The Rise and Fall of India’s Richest Man

Adhar does not try to cover up the dark secrets of her father’s complicated private life. Rather she revels in writing about Dalmia’s sexual transgressions and adds a touch of sensationalism, which suggests she is shrewdly aware of what it would take for her book to sell. Dalmia whose “attitude towards women was Vedic” had six wives in all — the first two illiterate village girls, the last four in contrast very literary and accomplished. One wife died early leaving Dalmia with a permanent guilt complex. Another walked out almost immediately after marriage. But four agreed to an unnatural arrangement by which they maintained separate households but competed for his attention.

Dalmia’s personality was a strange mixture of the spiritual and the carnal, the saintly and the sinful, the sublime and the worldly. He began life in poverty in the backwaters of Chirawa in Rajasthan. He moved to Calcutta in his teens in search of fortune. An inveterate gambler, Dalmia, after early setbacks and unpaid debts, made a small fortune speculating on silver prices. He went on to become the richest man in India, with a variety of industries ranging from sugar, cement and insurance to newspaper and textile.

Dalmia, who donated generously to the freedom movement, was friendly with many Congress leaders, including Sardar Patel, Subhas Chandra Bose and Mahatma Gandhi. He was especially close to Jinnah, even though the two men represented diametrically opposite viewpoints. But, Adhar’s suggestion that Dalmia might have been successful in averting the formation of Pakistan by mediating with Jinnah, were it not for sabotage by some Congress leaders, sounds far fetched.

With Nehru, Dalmia had a troubled relationship from the start. Dalmia, a staunch Hindu and believer in cow protection, considered the sophisticated, British educated, atheist Nehru hypocritical and a pseudo-socialist. It did not help that Dalmia was unsubtle enough to mail Nehru a cheque for Rs 5000 in 1931 to tide over financial difficulties. (the Birlas were more discreet in such matters). Nehru scornfully returned the money. Adhar blames Nehru for Dalmia’s later disgrace and imprisonment for defrauding his insurance company, but acknowledges that Dalmia brought trouble on himself by his concerted campaign against the then prime minister. Filled with hubris and convinced by his astrologer Haweli Ram that he would become finance minister, Dalmia forced his newspapers to display his vituperative anti-Nehru speeches prominently.

The title of the book is a take on Mother Dearest, the hatchet job on the late actress Joan Crawford by her adopted daughter. In India, where filial loyalty is taken very seriously, Adhar will certainly be castigated for irreverence. Her references to her 16 siblings, six real and 10 step, may be deemed malicious and

intrusive.

Adhar has not even spared her mother, Dineshnandini, whose enemies accused her of being a sorceress and attempting to poison her husband by spiking his food with datura seeds. Dineshnandini, the author claims, was deliberately framed so as to bring about her fall from grace —though she acknowledges that her mother, who earned a name for herself as a writer and poet, practiced tantra and had a clinical history of melodramatic hysteria.

Despite its handicaps, the biography cannot be dismissed simply as Adhar’s revenge for her teenage trauma in an extremely dysfunctional family. Her racy account succeeds in holding the reader’s interest and has the ring of truth, at least from her perspective. The fate of her family in Dalmia’s last years is described poignantly. The machiavellian intrigues in the household by scheming astrologers, cooks, housekeepers and sundry factotums. The pain and loneliness of living in a decaying 40-room mansion with an overgrown three-acre garden in the heart of New Delhi, where one son is forced to grow potatoes in the backyard to help pay the bills.

Adhar’s recollection of her father’s funeral suggests that it was as dramatic as his life. The step siblings quarrelled over who should light the pyre. The favourite nephew, Vishnu Hari, seized the initiative, while Dalmia’s first born son was beaten up by goons. Adhar sprang to his rescue only to set tongues wagging and revive rumours of incest. The rich, as they say, are certainly different from you and me. And this gossipy biography seems all set to make the bestseller list.