50 years of Amul: How an advertisement for butter transformed into witty social commentary

Over the years, the Amul girl has been a steady presence in the lives of Indians — she stared out at us, from hoardings and magazines, from the newspaper, on websites, and on TV.

How did the Amul girl become more than a mascot for an ad campaign? How did the moppet and the cartoons (conceptualised by Mumbai-based daCUNHA Communications) she starred in, transform into social commentary? How did the Amul ads come to voice opinions on events ranging from sports to politics, to controversies that caught the country’s imagination — critical yet neutral, saying what the media couldn’t, but what the public thought?

A new book — Amul India 3.0 published by HarperCollins India — chronicles the metamorphosis of what began as a simple ad campaign for a ubiquitous product like butter, into something that offered a valuable contribution to Indian socio-political discourse.

Here’s a collection of some of the Amul ads that made an impact down the years, reproduced courtesy HarperCollins.

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When celebrated artist MF Hussain found a muse in actress Madhuri Dixit, Amul offered this cheeky take:

Spain’s eight-year reign of world football ended unceremoniously with the 2014 World Cup. Amul was quick to wonder if the team’s “tiki-taka” brand of football had run its course:

One of the most shocking on-field controversies in recent Indian sporting history, this was Amul’s spin on the ‘slapgate’ between Harbhajan Singh and Sreesanth:

Amul’s witticism addressed both sides of the coin, during award wapsi season:

What Rahul Gandhi would have given, to have had Amul’s penchant for one-liners, when it came to his now infamous interview with Arnab Goswami:

Amul did what newspaper front-pages often struggle to do: creating a significant headline, and a pun in the same breath. This is how it observed Arvind Kejriwal and AAP sweeping away the competition:

Donald Trump was the butt of all political jokes as he ran for the Presidential office. And Amul was not far behind:

A clever riposte masked as a question: This campaign perfectly embodied the quandary that most Brits faced during the Brexit vote.

One of the USPs of Amul ads was the use of Hinglish. And here it made a perfect appearance, addressing the Adarsh Society Scam in Mumbai:

A hilarious take on Pahlaj Nihalini’s tiff with Anurag Kashyap (and the rest of the Hindi film industry) over the absurd censorship of the film Udta Punjab:

Javed Miandad hitting that last ball six in Sharjah subjected Indian cricket to the kind of anger and grief that has perhaps never been felt since. Amul felt it too, and was not coy in saying it:

The introduction of the video ‘third-umpire’ was revolutionary in cricket and indicative of the growing cachet of the TV audience. Here it was perfectly caricatured: