The Savoury Tale Of India’s Favourite Bhujiawala

Pavitra Kumar. Bhujia Barons: The Untold Story of How Haldiram Built a Rs 5000-Crore Empire. Penguin/Portfolio. 2016

Haldiram’s – whose spicy bhujia is a bit of an obsession with Indians around the world – has a history replete with ingredients worthy of a potboiler movie script; underdog hero, dizzying success, murder, intrigue, and a long-winded, high-decibel family feud that’s been playing out in the courts for nearly three decades. Their story is a bit like the ready ‘masala mix’ – to use a crude bhujia analogy – essential to produce a veritable business biography that’s pacy, gripping and peppered with insight, colour and heavy doses of local flavour.

But quite like it takes more than spice and seasoning to craft a complex recipe, it requires deft storytelling, and a good degree of solid research to bind a large pile of discrepant, fragmented material, spanning three generations, multiple protagonists and several warring factions of a splintered family, into a cohesive whole. Author Pavitra Kumar, a former journalist with CNN IBN and now a Minnesota-based marketing professional, who is also a personal friend, successfully manages the feat in her first outing for Penguin, Bhujia Barons: The Untold Story of How Haldiram Built a Rs 5000-Crore Empire.

Over the years, Haldiram’s has garnered its fair share of the press. From tracing the incredible journey of its precocious founder Gangabhisan Aggarwal a.k.a. Haldiram in Bikaner, right through to the media blitzkrieg that was unleashed following the murder of a tea stall owner, for which Prabhu Aggarwal, the current scion of the Kolkata wing of the family, was sentenced to life behind the bars; the brand has been witness to both the good and the ugly of being in the spotlight.

Yet, information about them has been scattered and limited to occasional news clippings. Not a lot is known about the reticent, secretive individuals that run this large, uniquely managed enterprise that is both – many different territorial entities with no real connect, and one large enterprise that’s tied together by family, shared history, fierce dissension and most critically, an impregnable brand name that is at the crux of one of the bitterest of legal family tussles being fought in corporate India today.

Kumar’s foremost achievement as an author chronicling this labyrinthine saga, is that she seamlessly pieces together the disparate bits of this elaborate puzzle, to tell a non-hagiographic, albeit indulgent history of Haldiram’s. It is an ambitious project that takes her to Bikaner, Nagpur, Delhi and Kolkata, to the salons, factories and boardrooms of the warring factions, from whom she snatches out interesting anecdotes, and finds the pulse of what is arguably today, India’s best known, and also most infamous packaged snack company.

The book gives us rare glimpses into the lesser known aspects of Haldiram’s beginnings in the 1930s; the invisible contributions of a maternal aunt Bikhi Bua, who unwittingly set the wheels in motion for the business, with her mother-in-law’s recipe for the fat, rugged bhujia that Haldiram and his brothers loved to binge on. Or early examples of product differentiation that the young lad showcased, by tweaking Bikhi’s original recipe, using less of besan and more of moth ki daal, to make the end product crispier. Haldiram also demonstrated traces of marketing genius and called his bhujia ‘Dungar Sev’ after the much-loved Maharaja of Bikaner, Dungar Singh, creating a strong brand recall in the market in a time when such tactics were unknown to Indian businessmen.

Over the decades, as the business spread its tentacles across the country and significant parts of the globe, various branches of the sprawling Aggarwal family have had a hand in growing the empire, that has under its fold today nearly 500 products sold under an array of brand names, several quick service restaurants, an e-commerce portal that’s on anvil and ambitious plans for expansion across categories such as frozen food and healthy snacks.

But, as Kumar rightly observes, the family has been as much an enabler of this growth, as it has, an impediment to even greater possibility for success. The endless scrimmage over the Haldiram’s trademark, that overlaps multiple businesses and only modest strides in professionalising the setup has meant, taking the company public through an IPO for instance, has been a near impossibility.

The boldness of the founder, has also at times been replaced by an aversion to risk by successive generations, and at various points in history the family seems to have taken “smaller tentative steps when they could have taken long strides, acting with caution rather than with confidence”, says Kumar. A tendency to protect their heritage, along with decades of bickering and conflict have also “been the blunt side of the razor-sharp sword they wielded, dampening their successes at times”, she adds.

Moreover, important business decisions such as expansion could have also been a result of family pressure or pure serendipity rather than any strategic foresight, believes Kumar, and that things have worked for them thus far, is a factor of hard work and acumen but also fortuitousness and good luck.

Which begs the question, can Haldiram’s survive the onslaught of intense competition from MNCs and a new breed of local players that are breathing down its neck? Or will it, like most family businesses do, die a natural death? Kumar, for all her great recounting skills, is unable to cast a critical gaze on these hard business questions.

A more analytical approach in the narrative would have been welcome, because a complete story is in equal measure about the future trajectory of a brand as it is about its past. What’s also missing is a deeper insight into how the strategies and approaches of each of the families under the brand’s umbrella differ from one another, or how they manage to maintain a broad level of standardisation despite being separately run. It would have also been interesting to understand in more detail why the cousins, bound by territorial agreements in India, choose to export their goods to 60 countries as one entity. What is it that stops them from coming together nationally when they can put up a united front internationally?

Still, for all its shortcomings, Bhujia Barons is a sincere candid attempt at chronicling the trials and triumphs of a family that built a Rs 5,000 crore fortune, selling a humble tea-time snack. Also, for the sake of posterity, it is a detailed documentation of the invaluable history of a traditional Indian enterprise, that can be of much value use as academic reference material.