Shweta Bachchan Nanda

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Brindya Rai, whose name is also written Vrinda, is the mother of the actress Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and the wife of the biologist Krishnaraj Rai. From a Tulu-speaking family of coastal Karnataka, she moved with her husband's work from Mangalore to Mumbai, where the couple raised their two children, Aditya and Aishwarya. She kept a private life while her daughter became one of India's most recognisable public figures, appearing with the family at occasions such as the Cannes Film Festival and at Aishwarya's marriage to Abhishek Bachchan in 2007. She has lived in Mumbai for many years and remains close to the Bachchan household.