Deep inside that bottle of Patak's curry paste in your kitchen lies an ancient and unresolved Hindu tradition-do daughters have a right to share the family fortune?

Meena Pathak and husband Kirit hailed as a U.K. Immigrant success story

But after being persecuted by Mau Mau insurgents, Laxmishankar moved his wife Shantagauray and their six children to Kentish Town, North London, in 1956.

After only being offered work as a drain cleaner for Camden Council, he followed the family tradition by setting up an Indian-food business in the basement of his rented house.

His children, including six-year-old Kirit, couldn't speak English and delivered food carrying notes from their father explaining the destination to bus drivers.

"We showed the driver the note in our left pocket to go and the note in our right to come back," says Kirit.

Meena Pathak

"You can imagine what it was like trying to sell samosas and Indian sweets in a predominantly Jewish area. If I took £2 in a day I had done well. They were desperate times."

Yet by 1958, Laxmishankar has saved enough to open his own shop in Euston, North London, and was soon able to set up a factory in Brackley, Northants.

It was Ugandan dictator Idi Amin who helped transform Patak's — the "h" was dropped to make it easier for the British to pronounce " when he expelled the country's Asian population in 1972.

Kirit says: "We thought, 'What are those people going to eat? They won't touch bangers and mash.'

"We had instructions printed for them and other information about life in Britain, and supplied food to the caterers.

"We really were working around the clock, making the food until late in the night and delivering van loads at 4am."

Yet if Amin perversely helped to establish Patak's, it was Kirit's young wife, Meena who turned it into the brand leader for Indian foods in the world with sales in over 45 countries.

Meena Desai was a 20-year-old model from Bombay when she wed Kirit in an arranged marriage in 1976. Her mother, Hansa, was a dentist and her father, Naishad, a colonel in the Indian army.

Having earned a degree in food technology as a teenager, she became the face of the Pataks company in the 1980s as she penned two best-selling cookbooks and appeared in television adverts.

Away from the cameras, she spent her time commuting between the family's home in Bolton, Lancashire, and the southern Indian city of Cochin in search of ingredients.

"The Jewel In The Crown was a smash hit and Madhur Jaffrey was cooking on TV. The mystique of India was spreading and here we were with the products," the ex-model says.

As their company grew, Kirit and Meena Pathak were hailed as Britain's most successful Asian couple " both have OBEs and their pictures were hung in Britain's National Portrait Gallery.

Meena on a cooking tour promoting her recipes and sauces

Yet, unwittingly, Meena, now 47, was driving a wedge between Kirit and his three brothers and two sisters.

What looked like a rags to riches fairytale was a mere facade for a murky tale of acrimonious family feuds linked to an ancient and controversial Hindu custom that denied daughters a right to the family fortune.

The family fight hit the headlines last month when Kirit's sisters, Chitralekha Mehta, 56, and Anila Shastri, 52, claimed in court that they had been cheated out of millions of pounds worth of shares in the company, which now employs 600.

Chitralekha Mehta

The two sisters claimed that they were dominated by their very strict and traditional parents.

They argued that they were the victims of old Hindu culture in which the family inheritance is inevitably passed on to the sons, thus depriving daughters of their legitimate rights.

The sisters argued that it was under the strong parental pressure that their shares were taken away.

Kirit accused the sisters of "ill motivated gold-digging".

He was backed by his mother, Shantagaury . "This case is a wicked attempt by my two girls, who have only greed, jealousy and malice in their hearts, to get money that does not belong to them.

"They will send me to my grave broken-hearted because of their own dissatisfaction with their husbands (both are divorced) and their lives, and they are blaming me for their misfortune."

The two sisters retaliated by describing Meena as an acid-tongued bully of their mother who lived in Kirit and Meena's 's seven-bedroom mansion.

Britain's Daily Mail newspaper reported that one of the sisters Chitralekha claimed Meena humiliated her 77-year-old mother

"She is scared of Meena. My mother told me about the many times Meena had scolded her for petty things like missing a bed sheet.

"My mother's place in Meena's house needs to be understood.

"My mother has frequently said to me that she was their 'golly', an expression commonly used by Meena to describe people she looked down on.

"I have witnessed my mother being humiliated by Meena in front of her friends many times."

In her sworn affidavit, younger sister Anila was also bitter.

"I was witness to the way Kirit and Meena worked to undermine other members of the family in the eyes of my parents.

"Very often at the dinner table, they would complain about the faults and weaknesses of others and they would never praise them."

Kirit does not disagree that the late-80s were among his family's darkest times.

"Just about every conceivable thing you could go through in a family, we were going through it.

"[Fights about] people not coming to work on time, who should get what car, how many bottles of lemonade did he get and how many did she get, her child goes to a better school than mine, why is she wearing a more expensive coat than mine

"I think it was pretty clear to everybody that things could not continue as they were. Basically, they weren't professional managers.

"The world was moving on but the family wasn't and they weren't making the right contribution. I had to make decisions against the family, to separate the cream from the milk."

Sibling rivalry came to a head in 1989, when Kirit bought out his three brothers in a £6million deal — yet he succeeded only because his mother, Shantagauray, had given him 2,500 company shares.

Those shares had been given to her for safekeeping by Chitralekha and Anila, who had thought they would be returned, according to court papers.

But, unknown to them, Shantagauray had followed Hindu custom, which decrees that only sons, not daughters, can inherit a family business.

All this simmering resentment led to last month's High Court showdown and laid bare the family rifts.

As costs of the legal battle reached C$3 million, the feuding siblings reached an out-of-court settlement which saw the sisters get 4 million pounds each, which includes a 12.3 per cent of the Patak company.

Chitralekha, after the settlement, said: "We are both very happy. We have won and the truth has prevailed.

She said the battle was about family unity not money.

"This was not about the money. We have fought this case to get back what we thought was rightfully ours-that is, the shares in the company."

The sisters might be happy and the legal dispute might be over but the comments of Kirit Pathak left ample hint that the bitterness was bound to stay.

"The decision to settle the claims is a result of my concern for the health of my mother and my elder brother, both of whom have suffered ill-health during the trial," he said. He said the mounting legal costs, aggregating to more than a million pounds, were having an impact on the company and its 600 employees.

The settlement will also give some satisfaction to the youngest Pathak son, Yogesh, who had urged Kirit in a letter two years ago to "swallow his pride and do the right thing" by settling out of court in a "genuine desire to salvage family unity".

The deal will not be completed until the details have been translated into Gujarati so that the family's 77-year-old matriarch, Shantagaury Pathak, can agree to it.

It is likely that the mother of all curry kings and queens will agree to the settlement.