Wadia family

The Wadia family is a Parsi family from Surat, India currently based in Mumbai, India. The family rose to wealth in the mid-1700s as shipbuilders serving the British East India Company as the latter established its sway over India. During the declining years of the British Raj, Neville Wadia, scion of the main branch of the family, married Dina Jinnah, only child of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. Despite being the only descendants of the founding father of Pakistan, the family chose to stick to their mills and factories in India rather than emigrate to the new country. They prospered abundantly under Nehru-Gandhi dispensation and today, they run the Wadia Group of companies, one of the larger industrial conglomerates in India. Lovji Nusserwanjee Wadia advanced the Wadia shipbuilding dynasty in 1736, when he obtained a contract from the British East India Company for building docks and ships in Bombay (present-day Mumbai). Although the Wadias would eventually come to be considered a Bombay family, many of them remained in Surat, where one branch of the family established a ship breaking yard (where ships are dismantled) that remains one of the largest of its kind in the world. The Wadia family has three main branches, each dealing in a particular industry: textiles, shipping, and jewelry. They have been active in a host of other smaller businesses, including film-making, biscuits and bakery products, tea and rubber plantations, fashion magazines and aviation. The poem whose words would become the lyrics of The Star-Spangled Banner, the national anthem of the United States, were written in 1812 on board a Wadia-built British Royal Navy ship, by Francis Scott Key. By the 1840s, the family was one of the leading forces in the Indian shipbuilding industry. At that time they had built over a hundred warships for Britain, and had trading networks around the world.