MAHASHAY Dharampal Gulati was 24 at the time of Partition and his family, which had a stable business of spices in Sialkot in undivided India, was among the millions caught in the deadly riots. The family had to leave behind its ancestral home, cattle and most importantly ‘Mahashian di Hatti’ - the spices’ shop founded by his father in Bazaar Pansaariyaan in Sialkot. Life changed dramatically for Dharampal Gulati when his joint family in Sialkot reached Amritsar first and eventually to a ramshackled house with a broken roof in Delhi soon after Partition, struggling to make ends meet. He had reached Delhi on September 27 on a train with two more relatives and Rs 1,500 in his pocket to live with a sister who had managed to claim one of the abandoned houses in Karol Bagh for them,” according to book “Divided by Partition, United by Resilience”.

 

“It was a small house with hardly any place to sleep, no latrine,” says Mallika Ahluwalia, who interviewed Gulati for the book, published in 2018 by Rupa. In Delhi, Gulati got his family’s details registered with the Government for a ‘refugee card’ that entitled them to basic ration. A class 5 dropout, Gulati tried his hand at running a horse carriage and selling sugarcane to make some money, months before returning to his ancestral trade and establishing what would become the iconic MDH brand of spices over the years. “I was wondering what I should do... One day, while roaming around, I reached Chandni Chowk. People were selling tangas there.

 

I asked them how much they were selling for. I bargained a little bit and finally got a tanga for 650,” the book said. “Life was tough. Dharampal remembers that the lack of a latrine in the house meant that they would have to queue up each morning at a public municipal latrine. The family had to live frugally, especially given the large extended family that had joined,” the book says. To grow the business, he gave an ad in a popular Hindi newspaper, Pratap - ‘Mahashian di Hatti of Sialkot Deggi Mirch Waale’.