From Petrol Pump to Reliance

The port of Aden, at the southern tip of Arabia, was one of the busiest harbours in the world in the 1950s. Ships stopped there to take on fuel on their way between Europe and Asia. The air was hot and dusty and smelled of oil and the sea.

Among the thousands of young men who had come there to work was a seventeen-year-old from a village in Gujarat. His name was Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani, and everyone called him Dhirubhai.

A teacher's son

He was born on 28 December 1932 in Chorwad, a small coastal village in Saurashtra. His father, Hirachand, was a village schoolteacher with a large family and a small salary.

There was rarely enough money. As a boy, the story goes, Dhirubhai earned a little by selling snacks to pilgrims on weekends at the holy hill of Girnar. He was not a keen student, but he was quick with numbers and quicker with people.

When he was about seventeen, his elder brother, who was already working in Aden, found him a job there. He left home and sailed across the Arabian Sea.

The clerk at the port

In Aden, Dhirubhai worked as a clerk for a large trading firm, A. Besse & Co., which among other things distributed fuel for the Shell oil company. In later years, popular retellings turned this into the story of a boy at a petrol pump. The truth is plainer: he was a junior clerk handling the paperwork of trade, and he watched everything.

He noticed how goods were bought, shipped and sold, how prices rose and fell, and how traders made money in the gaps between them. He saved what he could. He married Kokilaben, a girl from a village near his own, and she joined him in Aden.

A rented room in Bombay

Around 1958, Dhirubhai came back to India with his wife and their small son, Mukesh. He had some savings but no capital to speak of.

With a cousin, Champaklal Damani, he started a trading business called Reliance from a single small room in the crowded Masjid Bunder area of Bombay. It held little more than a table, a few chairs and a telephone. He traded spices at first, then polyester yarn, which was in short supply and great demand.

The family lived in a crowded chawl, a building of one-room homes off a shared corridor. Dhirubhai worked long hours, and he was known for keeping his word in deals and paying suppliers on time.

The mill and the boycott

In 1966 he took a big step. He opened a small textile mill at Naroda, near Ahmedabad, to make cloth from synthetic yarn. He called the fabric Vimal, after his nephew.

Then the wholesale cloth traders, who controlled the market, refused to stock it. They did not like a newcomer setting his own terms.

Dhirubhai did not give up. He and his salesmen went directly to shopkeepers across Gujarat and beyond, town by town. He opened shops that sold only his cloth. Slowly the name became known, and in time the traders who had refused him came back asking for stock.

Shares for ordinary people

In 1977 Reliance offered its shares to the public. At the time, buying shares was something done mostly by a small circle of wealthy investors in big cities.

Dhirubhai reached out to ordinary people instead: teachers, clerks, shopkeepers, families in small towns. Tens of thousands of them bought shares for the first time in their lives. Reliance's annual meetings grew so large that they had to be held in football grounds, with families attending as if it were a festival.

Over the next twenty years, the company grew from making cloth to making the raw materials for cloth, and then into petrochemicals and oil refining. In 1986 Dhirubhai suffered a stroke that left his right hand paralysed. His sons, Mukesh and Anil, took on more of the daily work, but he remained at the centre of the company.

The honest picture

His rise was not without controversy. Critics and journalists accused him of bending government rules and using political influence to help his businesses, and some of these battles became famous. His admirers saw a man who refused to accept that only the old and powerful families could build great industries. Both views are part of his story.

Dhirubhai Ambani died on 6 July 2002 in Mumbai, at the age of sixty-nine. By then, the company that began in one rented room had become one of the largest in India, and millions of ordinary families owned a small part of it.

Want to read more?

Hamish McDonald's The Polyester Prince and his later book Ambani & Sons give a detailed, independent account of Dhirubhai Ambani's life, including both his achievements and the controversies around them.