Scindia Steam Navigation Company Ltd.
Indian shipping company
The Scindia Steam Navigation Company Ltd. was one of the first large Indian-owned shipping companies, established in 1919 by 4 industrialists - Walchand Hirachand, Narottam Morarjee, Lallubhai Samaldas and Kilachand Devchand. Its first vessel, the SS Loyalty, sailed from Bombay to London on 5 April 1919, marking the first time an Indian company operated a steamship service between India and the United Kingdom. The company later expanded to coastal and international routes and played an important role in developing India’s maritime industry. In the early 1940s, Scindia established the Scindia Shipyard at Visakhapatnam, which became a significant milestone in modern Indian shipbuilding and was later nationalized as Hindustan Shipyard Limited.
History
Foundation and early years
On 19 December 1914, the RMS Empress of India was sold by Canadian Pacific Railway to the Maharaja of Gwalior. It was refitted as a hospital ship during World War I for Indian troops. On 19 January 1915, it was renamed Loyalty.
After World War I, prominent Indian businessmen including Walchand Hirachand, Narottam Morarjee, Kilachand Devchand, and Lallubhai Samaldas formed a syndicate to acquire the vessel Loyalty from Scindia of Gwalior. The Scindia Steam Navigation Company Ltd.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Scindia Steam Navigation Company Ltd.” as indian shipping company. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17089113. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1919, 1914 and 1915.
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This entry incorporates text from “Scindia Steam Navigation Company Ltd.” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.