Few people embody the ’90s as aptly as Subrata Roy, founder of the Sahara Group of companies. He was also known as Sahara Shree. The boy from Araria in Bihar began his career in Gorakhpur, with just Rs 2,000 as his capital. He struck gold with the famous Sahara Chit Fund scheme, which helped India’s poorest become investors for the first time.
Roy liked things big. In 1991, he had Amitabh “Big B” Bachchan fly in to launch his Hindi daily, Rashtriya Sahara, from Lucknow. He was a star in India’s corporate pop culture, dressed in expensive suits, and with high-flying friends in politics and corporate circles. He proceeded to real estate and a glamorous township in Lucknow’s rather dowdy Gomti Nagar came up, followed by others. The brochures of the company described it as “an emotionally driven integrated Indian family”. The Sahara planes had the legend “Emotionally Yours” on them. This reminded one of F Scott Fitzgerald talking of “a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life”.
Rashtriya Sahara was a rather awkward experiment. It had swanky offices with excellent facilities for journalists to commute to and from work, a good canteen where a meal cost only Rs 5, good salaries and bonuses too. But soon, we were pulling our friends’ legs for their Sahara uniforms (black trousers, white shirt and a tie), and having to greet everyone with “Good Sahara”, their hand over their heart. Roy liked theatrical flourishes and spectacles. A journalist friend confided they had to suffer “lambi lambi gyan vartayein” from Bade Sahib. One also heard how on the morning of his visit, they would all be made to stand in the arrival hall to greet Bade Sahib and his brother Joy Broto Roy (Chhote Sahib). The brothers were preceded by two women employees sprinkling rose petals on the red carpet. Once, when a cheeky young journalist dared to ask who was actually the editor, he was told the editor was the entire Sahara Parivar, but the managing editor was Joy Broto.
In personal meetings, Subrata Roy was always an expansive host. Unlike the often rather uncouth legacy-media barons, he was charming and well-mannered. He also strategised well to make the till-then-stolid Hindi newspaper market wake up and smell the coffee. He launched attractive schemes for readers, vendors and hawkers. A hawker who sold the paper continuously for 25 days was given a cycle and one who sold 200 copies in a day got a motorcycle as a reward. Particularly promising hawkers from Lucknow were flown on a Sahara plane to Delhi to meet Bade Sahib.
Roy is reminiscent of the famous Jay Gatsby from Fitzgerald’s classic, The Great Gatsby. When his sons married, almost the entire Delhi cabinet and nearly all the Bollywood biggies, cricketers (who by now wore Sahara jerseys on the field) and media moguls were in attendance. Special chartered Sahara planes flew in the honoured invitees, loaded with gifts. If the Lucknow media is to be believed, it was a Rs 500 crore wedding!
Like Fitzgerald’s doomed dreamer, Roy came from an ordinary middle-class family. Like Gatsby, he had faith in the dream of a grand nation. He knew small-town India and its markets and had the sensibility to jazz up things with theatrical openings and constant re-invention. Roy’s was a surreal life when he was on top. He was the only Hindi media baron with a TV channel and hotels in New York and London. He patronised cricket and presented each member of the World Cup-winning Indian cricket team with a villa. Time described him as the second-largest employer in India, after the Railways.
The fall began around 2011, with SEBI tightening the noose around the chit-fund scheme. Even now, it holds some Rs 25,000 crore of frozen funds. But during the long legal battles, much of Roy’s empire eroded. He lost the case eventually and spent two years in prison. He came out a broken man and his Great Indian Dream lay shattered.
Before you roll your eyes and call him a crook, remember one fact: The easy moral conclusions from Roy’s tale are undercut by a flaw in the Great Indian Dream itself. This dream hides two Indias. One is for the aristocratic Old Money, one for the newly rich. In a world where power constantly changes hands, and the rules of the game may do the same, it doesn’t take much for the outsider to become an upstart.
The Jazz Age and the roaring ’20s that saw Gatsby’s rise gave way to the Great Depression: Almost overnight, making money by bypassing some rules went from being acceptable to a game of Russian roulette. In such uncertain times, the rules of corporate Darwinism seem to decree that only Old Money, with genealogies in business and roots in international capital since the colonial period, shall survive.
The monumental success of the kind Roy achieved in one generation is possible only when the going is good. But as the Depression looms, they suddenly come up against unexpected blockades put up by a bureaucratic state. Most millennials brought up in an atmosphere of fear and censorship (formal or informal) of information, may have a problem understanding this. Let them look up the list of those that have got away since the pandemic — the Mallyas, Lalit Modis, the diamond merchants and who knows how many more. They all have one thing in common. They come from old money.
Roy was no different than most ambitious men and women, who have made it out of their small towns and got a seat at the high table. In the ultimate evaluation of his life and works, he was not out of touch with society. He was just one of the many unlucky recipients of a bullet in the Russian Roulette of capitalism.
The writer is a freelance journalist and former chairperson, Prasar Bharati
Sahara's Subrata Roy was the Great Gatsby of Hindi media
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16.11.2023
Few people embody the ’90s as aptly as Subrata Roy, founder of the Sahara Group of companies. He was also known as Sahara Shree. The boy from Araria in Bihar began his career in Gorakhpur, with just Rs 2,000 as his capital. He struck gold with the famous Sahara Chit Fund scheme, which helped India’s poorest become investors for the first time.
Roy liked things big. In 1991, he had Amitabh “Big B” Bachchan fly in to launch his Hindi daily, Rashtriya Sahara, from Lucknow. He was a star in India’s corporate pop culture, dressed in expensive suits, and with high-flying friends in politics and corporate circles. He proceeded to real estate and a glamorous township in Lucknow’s rather dowdy Gomti Nagar came up, followed by others. The brochures of the company described it as “an emotionally driven integrated Indian family”. The Sahara planes had the legend “Emotionally Yours” on them. This reminded one of F Scott Fitzgerald talking of “a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life”.
Rashtriya Sahara was a rather awkward experiment. It had swanky offices with excellent facilities for journalists to commute to and from work, a good canteen where a meal cost only Rs 5, good salaries and bonuses too. But soon, we were pulling our friends’ legs for their Sahara uniforms (black trousers, white shirt and a tie), and having to greet everyone with “Good Sahara”, their hand over their heart.........
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