Reliance began in one small Mumbai room with three chairs
India's Reliance empire started in a 350 square foot office in Mumbai equipped with a telephone, a single table and three chairs. Its founder, Dhirubhai Ambani, was a village schoolteacher's son who had spent years working in Yemen. He came home in 1958 to trade yarn and spices, and built one of the world's largest companies.
Ambani was born in 1932 in Chorwad, a village in Gujarat. After his time in Aden, where by some accounts he worked at a petrol station, he returned to try business in India's textile trade. With his second cousin Champaklal Damani, who had lived with him in Yemen, he set up a venture importing polyester yarn and sending spices back to Yemen. The family meanwhile lived in a two-bedroom flat in Bhuleshwar, Mumbai.
The partners had different temperaments and split in 1965, leaving Ambani to go it alone. Reliance went public in 1977. Its growth was shadowed by accusations of market manipulation, tax evasion and cronyism. In one 1988 episode, a group of Calcutta brokers bet against Reliance shares, rival buyers pushed back, and the Bombay Stock Exchange shut for three trading days; the short sellers ended up buying shares at high prices, reportedly from Ambani himself. A central bank inquiry found no illegal or unethical conduct by the company.
A stroke in 1986 left his right hand paralysed, and he passed control to his sons, Mukesh and Anil. A second stroke in June 2002 put him into a coma, and he died that July at the age of 69. After his death the brothers fell out over ownership and split the group in two.
An unauthorised 1998 biography, The Polyester Prince, was kept out of Indian shops under threat of legal action, and Mani Ratnam's film Guru was widely seen as echoing his life, though the director denied it was a biography. By 2017 the company employed more than 250,000 people, and in 2016 India posthumously gave him its second-highest civilian honour.
Source: Dhirubhai Ambani
