"THE Jaguar is now an Indian Beast!" exulted the usually staid Times of India, in referring to the buyout by Indian Tata Motors of iconic British car brands Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford, their American owner.

Concluded last week, the US$2.3 billion (S$3.2 billion) deal startled the corporate and motoring worlds. India, which had been nowhere in the international car business, was suddenly at centre stage.

Ford acquired Jaguar for US$2.5 billion in 1989 and Land Rover for US$2.8 billion in 2000. But it was unable to turn them around, having reportedly lost US$15 billion in the past two years, while Tata Motors' profit in the last fiscal year spurted by 26 per cent.

Mr Ravi Kant, Tata Motors' managing director, has said the Jaguar and Land Rover management would be retained and there would be no job cuts at the manufacturing facilities in Britain, which employ 16,000 workers.

Till now Tata Motors was known mostly for its family cars, the Indica and Indigo. Then, earlier this year, it made the stunning announcement that it would be making the world's cheapest car, the US$2,500 four-door Nano - due on the market this October.

Mr Ratan Tata, chairman of the group and its guiding spirit over the past two decades, is the nephew of the legendary J.R.D. Tata, one of the business doyens of post-independence India. The Tatas are Parsis, or Zoroastrians, the fire- worshipping, Persian-descended community which came to India centuries ago, seeking shelter from persecution in their homeland. J.R.D., along with G.D. Birla, ran the two biggest industrial houses in India, until the Ambanis and Mittals came along. Ratan was virtually designated by the childless J.R.D. as his successor.

The choice was not liked by many of those who had successfully run the Tata empire under the benevolence of J.R.D. But Ratan came into his own when, with the opening up of the economy, India went global. He bought steel conglomerate Corus, Tetley Tea and New York's plush Pierre Hotel.

From making the best trucks in the country together with Mercedes-Benz, he branched into passenger cars. Then, four years ago, on a wet monsoon night when he was driving home from his office in Mumbai, he saw something that transfixed him: A young couple with their two small children on a two-wheeler scooter.

A few days later, he asked his engineers if they could design a safer scooter.

"The first doodles were sketches of a two- wheeler, with a bar around it and some weather-proofing," he said later. A core group, 500-strong, was formed and what eventually emerged was not a scooter but the concept of a small, affordable car which would meet the emission standards of today.

The sceptics, which included rival car manufacturers, scoffed. It can't be done, they said. But he proved them wrong. The Nano could revolutionise motoring not just in India but in many other parts of the world.

But Mr Ratan Tata has had his heart set on a prestigious car for a long time. In the 1980s he tried for the Honda Accord, but India was still in the throes of state control and the bid failed. He was more successful with Daimler-Benz, but it too branched off on its own later.

He finally has a full range of cars, from the cheapest to among the most expensive. And he has done it in an astonishingly short time, just 15 years. It took Toyota, Japan's leading car manufacturer, over two decades to get a firm foothold for Lexus in the United States.

Tata Motors is now in august international company: Mercedes-Benz, the Porsche-owned VW group, Toyota, Renault-Nissan and Hyundai. However, many big names have bitten the dust before, either unable to upgrade their technology or getting their economics wrong. This could be Mr Ratan Tata's sternest test.

The writer, a former editor of Reader's Digest, was also contributing editor at Top Gear, a BBC motoring magazine.

This article was first published in The Straits Times on Apr 4, 2008.