Azim Premji on Family-Business Stewardship

Premji was born into a Gujarati Ismaili Khoja Muslim family. His father Muhammed Hashem Premji was a noted businessman called the Rice King of Burma, and famously turned down Muhammad Ali Jinnah's invitation to move to Pakistan after Partition, choosing to remain in India — a family decision that anchors Premji's Indian nationalist identity.

In 1966, at age twenty-one, Premji dropped out of Stanford on news of his father's sudden death and returned home to take charge of the family business. He would finally complete his Stanford electrical engineering degree only in 2000 — a thirty-four-year detour that underscored how completely the family business consumed his early adulthood.

In his 2013 Giving Pledge letter, Premji credited his mother as the most significant influence on his early life. A medical doctor who never practised, she spent close to fifty years building and running a charitable hospital for polio and cerebral-palsy children in Bombay — giving Premji a hands-on model of how difficult, but necessary, sustained institutional philanthropy actually is.

He recounted how in 1966 he had to drop out of Stanford on his father's untimely death (completing his engineering degree only in 2000) and returned to India at age twenty-one to run the small family business. Over the next three decades he focused on building Wipro into a successful, professionally run organisation — a period he described as the precondition for everything he could later give away.