He came from the unprepossessing Kallidaikurichi, a village better known for its appalaams and pappadaams, and yet he seemed to carry within him the quiet conviction that he could go out and pull off bigger deeds.
SNN’s father had a modest foray into the hundi business and in that small beginning SNN saw the outline of a more formal financial institution. From there he went on to set up a bank (Indo-Commercial Bank) and later stepped into an even more audacious project, the creation of India Cements. Each transition was a deliberate leap into the unlikely.
Making of an Unlikely Industrialist
India Cements was the centrepiece of SNNs life. With no formal education, clad in his usual veshti and shirt and travelling by bullock cart, SNN identified the limestone deposits around Thalaiyathu in Tirunelveli district and recognised its industrial potential. What followed was remarkable. He knew that turning limestone into cement would require foreign technology and he singled out Denmark as the right partner (FLSmidth, the Danish company with expertise in cement machinery and technology). This was not guesswork. It was a form of industrial foresight that few of his contemporaries possessed. As the second world war raged across Europe, SNN forged an agreement in 1945 and persuaded the Danes to send technical experts, including a consultant and geologist, to examine the site and help build the plant.
The image must have been almost cinematic. European engineers arriving in dusty Thalaiyuthu, measuring limestone and surveying a landscape that, to the untrained eye, looked like little more than rocks, scrub and emptiness. At the same time, SNN also grasped that a project of this magnitude needed more than private capital. He assembled an interesting first board and public for funds, creating what is remembered as the first major public issue in India. One of the prospective directors, R Ramjeedas Iyer, was initially sceptical of Thalaiyutu’s potential. Yet SNN patiently convinced him to join the board. That ability to persuade was one of SNN’s greatest assets.
To do this under British colonial rule, when Indian enterprise was often met with scepticism, required not only business acumen but political nerve. The factory of such a large scale was a declaration that industrial modernity could be rooted in Tamil soil and run by Indian hands.
A township ahead of its time
SNN’s vision, of course, did not stop at the factory gate. He imagined a workers’ welfare town that would house schools, polytechnics, health facilities, shops and housing quarters. In an era that had not yet coined the phrase corporate social responsibility, SNN was already building a civic ecosystem around his enterprise. In imagination and function, this township was on par with the distant Jamshedpur, a place he had evidently not even seen.
Life Beyond Business
What makes SNN especially compelling is that he never allowed commerce to shrink his world. He was deeply interested in languages including Tamil, English and Hindi and became one of the strongest patrons of the Hindi Prachara Sabha in this part of the country. He even wrote a primer on Tamil-Hindi usage. That linguistic curiosity gave him a wider civic and cultural horizon than the average industrialist of his generation. SNN was equally drawn to literature, including the Kamba Ramayanam. It suggests a man who did not see business as a sealed compartment but as part of a fuller life of ideas and imagination.
There was also a more personal, almost playful side to him. He loved speed and cars and his drivers were reportedly told to accelerate whenever he sat in the back seat. That appetite for speed seemed almost symbolic of his character: he had little patience for a slow or cautious life. Yet the horrendous crash near Shimoga involving the car he was travelling in offered a sobering reminder that, for men like him, risk was never an abstraction; it was woven into the way they lived.
Knowing when to let go
Perhaps the most impressive thing about SNN was not what he built but willing to let go at the right time. After establishing a large and consequential enterprise, he had the spiritual maturity to step aside and leave it in the care of his sons and handpicked experts. This kind of exit is rare. Many founders remain imprisoned by their own creations. But SNN appears to have understood that a company grows best when the founder knows when to stop controlling it.
Rajaji called SNN a karmayogi. Kamaraj called him a great patriot. Gandhian Jamnalal Bajaj was so impressed by his work ethic that he sent his son Kamalnayan for industrial training with him. Overall, SNN’s life was defined by moments when the obvious answer was, “This cannot be done,” only for him to quietly set about proving otherwise. Perhaps that is the most enduring lesson one can learn from him. Vision is not always about imagining some fantastical future. Vision is not necessarily about seeing some fantastical future. Sometimes it is simply the capacity to look at an unpromising piece of land, an informal family business, an unfamiliar technology, or a seemingly impossible proposition and ask a more useful question, Why not?
And that is the man I encountered while writing Cementing Legacies. Not merely the founder of India Cements, but a banker who became an industrialist, a traditionalist who embraced modernity, a businessman who loved books, a builder who understood community and an individual who ultimately understood detachment.n
