27-05-2025
Textile and IT tycoon C Valliappa's biography is a valuable addition to the genre of business journalism
Early in his career, C Valliappa, a business tycoon well-known in South India, walked into his father's office in his financial company and sat down without realising the chain of command he had just broken. 'Look, here's your new managing director,' his father joked, making Valliappa realise that his rise to the top would not be as nepotistic as he expected. He would have to, in today's corporate-speak, drill down — on pretty much everything.
The story of his life has been detailed in a new biography The Sona Story: The Textile to Tech Journey of Chettiar Industrialist C Valliappa (Bloomsbury) by business journalist Chitra Narayanan. The book explores how his family was responsible for bolstering the Information Technology movement in Bengaluru, filling gaps in college-level technical education in South India and recovering from the end of a legacy business in textiles after conflicts with labour unions. The book is a little scattered, its non-linear flow getting in the way of the in-depth research and reportage the author has clearly done, but it is a valuable contribution to the genre of business biography for laypeople and experts alike.
The book begins with well-wishers and family members recalling the building, Sona Towers, in Bengaluru that became the first to house a satellite office in India, for Dallas-based Texas Instruments. A building that would go on to house many more multi-national IT companies like Verifone, Oracle and Cisco, Narayanan chooses the right quotes by business and political veterans like Nandan Nilekani, Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Srini Rajam to indicate just how big of a deal it was in the 1970s and 1980s for a US-based company to have foreign employees in India making software for consumption abroad. The building needed to have a very particular construction as well as the availability of a wind map so Texas Instruments could confidently set up a satellite — and it did, an achievement possible in equal part due to Valliappa's interest in architecture and him rising to a challenge by his father to make an office building wider than one made by him.
Growing labour costs in the '90s and the withdrawal of government subsidies, particularly in power, dented the family's textile business to an extent where it was ultimately irrecoverable. There were also conflicts with labour unions, stoked partly by Janata Dal leader HD Deve Gowda, that were handled with varying success. Despite attempts to cut costs by importing foreign machines to speed up production and multiple meetings with the labour unions, the mills were shut down in 1999.
Valliappa's personal life and interests are also part of the book, particularly his college days as a student leader in which he crossed paths with political and cultural figures like CN Annadurai, Dr S Radhakrishnan, Periyar, MS Subbulakshmi and Sadasivam, as well as anecdotes of his father sending him away from home at the age of 23 to prove his business acumen. Other stories, like that of the surgery that recovered his voice, his interactions with his sons and wife, and his love for Tamil literature, could have shone better if arranged in juxtaposition to the businesses he helmed every day for six decades.
