How Arundhati Bhattacharya Triumphed Against All Odds

'Giving up is very easy. But don't give up. Try out whatever you can. Something will happen.'

Women guests pose with Arundhati Bhattacharya, second from left, with copies of her memoir Aparajita at its launch in Mumbai.
The book, the Hindi edition of Indomitable, celebrates Bhattacharya's journey and her message of resilience and women's leadership. Photograph: Hemantkumar Shivsharan/Rediff

The Hindi edition of former SBI chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya's memoir arrived last week under a title that says, in one word, what four decades of banking never quite could: Aparajita -- the undefeated.

Key points

Arundhati Bhattacharya's Aparajita, the Hindi edition of Indomitable, traces her four-decade journey from a probationary bank officer to the first woman to chair the State Bank of India.
Bhattacharya says persistence, rather than a grand plan, shaped her career -- taking one step at a time and doing her best even when nothing was guaranteed.
She recalls the personal sacrifices behind her success, particularly the challenges of balancing a demanding banking career with raising her daughter Sukrita, while urging others never to give up without trying every possible option.

Published by Harper Collins in English as Indomitable in 2022 with its Hindi edition Aparajita launched on September 10, the book traces her rise from probationary bank officer to the first woman ever to chair the State Bank of India in its two-century history.

At the launch, in conversation with former CNBC-TV18 CEO Avinash Kaul, Bhattacharya, now President and CEO of Salesforce, South Asia, walked the room back through that journey -- not as a triumphant arc, but as a long series of small, stubborn decisions.

The First Day and the Long Climb After

She remembered her first posting with startling precision: Alipore branch, then the largest treasury branch in West Bengal, on the eve of a five-day Puja shutdown, with crowds lined up outside and government cheque scrolls to tally before anyone could go home.

"I simply did not have time to look up," she said. That day set the tone for what followed. There was no grand plan, she said -- no assurance that any of it would lead anywhere in particular.

"Nothing was guaranteed, nothing was given," she told Kaul. "You continue to put one step ahead of another and try to do your best while doing each of that."

Even success, when it arrived, looked stranger than expected. She recalled that the chairman's room at SBI headquarters famously never got renovated for years, because no incoming chairman wanted to vacate it long enough for the work to be done -- so when her own turn came, she sat outside her office for months just to get the room done up.

What did change, she said, was the institution itself: A bank that once measured itself only against its own past learned, as computerisation and competition arrived, to measure itself against the world, growing from "just a few guys" into a sprawling financial conglomerate.

A Mother's Doubt

Asked whether she had ever wanted to walk away, Bhattacharya said her only real crisis of confidence was never about the job -- it was about her daughter Sukrita, a special child.

A transfer to Lucknow left her afraid she wouldn't find the right school, and she came close enough to quitting that she phoned a former SBI chairman and mentor, M S Verma, to say so. His advice was blunt: She had just been promoted, and this was the moment to plant the fruits of her labour.

Don't give up without trying, he told her. She found a school in Lucknow better than any she could locate later in Mumbai -- and stayed.

"Giving up is very easy," she said, recalling his words. "But don't give up. Try out whatever you can. Something will happen."

She followed this advice and, as fate would have it, went on to become the first woman chairperson of India's largest public sector bank.

What Success Actually Cost

IMAGE: Emcee for the evening Dr Aditi Gowitrikar, Harper Collins' Sachin Sharma, the MD and CEO of Bombay Stock Exchange Sundraman Ramamurthy, Arundhati Bhattacharya, her daughter Sukrita Bhattacharya, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani, Navya Naveli Nanda, author Monika Halan and Avinash Kaul at the launch of the Hindi edition of Indomitable, titled Aparajita. Photograph: Sahil Salvi for Rediff

Bhattacharya did not dress up the price of that persistence. She described a mother-daughter relationship that "has never been easy," and a husband who, she joked, had married her half-expecting banks to shut at 2 pm and hot rotis to be waiting when he got home -- only to learn life would look nothing like that.

The steepest cost came during a posting in New York, when a visa technicality forced her to send her one-year-old daughter back to India with an aunt for a full year. She described calling every evening on unreliable landlines, panicking each time no one answered, eventually enlisting an entire neighbourhood back home to check in on her child and calm her fears.

"That one year," she said, "is something that still haunts me." Even so, she said she has made peace with the choice: "I'm okay with it in the sense that I can live with myself. That's the main thing you have to do."

On a New Generation

Now leading Salesforce in South Asia as its President and CEO, a company far younger in spirit and age, than the bank she once ran, Bhattacharya said she has come to firmly reject the idea that younger employees are entitled or unwilling to put in the work.

If anything, she said, they are driven more by purpose than her own generation often was -- a claim she backed with her own company's paid volunteering days, which she said do more to build loyalty and connection among young staff than almost anything else on offer.