Bachchan Family Tree - Bollywood's First Family

Brindya Rai, whose name is also written Vrinda, is the mother of the actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and the wife of the biologist Krishnaraj Rai. From a Tulu-speaking family of coastal Karnataka, she moved with her husband's work from Mangalore to Mumbai, where the couple raised their two children, Aditya and Aishwarya. She kept a private life while her daughter became one of India's most recognisable public figures, appearing with the family at occasions such as the Cannes Film Festival and at Aishwarya's marriage to Abhishek Bachchan in 2007. She has lived in Mumbai for many years and remains close to the Bachchan household.

Indira Bhaduri was a Bengali theatre performer in Bhopal and the mother of the actress and parliamentarian Jaya Bachchan. Married to the journalist and author Taroon Kumar Bhaduri, she raised the family in Madhya Pradesh, where both parents belonged to the city's active Bengali cultural and amateur theatre circles, the milieu in which her eldest daughter's interest in performance first took shape. She lived much of her later life in Bhopal and remained close to her daughter's family in Mumbai after Jaya's marriage to Amitabh Bachchan in 1973, which made her a grandmother to the author Shweta Bachchan Nanda and the actor Abhishek Bachchan.

Krishnaraj Rai was an Indian biologist and the father of the actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. He came from a Tulu-speaking Bunt family of coastal Karnataka and spent his career as a biologist with the Indian Army, work that took the family from Mangalore to Mumbai, where his children grew up and were educated. With his wife Brindya he had two children, Aditya Rai and Aishwarya. He remained a private figure through his daughter's Miss World win in 1994 and her marriage into the Bachchan family in 2007, appearing publicly only at family occasions. He died in Mumbai in 2017.

Kunal Kapoor (born 18 October 1977 in Mumbai) is an Indian actor and entrepreneur who married Naina Bachchan, the daughter of Ajitabh Bachchan, in 2015, joining him to the wider Bachchan family. He began as a model and assistant director before his film debut in Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities (2004), and came to wide attention as Aslam in Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's Rang De Basanti (2006). His later work includes Don 2, Dear Zindagi, the historical drama Veeram and the Netflix series Bard of Blood. Away from acting he co-founded Ketto, one of India's largest crowdfunding platforms for medical and social causes.

Pratap Narayan Shrivastava was the father of the Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan and the earliest documented figure in the family's line. He belonged to a Srivastava Kayastha family from Babupatti, in the Raniganj area of Pratapgarh district in what is now Uttar Pradesh, and moved to Allahabad, where he worked as a clerk in the city's paper trade. He and his wife Saraswati Devi raised their son in modest circumstances in Allahabad, a household the poet later described at length in his autobiography. It was there that Harivansh Rai was given the childhood nickname Bachchan, meaning child, which he adopted as a pen name and passed on as the family surname carried today by his grandson Amitabh Bachchan and his descendants.

Rajan Nanda was an Indian industrialist who led the Escorts Group, the Delhi-based engineering and tractor company founded by his father, Har Prasad Nanda. He joined the business in the 1960s and served as its chairman for decades, steering it through the liberalisation of the Indian economy and a series of joint ventures with foreign manufacturers. He married Ritu Nanda, the eldest daughter of the film-maker Raj Kapoor, and their son Nikhil Nanda succeeded him at the head of the company. Through Nikhil's marriage to Shweta Bachchan in 1997 he became, with Amitabh and Jaya Bachchan, a grandparent of Navya Naveli and Agastya Nanda. He died in 2018.

Ramola Bachchan is an Indian fashion entrepreneur based in New Delhi and the wife of the businessman Ajitabh Bachchan, the younger brother of the actor Amitabh Bachchan. She has spent much of her career in the Indian designer-wear and luxury trade, running retail and styling ventures in Delhi and organising fashion and lifestyle events in the capital, where she is a well-known figure on the social circuit. Married to Ajitabh, with whom she lived for a period in London before the family returned to India, she is the mother of Naina Bachchan, who married the actor Kunal Kapoor in 2015, and an aunt of Abhishek Bachchan and Shweta Bachchan Nanda.

Ritu Nanda (1948-2020) was an Indian businesswoman and author, and one of the country's best-known insurance entrepreneurs. The eldest daughter of the film-maker and actor Raj Kapoor, she grew up in the Kapoor family of Hindi cinema but built her career in business, becoming a leading agent for the Life Insurance Corporation of India and heading Escolife, an arm of the Escorts group that her husband Rajan Nanda led. She wrote Raj Kapoor Speaks, a widely read oral portrait of her father, published in 2002. Her son Nikhil Nanda married Shweta Bachchan in 1997, making her the link between the Kapoor, Nanda and Bachchan families. She died in January 2020.

Saraswati Devi was the mother of the Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan and the wife of Pratap Narayan Shrivastava. She lived in Allahabad in the early twentieth century, where the family had settled from Babupatti in Pratapgarh district, and raised her son in the modest Kayastha household the poet recalled in detail in his four-volume autobiography. It was in that home that Harivansh Rai acquired the affectionate nickname Bachchan, the Hindi word for child, which became first his pen name and then the surname of the film family descended from him, including her grandsons Amitabh and Ajitabh Bachchan.

Shyama was the first wife of the Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan. She married him in 1926, when he was still in his teens, and the ten years of their marriage are described at length in his four-volume autobiography, which treats her as one of the formative presences of his early life. The couple lived in Allahabad and had no children. She died in 1936, and the loss runs through much of the poetry he wrote in the years around his celebrated collection Madhushala. Harivansh Rai remarried in 1941, to Teji Suri, and it is from that second marriage that the present-day Bachchan family, including the actor Amitabh Bachchan, descends.

Taroon Kumar Bhaduri was a Bengali journalist, author and playwright based in Bhopal, and the father of the actress and parliamentarian Jaya Bachchan. He worked for years as a reporter for The Statesman in central India, where he became known for his coverage of the Chambal ravines and the dacoit gangs that operated there, reporting that fed his Bengali book Abhishapta Chambal and that supplied later Hindi film-makers with much of their material on the region. He was also active in theatre in Bhopal, the world through which his eldest daughter first came to acting. With his wife Indira Bhaduri he raised the family in Madhya Pradesh; through Jaya's marriage to Amitabh Bachchan in 1973 the Bhaduris were joined to the Bachchan family.

Teji Bachchan (1914-2007), born Teji Suri, was a Punjabi social worker and the second wife of the poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan. Born in Lyallpur in undivided Punjab, she was educated in Lahore, where she took part in amateur theatre, and married Harivansh Rai in 1941 after meeting him through literary circles. The couple settled in Allahabad and later in Delhi, and she became a well-known figure in the capital's cultural and political life, a close friend of Indira Gandhi and afterwards of Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi. She was the mother of the actor Amitabh Bachchan and of the businessman Ajitabh Bachchan, and remained the anchor of the family household in Mumbai in her later years, where she died in 2007.

Aditya Rai is an Indian merchant navy officer and the elder brother of the actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. The son of Krishnaraj Rai, a biologist with the Indian Army, and of Brindya Rai, he grew up in Mumbai after the family moved from coastal Karnataka, trained as a marine engineer, and built a career at sea and in shipping rather than in cinema. He has stayed largely out of public life, appearing chiefly at family occasions such as his sister's homecoming after winning Miss World in 1994 and her 2007 marriage to the actor Abhishek Bachchan, which brought the Rai family into the wider Bachchan circle. He lives in Mumbai.

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan (born 1 November 1973 in Mangalore) is an Indian actress and the winner of the Miss World title in 1994. Born into a Tulu-speaking family of coastal Karnataka and raised largely in Mumbai, she worked as a model before entering films with Mani Ratnam's Iruvar (1997), and became one of Indian cinema's most internationally recognised stars through Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, Devdas, Guru and Jodhaa Akbar, alongside English-language films and a long association with the Cannes Film Festival. The daughter of Krishnaraj and Brindya Rai and the sister of Aditya Rai, she married the actor Abhishek Bachchan in 2007, joining the Bachchan family.

Ajitabh Bachchan (born 1947) is an Indian businessman and the younger son of the poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan and Teji Bachchan. Educated in Allahabad and Delhi, he went into business rather than the arts, and in the late 1970s and early 1980s managed much of his elder brother Amitabh Bachchan's professional and financial affairs, including the family's film production interests. He lived for several years in London and later in Switzerland before returning to India, and has been involved in ventures in aviation services and infrastructure. With his wife Ramola Bachchan he has daughters including Naina Bachchan, who married the actor Kunal Kapoor in 2015. He has kept a far lower public profile than his brother.

Amitabh Bachchan (born 11 October 1942 in Allahabad) is an Indian actor widely regarded as the most influential figure in the history of Hindi cinema. The elder son of the poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan and the social worker Teji Bachchan, he worked briefly in Kolkata before his film debut in Saat Hindustani (1969), and became the defining star of the 1970s through Zanjeer, Deewaar, Sholay and Amar Akbar Anthony, roles that established the angry young man archetype in Indian film. He served a term in the Lok Sabha from Allahabad in the 1980s, returned to prominence hosting the quiz show Kaun Banega Crorepati from 2000, and has since worked steadily in films including Black, Paa, Piku and Pink. He married the actress Jaya Bhaduri in 1973; their children are Shweta Bachchan Nanda and Abhishek Bachchan.

Harivansh Rai Bachchan (1907-2003) was one of the most widely read Hindi poets of the twentieth century and the patriarch of the Bachchan family. Born into a Kayastha family with roots in Babupatti, Pratapgarh district, and raised in Allahabad, he taught English at Allahabad University, took a doctorate on W. B. Yeats at Cambridge, and later served in the Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi, where he worked on Hindi as an official language. His 1935 collection Madhushala remains his best known work and made him a central figure of the Nayi Kavita movement; he also translated Shakespeare and the Bhagavad Gita into Hindi and wrote a celebrated four-volume autobiography. Married first to Shyama and then to Teji Suri, he was the father of the actor Amitabh Bachchan and the businessman Ajitabh Bachchan, and was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1976.

Jaya Bachchan (born Jaya Bhaduri on 9 April 1948 in Jabalpur) is an Indian actress and politician. The daughter of the Bengali journalist and author Taroon Kumar Bhaduri and of Indira Bhaduri, she appeared as a teenager in Satyajit Ray's Mahanagar (1963), trained at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, and took her first leading role in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Guddi (1971). Through the 1970s she was among Hindi cinema's foremost actresses in Uphaar, Koshish, Abhimaan, Chupke Chupke and Sholay, and she returned to the screen in later decades with Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham and Kal Ho Naa Ho. She married Amitabh Bachchan in 1973 and has served several terms in the Rajya Sabha for the Samajwadi Party.

Naina Bachchan is an Indian investment professional and the daughter of the businessman Ajitabh Bachchan and the fashion entrepreneur Ramola Bachchan. Raised partly in London, where her father lived for several years, she studied in Britain and worked in investment banking and asset management before turning to the family's business interests in India. She is a niece of the actor Amitabh Bachchan and a first cousin of Abhishek Bachchan and Shweta Bachchan Nanda. In 2015 she married the actor Kunal Kapoor, known for Rang De Basanti, in a ceremony in the Seychelles that was among the more widely reported Indian weddings of that year.

Nikhil Nanda is an Indian industrialist and the chairman and managing director of Escorts Kubota, the Delhi-based engineering and tractor manufacturer founded by his grandfather Har Prasad Nanda. The son of Rajan Nanda and Ritu Nanda, and a grandson of the film-maker Raj Kapoor on his mother's side, he joined Escorts in the 1990s and took charge of the group after his father's death in 2018, overseeing its partnership with the Japanese manufacturer Kubota. He married Shweta Bachchan, the daughter of Amitabh and Jaya Bachchan, in 1997, a union that connected two of India's best-known families; their children are Navya Naveli Nanda and Agastya Nanda.

Abhishek Bachchan (born 5 February 1976 in Mumbai) is an Indian actor, the son of Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bachchan. He made his debut in Refugee (2000) and established himself through Yuva, Dhoom and Bunty Aur Babli, going on to work in Guru, Sarkar, Paa, Bol Bachchan and, more recently, the streaming films Ludo, Dasvi and I Want To Talk. He has won Filmfare Awards for Best Supporting Actor in three consecutive years, and has co-owned teams in the Indian Super League and the Pro Kabaddi League. He married the actress and former Miss World Aishwarya Rai in 2007, a wedding that drew extraordinary press attention in India, and the couple live in Mumbai as part of the wider Bachchan household.

Agastya Nanda (born 2000) is an Indian actor, the son of the industrialist Nikhil Nanda and the author Shweta Bachchan Nanda, and a grandson of Amitabh and Jaya Bachchan. Raised in Delhi and educated there and abroad, he made his screen debut in Zoya Akhtar's The Archies (2023), a Hindi adaptation of the American comics set in a fictional Indian hill town of the 1960s, in which he played Archie Andrews. He is a great-grandson of the poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan on his mother's side and, through his father's mother Ritu Nanda, a great-grandson of the film-maker Raj Kapoor, placing him at the meeting point of two of Hindi cinema's oldest families.

Navya Naveli Nanda (born 1997) is an Indian entrepreneur and podcast host, the daughter of the industrialist Nikhil Nanda and the author Shweta Bachchan Nanda, and a granddaughter of Amitabh and Jaya Bachchan. She studied at Fordham University in New York and returned to India to work with the family's Escorts business while founding ventures of her own: Aara Health, a women's healthcare platform, and Project Naveli, an organisation focused on gender equity and on access to education and healthcare for women in India. She hosts the interview podcast What The Hell Navya, in which she appears alongside her mother and her grandmother Jaya Bachchan, and is among the most visible younger voices in the extended Bachchan and Nanda families.

Shweta Bachchan Nanda (born 17 March 1974) is an Indian author and columnist and the elder child of Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bachchan. Raised in Mumbai, she chose not to enter films, and in 1997 married the industrialist Nikhil Nanda, moving to Delhi, where the Nanda family runs the Escorts engineering group. She has written a long-running newspaper column, published the novel Paradise Towers in 2018, and co-founded a clothing label with the designer Monisha Jaising. Through her marriage the Bachchans were linked to the Nandas and, through her mother-in-law Ritu Nanda, to the Kapoor film dynasty. Her children are the entrepreneur Navya Naveli Nanda and the actor Agastya Nanda.