When ‘Make in India’ was more than just a government slogan

Has the campaign now become more about balancing foreign exchange, rather than innovation and ambition? 

My father, Abhijit Ghose, graduated from IIT Kharagpur in 1973. Engineers are sure of their numbers and he is certain that more than 70% of his batchmates are now overseas. As graduates from India’s premier technological institute, they were welcomed by universities and corporations abroad with handsome offers. As a child, while figuring ‘what I wanted to be when I grew up’, I often asked my father why he wanted to be an engineer. He said it was because he wanted to build things — this was confusing to me because most engineers I knew then, and know now, work in sales or finance. He wanted to make, and he wanted to make in India. 

For the first two years after college, he made audio systems at his parents’ Calcutta home with a batchmate, commissioning local carpenters to build cabinets to encase them. Though they had one ‘celebrity client’ — Sharmila Tagore’s sister Tinkoo Tagore — this was not likely to turn into a sustainable business for two idealistic Bengali boys. So when a government agency called to pair him with a fledgling Calcutta company called Sonodyne, he took the meeting, and joined as one of their first designers of audio equipment. 

Sonodyne was founded in 1970 by Ashok Aikat and Ashoke Mukherjee, young engineers who quit their jobs at GEC to set up a company that would grow to become the pioneer of high-fidelity audio in India. “The only options for electronics engineers back then were to join government service or go abroad… I wanted to start an industry,” Mukherjee tells me. And that’s what they did with a ₹2.7 lakh government loan. 

Despite its modest scale, there was always a certain flourish in the brand’s vision. Aikat had marketing savvy; Mukherjee was an avid art collector, a close friend of M.F. Husain, who lent his art to the brand at various stages. Sonodyne managed to get on board Subir Pramanik as an advisor: my father still speaks about him with a rosy-eyed reverence. India-born Pramanik was a legend in the international audio space as one of Bang & Olufsen’s design engineers in Denmark. Every weekday for a little over a year, my father and another designer-in-training went over to Pramanik’s Ballygunge home for lessons in design, distilled into two words: “Choose elegance.” 

Pramanik taught them to design amplifiers and loudspeakers in stark opposition to the Bose philosophy of ear-pleasing psycho-acoustic engineering. “Just amplify, never ‘colour’ sound,” he said. Audiophiles appreciated that, particularly jazz aficionados. The training was put to test when Sonodyne was called upon to design the loudspeakers, mixers and amplifier banks for Jazz Yatra in Calcutta in 1977 with performances by the greats — Louis Banks, Braz Gonsalves and Pam Crain. 

The brand found cult status. In its heyday in the late 70s and 80s, their iconic Uranus cassette deck was a status symbol, retailing through showrooms beyond Calcutta, in Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Madras and Allahabad. They acquired large orders as OEM (original electronic manufacturers) for companies in the U.S., the U.K. and Germany. The USSR became a gargantuan buyer. They obtained a Dolby licence and for a long time remained the only Indian company to have one. To keep up with rising export demands, my father moved to Mumbai to set up the export design lab and factory. 

Liberalisation might have bought us Coca-Cola but it wasn’t all sweet and fizzy for Indian manufacturers. While it did mean that importing Italian paint and critical components from Scandinavian suppliers was possible (till then, everything Sonodyne used had to be made in India too), it came with a host of complications. Until the market had opened up to multinational players like Philips, brands such as Sonodyne and Cosmic (now defunct) had enjoyed a good market share because imported speakers, taxed as luxury goods, were prohibitively expensive.