Reproduced with permission from Madras Miscellany, by S Muthiah, The Hindu Metroplus– May 13, 2002
Dragoco India’s new plant, 20 km down the Old Mahabalipuram Road, may be a state-of-the-art factory, but I was delighted to see in it a feature out of the past that would make it different from Dragoco’s Australian, Singapore and Shanghai plants. This was a Chettinad-style courtyard, complete with broad, surrounding corridor, antique wooden Chettinad pillars on traditional stone-cut bases and carved capitals that alone appeared to be the art of the re-creators of the antique. The only thing gently nudging this vaasal out of Chettinad tradition was the greenery and cascading water. A joint effort of Singapore and Madras architects, the pillared courtyard was the distinct touch I recognized of A Venkat of the Geoffrey Bawa School that adds indigenous features to modern architecture.
Vast lawns, glassed in foyer, work cubicles and labs, office space and testing facilities, even the pictures on the walls, all reflected exterior and interior designers teaming to make a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility’s front office deserve several pages in the design glossies. Looking at it, K S Narayanan (‘Nana’), patriarch of the Sanmar Group, whose joint venture this has been in another setting these past eight years, could well have been thinking that it reflected well how far the Group had come from those small beginnings in 1938.
In an attractively brought out private memoir late last year, Friendships and Flashbacks, K S Narayanan (KSN) reminisced about those first steps he had taken in industry as he moved out of banking. Then too as with Dragoco, it was a venture that was chemicals-based. Recalling the takeover of a failing printing ink factory, he wrote, “In a huge property on what was then the Guindy Road (now Sardar Patel Road), a High Court officer built a shed and installed some newly bought machinery to give his son a start in life. The son was a chemist… and had wanted to try his hand at running a printing ink factory.” When KSN bought it from the chemist and his father, he named it Nanco Printing Inks, from ‘Nana and Co.’; “it made sense in those days to give a company a name that was not too unmistakably ‘Indian’.”
About 30 years later, when I had strayed into the printing business, I had visited that shed. By then, it was the Ganges Printing Ink factory, but I remember that a more unprepossessing, ill-kept and dirty shed I had rarely seen. It may have been closer to mint condition – though still very much a shed – in KSN’s days, but even that must have been a far cry from the squeaky clean facility of international standards that I was wandering through, I thought the other day, registering how far the group had been brought by father and sons, Sankar and Kumar.
To meet his first big order, from T Sadasivam for Kalki, who believed in ‘just in time’ ordering, KSN,
his friend T S Narayanaswami, with whom he was to establish India Cements in time, and his driver worked all night to fulfil the order given after the factory had closed for the day. Dragoco would not be making its flavours and fragrances, for food, beverages, soaps and detergents, on that kind of schedule, looking at the air of German clinicalness it appeared to have.
It was also at Nanco that KSN first came in touch with several Europeans involved in industry, and found it easy to forge friendships with them. One of them was Emil Fjermeros, a Norwegian whose Ganges was to take over Nanco and induct KSN as a director of the Norwegian company. When I knew Ganges in its shabby state, it had been taken over by other Indian interests. KSN’s close relationship with Scandinavia and the family’s enthusiasm for joint ventures with foreign partners – the Group has 16 going today – could well have been laid in that friendship.