Final Victory

Late on the evening of 8 January 1979, Naval Godrej, the third son of Pirojsha Godrej, was stabbed at his Mumbai home. His daughter-in-law and mother-in-law were attacked with him. The assault, said to have been incited by a powerful trade union leader in the city, shocked the business community and the wider public. Naval was a rare industrialist who shared a close bond with the people who worked for him. He trusted their basic decency and believed he had no enemies, a belief the author sees as his fatal flaw.

In Final Victory, B.K. Karanjia tells Naval's story from the vantage of a friendship that lasted some fifty years. He combines his own recollections with interviews with Naval's family, friends, colleagues and Godrej workers, and with Naval's private papers. Naval emerges as a gifted mechanical mind whom his father brought into the family firm straight after high school. He learned the trade from the shop floor up, and he held to a hands-on way of solving problems, never asking of others what he would not do himself.

His feel for machines led him to build up the Godrej Tool Room and to start the typewriter and refrigeration businesses, which, alongside safes and Storwel cupboards, made the Godrej name familiar in households across India. He was also closely involved in building the Godrej industrial township at Vikhroli, regarded as one of the most environmentally considerate of its kind. True to the family's commitment to the welfare and development of its workers, he helped establish the Naoroji Godrej Plant Research Center, the Foundation for Medical Research, and the Mandwa Project of the Foundation for Research in Community Health.

The book is full of anecdotes that show the man behind the industrialist: humble and plain-living, driven and energetic, quick to anger at anything he saw as unjust, playful in his humor, and devoted to sport, sailing above all. It is a warm portrait of a strong-minded man and of his place among the builders of the House of Godrej.