Krishnaraj Rai

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.