In the autumn of 1947, as the Indian subcontinent fractured into two nations, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founding father, made an unusual request of a businessman.
Jinnah wanted Mohamed Hasham Premji to become the new country’s first finance minister, a role that would place him at the centre of nation-building at one of the most volatile moments in South Asian history. Premji declined. Instead, he returned to his factory floor in western India and went back to making cooking oil and soap.
The decision would echo far beyond his own lifetime.
From Burma’s rice trade to India’s factory belt
Mohamed Hasham Premji was born into a Gujarati Muslim family with deep commercial roots in Kutch (Gujarat). His grandfather had been a prominent rice merchant in Burma, and Hasham followed that path, building a formidable trading operation in what is now Myanmar. By the 1930s and early 1940s, his dominance in the rice trade had earned him the nickname ‘the Rice King of Burma.’
Unlike many traders of his era, Premji was not content to remain in commerce alone. In the closing years of World War II, as colonial rule weakened and India’s independence loomed, he began to shift his attention toward manufacturing, a move that required more capital, more risk and longer horizons.
On December 29, 1945, Premji incorporated Western India Vegetable Products Limited in Amalner, a small town in Maharashtra’s Jalgaon district. The company began with a modest capital base, but its ambitions were clear: to manufacture hydrogenated vegetable oils and soaps for a mass consumer market that was chronically undersupplied.
A business built on timing
The timing proved decisive. India’s independence, followed by Partition, triggered shortages in basic consumer goods. Premji’s flagship product, Sunflower Vanaspati, quickly found a place in Indian kitchens, while a byproduct of oil production was converted into 787 laundry soap, ensuring minimal waste and steady margins.
Later, the company also manufactured tin containers in-house, vertically integrating its operations to control costs and quality.
In 1946, just a year after its incorporation, Western India Vegetable Products went public, an unusually rapid move that signalled investor confidence in both the business and its founder.
Recognition beyond commerce
Premji’s reputation travelled well beyond balance sheets. When Pakistan emerged as a new state, Jinnah escalated the offer, inviting Premji to serve as finance minister in the country’s first cabinet.
The refusal was final. Premji chose to remain in India, prioritising his business and family over political power. The decision quietly altered the trajectory of Indian corporate history: his son, Azim Premji, born in 1945, would grow up Indian, not Pakistani, a fact that would later shape one of the country’s most consequential business transformations.
An abrupt end, and an unfinished vision
Hasham Premji died suddenly in 1966, in his early 50s or 60s, leaving behind a stable but conventional consumer goods company. At the time of his death, the business was valued at roughly Rs 20-21 lakh, as per the company website.
His son Azim, then just 21 and studying electrical engineering at Stanford University, was forced to return to India to take over, a succession crisis that might have dismantled a less carefully built enterprise.
What Hasham left behind was not merely a company, but a philosophy. As Azim Premji would later recall, his father’s Gandhian principle guided him.
A founder in the shadows
Today, Mohamed Hasham Premji is largely remembered in footnotes as the father of Azim Premji or the man who declined Jinnah. Yet the foundations of Wipro’s improbable journey, from cooking oil to global information technology, were laid not in Silicon Valley or Bangalore, but in a rice trader’s willingness to think beyond trade, beyond politics and beyond his own lifetime.
His most consequential act may not have been the company he built, but the country he chose to stay in.