LAST YEAR’S MODEL
It’s sad that Hindustan Motors is no longer producing Amassadors, the hefty, bubble-topped sedans that were, in the 60’s and the 70’s, basically, the only car on the road in India. The car is iconic, and stood for middle class India the same way the Beetle stood for 60’s America, and the Trabant for postwar East Berlin. Virtually all Ambassadors were painted the same color, a chalky grey-white, and personalized with garlands and trinkets, often religious, dangling in the front and back window. Back then not every family of means had a car. Those who did had an Ambassador and, along with it, a dedicated driver who tended to it as if it were a living thing: washing it down each morning before it hit the road, keeping it perpetually fueled and oiled, and, often, sleeping in the back seat at night.
My father’s family in Trivandrum had an Ambassador, and each time we visited as children we met our grandfather waiting outside the airport standing beside the car with the driver. Three generations piled into it, like a clown car, and our enormous pigeon blue hardside suitcases were stacked in the boot and on the roof. The car didn’t have air conditioning so the windows were perpetually rolled-down, though the ones in back could only go half-way. The driver was cautious but, to accommodate two others in the passenger seat, drove with his head, right arm, and shoulders out the window. The seats, upholstered in a thin vinyl, were springy, so we bounced around with every dip and turn in the road.
The Ambassador dominated the market because it was a strong, flexible car, and because it was one of the few cars available. Importing a foreign car at that time required considerable wealth and influence; it was an opulence. Today, with more liberalized trade policies, the market is flooded with foreign cars. More and more Indians have more and more money, and want a different kind of ride. The best-selling cars in the country last year have the same big, glossy, Transformer-type stylings as the minivans and suburbans that can be spotted on the road in any American suburb. And in the past five years Bentley, Lamborghini and Ferrari have all opened showrooms in India.
It’s telling that Indians, who have a passion for over-embellishment, were happy for so long with the dowdy white Ambassador. Why didn’t Hindustan Motors introduce the car in fuchsia, saffron, and electric green, or plaids and paisleys? Decades ago India wasn’t a materialistic culture, and it wasn’t an individualistic culture either. Just having a car and driver – which freed one from walking long distances, riding teeming buses, and hauling packages – was a luxury. Car owners were less interested in exhibiting their wealth or asserting their individuality than in convenience. Maybe I’m less unsettled about the loss of this car than the loss of that India.
