Many families in India
own business empires – the Tatas, Ambanis, Bajajs, Modis et al.
But Bollywood always
zeroes in on the surname Singhania when it has to portray a tycoon rolling in
wealth.
The latest example is
the movie Humshakal.
In the movie, Saif Ali
Khan is Ashok Singhania, a magnate settled in London who uses a helicopter
instead of a car.
Earlier, Aamir Khan in
Ghajini was Sanjay Singhania, an industrialist.
I have often wondered
why the Hindi film industry picks only Singhania.
I am yet to watch a
movie in which the protagonist is Sanjay Godrej or Sanjay Birla or Sanjay
Bajaj.
Are the surnames Tata
and Birla synonymous with people who are like money-minting machines and don’t
have time for romance?
Is the surname Ambani
not hip enough to suit an actor like Aamir Khan or Saif Ali Khan or Akshay
Kumar?
Will the audience
think only about refrigerators when the main character is Sanjay Godrej on the
screen?
Perhaps the surname Singhania
suggests a bit of everything – wealth, grandeur, suaveness and romance. And may
be, it is not overexposed like Tata, Ambani, Bajaj or Godrej.
Kanpur was once the
home to the Singhanias and fount of their JK group.
But Singhania is not a
surname; it’s the distorted form of the name of a village Singhana in the
deserts of Rajasthan.
A bunch of
enterprising people of Singhana found it too small for doing business and
migrated to Kannauj, around 80 kilometres east of the Kanpur in the mid
nineteenth century. The locals of Kannauj started calling them Singhania and
today the name stands for wealth and richness. The story is more or less similar
to the Kauls becoming Nehrus.
The family later
shifted to Kanpur that under the British was developing and Juggilal Singhania
set up a textile mill in the city.
But it was under the entrepreneurship
of his grandson Padampat Singhania that the family came to own a conglomerate, manufacturing
textile, paint, wool, tyres, steel, ice, cosmetic products, vegetable oil,
brushes…….
