The birth of Ashok Leyland
By Kiron Kasbekar | 20 Nov 2023
The company was first called Ashok Motors. The name came from the founder Raghunandan Saran’s son Ashok.
Raghunandan, son of a car dealer in Delhi, had been inspired by India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s call to businessmen to create a manufacturing base in the country. He built a plant in Madras in 1948 to make cars.
While the company commenced operations with the assembly of Austin cars in Ennore, a suburb of Madras (now Chennai), Saran quickly recognized that the Indian market’s real potential for vehicles lay in trucks and buses catering to public needs rather than private vehicles like cars. The search for a partner to make commercial vehicles started.
Sadly for the family, Saran died in an air crash in 1953. His widow, Raksha Saran, became a director on the company’s board.
Later, even as Austin cars began rolling out of the Ennore plant, plans to make trucks had already been laid. In 1950 the company had signed a 7-year agreement with British Leyland, under which it gained the sole rights to import, assemble and make Leyland trucks. It received a license from the British company in 1954 to make 1,000 Comets a year.
In 1955 British Leyland acquired a 40 per cent stake in the company, and its name was changed to Ashok Leyland.
In May 1954 the Indian government approved Ashok Motors’ proposal to make the Leyland Comet in India. The company also planned to make the Tiger Cub lightweight bus in India.
This was done at the same time that plans of other companies were also approved. These included Hindustan Motors’ plan to make Studebaker lorries, Tata Engineering & Locomotive Company’s plan to make Mercedes-Benz vehicles, and Premier Automobiles’ plans to make Dodge, De Soto, Plymouth and Fiat cars.
