1942

His death in 1942, before independence, left the group to be carried forward by his sons Kamalnayan and Ramkrishna, whose stewardship converted the freedom-era ventures into the Bajaj Auto and Bajaj Electricals businesses that scaled in the post-independence decades.

The transition is notable for an explicit Gandhian instruction that the family treat its industrial wealth as held in trust for the public, an inheritance of posture that the later generations of the family publicly invoked even as the businesses moved into the licence-raj and post-liberalisation eras.