The Doors Marked “Not for Her”
Sharayu Doshi was born in 1933 in Mumbai, into a family whose name was already stitched into India's industrial fabric — the Walchand group. Her father was Lalchand Hirachand and her mother Lalitabai. By most accounts of the era, that lineage should have opened every door in Indian industry to her. It didn't. Tradition barred women from entering the family business, and she was denied a place in it.
She married Arvind Gaurishankar Daftary at the age of nineteen, a partnership that would prove central to what came next — not because he ran the show, but because he didn't try to.
Building Bharat Radiators From Nothing
At 25, refusing to accept exclusion as a final answer, Daftary struck out on her own. In 1958, she founded Bharat Radiators Limited, an auto-parts manufacturing company, with a capital of just ₹200,000 and five workers. She built it with business acumen and a humane approach to leadership that, workers would later say, put her on first-name — or rather nickname — terms with the shop floor. She would remain managing director of the company for the rest of her working life, a tenure in corporate governance that stretched roughly 68 years.
That kind of longevity is rare anywhere. For a woman who'd had to build her own company because the family firm wouldn't have her, it was close to unprecedented.
First Among Equals, Three Times Over
Long before she reached the top of the Indian Merchants' Chamber, Daftary had already been quietly rewriting the rules of who got to lead Indian industry bodies.
In 1971, she became the first woman elected president of the Automotive Components Manufacturers Association — a natural extension of her own work in auto parts manufacturing, but still a first for a body run, until then, entirely by men. She went on to become the first woman member of the executive committee of FICCI, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, and the first woman Rotarian in her area's Rotary Club.
Two Barriers, One Chamber
Then came 1981, and the presidency that gives this piece its title.
Daftary became the first elected president of the Indian Merchants' Chamber — the IMC, founded in 1907 and one of the oldest and most influential trade bodies in the country. Read that carefully: not “the first woman elected president.” The first elected president, full stop. Before her, the role had apparently never been filled by direct election in quite the same way — she was breaking the procedural mould at the very same moment she was breaking the gender one.
Interestingly, during that same run, she stood for president-elect of both the IMC's mainstream body and its Ladies' Wing simultaneously — occupying, for a moment, both the general seat of power and the separate women's wing built because the general seat had once been unreachable. It's a small detail that captures the whole shape of her career: she didn't wait for the side door to be enough.
The Padma Shri and a Life in Institutions
Recognition from the state came later but was significant. In 2004, the Government of India awarded her the Padma Shri, the country's fourth-highest civilian honour, for her contributions to Indian industry.
Her institutional life didn't end at industry bodies. She also served as president of the Dakshin Bharat Jain Sabha. As a devout Jain, she took on the editorship of Jain Bodhak, a fortnightly publication on Jain living, and used it as a platform to make an argument close to her own life story: that gender equality was never an import into Jain dharma but was intrinsic to it, granting women the same dignity, freedom of thought, and opportunity as men — a position she articulated explicitly in response to a government declaration of a “Women's Right Year.”
“Tai” to Her Workers
For all the firsts and honours, those who worked under her at Bharat Radiators remembered something less formal: they called her “Tai” — elder sister — a title that doesn't get handed out for boardroom performance alone. It speaks to a management style that ran on presence and care as much as on strategy, the same instinct that had her guiding decisions with business acumen and a humane approach that could hold its own against hothouse-trained MBAs chasing upward mobility.
A Legacy Measured in Doors Opened
Sharayu Daftary died in May 2025 at the age of 91, closing a public life that had spanned nearly seven decades — from a 25-year-old shut out of her own family's business to a nonagenarian still remembered by name on the factory floor. Married with three daughters, she built not just a company but a template: that the barriers placed in front of capable people are, in the end, only as permanent as the will to walk around them.
She didn't just become the first woman to lead the Indian Merchants' Chamber. She became, by the same act, its first elected leader of any kind — a double first that, decades on, still reads as a fairly precise summary of the life she lived.
References:
- Wikipedia — Sharayu Daftary — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharayu_Daftary
- Jain Samaj — Sharayu Daftary: Founder, Bharat Radiators Ltd. — https://www.jainsamaj.org/content.php?url=SharayuDaftaryFounderBharatRadiatorsLtd
- Ahimsa Foundation / JainSamaj.org — Sharayu Daftary biography — https://www.jainsamaj.org/content.php?url=Sharayu_Daftary_:_Founder,_Bharat
- PeoplePill — Sharayu Daftary: Indian Industrialist — Biography, Education, Career, and Life — https://peoplepill.com/people/sharayu-daftary
- Grokipedia — Sharayu Daftary — https://grokipedia.com/page/Sharayu_Daftary
- Wikipedia — Indian Merchants' Chamber — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Merchants%27_Chamber