Amitabh Bachchan

Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

Gen 4 · b. 1973

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.

Gen 4View record →

Nikhil Nanda

Gen 4

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.

Gen 4View record →

Ritu Nanda

Gen 1 · 1948 - 2020

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.

Aditya Rai

Gen 2

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.

Gen 2View record →

Indira Bhaduri

Gen 1

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

Gen 1

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.

Naina Bachchan

Gen 4

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.

Gen 4View record →

Rajan Nanda

Gen 1

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

Gen 3

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.

Gen 3View record →

Shyama Bachchan

Gen 2

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.

Gen 2View record →

Taroon Kumar Bhaduri

Gen 1

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.