Family History
Ghanshyam Das Birla was born on 10 April 1894 at Pilani village, in the Indian state then known as Rajputana, as a member of the Marwari Maheshwari community. His grandfather, Shiv Narayana Birla, had diversified from the traditional Marwari business of moneylending against pawned items. He had left Pilani for Bombay, using his modest capital to establish a dealership in cotton. The venture was successful and he came back to Pilani to build a mansion (or Haveli), which still stands by the name Birla Haveli. G. D. Birla's father, Baldeodas Birla, was adopted from the Navalgarh Birla family. Baldeodas's fortune was made in partnership with his nephew, Fulchand Sodhani, through speculation in the opium trade running into more than 10 million rupees, in which his elder brother Jugal Kishore Birla had earned a name.
Read more about this topic: Ghanshyam Das Birla
Famous quotes containing the words family and/or history:
“... a family I know ... bought an acre in the country on which to build a house. For many years, while they lacked the money to build, they visited the site regularly and picnicked on a knoll, the sites most attractive feature. They liked so much to visualize themselves as always there, that when they finally built they put the house on the knoll. But then the knoll was gone. Somehow they had not realized they would destroy it and lose it by supplanting it with themselves.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“If usually the present age is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (18551916)