The kitchen space in an Indian household has rarely been the cause of excitement among people redesigning their homes, or building a new one. May be now, with the décor industry taking matters into its own hands, Indians have begun to look past their bedrooms and drawing rooms.
For the large part, the kitchen remained a dingy, unsexy corner, or wherever the chulha was kept. It was the place where women toiled, often squatting on the floor for long grinding, grating and cutting.
Things began to change for middle class Indians in the mid-1980s, when a kitchen-appliances brand named Niki Tasha tried to bring a revolution in our homes. Launched by Ritu Nanda, a self-made professional and daughter of actor Raj Kapoor and whose son Nikhil is married to Shweta Bachchan, Niki Tasha got its name from Nanda’s two children –Nikhil and Natasha. In her entrepreneurial debut, Nanda positioned Niki Tasha as a premium brand for the “affluent” urban homes.
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That was when Indians began to look at their kitchen differently. It came a few decades after the United States’ newfound prosperity at the end of World War 2 had ushered in the phenomenon called the ‘pink kitchen’. US residents building new homes in the 1950s made the kitchen area their central focus, colouring it in all shades and designs.
When Ritu Nanda’s Niki Tasha was launched, Indians had several home appliances companies like Bajaj and Philips competing to be the authoritative voice in the market. And the competition only got tougher with the launch of Hotline around the same time – owned by late Mukesh Agarwal, the husband of Bollywood star Rekha.
“Niki Tasha redefined Indian kitchens for the first time. Awareness about having smart and stylish kitchens and kitchen appliances dawned,” says Navroze Dhondy, a marketing and advertising expert. Dhondy points out that Niki Tasha was mostly known for its stove burners and cooking appliances.
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Brand guru Santosh Sood, who was also associated with advertising agency Lintas, remembers how the staff was “absolutely delighted” when some time in1985, their agency had gifted them Niki Tasha products.
“It was the ultimate symbol of luxury… you had a Niki Tasha, you would get the sense that you had arrived in life,” he says.
When heaters with coils, cylindrical gas stoves and, if you could afford one, a single burner steel stove was what Indian homes cooked their meals in, without complaining, Niki Tasha brought to urban kitchens multiple burner stoves and the concept of kitchenette, becoming a pioneer of sorts in giving Indians a sense of what kitchen in the near future were going to be burning hot with.
“Those days, one could only buy the unappealing and ugly looking gas burners which came with the LPG gas connections..but here came Niki Tasha, and even Hotline, that brought in gas burners that looked nice, smart and colourful,” says Sood.
NikiTasha went on to launch a host of other kitchen appliances such as grinders and hand mixers among other things. It also ventured into launching television sets.
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The popularity of Niki Tasha, and the ‘80s association with it, continues to have a recall value even after three decades. It must be if former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah could tweet about it in 2016: “Anyone else remember the excitement of watching the pre-Grammys & #Grammys on #Doordarshan sponsored by Niki Tasha kitchenette? #80s.”
Even though it was NikiTasha that to an extent opened the Indian kitchen’s window into the future, it couldn’t keep its own burner on as the winds of change came in. “Niki Tasha failed to corporatise its operations and stiff competition from other brands took its place. Although the company was sold off, the brand name was kept alive and so you could still get kitchen appliances under the NikiTasha brand,” Dhondy says.
After the failure of Niki Tasha, its owner Ritu Nanda shifted her focus towards the insurance sector, even taking up the role of an insurance agent for a brief while in the 1980s. But for a lot of Indians, Niki Tasha remains a nostalgic symbol of modernity and luxury.