Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw should have been afraid. Every day for three months in 1985 she waded through a crowd of angry employees to get to her office at Biocon India, a maker of enzymes in Bangalore. This was her payback for hiring uneducated employees. After they joined a communist labor union, she retaliated by automating the plant. The crowd outside burned her in effigy. "I didn't think they'd hurt a woman," she says. But her detractors have certainly tried to hold her back, making it about as tough as possible for a woman to find her way. India's 40 richest! A...