Chapter IV · Honour & Trust
Rai Saheb and Rai Bahadur under the old administration, a seat in the Republic’s first Rajya Sabha, and a French ministerial order — a century apart, and all three earned differently. Taken together they trace how a merchant house moved from the durbars of princely Hyderabad into the public life of a republic, and then outward into the world.
The Arc
Three different authorities, three different centuries of thinking about what merits recognition. Read in sequence, they are a small history of how public standing itself changed in India.
I
Early 20th Century · The Durbar
Rai Saheb & Rai Bahadur
Conferred under the administration of the day for public service and standing in trade — the recognition of a merchant who had become a builder of institutions.
Read below ↓II
1952 · The Republic
Member, First Rajya Sabha
Not conferred but elected. The family’s public life moved from princely durbars into the Council of States of a new republic, representing the erstwhile Hyderabad State.
Read below ↓III
2012 · The World
Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
A French ministerial order, awarded for contribution to the arts — the first of the three to come from outside India, and the first for cultural rather than commercial life.
Read below ↓Honour I · Early 20th Century
Rai Saheb, and afterwards Rai Bahadur
The titles of Rai Saheb and Rai Bahadur were conferred on Indian subjects for conspicuous public service — philanthropy, civic works, service on public bodies, and standing in trade. They were held for life, announced formally, and carried real weight in the public life of the day. To hold both, in sequence, marked a man out well beyond his own district.
Pannalal Hiralal Lahoti held them as an industrialist of the former Hyderabad State — Managing Director of the Mahboob Shahi Kulbarga Mills, among the largest and earliest integrated textile mills in the Nizam’s dominion, employing thousands and anchoring the cotton economy of the Gulbarga region.
But the honour is not what he is remembered for. What survives him is a document.
In 1956 he directed, by will, that one-fourth of his estate be set aside in perpetuity for hospitals and educational institutions. Not a donation but a standing instrument — a claim on the family fortune that could not be revisited by later generations, and that continues to fund schools, colleges and eye care across three regions seventy years on.
A title lapses with the man who holds it. A trust does not. Of the three honours on this page, his is the one that is still working.
Honour II · 1952
Member of the First Rajya Sabha of the Republic of India
The second honour is different in kind from the first, and the difference is the point. Rai Saheb and Rai Bahadur were conferred — granted from above, for services rendered. A seat in the Council of States was held. It came with a constituency, a term, and a duty to somebody other than the man who granted it.
In 1952, the Republic constituted its first Rajya Sabha. Puranmal Lahoti of Latur sat in it, representing the erstwhile Hyderabad State — the same territory in which his family had traded for the better part of a century, now a constituent unit of a constitutional democracy rather than a princely dominion.
In one generation the family had moved from the durbar to the Council of States.
He was a patron of technical education in his own right. The Puranmal Lahoti Government Polytechnic at Latur, established in 1962, still carries his name — and gave Marathwada its first generations of professional engineers, at a moment when the region had very little technical training of its own.
That pairing is characteristic of the house: a public position used, in the same lifetime, to build something that would outlast the position.
Honour III · 2012
Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
The Ordre des Arts et des Lettres was instituted by the French Ministry of Culture in 1957 to recognise significant contribution to the arts and letters, or to their diffusion in France and the wider world. Chevalier is its first grade. It is conferred by the Minister, and it is given to comparatively few people outside France.
Prshant K. Lahoti was appointed Chevalier in 2012, in recognition of his contribution to the arts and to Indo-French cultural relations — the work of the Kalakriti Archives, one of the most significant private repositories devoted to the visual history of the Indian subcontinent, and of the Krishnakriti Festival, held free and open to all in Hyderabad every January since 2004.
The first of the three honours to come from outside India — and the first given for culture rather than commerce.
It did not end there. The relationship it recognised was formalised five years later as the Franco-Indian Education Trust, a joint initiative with the Embassy of France established in 2017 and unveiled during the French state visit to India in 2018 — a bilateral platform for educational mobility across every discipline.
Which returns the sequence to where it began. The first honour produced a trust in 1956. The third produced one in 2017. Between them, the family’s answer to recognition has been consistent for seventy years: turn it into an institution.
In Sequence
Each came from a different authority, under a different political order, for a different kind of merit. What stays constant is not the honour but what was done with it.
| Honour | Granted by | For | Nature | What it produced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rai Saheb & Rai Bahadur | The administration of the day | Public service, philanthropy, standing in trade | Conferred, held for life | The charitable trust of 1956 |
| Member, First Rajya Sabha | The Republic of India | Representation of the erstwhile Hyderabad State | Held, with a term and a duty | A polytechnic at Latur, 1962 |
| Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres | The Government of France | Contribution to the arts and Indo-French relations | Conferred by a foreign ministry | The Franco-Indian Education Trust, 2017 |
Read down the last column and the pattern is plain enough: in this house, an honour has never been the end of something. It has been the beginning of an institution.
Continue
1956 · 2003 · 2017
The three instruments of giving that grew out of this page — a charitable will, a memorial foundation, and a bilateral bridge with France.
The trusts →Twenty Institutions
Where the money went. Endowed to local bodies across five regions, so each would belong to the community it served.
The institutions →Seventeen Members
The three men on this page in their place in the line — the Hyderabad, Gulbarga and Latur branches, and the generations either side.
The people →