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BY any other metric, she should be old. She was born in 1966 after all. Her very first public outing was atop a horse, reins in one hand, a slice of (Amul) buttered bread in the other. While the other elements of her signature look weren’t in evidence at the time — her iconic white frock with the red polka dots, her short blue bob caught up in a ponytail sprouting from her crown — her tongue-in-cheek humour certainly was. “Thoroughbread,” she quipped, taking note of an elite sport that was increasingly gaining visibility in India: horse racing.
The irrepressible moppet was the brainchild of adman Sylvester daCunha, artist Eustace Fernandes, Usha Katrakanda and others. They’d received the advertising mandate for Amul, and daCunha was looking for a way to go beyond the staid, overdone depictions of food commercials. Voila, a beloved mascot, with a pithy take on all the current events that had India in their thrall, came into existence.
Now a respectable 57 years old, the Amul girl hasn’t aged a whit. She’s just grown ever-more-beloved in the minds of Indian consumers, a pop culture fixture, an unchanging figure in the landscape of our collective consciousness.
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Sylvester daCunha passed on the baton of the Amul ads to his son, Rahul, back in the ‘90s, with nary a dip in her identity, ethos and what she represents. She seamlessly transitioned from billboards to social media, her grasp firmly on the nation’s pulse. And this week, in a development that marked the end of an era, it was reported that the senior daCunha had passed away. Jayen Mehta, the MD of Amul, said the company was mourning the sad loss.
While the Amul Girl is among India’s best-known food brand mascots, there are a few others who’ve tasted popularity — albeit not with as much continued/crossover success as the Utterly Butterly Delicious tot. Here’s a brief look at a few others:
The Parle-G Baby
In many ways, the Parle-G Baby is the Amul Girl’s cousin. For one, she too was created in the 1960s, under the leadership of Maganlal Dahiya, the creative head of Everest Brand Solutions. She is just as recognisable a symbol (albeit of biscuits) as her butter counterpart. She is equally ubiquitous, tied in with the everyday experiences of Indians. But unlike the Amul Girl, her illustrators preferred to paint her in a more realistic style, not as a cartoon character, which understandably has led to some confusion over the years over whether or not it is an actual baby who features on the Parle-G packaging. And even more importantly, since she is depicted as a younger character than the Amul Girl, the Parle-G Baby doesn’t really have a distinctive voice of her own, even if she does have a distinctive image.
Most Parle-G imagery shows the little girl holding up her hands, in a gesture either of surprise or of demand. She has on a slightly old-fashioned frock, and a very short tucked-behind-the-ears hairstyle. Her wide-eyed gaze is innocent but a faint mischief lurks just beyond. If another comparable icon — the Nirma Girl — appeared more two-dimensional, despite being based on an actual child (the late daughter of the detergent brand’s founder, Karsanbhai Patel), the Parle-G Baby was a decidedly three-dimensional cherub.
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And even though she didn’t say anything, the toddler got the brand’s message across just fine: this was a biscuit you’d want to buy for your kids. It was safe, wholesome and full of goodness. The nostalgia factor associated with the Parle-G Baby is so entrenched that nearly six decades later, there is a firm directive: no messing with the mascot.
The Lijjat Papad Bunny
Whether or not you were the kind who obsessed over the White Rabbit from Alice In Wonderland (yes, of course going down the rabbit hole was the only sensible thing to do in the situation!), chance are, you did have a soft corner in your heart for the Bunny who appeared in the Lijjat Papad commercial. So catchy was its “karram kurram” slogan that one didn’t even really pause to consider what an overgrown puppet rabbit was doing in an ad about papad anyway.
The story of how the mascot came to be is similarly whimsical and doesn’t have any clearly discernible rationale behind it. The Lijjat Papad team had seen a programme on Doordarshan featuring puppeteer and ventriloquist Ramdas Padhye, themed around a puppet couple. They asked Padhye to help create a mascot for their brand. A somewhat nonplussed Padhye came up with the bunny.
As Padhye recalls, even the owner of the Lijjat brand was initially uncertain about whether or not a khargosh was the right fit to feature in the ad. Ultimately, the signature guffaw created for the bunny by Padhye, in conjunction with its iconic lines — “mazedar lazzatdar swaad swaad mein lazzat Lijjat Papad!” — soothed all doubts about its appropriateness.
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The MDH Dadaji
The benevolent grandfatherly mascot of the MDH brand of masalas occupies an entirely different position from the ones mentioned above. For one, he really was the statesman of spices, propelling the MDH brand of masalas into a Rs 1,500-crore empire. For another, Dharampal Gulati was not an external/created character, but indistinguishable from the line of masalas he manufactured. His twinkling, encouraging gaze peered out from the ads for everything from Deggi Mirch, Chat Masala and Chana Masala, MDH’s bestsellers. As he became a household face, Gulati was fondly bequeathed the moniker of “Dadaji” or “Mahashay”. In December of 2000, he passed away aged 97, having achieved the milestone of being one of India’s highest-paid CEOs in the FMCG sector. All this, as a refugee who came to Delhi post-Partition with Rs 1,500 in his pocket, and having never studied beyond Class Five!
Over the years, a few mascots for foreign brands too have found dedicated followings in India — from Fido Dido, to the Mr Fantastic-esque Boomer Man and even Kellogg’s Chocos the Bear. But the homegrown icons continue to exert an unmatched pull, occupying a space somewhere between myth, memory and reality in our minds.