Agastya Nanda

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.