He has to fight back the tears when he sees his father’s corpse for the last time on this hot, sticky day in Mumbai. Kumar Mangalam Birla has slipped on a white kurta, a collarless, lightweight shirt and has also wound a dhoti round his legs – as Mahatma Gandhi once did. Thousands have come to bid farewell to the richest man in India: Aditya Vikram Birla, the head of the entrepreneurial dynasty, which financed its independence movement, is dead. He died of cancer, at the age of 51. The father now lies in state in Banganga, the centuries-old crematorium space at the southern tip of Mumbai. Steps lead to the stone basin where the water has been replaced with ashes and which is surrounded by Hindu temples and high-rise buildings. There is nowhere else in the economic hotspot that is as quiet as it is here.

The son touches his father’s face for the last time. He is wearing a brown suit, his favourite suit, for his last journey. Birla sprinkles the corpse with water and lights the pyre.

It is that day at the beginning of October 1995, on which the stock exchange in Mumbai opens 90 minutes late for the first time in its history — out of respect for the deceased.

Kumar Birla is alone. It is now coming to him, the son, the heir. The 28 year-old, who seems so modest with his gentle voice and his perfectly parted hair. How is he to run one of the most powerful economic empires in Asia?

The following morning, the young Birla plunges into the raging traffic. He drives to the office as if nothing has happened. Business as usual. But it’s all different. The patriarch is dead. The situation is critical. Months later, managers are still bursting into tears and leaving the room if the father’s name is mentioned. A trauma. How can he follow in his father’s footsteps, one of the most successful entrepreneurs of his generation?

"That was a difficult period for him”, remembers Birla’s wife Neerja. “He had to deal with people, who were two or three times his age.” The pressure was unbelievably intense”, says Amit Chandra, MD of Bain Capital’s Indian operations. “There was also a great deal of scepticism within the company.”

A decade later, the sceptics have been silenced. Kumar Birla — India’s youngest billionaire, at the age of 40 — has boosted the Aditya Birla Group’s sales from USD 1.5 billion to USD 28 billion. “Anybody operating globally today can no longer afford to disregard India”, says Birla. Increasing consumer demand, the engineers, the factories and right in the middle, Birla himself, who embodies one of the country’s most influential dynasties. The family, which initially earned its money in cotton trading, has left its mark all over the country. Aluminium, copper, cement — its empire is expanding continuously. Universities, foundations and temples bear the Birla name. They operate India’s fourth largest chain of schools, 18 clinics and start hundreds of social projects.

The Birlas have come to terms with the powers-that-be for decades, have grappled with socialist premiers. They now have to deal with a more slippery opponent: the market, which will not let itself be schmoozed, does not show its colours and is not remotely interested in the past.

The young Birla is taking the bull by the horns, is filling key positions with new staff and is reforming the Group step by step. The old, cyclical commodities business is no longer sufficient. Birla is moving into new markets, is seeking contact with consumers. Mobile phones, loans, insurance policies, supermarkets. Today, 100,000 people work for Birla in 20 countries: at a mobile phone provider in Mumbai, a carbon factory in the Chinese city of Dashiqiao, a copper mine in Queensland, Australia, or an aluminium plant in Nachterstedt, Saxony-Anhalt. Three dozen companies belong to the Group. “He has made the right decisions strategically”, says Rajeev Gupta, head of the investment company Carlyle’s Indian operation. “Not every chairman of the major conglomerates has managed to do this.”

Kumar Birla embodies India’s ambition to rank among the world’s greatest. He has long played in a league with the 70 year-old industrialist Ratan Tata or the 61 year-old founder of Infosys, Narayana Murthy — only he is far younger. “He has not merely preserved his father’s legacy”, says investor Chandra, “he has transformed it into something new.” Into a Group that is profitable, is expanding rapidly, pays its employees according to their performance — and has every employee sign a canon of values: anybody indulging in any bribery or corruption has to go. “Growth can never be an end in itself”, warns Birla, whose country is in the process of becoming an economic superpower. “Kumar’s ability to combine new ideas and traditions is impressive”, says billionaire Murthy. He is “quiet and prudent”. Vimal Bhandari, who runs the Indian operations of the insurance company Aegon, describes him as “the human face of capitalism”. And right in the middle, as if tradition triumphed over modernity there, he boasts a luxuriant, black moustache.

“Be brave! And don’t look back!”, were the last words that the dying Aditya Vikram whispered in his son’s ear in 1995 before falling into a coma in the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. The best specialists were powerless in the face of the aggressive cancer that devoured his body, starting with the prostate, then moving on to the spine and the lungs.

Anybody of any rank or consequence in Indian society came to the funeral in Mumbai. Ministers, entrepreneurs, celebrities. At the head of the funeral procession, which trundled through the streets with the flower-bedecked corpse, walked Kumar Birla. “The dust has to settle first”, he whispered to the head-hunter Tarun Sheth, who was among the mourners. “But then I need your advice.” Some things had to change.

The son spent a year looking at the companies, travelling from factory to factory, talking, receiving, and listening. Then the staff got to know him. The new boss is not the old one: he hired managers from multinational groups and broke with the tradition of employing staff into old age. Birla created space for new heads. 350 managers had to go, in future staff were to retire at 60. “That was a shock for the company”, says Sheth. “The average age of managers fell from 54 to below 40.

Birla is not afraid of closing factories if they can no longer withstand cheap competition from China. Sacrilege. “One doesn’t throw good money after bad”, says Birla. “Rather we should invest in businesses offering high growth rates.” A matter of course. How radical for a company whose managers were measured for decades by their loyalty to the patriarch and not on their performance. The numbers man Birla insists on good results, efficient processes — but does not want to alienate anybody. He offers managers, who are not pulling their weight, other posts. “I am not a rebel”, he says, “but neither am I am conformist.”

Birla has known the empire from childhood. He has seen how three generations run their companies independently of each other: his legendary great-grandfather Ghanshyam Das Birla, who financed Gandhi’s freedom movement as a young industrialist; grandfather Basant Kumar, who expanded the empire after the war; and father Aditya, who expanded internationally and rapidly outdid his predecessors as entrepreneurs. “It is as if I’ve been at a business school since the age of 15 or 16.”

Aditya Birla left nothing to chance; he took his son with him to meetings. “I wrote notes for myself, if I didn’t understand something”, remembers Kumar Birla. Time became short once the father knew that he was suffering from cancer. Aditya made his son familiar with important appointments and urged him to act more autonomously. Kumar was to lead negotiations, make decisions.

Scarcely anybody suspected how rapidly the son would take over and how great the changes would be. Since the son was no alpha animal. He feared and idolised his father — like the others. “I was afraid of him, too”, he says. Nobody dared to contradict the boss. When he rang, employees at the other end of the line instinctively leapt up from their chairs. “He could be as hard as nails”, says Kumar. And yet the father allowed him a great deal of freedom and gave him self-assurance. When the son did badly in an examination, Aditya set his mind at rest. “Think of the next examination and don’t let yourself be upset by what happened today.” This is advice, which the son repeats virtually word for word years later: he tells MBA graduates that good executives “leave past mistakes behind them, learn from them and turn to the future.”

Aditya Birla knew exactly how it had to look. The son acquiesced. He said yes when the father advised him to train as an accountant. Yes, when his father urged him to study for a Bachelor of Commerce degree. Yes, when the father chose 18 year-old Neerja Kasliwal, the daughter of a textiles industrialist, as his wife and planned the wedding with 5,000 guests down to the most minute detail. Aditya appointed dozens of Birla managers to the wedding committee. And Kumar said yes when the father sent the young couple to London for two years; Kumar was to do an MBA. The son did what was expected of successors in traditional entrepreneurial Marwari families from Rajasthan. “I trusted my father’s judgement so it never even occurred to me to say no.”

But the son had to follow his own path. He took the first steps in London, in the neo-classical rooms of the Business School at Regent’s Park. He began to suspect how much his own company needed to change. “The time spent in London gave him a completely new perspective”, says the head-hunter Sheth. Especially since the world around him was being turned upside down. In 1991, the new government in Delhi brought itself to take a spectacular step: it abolished the planned economy, opened the insular economy to competition and foreign capital. Software entrepreneurs became billionaires, the old economic elites conquered new markets. It was a second economic revolution — following political independence in 1947.

Birla carries a liability around with him, an inheritance worth billions. And a great name, which is associated with the struggle for independence. “I have great confidence in your benevolence and that of your brothers”, wrote Gandhi to Kumar’s great-grandfather. “Rich people like you can be easily counted on the fingers of one hand.” The two met for the first time in 1915: spirit and capital, a great soul and great riches. United in the struggle against the arrogance of their British colonial masters. And in the desire for independence. Birla financed Gandhi, Gandhi ennobled Birla. They wrote to each other almost every week. The man in loincloth often retired to Birla’s palatial house in the centre of Delhi. When he stepped into the garden for evening prayers there shortly after 5.00 p.m. on 30 January 1948, three shots hit him in the chest. The corpse lay in state on the veranda before it was burnt. Today, the Birla residence is a museum dedicated to Gandhi. “I am proud to be a member of this family”, says Birla.

Young Birla links the story by having the values of Gandhi and the famous name of his father. Kumar has resurrected him; he has combined all the companies under the umbrella of the Aditya Birla Group. On 14 November 1996, when his father would have been 53 years old, the son launched the Group’s new logo: a rising sun. The message was that the future had just begun. A stroke of genius by the son, whom so few credited with real greatness, and homage to the father: Aditya is the god of the sun in Hindu scripture.

The symbolism is ubiquitous. A cubist steel sculpture of a larger-than-life figure about to leap into the heavens with only his toe touching the earth stands before the Group’s head office. In the executive suite on the fifth floor, marmoreal rays project from the ceiling into the rooms and the heavy wooden tables are decorated with the father’s initials. Birla rarely comes through the huge main entrance and the stone foyer with the flower-bedecked busts of his father. If he drives up in his BMW 5 series car, he uses the glass-covered side entrance and the silver-clad lift to reach his office. Flunkeys in livery flit through the air-conditioned corridors, the walls are hung with paintings by Indian artists, in between a sculpture of Ganesha. The Hindu god with the head of an elephant, pendulous abdomen and four arms is supposed to remove obstacles from one’s path.

The grandfather Basant Kumar Birla, who was devoted to his grandson when he was still a child, had his office on the same floor. “My height and weight were measured constantly”, remembers Kumar. “Grandfather noted the figures in his diary. He worried constantly that I was too thin.” Today, the 87 year-old is responsible for several listed groups worth billions. “We run these companies independently of each other”, says the grandson. “This was always the case with us.”

In the meantime, the grandfather has publicly declared that he will bequeath his companies to Kumar. He will resign at 90 at the latest, then the Group’s turnover will increase once more. Kumar’s private fortune is estimated at over USD 10 billion. He ranks 76 in the Forbes list of billionaires and is trending upwards. However, Birla, who is a vegetarian and does not drink alcohol, has little in common with the billionaires, who relish flaunting their wealth and surround themselves with Bollywood beauties. Like brewery king Vijay Mallya, who has acquired a Formula 1 team in addition to a cricket team. Or petroleum tycoon Mukesh Ambani, who is in the process of building a 200 m high house, costing EUR 750 million, for his family of five — and 600 servants.

Four years ago, Birla moved from his apartment to a villa in the south of Mumbai, in upmarket Carmichael Road, which meanders up the Cumballa Hill, where the billionaires Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani also live. This is where the country’s greatest entrepreneurial families meet in close proximity. Birla has had an underground garage built, his own cinema and a swimming pool on the roof. It is an oasis to which he retires when he leaves the office and comes home to his wife and children. “I should spend more time with them in future to ensure they get to know me better and we establish closer links.” A long-standing reproach. In 1999, when he took a holiday again for the first time almost four years after his father’s death, he was shocked. “I almost seemed a stranger to my daughter”, he remembers. “If felt as though I had landed in somebody else’s family.”

Birla’s daughter Ananyashree is now 14 years old, plays football and has a passion for chess — she recently played at a tournament in Budapest. His son Aryaman Vikram, whom biographers are already marking as the next head of the dynasty in family trees, is 11 years old; the youngest daughter Advaitesha four. Kumar’s mother Rajashree, who lives in the same house, complains that her son takes too little holiday.

He can still remember clearly the times when he travelled with his father in Darjeeling or Kashmir. He has not forgotten how he tramped through the Matheran forests in pouring rain, how he squeezed into canoes or conquered the Sandakhphu, a 3,500 m high mountain near Mount Everest, in a jeep travelling over rocky paths. “I prefer to stay in a noisy city pulsating with life than lie on the beach or go into the mountains.” Ideally in London. The Birlas still have their own apartment there. The couple go to the theatre or to restaurants and enjoy ambling through Hyde Park or Green Park. “You can do a great deal there but also simply chill out alone.”

Only no spotlights. “Kumar is very shy”, says investor Chandra. “At parties he prefers to stand quietly alone, talks to people he knows — or simply thinks.” Birla says, “I am happy if I can go straight home from work.”

He spends two hours with a spiritual teacher every Wednesday. Together with the guru, he interprets philosophical texts, recites and meditates. “I am not deeply religious but I am religious to some degree”, says Birla. This is traditional. Each factory has its own Hindu temple. Neither should the dozens of monumental prayer sites, which the Birlas have constructed throughout the country, be forgotten. It has been a necessity for the family, “to disseminate a kind of religious mentality”, the great-grandfather once said. Kumar Birla is more restrained. A person’s beliefs are something personal. “The only religion that is important is passion for the company.” However, spiritual experience helps people to be strong and “companies with better corporate governance and values-based management are valued at up to 20 to 30 per cent higher by the markets.”

Good corporate management, values, and spirituality — these are the themes, with which he tries to score. Birla, the good industrialist, who does not put returns above everything else and rejects unbridled capitalism. Not all investors appreciate that. “He will never be a loser”, days Aegon boss Bhandari, but neither will he be as successful as the Mittal clan, who are forging the world’s greatest steel combine, or the Reliance Group, which went public in spring. Birla will always exploit far in excess of 70 or 80 per cent of potential but never more than 90 per cent.

Is it possible to be a good man and a successful one at the same time? In the post-war years, when India’s banks were nationalised under socialist governments and companies were the subject of general suspicion, this was practically ruled out. Capital was viewed as evil. Birla is convinced that today, the perception has changed and tells a story: “Many years ago, when the Pope died and was en route to heaven, his new home, he met an entrepreneur. When the archangel allotted the Pope an apartment with the keys and allotted him a large house, the entrepreneur was distraught. There must be a mistake, he explained to the archangel. He was only an entrepreneur, the other chap was the Pope! Yes, I know’, answered the angel. ‘But we already have 200 popes up here – and you are the first entrepreneur, whom we are welcoming to heaven.’”

When Kumar’s father Aditya Birla went to Boston to study at the beginning of the 1960s, the great-grandfather gave him some advice: “Only eat vegetarian food, do not drink alcohol, do not smoke, go to bed early, marry early, put the light out when you leave a room, develop regular habits, go for a walk every day, spend time with your family. And, in particular, never be extravagant.”

If the great-grandson had to give an account of his moral conduct today — he would not be embarrassed. The recipe, which has made the Birlas rich, still applies. Even the 10 millimetre calibre Swiss Morini pistol, which Birla uses for target practice at weekends, helps his concentration.

Kumar Mangalam Birla, who has learnt to say no, has shown them all, the sceptics, the rivals, his family and himself.

And he has unconsciously taken the path that a Muslim cleric from Sri Lanka prophesied for him. The religious guide told his grandparents that the three year-old would become seriously ill at the age of seven. In fact, doctors subsequently diagnosed a serious bout of meningitis and the family feared for the boys’ life. Kumar survived. The second prophecy was quickly forgotten. The man indicated to the Birlas that the boy would subsequently become the “No. 1”.