Indira Bhaduri

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.