Ghatsila is a small town in Singhbum, Jharkhand. In the 1970s, when Ghatsila was still part of Bihar, my father travelled there on work. A technologist, he had been assigned to inspect some mines in the region. For one of his trips from Calcutta, where we lived, he decided to drive the 250 odd kilometres to Ghatsila and to the nearby mines. On his return one afternoon, in his dirty, dust-caked Ambassador, he proceeded to have the car washed while he went in for a bath. In a couple of hours, he had driven off to the club in the same car.
That incident became an anecdote my father loved telling and re-telling — about how the Ambassador was a car you could drive to the mines and drive to the club, how it could take the roads of rural Bihar and the roads (only somewhat better in the mid-1970s) of a big city such as Calcutta, how the Ambassador could be repaired by a country mechanic in the middle of nowhere, how the Ambassador was the iconic Indian car, so suited to sub-continental conditions and conditioning.
The story has a nice, emotional ring to it. Variations of it have been heard in the past few days as generations of Indians have looked back with nostalgia and an excessive melodrama to their own experiences with the Ambassador car. A moment of closure has arrived with the shutting down of the Hindustan Motors factory in Uttarpara, near Calcutta — or Kolkata as it now known, in a world were old verities are no more sacred.
The Uttarpara factory was where the Ambassador was built. Perhaps it was the rough and ready manner of the factory and its functioning or the fact that the Ambassador lent itself to such all-purpose and non-specialist repair that led to HM becoming the abbreviation for not just Hindustan Motors but also Hatora Maar (hit it with a hammer). This indicated the innovation and improvisation that Indians of the era often had to resort to in order to get the Birla jalopy going.
The silencing of the Hindustan Motors facility in Uttarpara is a story at many levels. At the simplest one, it is of tragedy for the workers and their families now left bereft of income. On a wider plane, it speaks of the industrial decline of Bengal and the expanding rust belt in the environs of its capital, a once-proud manufacturing hub now left behind by time and technology.
Yet, the narrative that has overtaken us is one of memory and pathos. Driving around in an Ambassador as little children, with parents and large extended families to nestle us, the innocence of those years, the magic of nostalgia: this is a mesmerising mix. Unfortunately, it has prevented any dispassionate analysis of the Ambassador phenomenon. Let’s face it: the Ambassador was a terrible and outdated car for much of the period in which it was a top seller.
When my father boasted that it was a car he could drive to the mines of Bihar and the club in Calcutta, he was being economical with the truth. He didn’t really have an option, did he? When a number of misty-eyed folk tell us the Ambassador could be repaired by every other technician and was the rare branded product that became a commodity, they too neglect the fact that there was an absolute absence of choice. If there is only type of car to repair, then all motor mechanics everywhere will obviously learn to repair it.
The Ambassador and its promoters weren’t performing some national service. They were making good money selling an over-priced, under-performing product in a protected market, with government contacts and policies of cronyism keeping out competition. As has often been pointed out, Hindustan Motors and Toyota began making cars at about the same time. Till the 1950s or may be even early 1960s, the Ambassador was a reasonably contemporary car. After that it missed revolution after revolution in the automobile sector. Is it fair to glorify this as some sort of an achievement?
In the 1980s, when the first Maruti 800s came on the streets, I recall a crotchety old uncle being dismissive of the little Japanese cars. “It’s a car for girls,” he smirked. His reasoning was simple enough — how could a car that allowed the driver to change gears so easily be a real car. With the Ambassador, changing gears was the equivalent of entering an arm-wrestling match. Was it truly the best car and the most comfortable one for Indian roads? We can never know because: one, we didn’t bother to ask why the roads were bad; and two, there were no other types of cars to test on those lunar-surface roads anyway.
In a sense, the Ambassador is symbolic of India’s failed 1970s and of the stagnation of the Indira Gandhi years. We started marching backwards at precisely the moment when East Asia and the Asian Tiger economies began to transform their approach and press the growth accelerator. To have missed those opportunities was certainly not glorious. Weeping copiously for the Ambassador is to ignore that reality. It is to dedicate oneself to the comfort zone of the Daridra Narayan mentality, and to the perception of poverty and scarcity as revered and somehow virtuous. Unfortunately, this mindset still remains influential in India.
This is not to suggest that ostentation and over-the-top lifestyles, bling and bluster, are all to be recommended and are natural antidotes. It is only to urge that quality consciousness, value for money and excellence in professional achievement are the rightful drivers of a halfway decent economic system and natural rights of a consumer. For decades, the Ambassador provided none of these. It existed in a distorted market framework that sought to make its success seem normal and correct. One needs to be mindful of that.
As such, even when I think of my childhood and those rides in our family Ambassador, even when I remember my parents and my carefree boyhood, I cannot get myself to shed tears for the Ambassador. It was a shoddy car — fit only for an India that consistently and flagrantly betrayed its potential.
The writer can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com
