From Tonga to MDH

In the autumn of 1947, a tonga, a two-wheeled horse cart, waited outside New Delhi railway station. The driver called out for passengers. The fare to Karol Bagh was two annas.

The driver was a young man in his twenties. A few months earlier he had been working in his family's busy spice shop in Sialkot, in Punjab. Now Sialkot was in a different country, and he was a refugee in Delhi, with a horse he barely knew how to handle.

His name was Dharampal Gulati.

The shop in Sialkot

Dharampal was born in Sialkot in 1923. His father, Chunni Lal Gulati, ran a small shop selling spices. People in the town called his father "Mahashay", a respectful title, and so the shop became known as Mahashian Di Hatti, the shop of the Mahashay. It was famous locally for its deggi mirch, a deep red chilli powder.

Dharampal did not enjoy school. He left after the fifth class. His father tried to find him a trade, and he tried several, working with mirrors, soap, cloth, rice and carpentry. None of them lasted.

In the end he came back to the family shop, and there he found something he was good at. He learned to choose good chillies and spices, to grind and blend them, and to talk to the customers who came back again and again.

Partition

In August 1947, India became independent, and the land was divided. Sialkot became part of Pakistan.

The months that followed were among the most terrible in the history of the subcontinent. Millions of people were forced to leave their homes and cross the new border in both directions. Hundreds of thousands were killed in violence between communities. Trains arrived at stations full of the dead.

The Gulati family left Sialkot with only what they could carry. They passed through a refugee camp in Amritsar and travelled on to Delhi, where they arrived in September 1947. The city was full of people like them, who had lost their homes, their shops and their savings.

Two annas a ride

Dharampal had about fifteen hundred rupees. He spent more than six hundred of them on a tonga and a horse, and began driving passengers between the railway station and Karol Bagh.

It was hard, uncertain work. Passengers were few, other drivers were more experienced, and some days he earned very little. He had been a shopkeeper, and he did not feel at home on the driver's seat.

After about two months, he sold the tonga. He decided to do the one thing he truly knew.

A wooden stall

With the money, he bought a small wooden stall on Ajmal Khan Road in Karol Bagh. Above it he put up a sign with the old name from home: Mahashian Di Hatti of Sialkot, the sellers of deggi mirch.

The sign mattered. Many refugees from Sialkot had settled nearby, and they recognised the name. They knew the quality of the chilli powder their families had bought for years. They came to the stall, and they told others.

The family ground the spices themselves and kept the quality high. Slowly, the business grew. In the 1950s Dharampal opened a shop in Chandni Chowk, in old Delhi, and then a small factory in Kirti Nagar.

MDH

Over the decades, Mahashian Di Hatti, shortened to MDH, grew into one of the best-known spice brands in India. Its packets, with their familiar colours, were found in kitchens across the country and in Indian shops around the world.

In his later years, Dharampal Gulati became a familiar face himself. He appeared in the company's own television advertisements, an old man with a turban and a white moustache. Many people knew him simply as the grandfather from the spice advertisements.

He gave a great deal back. Through a charitable trust named after his father, he supported a hospital in Delhi named after his mother, Mata Chanan Devi, as well as schools and help for people in need.

In 2019, the Government of India awarded him the Padma Bhushan for his work in trade and industry. He died in Delhi in December 2020, aged ninety-seven.

The road back

People often tell his story as one of great success. But the part worth remembering is quieter. A young man who had lost his home and his town tried something new to survive, saw that it was not right for him, and went back, without pride, to the small, careful work he had learned in his father's shop.

Want to read more?

Yasmin Khan's The Great Partition is a clear and humane history of 1947 and the refugees who crossed the new borders. The MDH website tells the story of the company from Sialkot to Delhi. The Padma Awards records of the Government of India list Mahashay Dharampal Gulati's honour.