabji Tata and an American...He pursued this quest further than either of the Tatas did, sometimes to the detriment of his own health in the jungles and swamps…and to his own future career disadvantage because of Dorabji’s increasing jealousy. More than any of his colleagues he lived among, and worked with, the labourers, presumably out of his growing socialist convictions, but certainly to their reinforcement. Partly for the sake of his health, and partly to distance his views from those of the Congress-orientated Tatas, he was sent to the outer reaches of the Tata empire—London. Few books have paid due attention to the fact that in plague-ridden Bombay and in the jungles, Saklatvalla had spent what was to prove half his life working for the poor.
When he arrived in London in 1905 he was again depressed and ill and went to take the waters at the Derbyshire spa town of Matlock. There he fell in love with a waitress at his hotel. A year later he married Elizabeth, known as Sally, and renamed by Saklatvalla as Seri...Saklatvalla arrived in England a member of the Liberal Party; he moved progressively to the Left through the Independent Labour to the Communist Party. Wadsworth gives a good account of his increasing political activity [the reference here is to Marc Wadsworth, “Comrade Sak
