The business story
Born in Chorwad, Gujarat, in 1932 into a modest but literate trading-caste family. Worked for the trading firm A. Besse & Co. in Aden as a teenager, then returned to India in 1958 to found Reliance Commercial Corporation. Moved from yarn trading into textiles (the Vimal brand), took Reliance public in 1977, and pioneered India’s retail equity culture via mass shareholding and convertible debentures. Built Reliance into India’s largest private enterprise, integrated backwards into polyester, petrochemicals, and refining. Died in 2002; awarded the Padma Vibhushan posthumously in 2016.
Early life and background
Dhirajlal Hirachand Ambani, known as Dhirubhai, was born in December 1932 in Chorwad, a village in the Junagadh region of what is now Gujarat. His father was a village schoolteacher. The household had little money and many mouths, and Dhirubhai left school early, but it was also a literate Modh Bania family rooted in a trading culture. He grew up comfortable with numbers and negotiation, and as a boy he sold fritters to pilgrims near the Girnar hills.
Around 1949, still a teenager, he followed an elder brother to Aden, then a British colony and a major port for oil bunkering and trade. He joined A. Besse & Co., a large trading house that distributed Shell products in the region, starting in junior roles and rising into trading work. Those years taught him how commodities, currencies, shipping and fuel moved across borders, knowledge that was hard to acquire inside India's closed economy. A popular story says he profited by melting down Yemeni coins for their silver; it fits his instincts but has never been verified.
Building Reliance
Dhirubhai returned to India in 1958 and set up Reliance Commercial Corporation with his cousin Champaklal Damani, working from a small office near Masjid Bunder in Bombay while the family lived in a modest Bhuleshwar apartment. Starting capital is usually put at around ₹15,000. The firm exported spices and other goods to Aden and imported yarn.
The partnership ended in the mid-1960s, reportedly because the two men had very different tolerances for risk. Dhirubhai kept Reliance, opened a textile mill at Naroda near Ahmedabad in 1966 and made Vimal a well-known brand. From there the company pushed backwards into its own inputs: polyester, petrochemicals and eventually refining at Jamnagar, becoming India's largest private-sector enterprise.
Reliance listed in 1977, and this is where his most widely recognised contribution lies. He persuaded ordinary middle-class Indians, most of whom had never held a share, to invest. He used convertible debentures to raise large sums without giving up control or relying only on banks and state lenders, and held shareholder meetings in football stadiums to fit the crowds. The retail investor base he built helped shape India's modern equity culture.
