TEJPAL FAMILY
Nanji Khatau, Tejpal Khatau, and Gokuldas Tejpal
Three Generations from Kotharsa to Bombay’s Great Charitable Trusts
Nanji Khatau, Tejpal Khatau, and Gokuldas Tejpal
Three Generations from Kotharsa to Bombay’s Great Charitable Trusts
Two decades or so after Jivraj Balu made his own solitary crossing to Bombay, a second Bhatia family from Kutch would follow a strikingly similar path from destitution to civic prominence — and would, within three generations, leave behind one of the largest Hindu charitable trusts in nineteenth-century Bombay. The family’s story begins not in Bombay at all, but in the village of Kothara in Kutch’s Abdasa region, home to perhaps a hundred Bhatia households living as farmers and labourers on the edge of a land where drought was a near-constant visitor.
Nanji Khatau c. 1793–1839
It was drought, and the debt it brought with it, that set this branch of the family’s history in motion. Facing a failed harvest and a moneylender’s mounting claim, the village headman Khatau Keshavji arranged, much as Jivraj Balu’s family had a generation earlier, to send his ten-year-old son Nanji off to fend for himself. A boatman from a neighbouring village was persuaded to take the boy aboard a cargo vessel bound for Bombay, with nothing more than enough provisions for the crossing and not a coin tied into his waistcloth.
Nanji worked his passage as ship’s help and reached Bombay after roughly a fortnight at sea, only to be set down on the docks with no one to receive him and no way to make himself understood — his Kutchi speech left him barely able to communicate even in Gujarati. He spent his first night curled up, hungry, on the raised step outside a shuttered shop. The following morning, a labourer took pity on the frightened, weeping child, brought him into the dockyard, shared his own food with him, and eventually delivered him to a Gujarati grocer’s shop, since no one else seemed willing to take responsibility for so young a boy.
The grocer set Nanji to selling dried dates outside a nearby village school, advancing him a small stock on credit and teaching him the arithmetic of buying and reselling in tiny increments. Within a single day, the boy had already turned a clear profit; within two, he had grasped the trade well enough to be trusted with more. He proved sharp, fearless with older boys, and scrupulously honest — he neither gave credit carelessly nor allowed himself to be cheated. The grocer, impressed, eventually took him on as a paid employee, giving him a small wage and a change of clothes.
It was drought, and the debt it brought with it, that set this branch of the family’s history in motion. Facing a failed harvest and a moneylender’s mounting claim, the village headman Khatau Keshavji arranged, much as Jivraj Balu’s family had a generation earlier, to send his ten-year-old son Nanji off to fend for himself. A boatman from a neighbouring village was persuaded to take the boy aboard a cargo vessel bound for Bombay, with nothing more than enough provisions for the crossing and not a coin tied into his waistcloth.
Nanji worked his passage as ship’s help and reached Bombay after roughly a fortnight at sea, only to be set down on the docks with no one to receive him and no way to make himself understood — his Kutchi speech left him barely able to communicate even in Gujarati. He spent his first night curled up, hungry, on the raised step outside a shuttered shop. The following morning, a labourer took pity on the frightened, weeping child, brought him into the dockyard, shared his own food with him, and eventually delivered him to a Gujarati grocer’s shop, since no one else seemed willing to take responsibility for so young a boy.
The grocer set Nanji to selling dried dates outside a nearby village school, advancing him a small stock on credit and teaching him the arithmetic of buying and reselling in tiny increments. Within a single day, the boy had already turned a clear profit; within two, he had grasped the trade well enough to be trusted with more. He proved sharp, fearless with older boys, and scrupulously honest — he neither gave credit carelessly nor allowed himself to be cheated. The grocer, impressed, eventually took him on as a paid employee, giving him a small wage and a change of clothes.
For roughly three years Nanji supported himself hawking roasted grain, puffed rice, and dates through Bombay’s streets, earning a few annas a day, living on a single simple meal, sleeping at the grocer’s shop-step, and sending savings home to his father in Kutch each year.
His fortunes turned when he moved into the cotton trade — first sorting mixed-quality cotton for a Kutchi merchant near Jakhau port who supplied Bombay’s market, then, within a few months, doing the same work for a larger firm at a better wage. He learned to grade cotton, prepare samples for the trading houses, and stamp bales with merchants’ marks, and by his mid-teens was earning a substantial monthly income for a boy his age. It was at this point, with his own position secure, that Nanji sent word home for his younger brother, Tejpal, to be sent to join him.
Tejpal Khatau 1802–1833
Tejpal’s own arrival, some years earlier, had in fact already ended in failure. Sent to Bombay at only five years old — nine years younger than Nanji — while their father struggled to feed even the children who remained at home, the small boy had been placed in his elder brother’s care by the same ship route. But Nanji, himself still a boy with no settled household of his own, could not manage both his street trade and a five-year-old too young to walk the ten or twelve miles a day that hawking required, and after a few days the attempt was abandoned; Tejpal was sent back to Kutch.
He returned to Bombay later, older and more capable, and it was this second arrival — now seven, and already able to read the Gujarati and English alphabets from his work stamping cotton bales — that proved lasting. The brothers took a small rented room together, and Nanji began teaching Tejpal the cotton trade directly: picking, grading, and recording.
Tejpal’s own arrival, some years earlier, had in fact already ended in failure. Sent to Bombay at only five years old — nine years younger than Nanji — while their father struggled to feed even the children who remained at home, the small boy had been placed in his elder brother’s care by the same ship route. But Nanji, himself still a boy with no settled household of his own, could not manage both his street trade and a five-year-old too young to walk the ten or twelve miles a day that hawking required, and after a few days the attempt was abandoned; Tejpal was sent back to Kutch.
He returned to Bombay later, older and more capable, and it was this second arrival — now seven, and already able to read the Gujarati and English alphabets from his work stamping cotton bales — that proved lasting. The brothers took a small rented room together, and Nanji began teaching Tejpal the cotton trade directly: picking, grading, and recording.
Once Nanji had built up capital of his own and handed the family’s established trade over to Tejpal, he launched an independent cotton business; his very first transaction returned a profit of one hundred rupees, and the business grew steadily from there, eventually supporting Nanji’s own warehouse. By the time Nanji was twenty, he had accumulated some ten thousand rupees — enough to leave the business in his brother’s hands, return to Kutch, and marry.
Gokuldas Tejpal1822–1867
Gokuldas, born in Bombay itself, grew up as heir to both his father’s and his childless uncle Nanji’s fortunes. He received only a brief formal education — a handful of years learning Gujarati before being placed with an English-medium tutor, in a Bombay where Bhatia merchants had by then earned real standing with the English trading houses for their honesty, even when their command of English remained imperfect. Nanji began grooming the boy for business early, and Gokuldas is remembered as having taken to it "like a fish to water," working long days in a cramped office at an age when many boys were still at school, and living, by the standards of the merchant families around him, an almost austere existence — carriages and household staff kept strictly for appearances and necessity, with little else spent beyond occasion and obligation.
After Nanji’s death around 1839, Gokuldas — not yet seventeen — inherited roughly six lakh rupees, and did not let the sudden wealth unsettle him. He revived the cotton and Malabar trade, kept a famously plain household despite his means, and grew the family fortune into the crores, though the collapse in cotton prices following the end of the American Civil War cost him roughly two-thirds of his accumulated wealth at one point.
Gokuldas’s transformation from a conventional, old-fashioned merchant — whose charitable giving until his mid-forties had followed the customary pattern of wells, rest-houses, and pilgrimage-town donations in Kutch and Kathiawad — into one of Bombay’s great civic philanthropists is credited to his close friendship with Seth Lakhmidas Khimji, a leading reformer among the Bhatias of his generation. Lakhmidas had been prominent in exposing the conduct of Vaishnav religious leaders in the reform controversies of the period — the same current of reform associated with Karsandas Mulji and the Maharaj Libel Case, covered elsewhere on this site — and is remembered as the driving inspiration, if not the funding, behind Gokuldas’s later civic giving.
In his final years, Gokuldas gave on a scale that few Bombay Hindus of his generation matched: some five lakh rupees during his own lifetime, and a further roughly eight lakh rupees provided for in his will — a sum that was reportedly doubled again once the Bombay High Court, in 1880, transferred administration of the bequest to a committee of prominent citizens for public management, an arrangement that has continued, in essence, for close to a century and a half since. The single largest of these gifts — funding for what became the Gokuldas Tejpal Hospital near Dhobi Talao — is recorded at one and a half lakh rupees, after Gokuldas was persuaded to increase an initial, more modest figure on the advice of a kinsman, Seth Morarji Gokuldas.
Administration of the trust did not pass smoothly: Gokuldas’s widow contested the will’s execution for some years before the courts finally settled the estate’s management on a committee of leading Gujarati, Maharashtrian, and Parsi citizens of Bombay, following the scheme Gokuldas himself had set out.
Administration of the trust did not pass smoothly: Gokuldas’s widow contested the will’s execution for some years before the courts finally settled the estate’s management on a committee of leading Gujarati, Maharashtrian, and Parsi citizens of Bombay, following the scheme Gokuldas himself had set out.
The Gokuldas Tejpal Legacy
Beyond the hospital that bears his name, the Gokuldas Tejpal trust funded temples, rest-houses, and charitable feeding in his native Kutch villages and elsewhere, an Agiyari Lane property in Bombay, the J.T. High School, the well-known Lakshmi Narayan Temple at Gowalia Tank, a Sanskrit school, a girls’ school, and — most enduringly — the Gokuldas Tejpal Boarding, one of Bombay’s most historically resonant institutions.
The J.T. Boarding’s significance extends well beyond its founder’s community: it was the venue for the first-ever session of the Indian National Congress, and its dormitories housed generations of Gujarati students who went on to national prominence, including Mahadev Desai, Bhulabhai Desai, Prabhashankar Pattani, Parikshitlal Majmudar, Justice N.H. Bhagwati, and Morarji Desai, among many others.
Beyond the hospital that bears his name, the Gokuldas Tejpal trust funded temples, rest-houses, and charitable feeding in his native Kutch villages and elsewhere, an Agiyari Lane property in Bombay, the J.T. High School, the well-known Lakshmi Narayan Temple at Gowalia Tank, a Sanskrit school, a girls’ school, and — most enduringly — the Gokuldas Tejpal Boarding, one of Bombay’s most historically resonant institutions.
The J.T. Boarding’s significance extends well beyond its founder’s community: it was the venue for the first-ever session of the Indian National Congress, and its dormitories housed generations of Gujarati students who went on to national prominence, including Mahadev Desai, Bhulabhai Desai, Prabhashankar Pattani, Parikshitlal Majmudar, Justice N.H. Bhagwati, and Morarji Desai, among many others.
Sources
Swami Anand, Kulkathao (Bombay, 1966), Chapter 2: “Tejpal Gharanu” (“The Tejpal Family”).
Wikipedia contributors. "Gokuldas Tejpal." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 3 Jun. 2026. Web. 2 Aug. 2026.
Swami Anand, Kulkathao (Bombay, 1966), Chapter 2: “Tejpal Gharanu” (“The Tejpal Family”).
Wikipedia contributors. "Gokuldas Tejpal." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 3 Jun. 2026. Web. 2 Aug. 2026.