Harivansh Rai Bachchan

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.