40 Fun Facts About Indian Brands

Bata, which built Batanagar near Kolkata in the 1930s, was founded in 1894 in Zlín, a town in which country?

Czech Republic: Tomáš Baťa and two siblings started the firm in Moravian Zlín, then part of Austria-Hungary, and after Czechoslovakia nationalised the factory in 1945 the family rebuilt Bata from abroad.

Which IT giant was incorporated in 1945 at Amalner, Maharashtra, as a maker of vegetable cooking oil?

Wipro began as Western India Vegetable Products; Azim Premji took charge at 21 when his father died in 1966 and steered the oil firm into computers in the 1980s.

Which tyre maker did K. M. Mammen Mappillai start in Madras in 1946 as a toy-balloon workshop?

MRF stands for Madras Rubber Factory; Mammen Mappillai moved from toy balloons to tread rubber in 1952 and only then into tyres, with America's Mansfield Tire & Rubber as partner.

Which washing powder, priced at ₹3.50 a kilo against Surf's ₹13 in 1969, did Karsanbhai Patel name after his daughter?

Nirma is short for Nirupama, Patel's daughter; the government lab chemist mixed the yellow powder at home and sold it by bicycle around his office hours, then quit his job after three years to make it full time.

Which cola, created in 1977 after Coca-Cola quit India rather than disclose its formula, was sold to Coca-Cola in 1993?

Thums Up went to Coca-Cola in 1993 along with Parle's Gold Spot and Limca, and the returning giant ended up selling the rival that had been created to replace it, under the 'Taste the Thunder' line.

The Tata Nano, unveiled in January 2008 as the world's lowest-priced production car, was aimed at what showroom price?

₹1 lakh, or ₹100,000, was the target; the Singur factory in West Bengal was abandoned after farmers protested the land acquisition, and production at Sanand in Gujarat ended in 2018.

Tata Motors paid about $2.3 billion in 2008 to buy Jaguar and Land Rover from which carmaker?

Ford let both marques go for about half of what it had paid for them, wanting cash for its loss-making American business, and Tata folded the pair into a single British company, Jaguar Land Rover.

Which airline, returned to the Tata group in January 2022, has had a bowing, turbaned Maharaja as its mascot since 1946?

Air India's Maharaja was drawn in 1946 by commercial director Bobby Kooka and J. Walter Thompson artist Umesh Rao; the airline had begun as Tata Airlines in 1932 before nationalisation in 1953.

Nusli Wadia, whose group controls biscuit maker Britannia, is the grandson of which founder of a neighbouring nation?

Muhammad Ali Jinnah's daughter Dina married Neville Wadia, and their son Nusli succeeded his father as chairman in 1977 and heads the Wadia Group, whose holdings also include Bombay Dyeing.

Which cosmetics brand did the Tatas launch in 1952 after Nehru urged them to make beauty products in India?

Lakmé is Lakshmi in French, the title of a Delibes opera; Nehru worried that Indian women were spending scarce foreign exchange on imported cosmetics, and the Tatas sold the brand to Hindustan Unilever in 1998.

Which brand's polka-dot-frocked girl has fronted topical ads since Sylvester da Cunha's agency created her in the 1960s?

Amul's girl was art director Eustace Fernandes's cheeky answer to the butter girl of rival dairy Polson, drawn once da Cunha's agency had won the account, and her hoardings have teased the news ever since.

Which software firm, founded in Pune in 1981 by seven engineers with $250, was the first Indian company on Nasdaq?

Infosys listed on Nasdaq in March 1999, eighteen years after N. R. Narayana Murthy and six colleagues started it on seed money borrowed largely from their wives; it moved from Pune to Bengaluru in 1983.

Which online retailer did two unrelated Bansals, both ex-Amazon, start in a Bengaluru flat in 2007 selling only books?

Flipkart began, like Amazon, as an online bookshop; Sachin and Binny Bansal had both worked at Amazon, and eleven years later Walmart paid about US$16 billion for a 77% stake.

SBI, the subcontinent's oldest commercial lender, descends from which institution founded on 2 June 1806?

Bank of Calcutta was renamed Bank of Bengal, merged with the Bombay and Madras presidency banks into the Imperial Bank of India in 1921, and became the State Bank of India on 1 July 1955.

Which restaurant-listing site did two Bain & Company consultants launch in July 2008 under the name FoodieBay?

Zomato replaced the FoodieBay name in November 2010, partly to avoid a clash with eBay and partly because founders Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah were unsure they would 'just stick to food'.

Paytm, whose parent One97 floated in November 2021 in what was then India's largest IPO, is short for which phrase?

Pay through mobile is the expansion of the name; parent One97's ₹18,300 crore float was India's biggest to that date, yet the shares ended their first day of trading more than 27% down.

OYO's Ritesh Agarwal won a $100,000 fellowship in 2013 from which investor who pays the young to skip college?

Peter Thiel's fellowship went to a teenager who had already started Oravel Stays, an Airbnb-style listing site, in 2011; Agarwal dropped out of college and rebuilt the idea as the OYO budget-hotel chain.

Royal Enfield, born in Redditch, England, and built in Chennai since 1955, is owned by which Indian vehicle maker?

Eicher took in the struggling Enfield India in 1994, long after the English parent in Redditch had folded, so the Bullet assembled under licence in Madras ended up carrying the old British marque on alone.

The Bajaj Chetak scooter, which once carried a ten-year waiting list, was named after the horse of which Rajput warrior?

Maharana Pratap's horse Chetak gave the Vespa-derived scooter its name; marketed as 'Hamara Bajaj', it was revived as an electric scooter unveiled in October 2019.

Hero MotoCorp, the Munjals' two-wheeler maker, bore which Japanese partner's name until the venture ended in 2011?

Honda and the Munjals teamed up in 1984, but the pact barred Hero from exporting beyond a few neighbouring countries, so the family bought out its partner's 26% stake and renamed the firm Hero MotoCorp in 2011.

Which Indian car, built at Uttarpara near Kolkata from 1957 to 2014, was based on Britain's Morris Oxford?

Hindustan Ambassador production outlasted its British original by more than half a century, and in 2017 Hindustan Motors sold the famous name to Peugeot, the French carmaker.

Sunil Mittal, who started out making bicycle crankshafts in Ludhiana in 1976, launched which mobile brand in Delhi in 1995?

Airtel grew out of a ₹20,000 workshop: Mittal moved from bicycle parts to importing Suzuki generators, then to push-button telephones, before winning a licence to run mobile services in the capital.

Haldiram's began in 1937 as a sweets and namkeen shop run by Ganga Bhishen Agarwal in which Rajasthan city?

Bikaner gave the shop its bhujia: Ganga Bhishen Agarwal, known as Haldiram, won a following with his own take on the local snack, and a grandson carried the name beyond the city to Nagpur in 1970.

Which spice brand did Dharampal Gulati restart from a wooden stall in Delhi after Partition drove his family from Sialkot?

MDH is short for Mahashian Di Hatti, his father's shop in Sialkot; Gulati, who had left school at ten, drove a horse-drawn tonga around Delhi before reopening under the old name in Karol Bagh.

Godrej, patentee of the first springless lock, made 12.83 lakh of what for India's first general election?

Steel ballot boxes poured out at 15,000 a day for four months, with an internal locking lever that shop-floor worker Nathalal Panchal designed after more than 50 prototypes.

Which Ayurvedic goods firm's name is what patients called the Kolkata physician who founded it in 1884?

Dabur fuses daktar, 'doctor', with Burman: its founder made his name in 1880s Bengal by preparing Ayurvedic remedies for the killer diseases of the day, among them cholera and malaria.

Boroline, the antiseptic cream a Bengali merchant launched in 1929, shows which animal on its green tube?

An elephant, inspired by Ganesha and standing for strength, made it the 'haatiwala cream'; Gour Mohan Dutta built the name from boro for boric acid and the Latin oleum, oil.

Gattu, the mischievous boy with a paint bucket who became Asian Paints' mascot in 1954, was drawn by which cartoonist?

R. K. Laxman drew Gattu for a firm four friends had started in a garage in Girgaon, Mumbai, in February 1942; the boy appealed to the middle classes the company was courting.

Which TV maker's 1980s ads paired a horned, tailed devil with the line 'Neighbour's envy, owner's pride'?

Onida's makers, Mirc Electronics, were newcomers when their agency chose to sell the set through envy: the green, horned villain of a 1982 print ad went on to become the brand's mascot.

ITC, now known for Aashirvaad atta and Sunfeast biscuits, was registered in Kolkata in 1910 under what name?

Imperial Tobacco Company of India Limited became India Tobacco Company in 1970 and I.T.C. in 1974; since 2001 the letters officially stand for nothing, and the hotels arm was spun off in January 2025.

Bisleri, bought by the Chauhan family of Parle in 1969, was named after a 19th-century inventor from which country?

Italy's Felice Bisleri made a tonic of that name; the Italian firm behind it began bottling water at Thane in the 1960s, found it could not sell the stuff and left India, selling the brand to the Chauhans.

Lijjat Papad was started on 15 March 1959 by seven Gujarati women on a Girgaum rooftop with a loan of how much?

₹80, lent by social worker Chhaganlal Karamsi Parekh, bought the ingredients for four packets of papad on day one, and the seven went on to build a women's co-operative with tens of thousands of members.

Rooh Afza, the rose-red sharbat of iftar tables, was formulated in 1906 by the founder of which Unani house?

Hamdard's founder, Hakim Hafiz Abdul Majeed, devised the syrup as a summer cooler; Partition then split the family firm, so separate Hamdard companies in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh each make their own.

Balvant Parekh, once a peon sleeping in a timber trader's warehouse, launched Fevicol in 1959 through which company?

Pidilite Industries grew out of the dye and pigment unit he started with his brother Sushil in Mumbai in 1954; Fevicol was pitched as a ready-to-use answer to the fat-based glues that had to be melted before every job.

Which airline overtook Jet Airways as market leader in 2012 and ordered 500 Airbus jets in 2023?

IndiGo bet big before it owned a single plane: it ordered 100 Airbus jets at the Paris Air Show in June 2005, more than a year before its first flight in August 2006.

Which Tata–Singapore Airlines venture, launched in 2015, merged into the national flag carrier in November 2024?

Vistara stopped flying on 12 November 2024 as the Tata group folded it into its flag carrier, and Singapore Airlines swapped its 49% of the venture for a 25.1% stake in the enlarged airline.

Ajay Singh relaunched the former ModiLuft as which low-cost airline, whose first flight was Delhi-Mumbai on 24 May 2005?

SpiceJet passed in 2010 to media baron Kalanithi Maran, who bought control; in January 2015, with the airline close to failing, he handed it back to Singh.

Zerodha, the discount broker the Kamath brothers started in August 2010, pairs 'zero' with a Sanskrit word meaning what?

Barrier is 'rodha' in Sanskrit, so the name promises trading with no obstacles; Nithin and Nikhil Kamath began with six employees and ₹2 crore in seed money, mostly from Nithin's savings.

When Mukesh and Anil Ambani's feud split the Reliance empire in 2005, who brokered the division of the group?

Their mother, Kokilaben, stepped in because Dhirubhai Ambani had died in 2002 without settling who would run the empire; her deal left Mukesh the oil and petrochemicals and gave Anil telecoms, power and finance.

Who owns about two-thirds of Tata Sons, the holding company at the top of the Tata group?

Charitable trusts endowed by members of the Tata family hold about 66% of Tata Sons, so the bulk of the dividends paid up by the group's companies goes to education, health and the arts.