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What's the connection?
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The three business houses, Aspinwall, Bertelsmann and Trayons have one common connection — Madras.
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WHAT DO Aspinwall, Bertelsmann and Trayons have in common? Those whiz kids at business quizzes might well answer that all three made headlines in Business Line during the last week of August, but any good quizmaster would expect them to do better. And if they did, the answer would be that all three once had Madras connections.
J.H. Aspinwall, president of the British Cochin Chamber of Commerce in 1870, had founded Aspinwall's many years earlier, but with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, dreamt of a harbour at Cochin that would become ``the gateway to South India''. He, however, strung a second string to his bow, in case Madras got, as it did, its harbour first. That string was a branch established in 1867 with a Scotsman, Andrew Vans Dunlop Best, at the helm. Best appears by 1872 to have married the boss's daughter and taken over the firm, Best & Co. being listed that year as a member of the Madras Chamber of Commerce. By 1879, Best & Co. had taken over Aspinwall's interests in Madras and the two companies came to a unique agreement not to operate on each other's coast, the Malabar Coast Aspinwall's, the Coromandel Best's.
As late as the 1940s, Best's was asking Aspinwall's for permission for Crompton Engineering, an associate company of Best's, to open a branch in Calicut. Such was the respect for gentlemen's agreements in that age.
Bertelsmann of Germany forged its Madras connection in 1965. A medium-sized publishing house belonging to the Mohn family of Gutersloh, a small town southwest of Hanover, it was known for its cartographic publishing and a book club it ran in Europe. It teamed up with TTK in Madras to flood India's schools with atlases and had dreams of expanding its book club here. It took it around eight years to realise how little Geography, History and other Social Sciences were valued in India and how small the market for English language books was. By then it had started burgeoning and Madras and India were too small for it to stay put. Nearly two decades later, it had become one of the top three media companies in the world — and India is still, by and large, a world away from it.
As for Travancore Rayons, or Trayons as it is more often referred to, Madras-based M.Ct.M. Chidambaram Chettyar's friendship with Sir C.P. Ramaswami Aiyer led to his forming the company and setting up its factory on the banks of the Periyar River in 1946.
It was the first factory to produce synthetic fibre established between Suez and Singapore, and from viscose rayon manufacture, it went on to cellophane manufacture.
M.Ct.M. Chidambaram Chettyar's family had founded United India Life Insurance in the 1930s, he added Fire & General to its activities and went on to found the Indian Overseas Bank.
Together with the Seshasayees, who had helped establish FACT in Travancore, he helped in pioneer industry in Kerala (not to mention independent India), but Kerala's industrial dream never really took off.
And Travancore Rayons, long locked out, is a reflection of that failed dream today.
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