Indian Brands Trivia
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40 free Indian Brands trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Every Indian brand has a back story that is stranger than its jingle. A tyre giant that began with something you inflate at birthday parties, a software major that started out pressing seeds for the kitchen, a scooter named after a warrior's horse, a cosmetics house set up because a prime minister was worried about foreign exchange, and a shoemaker millions assume is homegrown but is not. These 40 questions cover the founders, mascots, taglines, takeovers and name changes behind the brands on Indian shelves, roads and phones: biscuits and snacks, washing powder and antiseptic cream, scooters, cars and tyres, watches and handloom, software, e-commerce and fintech, lenders old and new, and the airlines that came, went and merged. Ownership is dated where it has changed hands, because in India it often has. Most questions are pitched for a family table or a pub quiz, with a handful of deep cuts for people who read the small print on the packet. Play on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print it for a quiz night, a classroom or an office contest.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Bata, which built Batanagar near Kolkata in the 1930s, was founded in 1894 in Zlín, a town in which country?
Czech Republic
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.
Q 02Which IT giant was incorporated in 1945 at Amalner, Maharashtra, as a maker of vegetable cooking oil?
Wipro
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.
Q 03Which tyre maker did K. M. Mammen Mappillai start in Madras in 1946 as a toy-balloon workshop?
MRF
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.
Q 04Which washing powder, priced at ₹3.50 a kilo against Surf's ₹13 in 1969, did Karsanbhai Patel name after his daughter?
Nirma
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.
Q 05Which cola, created in 1977 after Coca-Cola quit India rather than disclose its formula, was sold to Coca-Cola in 1993?
Thums Up
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.
Q 06The Tata Nano, unveiled in January 2008 as the world's lowest-priced production car, was aimed at what showroom price?
₹1 lakh
₹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.
Q 07Tata Motors paid about $2.3 billion in 2008 to buy Jaguar and Land Rover from which carmaker?
Ford
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.
Q 08Which airline, returned to the Tata group in January 2022, has had a bowing, turbaned Maharaja as its mascot since 1946?
Air India
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.
Q 09Nusli Wadia, whose group controls biscuit maker Britannia, is the grandson of which founder of a neighbouring nation?
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
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.
Q 10Which cosmetics brand did the Tatas launch in 1952 after Nehru urged them to make beauty products in India?
Lakmé
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.
Q 11Which brand's polka-dot-frocked girl has fronted topical ads since Sylvester da Cunha's agency created her in the 1960s?
Amul
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.
Q 12Which software firm, founded in Pune in 1981 by seven engineers with $250, was the first Indian company on Nasdaq?
Infosys
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.
Q 13Which online retailer did two unrelated Bansals, both ex-Amazon, start in a Bengaluru flat in 2007 selling only books?
Flipkart
Q 21Which Indian car, built at Uttarpara near Kolkata from 1957 to 2014, was based on Britain's Morris Oxford?
Hindustan Ambassador
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.
Q 22Sunil Mittal, who started out making bicycle crankshafts in Ludhiana in 1976, launched which mobile brand in Delhi in 1995?
Airtel
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.
Q 23Haldiram's began in 1937 as a sweets and namkeen shop run by Ganga Bhishen Agarwal in which Rajasthan city?
Bikaner
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.
Q 14SBI, the subcontinent's oldest commercial lender, descends from which institution founded on 2 June 1806?
Bank of Calcutta
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.
Q 15Which restaurant-listing site did two Bain & Company consultants launch in July 2008 under the name FoodieBay?
Zomato
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'.
Q 16Paytm, whose parent One97 floated in November 2021 in what was then India's largest IPO, is short for which phrase?
Pay through mobile
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.
Q 17OYO's Ritesh Agarwal won a $100,000 fellowship in 2013 from which investor who pays the young to skip college?
Peter Thiel
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.
Q 18Royal Enfield, born in Redditch, England, and built in Chennai since 1955, is owned by which Indian vehicle maker?
Eicher
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.
Q 19The Bajaj Chetak scooter, which once carried a ten-year waiting list, was named after the horse of which Rajput warrior?
Maharana Pratap
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.
Q 20Hero MotoCorp, the Munjals' two-wheeler maker, bore which Japanese partner's name until the venture ended in 2011?
Honda
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.
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.
Q 24Which spice brand did Dharampal Gulati restart from a wooden stall in Delhi after Partition drove his family from Sialkot?
MDH
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.
Q 25Godrej, patentee of the first springless lock, made 12.83 lakh of what for India's first general election?
Steel ballot boxes
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.
Q 26Which Ayurvedic goods firm's name is what patients called the Kolkata physician who founded it in 1884?
Dabur
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.
Q 27Boroline, the antiseptic cream a Bengali merchant launched in 1929, shows which animal on its green tube?
An elephant
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.
Q 28Gattu, the mischievous boy with a paint bucket who became Asian Paints' mascot in 1954, was drawn by which cartoonist?
R. K. Laxman
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.
Q 29Which TV maker's 1980s ads paired a horned, tailed devil with the line 'Neighbour's envy, owner's pride'?
Onida
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.
Q 30ITC, now known for Aashirvaad atta and Sunfeast biscuits, was registered in Kolkata in 1910 under what name?
Imperial Tobacco Company
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.