Wanted -- One Maruti 800, Indian Icon

(Corrects description of Indira Gandhi's son Sanjay in sixth paragraph.)

Last month, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd., the automaker that dominates the Indian market, announced that it had decided to retire the iconic Maruti 800 after more than 30 years of production and nearly 3 million cars sold. Millions of Indians (including myself) felt a bittersweet rush of surprise, disbelief and nostalgia -- and indeed a taste of their own looming marginality. If the 800 could be finished off merely because it could not meet new, stricter fuel-emissions requirements, couldn't the advance of other strange ideas and notions in the new India soon render the 800 generation irrelevant, too?

If the announcement felt like the end of an era, it was because the little car was one of the few outstanding consumer products to precede, rather than emerge from, India's belated consumer revolution of the 1990s onward (and therein lies, amid all the grace, a somewhat tacky story). The Maruti was "the people's car" -- a phrase thought up by India's socialist government, which manufactured the car in partnership with Japan's Suzuki Motor Corp. For once, though, there was no gap between rhetoric and reality. The car first hit the roads in 1983, and for years it zipped across India's starved, stoic socialist landscape -- this was a time when one still had to wait a year or two to get a telephone, and almost as long to get it repaired when it stopped working the next week -- without anything to match it. It was the consumer good that middle-class Indians most coveted and cherished, and it was India's best-selling car from 1983 to 2004.