This was sometime in 1982, in Bombay. An advertising firm, Source Advertising, had been commissioned to design posters and press ads for Sir Richard Attenborough’s film, Gandhi . It was one among the ad agencies to which the Golden Tobacco Company Limited outsourced work. The brief required somebody who was reliable and would turn in the work on time. “I was asked by my boss to find that person. It was a tall order and how could I guarantee how somebody else would work? So I told him I would do it,” says Saratchandran P. who was the art director at Golden Tobacco. He painted a few posters which were selected by Attenborough and were used.
None of the posters remain; the vagaries of nature and time claimed them. This was not even his first tryst with painting posters for a film. Incidentally it was a film poster that took him to Mumbai.
Way back in 1963, as a young man in Thalasserry he painted a poster for actor Sadhana’s debut film opposite Joy Mukherjee, Ek Musafir Ek Haseena . ‘Screen’, a paper dedicated to films had announced a competition calling posters for the film. It was a nation-wide competition and Saratchandran sent in his entry. The poster had Joy Mukherjee and Sadhana with snow-clad mountains in the backdrop. He won the second prize, a princely Rs. 350, which bought the ticket to Bombay, in 1964.
“I almost didn’t get the prize money. A family friend, a judge sent a legal notice to S. Mukherjee threatening him with a case, ” the 74-year-old says, the memory bringing a smile to his face. Saratchandran’s tryst with art began early. He studied art under the late C.V. Balan Nair at the Kerala School of Arts at Thalasserry and also taught there before he moved to Bombay. He worked under Shanti Niketan-trained artist N.R. Dey as an illustrator and finishing artist.
Later he joined Golden Tobacco Company as art director. There he designed cigarette covers for the export market. Those days, according to him, Hilton Tobacco and Navabharat Tobacco were among the major companies that exported cigarettes. He has designed packets for those which went to countries such as the United States, erstwhile USSR, West Asia, Cyprus and Ethiopia.
“The buyers would place the orders for the cigarettes and come to Bombay for the designing of the package. I would meet the client, they would give me the brief and I would make three prototypes. All this had to be done in 10 days. They’d suggest changes, if any, and the design would be selected, packaging made and the cigarettes would be on their way.”
A cigarette packet is not just a cigarette packet, apparently. The monogram, the lettering, the logo, the colour; then there are package styles such as shell and slide, pouch packet, hinge packet so on and so forth. There are a few Indian brands for which he designed the packaging, “very few”, he clarifies.
In the middle of his professional commitments, in 1976-77, the Asian Amateur Boxing Federation boxing came to Bombay. He grabbed the opportunity to design the promotional collaterals – posters, press ads and trophies – for the event. “The selection process was tough. I was told not to expect anything. The Japanese and the Koreans were the big shots and theirs would be the final call. I declared that I wanted payment only if the posters were approved. The brief was that the boxer in the poster should not resemble Amitabh Bachchan but that he should be rough and tough.” Needless to say his posters were approved; he got paid and even designed the medal and the trophy.
On quitting Golden Tobacco Company Limited, he started his own company ORBIT Advertising in 1983. His clients included, apart from several tobacco companies, Alitalia Airways, Twenty First Century Printers and Cuticura Talc. He has also designed the pavilions for several prestigious national expos.
The process of painting the posters for Attenborough’s Gandhi is an interesting story in itself. Saratchandran had to see the film before he did anything and the eight inch by 6 inch sepia bromides of the film were of not much help. The solution was a VIP pass to a special screening of the film. He saw the film. The brief was simple – the posters had to be unlike those of an ‘award’ film. There had to be colour, it had to be vivid, “much like Sholay ”.
“The film was on Gandhi, there was no colour. Where would the colour come from? So I depicted the bloody Jallianwala Bagh massacre scene as the background, with Gandhi on the foreground. Everybody, including Attenborough, liked the posters.” Executed in poster colours (the German-made Pelican colours), the main poster comprised the 10ft by 20 ft and three smaller (30 inch by 40 inch) ones.
The poster was done, the agency got the kudos. What about the artist? Did he meet Attenborough? “Nobody asked about the artist. The agency executed the job. It didn’t matter at all, I was a freelance artist. It really wasn’t important.”
