Looking back at the original people's car...

If there is one moment when India changed, when it decisively moved from one set of aspirations and mindset to another, it is when it first saw the Maruti 800. For it was virtually the first product available in India that one lusted for. I remember being transfixed when I saw my first Maruti (it wasn’t even the car, it was the van); I had never seen anything shinier,anything more radiant with bliss.Twenty-five years on, that seems difficult to believe so completely have our eyes been jaded by all the cars that clog up our roads now. But to a generation that grew up watching other people drive their Ambassadors or Fiats (Standard Herald for the less lucky ones), the dinky little bit of plastic, all shiny and red was an invitation to a new kind of paradise.

The Ambassador was the reigning deity till then. Its lines were inspired by a matron’s commodious petticoats and its interiors had the well-worn comfortable shabbiness of the Indian drawing room. It drove one with the laconic recalcitrance of the father, while offering you the familiar comfort of a mother’s lap. You sprawled inside the car when not carrying your entire brood of third cousins and their family friends to the railway station to receive or to see someone off. The car was large, solid and rounded. Nothing about its design acknowledged that it was an object designed to move.

The Ambassador squatted on the ground, embracing its own centre of gravity. It was a car that clearly believed that it was better to waddle than to race and moved with stolid disregard for one’s surroundings or one’s intent. The Ambassador was status quo on wheels, a car that allowed one to stand still even as one moved and do so with one’s entire way of life intact. It pointed nowhere and took us nowhere, which was where we wanted to be. The Fiat was a modern car in the way that a transistor was modern. It detached itself from the collective, being designed for a nuclear family and it had a shape that actually pointed somewhere. It was a car that moved, albeit with extreme self-awareness about its limitations. Like the educated Indian, mildly successful, and keen not to underline that success too much, this was a car that took a small step forward without taking us anywhere new. If the Ambassador was a pyjama, the Fiat was a pair of creased terrycot trousers worn with a nondescript shirt. The Maruti came as a plastic shock out of the blue. It was all electric compactness, bristling with impudent desire. It looked like it was made as a seamless whole by technology instead of being painstakingly riveted together by a combination of lathes and welding machines, as appeared to be the case with the older cars. If the Ambassador and the Fiat at best deigned to confer broad agreement on our travelling intentions, the Maruti leapt to our commands, converting even transient whims that barely crossed our minds into spittle-spraying feats of fierce manoeuvrability. We squeezed into our little dream machines and rocketed off to newer destinations on the road as well as in the mind.


It freed us from our life script. For most of us, who were born in the middle class only to die there, the car was a border we could not imagine crossing. Only the haves could dream of owning a car. For the rest, a Bajaj Chetak after 8 years of waiting period was the best one could hope for. The Maruti compressed the promise of consumerism in its appearance, performance and price. It flung the doors of aspiration wide open and made us believe for the first time we could escape the middle class, tyres screeching. In a larger sense, it made us experience the power of desire and the exhilaration of being in the driving seats of one’s life. We were able to tear ourselves away from a world which measured performance in terms of the thickness of gauge or in terms of hardiness of form. Mutability, flexibility and speed came to be valued as did the overtness of external appearance. We understood packaging even as we redefined the meaning of performance. Substance was no longer opposed to style, and price no longer extracted for performance.

Seen with today’s eyes, the Maruti 800 is a somewhat basic piece of machinery that seems oddly outdated. But if we have driven as far as we have from it, let us remember it was in the Maruti.



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- SANTOSH DESAI,
The Times of India