Hawaii
Watumull: The Indian family that built a business empire in Hawaii from scratch
Flickr/East-West CenterIn 1915, 29-year-old Indian entrepreneur Jhamandas Watumull arrived in Hawaii’s Honolulu island to set up a retail shop of his import business with his partner 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 care of their business in Manila. Over the next several years, the brothers would travel 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 family is inextricably linked with Hawaii’s rich history.
The first South Asians to move 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 family 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 trading business in Manila with his partner 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 time, 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.
Getty ImagesIn 1937, Gobindram built the Watumull Building in Honolulu’s Waikiki neighbourhood to house the company’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”.
The Aloha shirts
As Hawaii emerged as a popular destination 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 Hope, an expert 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 know here,” Hope 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 Hope that the Watumull’s Waikiki store had American movie stars Loretta Young, 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 Company, where the first matching family aloha wear was created.
Getty ImagesLong road to citizenship
Despite their success, 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 difficult 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 go 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 time between India and Hawaii.
During India’s 1947 partition, the Watumull family 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 family business and become its head.
In 1955, the brothers split the business with Jhamandas and Gulab keeping its retail portion while Gobindram’s family 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.
Getty ImagesIndia connect
Over the years, the family remained invested in the welfare of India and its people. Gobindram was an active member of the Committee for India’s Freedom and often travelled to Washington to support 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 family’s philanthropy has and continues to include funding for educational institutions in Hawaii and in India, endowments for Honolulu-based art programmes and promoting Indian-Hawaiian exchange.
Getty ImagesMany of the Watumull brothers’ grandchildren now work in and around Hawaii.
In the past few years, as the family business shifted focus to real estate, the last Watumull retail store closed in 2020. The company thanked its customers “for years of good business and good memories”.
Watumull Properties purchased a 19,045 sq m (205,000 sq ft) marketplace in Hawaii last year. JD Watumull, the president of the company, said, “The Hawaiian Islands continue to be our family’s focus today and in the future.”
Follow BBC News India on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
Hawaiian removed free economy meals from its website today without an announcement or warning. If you are flying on Hawaiian today, you may be in for a surprise. We have received reports that, as of yesterday, complimentary Koloa Rum punch was still served.
The airline’s food page now loads an Alaska-style paid pre-order menu. It includes no Hawaii items other than Passion Orange Guava Juice, but does offer a Northwest Deli Picnic Pack, among other choices. The hot sandwich, chips, the Honolulu Cookie Company dessert, and whatever else you may remember from Hawaiian are now gone. Beer in the main cabin is $8.99, wine and spirits are $9.99, and canned cocktails are $12.99.
Updated. Hawaiian/Alaska just said – sorry folks, big error on our part.
“There are no changes to our complimentary meal service in our main cabins. During our PSS transition, several dual‑brand content updates were made to our webpages, and the link referenced in your post was unintentionally directing to an Alaska Airlines pre‑order page. We’re working to correct that now.” — Alaska Airlines.
So now it isn’t clear what this really means for travelers. The Hawaii Airlines meals page (screen shot below) was as found today and now they say these are wrong. But what really is happening, and what the plans are for meals, among other things, is not any clearer.
What changed wasn’t unexpected, but.
Until today, Hawaiian stood apart from every other U.S. airline in this one simple way. You boarded a five or six-hour flight to Hawaii and knew you would be fed something. The meal was still built into the ticket, long after others had removed it, and it stayed there for years after the food itself stopped being anything anyone called special. BOH editors have been flying Hawaiian long enough to have watched the entire tradition shift over the years.
Now the airline’s food runs on pre-ordered food, paid selections, and the same setup Alaska uses everywhere else in its network. That makes sense. The free meal was not, however, quietly removed or softened around the edges. And there are noticeably no Hawaii themed offerings. We hope that will change. The page that promised food was just rewritten, and the replacement is a paid menu.
What is still free and what is not.
Complimentary options in the main cabin are now soft drinks, coffee, and juices. As we reported on our Alaska flight from Hawaii on Monday, we also received a full-sized Biscoff cookie and were handed an expensive chocolate bar. Those are not on the list, however. In any event, this is one of the moves away from what Hawaiian flyers were used to seeing when they checked the Hawaiian Airlines website before a trip.
The food order requires using the app or website, a stored payment method, and a selection window that closes 20 hours before departure. But you can order up to two weeks in advance. If you miss the window, you can buy from the cart, as we also mentioned yesterday. This is the model used across most U.S. domestic routes, and Hawaii flights are now on it too.
Readers were honestly already prepared.
Beat of Hawaii readers saw this coming months ago. One told us to just assume no meal and be pleasantly surprised. Another said she would rather bring her own food. We both concur, and we did. A third called the sandwich basically a hot pocket. Those were not isolated complaints from people nitpicking airline food quality.
And we’ll say, honestly, that Alaska’s paid options are of far higher quality. In any event, travelers were already adjusting to a service pattern they could already see falling apart before Alaska removed it entirely from the website today.
A smaller group still wanted the meal, especially on longer flights where a snack does not get you very far. Both groups ended up landing at the very same place today. The meal is no longer an automatic assumption. It is now something you plan for, pay for, or go without, and that change may come as a surprise to some who have long flown Hawaiian.
Alaska’s system is now the whole system.
Alaska has not served free economy meals for nearly a decade. Its service is based on pre-order or limited in-flight options, and that is now the way it works on Hawaiian flights, too. The Hawaiian planes look the same as before, with the Pualani still on the tail, and the crews are still Hawaiian, but the food system behind the experience is new.
Passengers should plan to decide and pay in advance or expect few options. Honestly, this is an alignment with other airlines, so it should not come as a big surprise. That’s how Alaska has operated for years, and Hawaiian mainland flights now operate inside that same structure.
The details visitors once cared about have changed.
The sandwich got the attention, but readers were pointing in another direction. They often commented on the Koloa Rum punch, the walk-up galley that opened after main service, and the cookie handed out near the end of the flight. One BOH reader put it plainly by saying the rum punch felt more special than the food, and that probably gets closer to the real loss than all the arguments about the odd sandwich ever did.
None of those details appear anywhere on the new Alaska-branded main cabin page. The rum punch is not even in the beverage list. The walk-up galley is not described. The cookie is not mentioned.
The shift is already complete.
For years, flights to Hawaii had different expectations than the rest of U.S. domestic service. There was no app required, no payment screen, and no 20-hour deadline hanging over you before you ever got to the airport. The food showed up, whether you loved it or mocked it, and that was at least still something.
That is over now. Food is optional, planned, and paid. The Hawaii flight planning starts before you get on the plane, and what you eat depends on what you selected earlier, rather than what the airline places in front of you once you are airborne. Hawaii has joined all other domestic flights in that way, as Hawaiian was folded into the same system every other U.S. airline already uses.
Where does this go from here?
First class moves to pre-order in May under Chef Valdez. Tokyo, Sydney, Papeete, and even the long-haul 11-hour HNL-JFK run are not listed on the new international food page at all, leaving those routes unaccounted for for now and giving readers another reason to wonder what else is about to change in the Alaska/Hawaiian offerings.
Mainland economy meal service is the part we can see today, and the change is already notable. Were you booked on a Hawaii flight expecting the meal? What did you find on your tray instead?
Hawaiian Airlines food page as of April 22, 2026:
Photos © Beat of Hawaii.
Get Breaking Hawaii Travel News
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – The search for Honolulu’s next police chief is moving into the next phase.
The Honolulu Police Commission announced it has narrowed the candidate pool to six semi-finalists, selected from an initial list of 11 applicants identified by a recruitment firm.
“The commissioners feel these six applicants exhibited the leadership and management skills necessary to lead an organization as large, complex and critical to the community as the Honolulu Police Department,” said member of the Honolulu Police Commission, Chair Laurie Foster.
“Those qualities were identified in part by surveys and stakeholder interviews conducted by the recruitment firm,” she added.
The names of the semi-finalists have not been released. Officials said confidentiality is being maintained at this stage to encourage applicants who may still be employed elsewhere.
The candidates will next be interviewed by stakeholder panels made up of community members and others who interact with the Honolulu Police Department.
The commission is expected to select finalists during a May 6 meeting, with those names to be announced afterward.
Finalists will then participate in additional interviews and a public appearance before the commission votes on the next police chief at a public meeting scheduled for May 20.
Copyright 2026 Hawaii News Now. All rights reserved.
Pending Home Sales Increased From February to March in the U.S.
Despite higher mortgage rates, pending home sales in the U.S. were up 1.5% in March from the prior month while recording a 1.1% year-over-year decline, according to the National Association of Realtors. On a monthly basis, pending home sales were up in the Northeast and South, while they declined in the Midwest and West. Year-over-year contract signings, however, were down in every region but the South. Realtor.com
‘Untouched’ Scottish Island Selling for £350,000
An island in Scotland will be sold at auction this week with a guide price of £350,000 (US$473,441). Insh Island last sold in 2019, when the National Trust for Scotland sold it for a reported £353,000. The National Trust acquired the island from the will of a man who reportedly lived in a cave for 30 years. Daily Record
Iran War Puts a Pause on Hawaii’s Housing Market Recovery
Hawaii’s housing market was set to be on the road to recovery this year, with local interest rates predicated to decline. However, the war with Iran has caused rates to shoot back up, diminishing buyer confidence. Hawaii’s high concentration of condos and second homes keeps Hawaii’s average mortgage rates slightly higher. Pacific Business News
Unlivable Waterfront Home Outside Melbourne Sells for A$2.38M
An unlivable property in Williamstown, Victoria—a suburb of Melbourne—has sold at auction for A$2.38 million (US$1.7 million), more than A$680,000 over its reserve price. Despite its rundown condition, the sale price isn’t surprising to most, as it’s one of the last opportunities to build on the waterfront. Domain
-
Lifestyle52 seconds agoShe built a following of plus-size customers. Why is she closing her L.A. resale shop?
-
Politics7 minutes agoAs primary election nears, top candidates for California governor debate tonight
-
Science13 minutes ago44% of Americans breathe dangerously polluted air. In California, it’s 82%
-
Sports19 minutes agoKings’ close playoff losses to Avalanche stoke confidence and frustration
-
World31 minutes ago‘Blockade and threats’: Iran blames US siege of ports for stalled talks
-
News1 hour agoPentagon says Navy secretary is leaving, the latest departure of a top defense leader
-
New York3 hours agoGunman Who Killed Baby in Brooklyn Was Targeting Her Father, Police Say
-
Detroit, MI3 hours agoHow these Detroit farmers are fighting for neighborhood food security