Public Family Trees/Bachchan/Shyama Bachchan
· Female · Allahabad, United Provinces, India
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Shyama Bachchan
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 y…
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Died1936
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Gen 3 · b. 1942
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.
Gen 3 · b. 1948
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.
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 4 · b. 1974
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.
Gen 4 · b. 1976
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.
Gen 5 · b. 1997
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.
Gen 5 · b. 2000
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.
Gen 3 · b. 1947
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.
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.
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 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.
The Vanderbilts are an American family who rose from Dutch farming stock on Staten Island to hold the largest private fortune in the United States, built by Cornelius Vanderbilt, known as the Commodore, out of nineteenth century shipping and railroads, and known today for the Gilded Age houses their descendants built and for figures from Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, to the journalist Anderson Cooper. ## Origins on Staten Island The family descends from Jan Aertsen van der Bilt, a Dutch settler who reached New Netherland in the seventeenth century and whose descendants farmed on Staten Island for generations. Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877) was born there, the son of a boatman, and began work as a teenager carrying freight across New York Harbour in a single sailing barge. He married his first cousin Sophia Johnson in 1813. ## The railroad fortune Vanderbilt moved from sail to steam, dominated the Hudson River and coastal trade, and after the Civil War turned to railroads, consolidating the New York Central system and building Grand Central Depot. He left almost the whole fortune to one son, William Henry Vanderbilt, who nearly doubled it in eight years before dividing it evenly among his own eight children. They built the family's great houses: The Breakers and Marble House at Newport, Biltmore House in North Carolina, Hyde Park on the Hudson, Florham in New Jersey and Shelburne Farms in Vermont. ## Notable members The third and fourth generations produced Consuelo Vanderbilt, who married the 9th Duke of Marlborough and became a social reformer in England; the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, who died in the sinking of the Lusitania; and Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, who won the America's Cup three times and invented contract bridge. The modern line runs through Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt to the designer Gloria Vanderbilt and her son, the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. ## Significance No American family is more closely identified with the Gilded Age. The Vanderbilts set the pattern for how new industrial wealth was spent, and then for how quickly such a fortune disperses across many heirs. What endures is institutional: Vanderbilt University, the Whitney Museum, and the houses at Newport, Hyde Park, Shelburne and Asheville that are now museums and public estates. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Founder | Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), the Commodore | | Origin | Staten Island, New York, of Dutch descent | | Source of wealth | Steamboat shipping, then the New York Central railroads | | Famous houses | The Breakers, Marble House, Biltmore House, Hyde Park | | Best known members | Consuelo Vanderbilt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Gloria Vanderbilt, Anderson Cooper | | Generations covered | Five, from the Commodore to Anderson Cooper |
The House of Plantagenet was the royal dynasty that ruled England for 331 years, from the accession of Henry II in 1154 to the death of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, making it the longest-reigning royal house in English history. Fourteen Plantagenet kings held the throne in unbroken succession, and in the fifteenth century the family's two junior branches, the houses of Lancaster and York, fought each other for the crown in the civil wars later known as the Wars of the Roses. ## Origins The dynasty came from Anjou in western France. Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, is said to have worn a sprig of broom, *planta genista*, in his cap, and from that nickname the family eventually took its name, although it was not used as an actual surname until Richard, 3rd Duke of York, adopted it in the 1440s. Geoffrey's marriage in 1128 to Empress Matilda, daughter and designated heir of Henry I of England, gave their son a claim to the English throne that he made good in 1154. With Normandy and Anjou behind him, and Aquitaine gained through his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II ruled lands reaching from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees, the assemblage historians call the Angevin Empire. ## Notable members The early, or Angevin, kings are among the most familiar names in English history: Henry II, whose itinerant justices and sworn juries laid the foundations of the common law; Richard the Lionheart, a leading commander of the Third Crusade; and King John, who sealed Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215. Henry III rebuilt Westminster Abbey, Edward I conquered Wales and summoned the Model Parliament, and Edward III opened the Hundred Years' War and founded the Order of the Garter. Later generations produced Edward the Black Prince, the victor of Poitiers, Henry V of Agincourt, and Richard III, whose lost grave was rediscovered in Leicester in 2012. ## Lancaster and York Edward III's many sons divided the dynasty. From his third surviving son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, came Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI, and, through Gaunt's Beaufort children, Margaret Beaufort and her son Henry VII. From his fourth son, Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, combined with the senior Mortimer descent from his second son, Lionel of Antwerp, came Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and his sons Edward IV and Richard III. The rivalry of those branches produced thirty years of intermittent civil war, ending when Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at Bosworth and married Elizabeth of York, uniting the red and white roses. ## Significance No other family has shaped English institutions so deeply. Under the Plantagenets, Magna Carta became a settled principle, parliament grew from an occasional royal council into a body whose consent was needed for taxation, the common law took its enduring form, and English displaced French as the language of the court. Their castles, abbeys and cathedrals still define the medieval landscape of England and Wales. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Ruled | England, 1154 to 1485 | | Founder | Henry II, son of Geoffrey V of Anjou and Empress Matilda | | Place of origin | Anjou, France | | Kings | Fourteen, from Henry II to Richard III | | Branches | Angevin, Lancaster, York | | Emblems | The broom flower, the red rose of Lancaster, the white rose of York | | Last king | Richard III, killed at Bosworth in 1485 | | Legacy | Magna Carta, English common law, the growth of parliament |
The Belgian royal family, formally the House of Belgium and dynastically a branch of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, is the reigning family of Belgium, founded when the German prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld accepted the throne of the newly independent kingdom in 1831 and continuing today through King Philippe and his heir, Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant. Belgium became independent from the Netherlands in 1830 and chose a constitutional monarchy. Its National Congress looked abroad for a sovereign who could balance French and British interests, and settled on Leopold, a widowed, well-connected and famously cautious prince who had already turned down the crown of Greece. He took the constitutional oath on 21 July 1831, still the Belgian national day. Seven monarchs have reigned since: Leopold I, Leopold II, Albert I, Leopold III, Baudouin, Albert II and Philippe. ## Origins The dynasty's roots are in the small Thuringian duchy of Saxe-Coburg, whose princes married into half the thrones of nineteenth-century Europe. Leopold I was the uncle of both Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert, and his second marriage, to Louise-Marie of Orleans, daughter of the French king Louis Philippe I, tied the new kingdom to Paris as well as London. The crown did not pass in a straight line: Leopold II's only son died at the age of nine, so the succession moved to Leopold II's brother Philippe, Count of Flanders, and then to Philippe's son, Albert I. Every Belgian monarch since 1909 descends from that collateral branch. ## Notable members Leopold II is the most studied and most criticised figure in the family, remembered for the industrial boom and monumental building of his reign and, above all, for his personal rule over the Congo Free State. Albert I and Queen Elisabeth of Bavaria became wartime symbols of Belgian resistance behind the Yser in 1914. Leopold III's surrender in 1940 and his conduct under occupation triggered the political crisis known as the Royal Question and ended in his abdication. Baudouin reigned for 42 years and presided over Congolese independence and Belgium's transformation into a federal state. Daughters of the house carried its blood outward: Charlotte became Empress Carlota of Mexico, Marie-Jose was the last Queen of Italy, and Josephine-Charlotte was Grand Duchess of Luxembourg. ## Significance In a country divided by language, the monarchy has been the one institution claimed by both Flemish and Walloon Belgians, and the king's role in brokering coalition governments remains politically real rather than ceremonial. The family has also changed with the country: equal succession was introduced in 1991, making Princess Elisabeth the first female Duchess of Brabant and the future first queen regnant of the Belgians, and in 2020 a court recognised Delphine of Saxe-Coburg as a daughter of Albert II. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Dynasty | House of Belgium (Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) | | Country | Kingdom of Belgium | | Founder | Leopold I, King of the Belgians (1790-1865) | | Reigning since | 21 July 1831 | | Monarchs to date | Seven, from Leopold I to Philippe | | Current head | King Philippe (born 1960), reigning since 2013 | | Heir apparent | Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant (born 2001) | | Principal residences | Royal Palace of Brussels, Castle of Laeken | | Motto | L'union fait la force / Eendracht maakt macht |
Shyama Bachchan married Harivansh Rai Bachchan.
Shyama Bachchan's recorded native place is Allahabad, United Provinces, India.
Shyama Bachchan is recorded in the Bachchan family tree on My rOoOts, alongside 23 other people.
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