About the Family
From a village in Rajasthan to the heart of the Nizam’s Deccan — a century and a half of enterprise, philanthropy and devotion to Hyderabad.
Origins
The Lahotis trace their roots to Gullar, a village in the Nagaur district of Rajasthan. It was from there that the family first came to Gulbarga — then a Kannada-speaking district of the Nizam’s Hyderabad State — some 160 to 170 years ago, making the Deccan their Janma Bhoomi, the land of their birth, and Karma Bhoomi, the land of their work. A Maheshwari trading family by origin, they were part of the wider movement of Marwari merchants who settled across the Nizam’s dominion and helped build its commercial life.
From that first foothold in Gulbarga, the family’s enterprise and generosity spread across all three regions of the old state — the Kannada districts of Hyderabad–Karnataka, Marathi-speaking Marathwada, and Telugu-speaking Telangana with its capital at Hyderabad.
The Enterprise
The family’s commercial life was anchored in its ancestral firm, M/s Dayaram Surajmal — indigenous bankers, cotton merchants and commission agents whose dealings ran across the internal borders of the Nizam’s dominion, financing agriculture and industry from the Karnataka districts through to Hyderabad.
It was this enterprise that carried the family from trade into industry. The firm served as managing agents of the Mahboob Shahi Kulbarga (MSK) Mills at Gulbarga — among the largest and earliest integrated textile mills in the Nizam’s dominion, and for many years the economic lifeline of the town.
The mill employed thousands and anchored the cotton economy of the region — which is why the family’s deepest institutional roots remain in Gulbarga to this day.
Honour & Trust
In recognition of his public works and his standing as a merchant, Pannalal Hiralal Lahoti was honoured by the administration of the day with the titles of Rai Saheb and Rai Bahadur. His legacy, however, rests less on the honours he received than on what he chose to do with what the family had built.
Through the Rai Saheb Pannalal Hiralal Lahoti Charitable Trust, he set aside a quarter of the family’s estate, in perpetuity, for schools and for hospitals.The thread connecting a 19th-century trading house to a 21st-century foundation
That single decision, made generations ago, still guides the family’s giving today, and the trust remains active in education and medical philanthropy across the region.
Across the generations
A Living Legacy
Rather than direct them from afar, the Lahotis endowed land and funds to local bodies, so that each institution would belong to the community it served. Many still carry the family name.
Among the law college’s alumni is Shri Mallikarjun Kharge, who studied law there before a lifetime in national public life.A lasting testament to the institution the family helped found
The people behind the legacy
What they stood for
The story continues
The same enterprise, generosity and rootedness in Hyderabad live on today through Kalakriti India.