People dismayed at the decision of the Tata-owned Titan Company to withdraw its controversial Tanishq advertisement should turn to history for perspective. In January 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi released a commemorative coin to mark the 175th birth anniversary of Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, the Tata Group founder. This honour was bestowed for the first time on an industrialist. Over a century earlier, the British Indian government handed over to the Tatas 25 square miles in Jamshedpur, for which they paid merely Rs 12,000 to thousands of peasant cultivators dispossessed of their land.

The details of the British-Tata deal are in historian Dilip Simeon's The Politics of Labour Under Late Colonialism. Simeon, in a 2015 interview, said, "Let us have no illusion – if you want to build a gigantic steel plant like TISCO [Tata Iron and Steel Company, Jamshedpur]…then you have to work with the power that exists." After Jamshedpur was founded, the nationalistic fervour of the Tatas fluctuated with the shifts in the ruler's attitude towards the national movement.