Book extract: Nawabs Nudes Noodles – India through 50 years of Advertising

Author: Ambi Parameswaran

Publisher: Pan Macmilan India

Pages: 301

Behind the erstwhile Moore Market in Chennai was the Corporation Stadium where I spent many an evening witnessing sports of all sorts. From the National Hockey Championships to the Ranji Trophy cricket matches, it was a part of my routine during my school days in the early ’60s. The fact that my Dad’s business was close by and that I loved to spend hours wandering around the bookshops at Moore Market were added advantages.

One of the most exciting things I had the opportunity of watching was the rekla race. While these still exist in some form in rural Tamil Nadu, they are no longer popular in the metropolitan city of Chennai. In these races, two men stood in a little chariot that was pulled by two bulls and raced around the stadium to the hooting of enthusiastic crowds. For those of you who may have seen the Hollywood movie Ben Hur and its chariot race, the rekla race was the Chennai equivalent. The bulls were semi -trained and the men riding the chariots were highly trained, but the races invariably ended in collisions, broken bones and more. The rekla race and jallikattu are very popular in rural Tamil Nadu. Jallikattu is another form of bull running where young men try to chase and catch an untrained bull and bring it to its knees. In a strange way, Indian men seemed to have a great fascination with the bull, from the seals of Mohenjo-Daro to the full-page obituary put out by a farme    r on the demise of his favorite bull in the Karimnagar edition of the Telugu daily Eenadu.

As a reflection of the ethos of those times, advertisments aimed at men had an overt macho personality. Brands like Lifebuoy showed brawny men playing football in mucky, rainy conditions only to get into a shower and bathe with the carbolic soap Lifebuoy to the tune of ‘Tandurusti ki raksha karta hai Lifebuoy, Lifebuoy hai jahan, Tandurusti hai wahan’ (Health is protected by Lifebuoy. Where there is Lifebuoy, there is health).

Lifebuoy ran a series of ads featuring men engaged in sports such as football set in a rather semi-urban environment. The Lifebuoy tag line from Lintas, the Lever ad agency, ‘Where there is Lifebuoy, there is health’ was the first ad slogan that was equally popular in urban and rural India.

Colgate toothpower in the ’80s­ took a different angle at the brawn vs brain issue, again aimed at both urban and rural consumers. The film is set in an akhara where muscle-bound wrestlers do their daily practice bouts. A burly young man has just finished his routine and picks up a piece of sugar cane and bites into it. But his dental cavities make him cry with pain. His young sister walks up and gently chides him, ‘ Badan ke liye doodh aur badam, lekin daantho ke liye koyla? Bhaiya, kabhi kabhi deemag ki bhi kasrat karni chaiye’ (For your body you consume milk and almonds but you clean your teeth with coal dust? Brother, at times you should also exercise your brains, not just your body).

The ad crafted by Kamlesh Pandey at Rediffusion then presented the advantages of Colgate toothpowder. Here was a brand that decided to use the Indian man’s fascination with bodybuilding to its advantage by presenting its toothpowder in an interesting context.

The ’70s and ’80s also saw cigarette advertising enter the cinema halls of India, when bad songs in movies often drove viewers out for a smoke break. While Charminar cigarette     said ‘Relax! have a Charminar’, Scissors said, ‘Men of Action-Satisfaction. Scissors always satisfies’. Four Square launched as India’s first king-sized cigarette in the late ’70s offered the dream to ‘Live Life Kingsize’.

When Godfrey Philips wanted a campaign for their Red & White cigarette – and I was part of the team that worked on the campaign – the agency decided to position the brand for men who did good deeds, but did not hanker after the accolades that follow. The campaign ‘Hum Red & White peene walon ki baat hi kuch aur hai’ (those who smoke Red & White are a different breed) went on to run for more than a decade. The model chosen to play the hero in the Red & White films, Raj Babbar, went on to become a very popular film star and has successfully moved into politics as well. A similar fate awaited the Charminar model,

Jackie Shroff, without the political afterlife.

While brands aimed at the lower socio-economic groups were speaking of brute strength and power, in the 1980s we started seeing brands trying to appeal to the new affluent in more sophisticated ways.