Doyen of Indian advertising
S. RAMACHANDER
R. K. SWAMY — His Life and Times: V.S. Chakrapani — Editor, V. Ramnarayan — Biographer; Pub. by Srinivasan K. Swamy, distributed by East West Books Pvt. Ltd., New No. 571, Poonamalle High Road, Kamaraj Bhavan, Aminjikarai, Chennai-600029. Rs. 1800.
There is something slightly disconcerting about taking up a commemorative volume for review. One feels it is not done; more so when it is R.K. Swamy, a leading light of Indian advertising for half of the last century, whom one had known and admired for a long time. Unlike Mark Antony, the authors of this volume make no secret of the fact that they come to praise the subject, unreservedly so. Yet this book also gives us a picture of the man and his background and provenance
, and what made him an unusual human being. Coming from the village milieu to the city was the trodden path of many young men spurred by English language education and urban job opportunities. Yet the advantage of a degree and a safe civil servant’s life were denied him by circumstances which took him instead to a chawl in Bombay.
Uphill task
Few who knew him as the founder chairman of the advertising firm that bears his name can imagine what an uphill task it must have been to break into the privileged world of advertising in the 1940s. He started in the Bombay office translating Gujarati magazine clippings for the media department, and moved up fairly swiftly through the ranks. Swamy caught the eye of E.J. Fielden, the legendary head of J.Walter Thompson Company (JWT), and was offered an opportunity to work in the Calcutta office, where he excelled in meticulous research and later back in Bombay. Within 15 years of the start he was sent out to the back of beyond that Madras was then, to start a new outpost. He did this in typical Swamy fashion with faith, tremendous grit, hard work, and often on a shoestring budget. He had to develop a market for the totally new service called advertising, give it a modern look and feel, as well as a renowned Thompson professional way. The transition, from the other more developed cities where he had worked till then, was not easy or smooth. Yet, Swamy was nothing if not a fighter — a staunch believer in a benevolent Almighty and himself and others around him, in that order. Above all, he grabbed his chance when he got a glimpse of one. His ability to spend hours collecting data in support of any presentation or document would have done credit to a research student. He was a master of painstaking perseverance.
The ad world
It is difficult for a young person of today to imagine how bleak the economic landscape was for new business ventures in the arid days of socialist policies. In 1973, at the depth of the recession, and tough personal and professional circumstances Swamy chose to beat the odds and left JWT. By then it was by far the largest agency in India and in many parts of the world, and home to him for 33 years.
One half of the book is the rest, which is history, seen through the eyes of many who came into contact with him. You can seldom find a more cosmopolitan mix of people than you do here cutting across every known barrier in this highly troubled and divided society. There was the tradition that a good job in advertising demanded above all the right parentage, posh school, the right diction and so-called sahib’s habits, and the proper clothes and table manners.
Here was an ad world which lived out its own caricature: pipe-smoking public school types, who wore cuff-links and braces and knocked back three gimlets before lunch and affected a Bertie Wooster manner, were by no means scarce even in the 1960s. God could not have set up a greater contrast than Swamy, if he tried, in the very pucca world of JWT. Still, the irony was that the agency overlooked R.K. Swamy for the top slot in the 1970s, when the emphasis on the external gloss was fast fading away, despite his being the senior most candidate. This was the spur that drove him to such enormous effort in his 1950s, to set up an institution.
Reminiscences
The contradictions and paradoxes in Swamy are well captured in the pictures and the brief reminiscences of people from many walks of life, some far removed from advertising. He emerges as one at once both traditional and modern, deeply faithful to his branch of Vaishnavite philosophy and practice, and yet willingly spending a lifetime in a very broad-spectrum profession that was home to people of every religious persuasion. Socially committed and willing to break new ground, more so as he evolved and adjusted to changing mores, he was in the end no diehard conservative. His completely unpublicised personal contribution to other lives was considerable, especially where associates, including friends’ children, young women in need of counselling and help in reconstructing their troubled lives, were concerned. Even in a profession not lacking in exceptional, eccentric people, Swamy still stood out, one of a kind. And not only broke the mould for the world of advertising but the kind of background he came from.
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