Industry
Multifaceted legacy of advertising genius and theatre pioneer Alyque Padamsee
Summary
- Under Alyque Padamsee, Lintas, which had begun operations in India as a division of Lever Brothers' advertising wing, prospered and was rated the country’s most creative agency.
MUMBAI : The godfather of Indian advertising and the patriarch of English theatre in India are two terms often used to describe Alyque Padamsee. That might be too limiting. For Padamsee had the spirit of an iconoclast, which led him to push the boundaries of whatever it was that he set his sights on.
In the foreword to his autobiography tantalisingly titled Double Life, Dushyant Mehta, then director, Repro India Ltd, narrates a joke about the man popular in advertising circles: “Alyque Padamsee, chief executive of Lintas, also known as ‘God’, had a secretary called Jenny Pope. To meet God, you first had to meet the Pope."
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That sums up his impact on generations of Indian advertising professionals who either worked with him over the 14 years from 1979 to 1993 when he ran Lintas or merely glanced through his creative oeuvre. That last is the stuff of legend and why he’s universally rated as an advertising genius who created some of the most memorable campaigns seen in India in the 1970s through 1990s. This was pre-liberalization India, where a combination of rapidly failing socialism and stifling social mores kept a tight lid on natural aspirations and dreams.
An advertising legend
Yet, where others saw an old India of restrictions and limitations, Padamsee viewed the country from the lens of an emerging generation that was looking to express itself. Thus emerged the Liril girl in 1975, a symbol of this new India that was shedding some of the inhibitions of the past and giving herself permission to dream and even fantasize. Model Karen Lunel, cavorting in a bikini under a waterfall, was a thousand Indian housewives enjoying themselves in the privacy of a bath.
Following Liril came ads for Cherry Blossom, Surf, and Bajaj Auto, with characters like Cherry Charlie and Lalitaji, a tribute to Padamsee’s ability to strike a chord with everyday Indians. He was equally at ease using advertising cleverly (some said scandalously) to sell a product like condoms, as he did with the notorious Kamasutra ad featuring Marc Robinson and Pooja Bedi.
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For sure, it wasn’t always him but the bunch of brilliant professionals he assembled, including Kiran Khalap, K.V. Sridhar, and Neville D’Souza. Many of them learnt from Padamsee and then went on to set up their own agencies. Khalap, for instance, co-founded Chlorophyll Brand & Communications Consultancy.
Under Padamsee, Lintas (an acronym for Lever International Advertising Services), which had begun operations in India as a division of Lever Brothers' advertising wing, prospered and was rated the country’s most creative agency.
Advertising, though, was too narrow a sphere to consume him entirely. Though he was born into a traditional Ismaili Khoja Muslim family, a performative streak ran through the Padamsees. While his father, Jafferseth Padamsee, was an affluent businessman, his brother, Sultan Padamsee, was into theatre. He passed away tragically by suicide at the age of 23.
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One of Alyque’s sisters, Roshan Alkazi, was married to Ebrahim Alkazi, the legendary director of the National School of Drama in New Delhi between 1962 and 1977. Another cousin was the famous painter Akbar Padamsee, who is considered one of the pioneers of modern Indian painting.
A legendary performer
Young Alyque, therefore, was brimming with creative ideas by the time he went to St. Xavier's College in Mumbai, where cricket competed with theatre for his attention. Tall and wiry, fast bowling suited both his physique and his personality. By then, he had already raised the banner of revolt, declaring himself to be an agnostic despite being raised in a devout Muslim family.
His three marriages, to Pearl Padamsee, Dolly Thakore, and Sharon Prabhakar, all Christians, came as little surprise, the common factor being that each of them was involved with theatre.
A night job as a performer on stage and on celluloid was a logical next step for the ad man. Movies weren’t really his thing, though he earned some fame for playing Jinnah in Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi. But those who have been privileged to watch him in his stage production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman will forever remember him as Willy Loman, the ageing travelling salesman whose line “the only thing you got in this world is what you can sell", was a nice little epitaph for Padamsee himself.
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Famous actors like Dustin Hoffman and Philip Seymour Hoffman have essayed the role on Broadway and Hollywood, but Padamsee brought the tragic story of a mediocre man aching for the love of his children even as he crushed their own dreams, to life.
Subsequently, productions like Jesus Christ Superstar, Tuglaq, and Evita, kept his love for theatre pulsating. In all, he produced over fifty full-length plays.
Padamsee passed away in 2018 at the age of 90. In her tribute, Rama Bijpurkar, who started her career with Lintas under him before becoming one of the country’s foremost thought leaders on India’s consumer economy, invoked his one-line ad brief for Surf, “Always the champion, never the challenger," to sum up the man.
It was a perfect epitaph for the colossus of Indian advertising.
