Darius Forbes, India’s boiler man, passes away at 97
Darius Forbes, a revered name in India’s engineering circles, passed away on Friday morning at the age of 97. Forbes, along with his uncle JN Marshall built Forbes Marshall, and is credited with forwarding steam engineering in post-independence India, where import hurdles were the norm.
Forbes was born to Parsi parents in 1926 in Bombay (now Mumbai), a city he would return to set up his first garage factory two decades later. Forbes did his initial schooling in Chennai, with a brief stint at the Banaras Hindu University (BHU) and engineering studies in Karachi (pre-partition India).
India’s first vice-president S Radhakrishnan, then the vice-chancellor of BHU, is said to have mentored Forbes.
Forbes joined his uncle’s business in December 1946 and marketed the steam engineering products for J N Marshall & Co. His Mumbai garage start-up was an idea floated in the face of India’s foreign exchange crisis in the mid-1950s, making it difficult to import products and parts.
A portrait of Darius Forbes published in European Financial Review in 2019 also noted Darius often overcame India’s then bureaucratic restrictions on forming joint ventures with foreign companies through “many partnerships based on honesty and trust without formal contracts; a high-risk approach, but one with high rewards.”
Ashok V Desai, in his academic paper titled ‘The Rise of Modern Parsi Enterprise’, notes while on a training trip to England in 1950, Forbes picked up several agencies for foreign manufacturers of boilers and other industrial parts.
Desai mentions brake manufacturer Ferodo, media house Times of India, Taj Mahal hotel and match-stick maker Wimco as those Forbes helped set-up initial boiler houses.
Forbes and India’s initial industrial boiler set-ups can often be found mentioned in the same line. Verghese Kurien, in his book ‘I Too Had a Dream’, mentioned Forbes as one of the young engineers on-site at Anand (Gujarat) sent to set-up the boilers.
As the Bombay garage soon ran out of space, Forbes chose Kasarwadi on the Mumbai-Pune Highway to set up his shop, where the company Forbes Marshall stands to date. Forbes was the chairman and managing director for Forbes Marshall until the age of 58, post which he moved on to the role of Chairman and then Chairman Emeritus.
Along with engineering, Forbes is also fondly remembered for his philanthropy and charity works. The Centre for Advancement of Philanthropy (CAP), of which Forbes was a co-founder, came along with his offer of office space.
Professor of Family Business, Denise Kenyon-Rouvinez, who authored the Forbes profile in the European Financial Review, recalls her first meeting with Forbes in Hyderabad, to which he had flown from Pune, at the age of 91, only to hear one of his sons talk for 30 minutes.
Forbes is survived by his two sons – Farhad and Naushad. His sons, in a note sent out to family and friends, said, “In his book, Darius writes that he is a “fortunate” man.”