[Gypsyjon]

Royal Enfield: Going continental


Nov 17, 2013, 08.10AM IST
While Harley the heavyweight is slowly hogging its way into the Indian market, guess who's hotfooting its way in the opposite direction — to the West? Like Harley, but in a different league, Royal Enfield has been a brand name for ages, packing a legacy that even the motorbike maestros from Milwaukee can't beat. Founded in England in 1893, a decade before Harley-Davidson , the legendary company became an Indian icon when the parent firm closed its factory in Redditch, Worcestershire in 1967, by which time its Indian subsidiary was cranking out Bullets.

In fact, it was the Indian government's search for a suitable motorcycle for its police and military that led New Delhi to the Bullet. (" Made like a gun, goes like a bullet" was the original motto of the company, reflecting its legacy as a weapons manufacturer for Her Majesty's government.)

When newly independent India ordered 800 Bullet 350 cc from Royal Enfield in 1955, the Redditch company joined Madras Motors to form Enfield India to assemble the bikes under licence. Under Indian law, Madras Motors owned the majority of shares in the company, so when the English parent dissolved under the weight of the automobile revolution, the Indian offshoot was a natural heir. By that time, the stately Bullet, with its budbud-bud sound, had become something of a desi macho man's mobike.


But the energy-sapping '80s and the nippy '90s that brought in nifty 100 cc Japanese-origin utility bikes soon forced Enfield to bite the Bullet, so to say. Corporate legend has it that Vikram Lal wanted to sell the loss-making company around the turn of the century when his son Siddharth, then only 27, raised his hand at a board meeting and asked to be given a couple of years to turn the firm around. "It wasn't as dramatic as that, but yes, I was naive enough to believe I had the answers and so I asked for an opportunity," Lal chuckled in an interview last September, looking out at the legendary race track at Brooklands (the world's first purpose-built motor-sport venue), where he had ferried scores of Enfield's new Continental GTs to be launched in what was once a parent market.

Riding on youth

Enfield's return to its original stomping — or vrooming — ground comes on the back of a decade of miraculous recovery that has seen its bikes find favour again with Indian customers. In the past few years, Lal has gradually repositioned Enfield as a cool, urban brand, although a third of the bikes are still sold in the Punjab-Haryana-Delhi market . Suddenly, it's hip to be astride an Enfield again. Riding on demand from an increasingly young demographic, sales doubled from 50,000 in 2010 to 100,000 in 2012, leading to the building a new state-of-the-art factory near Chennai with a production capacity of 175,000 bikes than can be scaled up to 500,000. But it's not just India that is playing on Lal's mind as the international market, more so the birthplace of Royal Enfield.

So this past summer, he hit British roads with the sleek new Continental GT, based on the Bullet, carting along a busload of biker scribes around the legendary Brooklands track and museum (where century-old vintage Enfields are displayed). It was an audacious launch redolent of "carrying coals to Newcastle".

But Lal reckons that Britain is ready for a nostalgic throwback through a cafe racer experience to a great brand that it virtually ceded to India, at a time when there is increasing consciousness about quick urban mobility. Lal himself spends much time trying to get his head around the growing urban transport nightmare, and who hasn't heard of London's congestion tax?

Still, there is an unmistakable pride and chutzpah in plying a British brand that was saved by India back to the Britons. But in a century where Indian entities have salvaged Tetley and Jaguar Land Rover, that should hardly come as a surprise . In fact, Lal is looking even further afield to America for Continental GT, and the irony of doing that — going up to 500 cc, even as Harley Davidson is puttering down to 500 cc for the Indian market — is not lost on bike aficionados. Evidently, there is vroom for everyone.