AP PHOTOS: Tata is a household name for hundreds of millions across India

NEW DELHI, India (AP) — Firdosa Jan, a Kashmiri housewife, is making tea in her home kitchen. The packet she gets the leaves from has Tata Tea Gold printed on it. Hundreds of miles away in the northeastern Indian state of Nagaland 25-year-old Teisovinuo Yhome is cooking a dish on an open fire, using Tata salt for seasoning.

Yhome helps her mother with the household shopping and says they have always bought Tata salt as far as she can remember.

Tata has been a mythical name in Indian consumer’s imagination for generations. Even before the days of aggressive marketing, Tata was a household name. People consumed its salt and tea, saw its lorries plying on the roads, took rides on Tata-made buses to commute to work, used its beauty products and lived in houses built with its steel.

Anecdotes abounded about Tata. Even though it was a business conglomerate, in popular imagination Tata was a man to envy and emulate, who at the turn of the 20th century, built the first luxury hotel, which was better than any the British rulers had built in India. He started the first airline in the country, which was exemplary in its service and punctuality.

Tata was socially responsible before corporate social responsibility (CSR) became the buzzword for businesses. The group was the first to introduce early employee benefit programs for its workers in 1896. It built a hospital in Jamshedpur, before starting a steel mill there. In 1892, it established an endowment fund for Indian students seeking to pursue higher studies abroad and in 1909 founded the Indian Institute of Science, now a public research university.

With time its legend has only grown, and in 2008, the company grabbed headlines with its ‘common man’s car’ Tata Nano. The car cost about $2,000 at its launch. In the same year, Tata acquired the iconic British brands of Jaguar and Land Rover.

Its product portfolio is large with dozens of brands, and even though people continue to use Tata cars, watches, air-conditioners, soaps, salt and tea, the products are a fraction of what the group produces or markets.

Ratan Tata, one of India’s most influential business leaders and former chairman of Tata Group, died at a Mumbai hospital on Wednesday night. He was 86. Under his leadership, the group grew into a $100 billion conglomerate.