When my wife was a little girl growing up in Ranchi, her father bought a white Ambassador. Well, there were only two colours you could choose from — white and black — and black was in some disrepute, because Calcutta (now Kolkata) had been recently hit by a spate of armed bank robberies where the robbers used a black Ambassador. All black Ambys were being arbitrarily chased on the roads by alert policemen.
My wife’s father was a man of action, in both work and leisure. So every year, the family went on long trips, from Ranchi to Calcutta, Agra, Delhi, in the Ambassador, Sometimes, friends came along. Once, when the car had to carry 10 passengers, my father-in-law stuffed his son — then three years old (now a hulking 6 ft 3) — to his right; that is, between the driver and the front right-hand door. Another child, even younger, spent the journey on the rack between the rear seats and the windscreen. The Ambassador offered both space and jugaad .
On May 25, Hindustan Motors stopped production of the Ambassador. “Iconic” seems to be the most-used word in media reports on the retirement of this lumbering anachronism, this…this artefact of the Nehruvian era. A mere 10 months ago, in July 2013, the Ambassador had won the crown for the world’s best taxi at the Beaulieu’s World of Top Gear motorsport show held in London, beating rivals from Britain, the U.S., Germany, South Africa, Mexico and Russia. The judges called it “virtually indestructible”.
When I moved to Delhi in late 1990, I was advised that I should get a white Amby. This would allow me to jump traffic lights with impunity, park anywhere I felt like, and break any other traffic rules that did not meet my standards. In a city obsessed with power, the white Amby exuded it, and no policeman wanted to take a chance. And if you hung white curtains on the rear window, you could maybe even run over a few people you hadn’t noticed in time or just didn’t like.
I timidly opted for the frog-like Maruti 800, which had the size and agility to quickly manoeuvre through traffic gridlocks. Except that, the few times I grazed an Amby (inevitable, given the general lebensraum attitude of Delhi’s Amby drivers), it remained unscratched and pristine, while my 800 looked like it had been bombed. “Virtually indestructible” is right.
When visiting Kolkata, I of course ride a lot of Ambassadors — all taxis in that city are Ambys, and they are quite often scary experiences. The car shakes across at least three dimensions, wheezes, belches, rattles — inoperable windows doom passengers to a porcine sweat, a door is sometimes tied to the car with ropes, and one has but two choices: cower in a corner and regret that you are an atheist, or believe you are Tintin in one of those impossible vehicles in treacherous terrain.
But then, when an Amby finally did break down, the man running the nearby tea shop could come and fix it. Mostly you needed to open the bonnet, pour some water to cool the engine, hit random parts of machinery with a spanner (any metal object, if spanner not at hand) and the faithful giant would wake up.
A friend of mine had mentioned that her father gifted her mother an Ambassador on her first birthday after getting married. So I WhatsApped her about what happened to the car. Her reply: “The car was used like mad. My mom drove to Ambala station all the time at unearthly hours to pick my dad up. She drove to Chandigarh in the middle of the night, once. Then it ferried us to school for years and dropped many fat teachers along the way too. Then long years of disuse. Mom refused to get rid of it. Lots of money spent to spruce it up periodically. Then one day my sister just sold it off. It carried too much emotional baggage. I was glad to see it go.”
Years later, my friend’s mother was coaxed by her daughters to try driving a Maruti 800. She was vastly unimpressed. What sort of car was this that braked and accelerated at just a hint from her heel? This was not a real car! “What would you like to drive then?” asked her daughters. She pointed wordlessly to a large menacing SUV across the road. She was then 70.
The death knell for the Ambassador was struck in 2003 by former Prime Minister Vajpayee who replaced his fleet of white Ambys with BMWs. That was it. The police started stopping white Ambys for traffic violations (though not the ones with curtains). An era had ended.
Of course, there are many who don’t have fond memories of the Ambassador. Said a friend: “It was a relic of everything that was wrong with India. Outdated technology, no regard for customers, no changing with the times, dull, drab. It was the Soviet Lada of India.” Another said: “It was called Ambassador, an envoy for India! What sort of respect would have India got with an envoy like that?”
Well, who knows, it may reappear one day, this lightly-remodelled 1950s Morris Oxford III, as some sort of retro-luxury limousine. Just as high-fare cycle rickshaws today ply the West End in London for wealthy young cool-hunters.
One coincidence, however, is striking. Only four months ago — January 23, to be exact — the last Maruti 800 rolled out of its factory. So the 800 that, the moment it launched in 1984, made sure of the Ambassador’s eventual demise, is also gone.
Strangely, however, there is more nostalgia for the Ambassador — that unwieldy gruntwork — than for the little car which transformed India’s motoring landscape and middle class lifestyle, and birthed a brave new auto industry. This is perhaps symptomatic of a nation that wants to surge forward, but finds it hard to let go of its past.
Author and columnist Sandipan Deb is the former managing editor of Outlook magazine and former founder-editor of Open.
