The dreamer who built solid castles in the air

Walchand Hirachand Doshi, born in 1882 as the Digamber Jain son of a cotton trader in Gujarat’s Wankaner, was not content with mills and trading houses. He wanted empire-scale industry, and for a while, he almost achieved it.

Walchand’s journey began humbly in the 1910s, with investments in Deccan Sugar Mills and Sholapur Spinning and Weaving Mills. Sugar, the ‘white gold’ of the Deccan, was flush with government incentives, and its profits gave him both capital and clout in Bombay’s mercantile circles. This early success wasn’t glamorous, but it was strategic, serving as a springboard for his audacious leap into heavy industry.

By the 1940s, Walchand had stitched together a federation of ventures that read like a blueprint for modern India: Scindia Steam Navigation Co., set up in 1919, was India’s first indigenous shipping line, defying British monopolies. Hindustan Construction Co. (HCC), set up in 1926, built docks and dams, while Premier Automobiles Ltd, founded six years later, rolled out India’s first passenger cars. In 1940 came Hindustan Aircraft Ltd—later nationalized as HAL—which birthed India’s aviation industry. With sugar and textiles as his cash engine, his empire was worth ₹60-75 crore in 1940s money.

The quintessential gambler

Among his peers, Walchand stood out for his audacity. The Tatas, with their steel fortress generating crores in revenue, were three to four times larger, while the Birla Group, with jute, textiles, and cement assets, matched Walchand’s scale but wielded deeper capital pools and shrewder political bets.

Walchand, however, was the quintessential gambler. His ventures in aviation, shipping, and automobiles were bold but over-leveraged. What’s more, they were tethered to strategic sectors that the newly independent Indian state would not leave in private hands.

His timing was both a blessing and a curse. The interwar years and World War II fueled demand for shipping and defence, which Walchand exploited masterfully. Scindia’s ships carried goods across oceans, and Hindustan Aircraft supplied planes for the war effort.

But India’s shallow capital markets and scanty bank credit left him vulnerable. After 1947, the Nehruvian state’s push to nationalize ‘commanding heights’ industries, including aviation, shipping and infrastructure, swept away his most ambitious bets. Hindustan Aircraft was absorbed into the state, and Scindia’s dominance waned as government priorities shifted.

The swagger of a Rockefeller

Walchand himself was a larger-than-life figure, a flamboyant nationalist-industrialist with the swagger of a Rockefeller. He cultivated political friends and princely patrons with ease, believing India’s industrial future was his to shape. Unlike the patient Tatas or the financially astute Birlas, Walchand ran on ambition and leverage, his ventures often dependent on state contracts or foreign partners.

Critics claimed that he dreamt like Rockefeller but borrowed like a speculator. Yet, there were no scandals to smear his reputation. His aggression was in lobbying, not fraud, extracting contracts from colonial rulers and wrangling with Nehruvian planners.

His sudden death in 1953 left no centralized succession plan. His half-brothers, notably Gulabchand Hirachand, took over Walchandnagar Industries, pivoting to engineering and defence contracts. HCC passed to Gulabchand’s son, Ajit Gulabchand, who inherited Walchand’s itch for grandeur. Ajit’s Lavasa city, a private hill station envisioned as India’s Lake Como, echoed his forebear’s ambition but crumbled under debt, violations of environmental regulations, and land acquisition controversies.

By the 2010s, HCC was among India’s most indebted infrastructure firms. Ajit, the flamboyant Davos skier, avoided outright fraud but couldn’t escape the optics of overreach. Investors and banks took hits as debt spiralled, a 21st-century echo of Walchand’s own vulnerabilities.

The legacy

Walchand’s legacy is one of paradoxes. He was one of the most visionary capitalists of pre-Independence India, a dreamer-builder who wanted Indian equivalents of Ford, Bechtel, and British shipyards. If the Wadias—cautious, technical, enduring—were the ballast of Bombay capitalism, Walchand was its rocket fuel: spectacular in ascent but sadly prone to burnout. His ventures were bold but not fraudulent.

His over-leveraged dreams and dependence on state goodwill left him exposed to a system that favoured the cautious. He built castles in the air that were gone too soon. His story is a lesson in ambition outpacing execution, a reminder that in business, vision alone is never enough.

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