Executive Director and later Chairperson, Scindia Steam Navigation Company | Led from 1946 | Bombay
A merchant’s daughter renamed
Jamuna Gokuldas was born in Bombay on 13 March 1909 to Mathuradas Gokuldas and Premabai, a wealthy merchant family. She was the only daughter among seven children. Like many girls of her class at the time, she was married very young. At 13 she became the wife of Shanti Kumar Morarjee, the only son of Narottam Morarjee, one of the Bombay businessmen behind the Scindia Steam Navigation Company.
According to Back to Godhead, the Vaishnava magazine that later wrote her life story in detail, her father-in-law renamed her Sumati, “she of superior intellect”. She grew up in the Pushti-marg Vaishnava tradition and stayed devout all her life. She was fluent in English, Hindi and Marathi. After her mother-in-law died young, the girl-bride also found herself running a large household.
A shipping company born in defiance
Scindia had been born only a few years earlier, as a political act as much as a commercial one. In 1919, Walchand Hirachand and his partners bought a ship called the Empress of India from the Maharaja of Gwalior and renamed her the SS Loyalty. Live History India records that the Scindia family had no financial stake; the name was used to win investors’ confidence. On 5 April 1919 the Loyalty sailed for London. That date is now marked as India’s National Maritime Day.
British shipping lines did not welcome the newcomer. Live History India describes how pressure from British India Steam Navigation, under Lord Inchcape, pushed Scindia into a 1923 agreement that largely confined it to coastal routes for ten years. Narottam Morarjee died in 1929, and his son Shanti Kumar became chairman.
A teenager in the managing agency
It was into this business, still fighting for room, that Sumati was brought. Most accounts say she joined the managing agency, Narottam Morarjee & Co., in 1923. Some secondary sources give her age then as 20, but by her birth date she would have been about 14. THE WEEK wrote in 2024 that her father-in-law chose her for her sharp intellect and eagerness to learn.
Over the next two decades she learned the business from the inside. Her husband was chairman. Contemporary directories, as summarised in later accounts, describe her as a partner who handled the company’s day-to-day affairs. Back to Godhead puts the turning point in 1946: “Sumati took full charge of the company, managing over six thousand people.”
Ships, Gandhi and the freedom struggle
The Morarjees were close to the national movement. Back to Godhead says Sumati corresponded regularly with Mahatma Gandhi, and the Nehru Archive describes her as a close aide of his. Several later profiles say she worked with the underground independence movement between 1942 and 1946. Specific details of that work are hard to pin down in the record.
What is documented is Gandhi’s long stay with the family. The Gandhi Heritage Portal records that after his release from detention in 1944, he spent about 34 days at the Morarjees’ bungalow in Juhu. On 19 May that year, Shanti Kumar took him to see the Bombay docks. During Partition, later accounts say the fleet carried Sindhi refugees from Pakistan. Shanti Kumar also sent steamers to Karachi at Gandhi’s request to bring back stranded Dalit families free of charge.
The fleet goes global
Independence opened the oceans to Indian shipowners, and Scindia moved fast. Its liner services reached the United States in 1947, the United Kingdom in 1948 and Singapore in 1950. East Africa followed in 1954, West Africa in 1956 and the North American Great Lakes in 1964. The company had built India’s first modern shipyard at Visakhapatnam, whose foundation stone was laid in 1941. In 1948 the yard launched the Jala Usha, the first ship built in independent India. The government took control of the yard from 1952 and nationalised it fully in 1961.
Sumati became the public face of Indian shipping. In 1956 she was elected president of the Indian National Steamship Owners’ Association. She was re-elected for the next two years and again in 1965. It is widely described as the first time a woman anywhere had led a national association of shipowners. In 1970 she became vice-president of the World Shipping Federation in London. When the Government of India gave her the Padma Vibhushan in 1971, the official notification listed her as “Executive Director, Scindia Steam Navigation Company Limited, Bombay”. Around then, reports put Scindia’s fleet at 43 ships of about 5.5 lakh tonnes deadweight.
In public she framed the business as more than trade. Back to Godhead and The Better India both record her saying: “It is not purely for business motives that we today concentrate on shipping.” In the same vein she said Scindia’s “most precious cargo has been ideas of universal brotherhood and deep spirituality.”
A passenger named Prabhupada
That belief led to one of the most famous voyages any Scindia ship ever made. In 1965 an elderly monk, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, asked her for free passage to America. Back to Godhead records that she refused at first, fearing a man of nearly 70 would not survive the crossing. He insisted on meeting her, and she relented. She briefed the captain on his vegetarian diet. The cargo ship Jaladuta left Calcutta on 13 August 1965 and reached Boston on 17 September. The movement Prabhupada founded there, ISKCON, would spread worldwide. The two kept writing to each other until his death in 1977.
Storm years
Shanti Kumar died in 1982. The couple had no children. Later profiles say Sumati chaired Scindia through most of the 1980s, though the exact dates vary from source to source. Those were punishing years for Indian shipping. Freight markets were weak, the fleet was ageing and the debts piled up.
By 1987 the crisis was in Parliament. A Lok Sabha written answer of 26 August 1987 said Scindia owed the government about ₹128 crore. The Shipping Credit and Investment Company of India had recalled its dues, appointed a receiver and reconstituted the board. Of a fleet of 24, the answer said, “at present 20 of its ships are held up”. Some were arrested abroad, some stranded, some idle and six were laid up for scrap. Other companies explored a takeover. Later profiles say Sumati, who reportedly called the ships her daughters, tried into the early 1990s to stop them being sold. The company gradually lost its fleet and stopped trading.
Unwept, unhonoured, unsung
Sumati Morarjee died of a cardiac arrest in Bombay in late June 1998, aged 89. Most accounts give the date as 27 June. Back to Godhead quotes a newspaper obituary that lamented the passing of the “first lady of Indian, nay world, shipping”, who died “largely unwept, unhonoured and unsung”.
She did not found Scindia. But for half a century she ran, and then spoke for, one of India’s biggest private shipping lines. She did it as a woman in an industry with almost no women in it, in the years when India was learning to carry its own trade on its own ships. The company did not survive the economics of the 1980s. Her part in putting an Indian flag on the world’s sea lanes did.
Founder Journeys is a Sakhi Sangini series telling the stories of women who built businesses in India. This story is based on public interviews and reporting.
Sources: Back to Godhead (July/August 2010); The Better India (September 2019); Heritage Times (March 2018); Live History India (December 2018); THE WEEK (November 2024); Padma Awards notification (January 1971); Lok Sabha written answers (August 1987); Gandhi Heritage Portal; Nehru Archive; Department of Public Enterprises
