Like the story of phoenix, it is also rising from the ashes.
Every word written with a fountain pen had an inky smell to it. But that was a different time, the fountain pen era. Today fountain pens are luxury items and naturally its complement, the ink, is a forgotten item.
After closing down its operations in 1989, Sulekha Works, the manufacturers of Sulekha Ink, is now on a comeback mode.
“We are back on track after we restarted operations in November 2006. Since it is an era where ball-point makers have dominance, we have diversified into many other sectors. Now, the company is into stationery, homecare and solar powered products sectors,” says Kaushik Maitra, the company’s managing director.
Of course, it’s still a long way to go. Maitra admits as much. “The second coming is working well as we posted a turnover of Rs 3.5 crore in 2010-11 against Rs 1.5 crore in 2009-10. In the 80s, our turnover was around Rs 4-5 crore per annum from inks only,” Maitra adds. During the independence era, Sulekha was a symbolic attack against the British regime by breaking the monopoly of British brands like Quink.
Sulekha Ink was considered to be a symbol of national pride as it was started by Nanigopal and Sankaracharya Maitra in 1934 at Rajshahi (now in Bangladesh) with the blessings of Mahatma Gandhi by becoming a pioneer in manufacturing of writing inks to boost the self reliance movement. But militant trade unionism and financial conditions compelled the company to shut down its operations in the late 1980s.
Realising the importance of the erstwhile Calcutta market, in 1939, its works were shifted to Kasba and thereafter moved to Jadavpur in 1946. In the same year, the company became public limited, ultimately having more than 1000 shareholders. In the 1960s, two other units of Sulekha were set up at Sodepur (North 24 Parganas) and Ghaziabad (Uttar Pradesh). In the early eighties, Sulekha expanded further in India and abroad with several governments from different countries of South Asia and Africa inviting it to set up their own writing ink and writing instrument-manufacturing units. “After closing down and going to liquidation in 1993, we settled our debts with the help of the West Bengal government and came back. Both the ruling and opposition parties helped us in this,” Maitra says.
The company now wants to regain its lost glory by launching a campaign on use of ink in schools in association with Indian Oil Corporation. “The campaign will be launched in schools across eastern India by the end of this month or by May. It’s an environment friendly move as use of ink pens would reduce the usage of plastics. We have to make the students aware about this,” he added. Moreover, in solar energy also the company is in tie up talks with four to five European companies.