BRAND RECALL

A collage of classic brands and consumer products and a trip down memory lane

You are what you eat, they say. If that’s true, the Indian consumer would be a fragrant confection of such ingredients as Rooh Afza, Dalda, Isabgol, Old Monk rum and Kailas Jeevan ointment. But why be literal about it? The fact is that most of what we consume is digested not in our guts but in our heads—in which case we are surely some Rajinikanth-style robot-transformers, part human part Maruti. And part-Suzuki, of course… Our consumerist DNA is tightly wound around a love-hate complex about foreign goods and brands. This famously achieved peak irony in 2005 when Indian hearts swelled as the patriotic businessman Sanjiv Mehta acquired the firm that once owned India—the East India Company. As it turns out, Mehta is a Brit. But never mind—in these fractious times, we really shouldn’t demand that even brands prove their citizenship. And the fact is that hybridity has always been a defining trait of Indian industry and brand marketing. Look through our scrapbook of commodity fetishism and you will find countless examples of products and brands that started out in distant lands but found their true domestic market right here. The Morris that became our Amby, the Vespa that became a Bajaj. Whiskey—which used to come from Scotland but is now as Indian as… well, Britannia bread. Trawling our memories of underdevelopment to assemble this collage of classic brands and consumer products, we are inevitably drawn into the cycles of abundance and scarcity which may also be part of our DNA—there is a popular scientific hypothesis that Indian metabolisms are marked by a ‘thrifty gene’ born of centuries of feast and famine. Similarly, our consumer appetites too have surely been shaped by the changing tides of Licence Raj and liberalisation, protectionism and globalisation. Some of the products you’ll see here survive only in collective memory or as collectible memorabilia, but many continue to thrive and are part of the daily lives of consumers across India or elsewhere in the world. Read on, and as you consume these pages, remember that you’re also enjoying another vibrant vintage brand—india today, estd. 1975.