The story of one of India’s grandest hotel groups is usually told through five-star lobbies and marble staircases. But the beginning of this grand saga was rather modest. It began on a cold Shimla hillside where a jobless young man failed a government clerk examination.
Raised by an 18-year-old widow in rural Punjab and disowned by his family, he was penniless and did not have any connection or network to bank upon. But he had grit and fire to do something extraordinary. What followed was a meteoric rise through hotel boiler rooms, a cholera epidemic, and a Rs 100 tip from Motilal Nehru.
Decades of struggle, relentless discipline and strong determination helped him transform that humble beginning into a multi-generational corporate dynasty, long before the founder’s name became synonymous with global luxury: Mohan Singh Oberoi.
Mohan Singh Oberoi’s early life: Childhood, family and education
Mohan Singh Oberoi was born on 15 August 1898 in Bhaun, a village in the Jhelum district of undivided Punjab, now part of Pakistan’s Chakwal District. His father, Attar Singh, a small contractor in Peshawar, died when Oberoi was six months old. His mother, Bhagwanti, was 18 at the time. She raised him alone in a village of a few thousand people, with no family wealth to fall back on.
He studied at the DAV School in Rawalpindi and later moved to Lahore to study law, living with an uncle. He left the course midway, partly to support his family. While staying with his uncle, a practising Sikh, Oberoi shaved off his beard. His uncle objected and asked him to leave the house. He then worked briefly at his uncle’s shoe factory, which shut down after riots. By the time he married Ishran Devi in 1918, he was twenty years old and without steady income.
How a failed government clerk’s exam led Mohan Singh Oberoi to the hotel business
In 1922, a plague outbreak pushed Oberoi to leave home for Shimla. With just Rs 25 in his pocket, he went there intending to clear the junior clerk’s exam. Unfortunately, he failed the exam.
With no plan left, he spent time wandering around the hills across Shimla. As luck would have it, he crossed Hotel Cecil. On a whim, he went inside and asked the man at the front desk for a job. That man turned out to be the hotel’s manager, DW Grove.
Voilà, he did get a job! Not at the front desk, though. His first job was in the boiler room, weighing coal sacks for the hotel’s water heaters for Rs 40 a month. It was later raised to Rs 50.
He worked his way up to the billing clerk, taking on responsibilities beyond what the job required. When his wife joined him in the hotel’s servant quarters, the two of them whitewashed the walls of their run-down room themselves, leaving blisters on his hands.
The Rs 100 Tip: How Motilal Nehru Altered Mohan Singh Oberoi’s Trajectory
While working as a cashier and stenographer under a new manager named Clarke, Oberoi had an encounter that stayed with him for the rest of his life. Pandit Motilal Nehru, leader of the Swaraj Party and father of India’s first Prime Minister, was a regular guest at the Cecil. He needed an urgent report typed overnight, and Oberoi stayed up to finish it. The next morning, Nehru handed him a Rs 100 note.
Oberoi later wrote that the gesture moved him to tears, since he had received little kindness up to that point in his life. With the money, he bought a wristwatch for his wife, clothes for their baby and a raincoat for himself. Years later, when Clarke bought a small hotel of his own, he asked Oberoi to help run it. That gave Oberoi his first-hand experience of managing a hotel entirely.
How Mohan Singh Oberoi bought his first hotel
In 1934, Oberoi bought Clarke’s Hotel from his mentor. This is generally considered the founding moment for the Oberoi Group. He mortgaged every piece of property he owned and pledged his wife’s jewellery to buy the property. He has literally put everything at stake. It took him five years of work to pay the loan back in full.
As P.R.S. Oberoi, his son and later Executive Chairman of the group, would put it decades on: “You must never accept anything that is second best.” That principle traces back to its founder, who put everything he owned at stake for one hotel.
The Calcutta cholera outbreak and its impact on Mohan Singh Oberoi
That was just the beginning. In 1938, Oberoi leased the 500-room Grand Hotel in Calcutta. The hotel had shut down in 1937 after the cholera epidemic killed more than a hundred foreign guests there, and the city was too frightened to visit.
Oberoi negotiated the rent down from Rs 10,000 to Rs 7,000 a month on those grounds. He then ran it as a profitable venture. He noted in one of his writings that much of his career had been shaped by disease outbreaks. Plague had pushed him out of his village, toward Shimla. Cholera opened the door to Calcutta.
Strategic Wartime Expansion: Housing the British Army
When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Calcutta filled with troops, and the British Army needed housing quickly. Oberoi arranged 1,500 beds for soldiers at Rs 10 per person for boarding and lodging.
That effort earned him his first major official recognition, the title of Rai Bahadur, awarded by the British government for wartime services in 1941.
How Mohan Singh Oberoi built India’s largest hotel chain through acquisitions
Acquisition had by then become part of the main success strategy for Oberoi. In 1943, he acquired a controlling stake in Associated Hotels of India from Spencer & Company, after years of quietly buying up its shares. He financed the purchase partly by borrowing against the very shares he was acquiring. AHI owned the Cecil and Corstophans in Shimla, the Maidens and Imperial in Delhi, and hotels in Lahore, Murree, Rawalpindi and Peshawar. The deal made him the first Indian to run the country’s largest hotel chain.
He later hired D. W. Grove, the man who had given him his first job at the Cecil, for Rs 1,500 a month. He also employed the son of another former employer as a general manager. Oberoi described it, as a moment where “the wheel had turned full circle.”
In 1955, he leased the former palace of the Maharajah of Kashmir, Hari Singh, for Rs 5,000 a month over twenty years. The palace had stood empty for a decade and had only ten bathrooms for its dozens of bedrooms and grand halls. He restored it and brought back its original furniture.
By 1965, Oberoi had become the first Indian hotelier to partner with an international chain, opening the Oberoi Intercontinental in Delhi, widely regarded as India’s first modern five-star hotel. A year earlier, in 1966, he had founded the Oberoi School of Hotel Management, now known as the Oberoi Centre of Learning and Development.
From building hotels to moving to politics: Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha years
Oberoi was elected to the Rajya Sabha in 1962, serving until 1968. He then won a seat in the Lok Sabha, representing the Hazaribagh constituency on a Jharkhand Party ticket, by a margin of over 46,000 votes. His Lok Sabha term ran from 1968 to 1971/72, after which he returned to the Rajya Sabha, serving a second term from 1972 to 1978.
Through this period, he continued expanding the hotel business. In 1973, the group opened the 35-storey Oberoi Sheraton in Bombay. Under his leadership, foreign tourist occupancy in Oberoi properties averaged around 85%.
He went on to convert old, dilapidated buildings into landmark hotels, including the Oberoi Grand in Calcutta and the Mena House Oberoi in Cairo. He also got the lease for the Windsor in Melbourne. He personally supervised its restoration despite strong opposition.
He also founded Mercury Travels, a travel agency, and launched Trident, the group’s second hotel brand aimed at business and leisure travellers. He described his approach to businesses in his quintessentially pragmatic manner: “A hotel is a small nation in itself… This empire is not an imperialistic one, but rather based on the idea of rendering service.”
Corporate Battles: ITC’s Stake, Reliance’s Entry, and Retaining Family Control
Oberoi died in New Delhi on 3 May 2002, at the age of 103. By then, the group owned or managed around thirty hotels and five luxury cruisers across six countries. Leadership had already passed to his son Prithvi Raj Singh Oberoi, known as Biki, since his elder son Tilak (Tikki) Raj had predeceased their father.
In 2010, the tobacco and hotels conglomerate ITC built up a stake in EIH, the Oberoi Group’s parent company, staying just under the 15% threshold that would have triggered a mandatory takeover offer. Tensions rose further when it emerged that Biki Oberoi had privately agreed to sell a large family stake to businessman Analjit Singh. In response, the family brought in Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries as a counterweight, selling RIL close to 15% of the company for more than Rs 1,000 crore.
Biki Oberoi stepped back from his role as chairman and CEO of EIH in 2013. He passed away in November 2023, at the age of 94, closing a father-son leadership run that had spanned more than a century.
How the Fourth Generation Maintained Control of the 100-Year-Old Hotel Chain
After Biki’s era, his son took over and became the MD and CEO of EIH in April 2015. Before this, he had served as the Deputy MD, Joint MD and COO. Arjun Singh Oberoi, another grandson of MS Oberoi, took over as Executive Chairman in May 2022, shortly before his father Biki’s death, in what appeared to be a planned transition.
Today, the family continues to hold its controlling stake in EIH through Oberoi Hotels, nearly a century after Mohan Singh Oberoi pledged his wife’s jewellery to buy a single hotel in Shimla.
Along the way, he received the Padma Bhushan in 2001, a Newsweek Elite Winner honour in 1978, and a place in the American Society of Travel Agents’ Hall of Fame, among other recognitions.
None of it changed how he explained his own approach to the business, expressed in a line that the group still holds him to: “No effort is too big, no detail too small.” It is a fitting way to describe a career that began with a man weighing coal sacks in a hotel boiler room.
Editorial Note: This profile is based on original reporting, including direct communication with The Oberoi Group. To ensure a comprehensive perspective, FinancialExpress.com corroborated this information with public records and third-party sources. This content is not sponsored, and FinancialExpress.com retains full editorial independence and final authority over all editorial decisions.