It's hard to imagine many Indian households that aren't somehow touched by the $100 billion conglomerate named for the family of Ratan Tata, who died this week at the age of 86. Tata has been a mythical name in Indian consumers' imaginations for generations. Every day, all across India, people consume the Tata Group's salt and lentils, commute to work on Tata buses passing Tata cars and trucks after applying Tata beauty products in homes built from Tata steel. In Kashmir, Firdosa Jan makes tea for her family from a packet labeled Tata Tea Gold. 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. Even though it was a business conglomerate, in the popular imagination, Tata was a man to envy and emulate. At the turn of the 20th century, Ratan Tata’s grandfather, Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, built the first luxury hotel in India, and many saw it as better than any the British...