The revolutionary orthodoxy and pioneering spirit of T.V. Sundram Iyengar

Born in 1877 in Thirukkurungudi, Iyengar had been trained as a lawyer, spent time as a clerk at the Bank of Madras, and might have lived out his days in respectable obscurity had the bank not passed him over for promotion after he took leave to attend his father’s funeral. Slighted, he walked away from the security of a fixed salary, first into the timber trade, then into transportation.

Astute businessman

In 1911, he founded T.V. Sundram Iyengar and Sons in Madurai. A year later, in 1912, he launched what would become one of the first organized passenger bus services, with two imported Dennis and Commer buses running between Madurai and Devakottai. The 64-mile journey cost ₹4 and came with a complimentary meal. By the standards of the time, this was an administrative miracle.

While the British Raj built railways to extract wealth, internal movement for Indians was restricted to slow-moving bullock carts. But Iyengar didn’t stop with the launch; he ensured that the buses ran on time. Historian V. Sriram writes: “The TVS group was built on the bedrock of a single individual’s integrity… It was said that you could set your watch by a TVS bus, and if it was late, it was because the sun had risen late.”

The business grew steadily. By 1929, TVS secured a General Motors dealership for southern Tamil Nadu. During World War II, when petrol became scarce, TVS manufactured 12,000 units of a charcoal-powered gas plant designed by Iyengar’s son T.S. Krishna. The company also opened a tyre retreading factory in Pudukottai and, in 1936, acquired Madras Auto Service Ltd, which became one of India’s largest General Motors distributors. Sundaram Motors followed in 1945, and Sundaram Finance in 1954.

The true measure of the man, though, wasn’t found in his ledgers, but in his home. A teetotaler, a vegetarian, and a practitioner of extreme discipline who rose long before dawn, Iyengar was an ascetic. But beneath the orthodoxy, he was a radical. When his daughter, T.S. Soundram, was widowed in her late teens in the 1920s, the crushing weight of tradition threatened to relegate her to a life of shaven-headed seclusion. Instead, under the direct influence of Mahatma Gandhi, who was a spiritual guide to the family, Iyengar did the unthinkable. He refused to let tradition bury his daughter’s future. He urged her to continue her studies and later blessed her remarriage to G. Ramachandran, a fellow freedom fighter, in November 1940.

In a society where widow remarriage was taboo, this was a social rebellion. Soundram went on to become a powerhouse in her own right, founding Gandhigram Rural Institute in 1947, becoming a doctor, and serving as Union deputy minister for education in 1962.

In business, though, Iyengar was quick to spot an opportunity and capitalize on it. During World War II, when fuel shortages threatened to shut down transportation across India, he had his son, T.S. Krishna, design a charcoal-powered gas generator. Iyengar retrofitted his own fleet using it, but also manufactured 12,000 units and sold them across the country, keeping Ford and Chevrolet trucks running.

The rise of TVS Group

By the time he died in 1955, the TVS Group had become one of South India’s largest conglomerates. Under successive generations of leadership, including grandsons Suresh Krishna, Venu Srinivasan, and Gopal Srinivasan, it managed a rare feat in the Indian corporate landscape: scaling to multi-billion-dollar size without losing the founder’s obsession with doing it the right way.

In an economy often criticized for shortcuts, the TVS Group became a global standard-bearer for rigorous quality. In 1998, Sundram Fasteners became the first Indian company to win the Deming Prize, Japan’s highest award for quality management. Sundaram Finance built its reputation on a basic principle: A customer’s word was binding, even without collateral.

T.V. Sundram Iyengar’s combination of audacity in business, accompanied by a strong social ethos, was characteristic of India’s early industrialists. J.N. Tata built the country’s first steel plant and endowed its first research institute. G.D. Birla funded Gandhi’s ashrams while running textile mills. They were capitalists, certainly, but they operated with an acute sense that profit was a means, not an end.

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