After weeks of inclement weather, the clouds have parted in London. It appears as though the sun’s rays have unanimously agreed to converge on the 300 acres of Stoke Park. Illuminated by nature’s spotlight, Sasha poses in front of a hedge brimming with rhododendrons under the watchful eye of celebrity stylist Law Roach. When Law tells Sasha to angle her face a certain way, she does. When Law pairs Hunter rain boots with Loewe autumn/ winter 2024 on Sasha, she happily obliges. When the hairstylist teases Sasha’s hair into a big halo of curls, she remains unperturbed. Even though Stoke Park is buzzing with the kind of activity to be expected from a Vogue cover shoot, Sasha seems to have found calm in the eye of the storm.
When I chat with her over Zoom a week later, Law’s spell has worn off. Sasha’s hair has reverted to its blow-dried default and the runway fashion has been exchanged for a pink sweatshirt. Now, she is once again Isha Ambani Piramal, heiress, business magnate and member of the executive leadership teams at Reliance Retail, Reliance Foundation and Dhirubhai Ambani International School, in addition to occupying pivotal roles in a panoply of family-founded companies.
Yet despite owning and operating some of India’s biggest organisations, Isha insists that the curly coiffure was the furthest she has ventured outside her comfort zone. It’s why Law invented Sasha, an alter ego, who would hold her hand and help her get there. “He really wanted me to get out of my skin, so we did a bit of method acting,” laughs Isha. “I left my instincts and sensibilities outside the room when I entered and decided to follow whatever creative direction was being given.” She was a quick study, picking up on the nuances of a shot and wrapping up each look quickly before scooping up her phone to check on her kids. Fame and fortune aside, beneath her calm exterior, Isha is like most millennials: anxious and self-effacing. “I’ve been having sleepless nights,” she says, her hand instinctively flying towards her head in a gesture of self-assurance. “My natural hair looks like that, and growing up, I don’t think we ever celebrated having curls, volume or frizz. The way my hair was done for the shoot took me back to my tussles in school—we were always taught to oil our hair and comb it down so it wouldn’t look so out of control.” Then, she shakes her head to dispel the memories. “I think we all just need to be more comfortable with who we are.” Somewhere inside Isha, Sasha’s spirit nods approvingly.
To her credit, blow-out or not, the 32-year-old has unlocked a new level of self-confidence lately, stepping into key roles at the mega opening of the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC) in March last year, followed by the Jio World Plaza launch in November. As head honcho at Reliance Retail, Isha has brought international brands such as Tiffany, Valentino and Balenciaga to India—names that Indians with purchasing power only had access to on their trips abroad. The glow of the limelight has percolated through her protective cocoon, pushing her to the front of the stage to address the crowd at every event as her parents applaud from the sidelines. “To build an institution in Mumbai like she’d seen in the West was a lifelong dream of my mother’s,” says Isha about the NMACC, her soft voice laced with fondness. Since it opened last year, the cultural centre has brought the works of some of the world’s most famous artists, such as Andy Warhol and Yayoi Kusama, as well as popular musicals, such as West Side Story and Mamma Mia!, to Mumbai, thereby redefining how locals spend their evenings outdoors. And if the chock-full Grand Theatre for the Matilda musical that just wrapped up is anything to go by, the NMACC has well surpassed expectations. “I don’t think we anticipated such a warm reception,” Isha concurs. “We’ve been living with this idea for so long. To see children coming and bringing their parents and grandparents along is very moving.”
It’s no coincidence that children come up in conversation when she speaks about work. Mum to twins Aadiyashakti and Krishna, Isha finds that thoughts of them permeate her mind all the time, be it while devising long-term business plans, planning her workday to ensure she and husband Anand Piramal are home in time to put them to bed or pencilling in playtime. For many, parenthood becomes an invitation to lean back into their silly side—an aspect of themselves they often shed on the road to adulthood. I ask Isha if that has been her experience too and she responds with a resounding no. If anything, it has made her take life more seriously. “I’m always thinking that there are these two little babies doing something somewhere and hoping that they’re okay. My doubts range from ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ to ‘Is it okay that we don’t have blackout curtains?’ and everything in between.”
It’s to quell these doubts that women usually look to their mothers. In Isha’s case, perhaps the connection to her mum feels stronger now more than ever before as she embarks on her own journey of motherhood achieved through IVF, like Nita Ambani did with Isha and her brother Akash. “I’m very quick to say that my twins were conceived via IVF because that’s how we’ll normalise it, right?” she says, hopeful that talking about the subject more openly will make it less taboo. “Nobody should feel isolated or ashamed. It’s a difficult process. When you’re going through it, you’re physically exhausted.” After years of being inundated with questions about whether she wants children, Jennifer Aniston finally opened up about her unsuccessful fertility treatment in 2022, admitting how hurtful the unrelenting probing had felt. Before that, in her 2006 memoir Down Came the Rain, Brooke Shields wrote about her IVF journey reducing her to “a slave to the time of day and little vials of liquid”. Closer to home, celebrity pregnancies are microscopically scrutinised and debated in public. It’s almost Atwoodian that in a world where women have to endure pregnancy and childbirth to create new life, often at great personal risk to their own, their bodies become sites of scrutiny, ridicule and violence. The vitriol upholds the outdated notion of fertility as the most crucial marker of femininity and illustrates why women continue to undergo IVF cycles in secret. “If there is modern technology in the world today, why not use it to have children?” Isha asks. “It should be something you’re excited about, not something you should have to hide. If you can find support groups or other women to talk to, the process can feel much easier.”
The importance of female friendships is not lost on the Ambani scion who grew up with two brothers and eventually found her sisterhood through school, college and work. All these years later, she continues to hold them close. In fact, one of them was so dear to her that she went on to become family. “I was very lucky that the person who my brother decided to marry was my best friend, Shloka,” she beams, recounting the beginning of their classroom friendship. “Shloka became like my sister as we grew up. Even right now, we’re sharing the house in London and we joke that we’re actually married to each other because both Akash and Anand are in Mumbai and we’re here with the kids.” Has the addition of Radhika to the family completed the trio? “Anant has always been like the baby figure in my life, someone whom I’ve doted on, so I look at Radhika with a mothering eye. My mum, Shloka and Radhika are my closest confidantes and my first line of friends.”
Isha carries this spirit with her to her workplace, where she’s actively trying to appoint more women at every level. “When you hire young women at junior roles, it’s so important for them to have senior female mentors to understand what their career progression will look like. I was 23 when I started working at Jio [telecommunications] and 90 per cent of the time, I was the only woman in the room.” One way to level the playing field, according to her, is to create equal opportunities for women by interviewing them for executive positions that have historically been ceded to men. “The NMACC team are mostly women. I had just given birth around the launch, and when I had to pump, no one batted an eyelid,” Isha recalls, underscoring her personal motivation to build her empire with women by her side. She also credits her strong support system at home for helping her transition into a working mum. “A mother has to take on a disproportionate amount of labour because there are a few things, like breastfeeding, that only she can do. But there’s a bunch of other stuff that both husband and wife can and must do when it comes to parenting.” Did Anand rise to the occasion? “I’m grateful to him, yes. He does the diaper changes and feeding. On the nights I have to stay up late or be away working, he makes sure he’s around so I don’t feel as bad.”
Isha swears by an anecdote ex-PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi once said in an interview about a woman’s biological clock and career clock being in conflict with each other. Her advice to new mothers, therefore, is to get the help they can afford and prioritise themselves postpartum. “It’s like they say during the safety briefing on a plane: put on your own oxygen mask first before assisting others.”
There’s no denying that having the Ambani suffix to your name comes with an assortment of privileges, including an army of employees at your service to make life easier. And Isha isn’t pretending that being able to successfully juggle a career with child-rearing isn’t a function of the privilege that she was born into. But beyond the headlines about larger-than-life weddings, prestigious acquisitions, big-ticket launches and wearing a blouse adorned with real jadau jewels to her brother’s recent pre-wedding celebrations, the Ambani daughter, who graduated from Yale with a double major in psychology and South Asian studies, has an academic’s mind. When she speaks about what’s to come, we get glimpses of plans to bring Jio World Plaza to full occupancy and showcase grander art and culture spectacles at the NMACC. But what she’s most excited about is how the Reliance Foundation could shape the future of education in India. “The world is changing rapidly and schools need to change along with it,” she says, her eyes alight. “For our parents’ generation, libraries were a source of information. Our generation relies on the internet for referencing. The generation after us will have access to artificial intelligence outside their bodies. What is going to be the role of the human brain?” She pauses, then jokes about being prone to rambling when discussing her passions. I nod encouragingly and she picks up where she left off. “Today, it’s common in schools to see two teachers with a set of 30 students. In schools that have the budget and resources, you might see three to four. Their idea is to slot kids into groups and deliver a customised learning experience based on their capabilities. But shouldn’t every child learn at their own pace? How can we deliver education one-to-one rather than a one- to-15 ratio? What are schools of the future going to look like? These are questions I’m wildly excited about finding answers to.”
So many dreams ready for takeoff, plus prepping for Anant and Radhika’s nuptials and bringing up twins. Is ‘me-time’ a word in Isha’s dictionary at all? Does she, like many of us, spend hours going down internet rabbit holes only to emerge on the weird side of Instagram? “If I had a day with no commitments, I would spend it by myself, scrolling Instagram in a room with no noise and lots of sunlight,” she concedes, smiling cheekily. So can we expect her profile to go public and blue-ticked anytime soon? “I genuinely am an introvert and I guard my private life. I just don’t see how posting about what I eat in a day or who I’m meeting will be interesting to anybody.” A Vogue India reel demonstrating the making of her jadau blouse by Abu Jani Sandeep Khosla that currently sits at 15.8 million views says otherwise, but let’s just say that this mama knows best.
Photographed by Micaiah Carter
Styled by Law Roach
Hair: Yianni Tsapatori/Tap
Makeup: Tanvi Chemburkar/Versis Entertainment
Manicure: Michelle Class/LMC Worldwide
Art Direction: Aishwaryashree
Bookings Editor: Aliza Fatma
Production: Chantelle-Shakila Tiagi, Zim Uddin/Tiagi
Assisted by: Ross Zilwood, Richard Cook, Jonathan Rose (photography); Crystalle Cox, Francesca Martin, Nafisa Tosh (styling); Iman Drissia Coudoux, Emir Tekin, Morgan Shepherd, Avee
Ram (production)
Photographer’s agency: SN37. Stylist’s agency: Mastermind Mgmt
This story appears in Vogue India’s July-August 2024 issue that is now on stands. Subscribe here
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