The King of Spices, Mahashayji of MDH, passes away

Saurabh Tankha

The owner of MDH Spices, Mahashay Dharampal, passed away due to a cardiac arrest. The 97-year-old was undergoing treatment at a Delhi hospital for close to a month. It was last year that he was bestowed with the country’s third highest civilian award, Padma Bhushan.

It must have been in the late 90s (around 1998-99) that I had met Mahashay Dharampal Gulati, around two years after I had joined The Pioneer’s editorial team in New Delhi. The features editor, Poonam Saxena, had conceptualised a column (I forget its name though) for Bazaar, the weekend supplement, wherein we interviewed owners of homegrown brands. As MDH was one of the biggest ones among the category (it still seems to hold the fort), we decided to do a story on the King of Spices, Mahashayji. Poonam assigned the task to me.

Getting an appointment with him was easy. He is one of the most down-to-earth individuals I have ever met. I remember spending around three hours with Mahashayji during which the then septuagenarian shared his life story – from being born in Sialkot, Pakistan in 1923, to selling spices at his father’ shop, Mahashiyan Di Hatti there to migrating as a refugee to Amritsar in India after Partition. It was later that the family moved to Delhi.

He gave me the tiniest detail of his life – didn’t shy away from sharing even the fact that he used to ferry passengers in his tonga to earn money during his initial days in Delhi. “I operated between New Delhi Railway Station and Qutub Road and between Karol Bagh and Bara Hindu Rao, at two annas per passenger,” he reminisced. Later, Mahashayji set up a shop in Central Delhi’s Karol Bagh from where he restarted the family business of selling spices. “A few years later,” Mahashayji recalled, “I rented a small shop in Chandni Chowk as the business had started doing well. I then bought land in Kirti Nagar in West Delhi where we established our manufacturing unit.”

During this meeting, there were many a takeaways for life – the biggest one beings that one should never feel down and out come whatever may. And one should always remain down-to-earth. Though I never had a chance to meet Mahashayji again after that day, his parting words of that time still ring in my ears – “Keep working hard with full honesty and success shall be yours.” A lesson which I follow till date.