Mohandas Gandhi and Dhirubhai Ambani were the two most famous scions of the Modh Bania, a Hindu commercial caste, based in the arid Saurashtra peninsula of India's western Gujarat state. The Mahatma idealized traditional village ways, passive resistance, and homespun cotton. Dhirubhai Ambani, a billionaire industrialist, preached prosperity to a burgeoning Indian middle-class via a business empire built on polyester.
Each changed India. Dhirubhai Ambani's public wore his textiles as durable suits and glittery saris. Indians invested by the millions in his Bombay-listed Reliance Industries, a sprawling conglomerate with $12.3 billion in annual sales that recently became India's first privately owned entrant to the Fortune 500.

With no Oxford or Yale degree and no family capital, he achieved what the 'Elite Brown Sahibs' of New Delhi could not: he built an ultramodern, profitable, global enterprise in India itself. What's more, he enlisted four million Indians, in an adventure in can-do capitalism, convincing them to load up on Reliance stock. His annual shareholders' meetings were held in a Bombay football stadium, and Dhirubhai Ambani became high priest of an 'equity cult' that finally drew the enormous savings of India's middle classes into productive-albeit, risky-investment.

'Think big' was his refrain and 'I am not a loser' was a phrase that epitomised this man behind the Reliance Group which started as a textile manufacturing unit but made its name later as a leading petrochemicals producer diversifying into petroleum refining, telecom and information technology sectors.

Manasi Shah
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