In 1915, 29-year-ancient Indian business owner Jhamandas Watumull arrived in Hawaii’s O’ahu island to set up a retail shop of his import business with his associate Dharamdas.

The two registered Watumull & Dharamdas as a business on Honolulu’s Hotel Street, selling exotic goods like silks, ivory crafts, brassware and other curios from the East.

Dharamdas died of cholera in 1916, prompting Jhamandas Watumull to send for his brother Gobindram to manage their Honolulu store while he took worry of their business in Manila. Over the next several years, the brothers would trip between India and Hawaii as they solidified their business.

Today, the Watumull name is ubiquitous on the islands – from garment manufacturing and real estate to education and arts philanthropy, the household is inextricably linked with Hawaii’s wealthy history.

The first South Asians to shift to the island from India, they are now one of its wealthiest families.

“Slowly, slowly, that’s how we did it,” Jhamandas told a local Hawaiian publication in 1973.

Born in pre-independent India, Jhamandas was the son of a brick contractor in Sindh province’s Hyderabad (now in Pakistan). The household was educated but not wealthy. After an accident paralysed his father, Jhamandas’ mother bought his passage to the Philippines where he began working in textile mills. In 1909, he began his own buying and selling business in Manila with his associate Dharamdas.

His grandson JD Watumull says Jhamandas and Dharamdas moved to Hawaii after a drop in their Manila business after the US, which occupied Philippines at the period, curtailed ties with foreign businesses.

Their Hawaii business was renamed East India Store soon after Jhamandas’ brother Gobindram began managing it. In the following years, the business expanded into a major department store with branches in several parts of Asia as well as Hawaii, says SAADA, a digital archive of South Asian American history.

In 1937, Gobindram built the Watumull Building in Honolulu’s Waikiki neighbourhood to house the business’s headquarters. According to SAADA, the multi-million-dollar business had expanded to 10 stores, an apartment house and assorted commercial developments by 1957.

The Star-Bulletin newspaper describes products at the store – linens, lingerie, brass and teak wood curios – as woven with “romance and mystery” that transported one “to distant lands and fascinating scenes”.

As Hawaii emerged as a popular goal for wealthy tourists in the 1930s, shirts in bold colours with island motifs called the ‘Aloha shirt’ became a sought-after souvenir.

According to Dale aspiration, an specialist in Hawaiian textile and patterns, the Watumull’s East India Store was one of the first on the island to carry designs with Hawaiian patterns.

The designs were first commissioned in 1936 by Gobindram from his artist sister-in-law Elsie Jensen.

“Instead of Mount Fuji, she’d have Diamond Head, instead of koi [she’d] have tropical fish, instead of cherry blossoms [she’d] have gardenias and hibiscus and all the things we recognize here,” aspiration said.

The designs were sent to Japan where they were handblocked onto raw silk, Nancy Schiffer writes in the book Hawaiian Shirt Designs.

“These subtle floral patterns, modern and dynamic in concept, were the first Hawaiian designs to be produced commercially,” Schiffer notes.

“They were sold by the boat load and were exhibited as far away as London,” William Devenport says in the book Paradise of the Pacific.

Gobindram’s daughter Lila told aspiration that the Watumull’s Waikiki store had American movie stars Loretta youthful, Jack Benny, Lana Turner and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson coming to buy these shirts.

“More and more we are finding out that Watumull has become a synonym for Hawaiian fashions,” Gulab Watumull said in a 1966 interview in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

The Watumulls soon bought the Royal Hawaiian Manufacturing business, where the first matching household aloha wear was created.

Despite their achievement, it would be decades before the Watumull brothers – Jhamandas and Gobindram – received US citizenship. Their early years in the country were marred by discrimination and challenging immigration laws, the Hawaii Business Magazine wrote.

In 1922, Gobindram married Ellen Jensen, an American, whose citizenship was stripped under the Cable Act for marrying an immigrant who was not eligible for US citizenship. Jensen would leave on to work with the League of Women Voters to reform the law and regain citizenship in 1931.

Gobindram would become a citizen in 1946 when a law allowing Indians to gain citizenship through naturalisation was enacted.

His brother Jhamandas, meanwhile, continued to split much of his period between India and Hawaii.

During India’s 1947 partition, the Watumull household moved from Sindh to Bombay (now Mumbai), leaving much of their property behind, SAADA says.

Jhamandas’ son Gulab eventually arrived in Hawaii to work in the household business and become its head.

In 1955, the brothers split the business with Jhamandas and Gulab keeping its retail portion while Gobindram’s household took over its real estate section.

Jhamandas moved permanently to Hawaii In 1956, a few years after the death of his wife and one of their sons, and in 1961, became a US citizen.

Over the years, the household remained invested in the welfare of India and its people. Gobindram was an energetic member of the Committee for India’s liberty and often travelled to Washington to back the country’s case for independence, Elliot Robert Barkan writes in Making it in America.

Gobindram’s home in Los Angeles was “a Mecca for people concerned with Indian independence”, Sachindra Nath Pradhan notes in the book India in the United States.

The Watumull Foundation in 1946 sponsored a series of lectures by Dr S Radhakrishnan – who later served as India’s president – at American universities.

Gobindram’s wife Ellen was instrumental in bringing an international parenthood conference to Delhi in 1959, leading to the establishment of the country’s first birth control clinics.

The household’s philanthropy has and continues to include financing for educational institutions in Hawaii and in India, endowments for Honolulu-based art programmes and promoting Indian-Hawaiian trade.

Many of the Watumull brothers’ grandchildren now work in and around Hawaii.

In the history few years, as the household business shifted focus to real estate, the last Watumull retail store closed in 2020. The business thanked its customers “for years of excellent business and excellent memories”.

Watumull Properties purchased a 19,045 sq m (205,000 sq ft) marketplace in Hawaii last year. JD Watumull, the president of the business, said, “The Hawaiian Islands continue to be our household’s focus today and in the upcoming.”

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