Packaged Nostalgia: The Stories We Tell About Ajjis
In this essay, I examine stories Indian brands tell about grandmothers
Lately, I've been noticing the grandma figure cropping up in products and experiences in a hyper-curated, hyper-packaged, manufactured-feelings kind of way — cueing and spoon-feeding how I'm supposed to feel about ajjis. I came across three or four different snack brands, all selling me some version of 'grandma's authentic taste'. "Ajji House" by Subko has been a bit of a talk of the town — a hip new spot to hang out, sip global specialty coffee, and soak in young Bengaluru energy. Why is there suddenly an ajji-shaped hole in branding consciousness that everyone’s scrambling to fill? And she’s ajji, she’s paati, she’s naani — not just any generic grandma designed for mass consumption. She’s regional and culturally textured.
I recently visited Subko's "Ajji House" cafe near Double Road in Bangalore. It's an old house restored into a cafe. It retains much of its original character and layers in narratives to create a space where the stories feel almost tangible. The seating, walls, photographs, and passages all seemed to hold fragments of the past. Much of it was subliminal — my mind automatically filled in the blanks of what was framed and left behind. The interiors felt like a snapshot, preserving a moment for as much as the physical restoration would allow. The food offered was fairly modern interpretations of popular Indian and global snacks. The brand story of Ajji House centres around, Kamalamma, and how she bought this home in a 1953 government auction to help her son access better education at Bishop Cotton Boys' School. Over time, this house became the centre of family life and childhood memories. Eventually, the family moved on, but the nostalgia stayed — and now it powers a brand.
This "Ajji House" story presents an ajji who appears to be a woman of remarkable independence and resources — someone who valued education, had a clear vision for her son's future, and had the financial and social capital to purchase property in the city center in the 1950s. But this is not a typical story. It's an upper-middle-class story — one that’s legible and palatable to modern, aspirational urban consumers. The ajji here is remembered because she fits a certain narrative: empowered, independent yet nurturing — and aligns with what a brand can comfortably market in today's urban cultural landscape.
Wipro Foods calls its traditional packaged snacks brand "Granamma," featuring an ajji as the brand mascot. "Granamma" appears to be a portmanteau of "Grandma" and "Nanamma/Amammama," which are Telugu terms for grandmother. There's Sweet Karam Coffee, another snacking brand with an endearing "paati" as its face — a Tamil term for grandmother. If Subko’s Ajji House tells the story of a specific, independent, upper-middle-class ajji with a name, a house, and a legacy, Wipro’s "Granamma" represents the opposite end of the spectrum — we don't know anything about this ajji beyond her approving smile. She’s never named, contextualized, or connected to a real history. She stands in as a feel-good placeholder for trust and tradition, reduced to a mere symbol built on the subconscious shortcuts we associate with trust, purity, and nostalgia.
Across India, food brands routinely co-opt the mother or grandmother archetype. It's always the same story: an ever-caring, ever-loving feminine figure whose life revolves around the culinary needs of the family — and of course, she expertly fulfils them. These stories don’t portray real mothers or grandmothers; they present what capitalism wants them to represent, so you'll buy whatever these companies are trying to sell.
Branding reduces complexity to a narrow, limited snapshot of the story it wants to tell. Simplification always involves exclusion. In doing so, it omits a lot and selectively shows a version of reality that is convenient and deemed memetic enough to sell whatever it wants to sell. This pattern has been critiqued in academic and media commentary — for example, in "Deified Mother in Indian Ads: Idealised Image and Ethical Issues," published in Communication Today in 2016. Nearly a decade later, the trend hasn’t faded — if anything, it has intensified, now with a nostalgic wrapper, showing just how entrenched and commercially rewarding this symbolic shortcuts continue to be.
Now, branding isn't the problem. However, the storytelling is and it's too powerful to be handled with lazy thinking. The problem lies in repetition: when the same archetype is chosen and repeated over and over again, it suggests that only one kind of woman, one kind of story, is worth remembering. Over time, this repetition shapes public consciousness by turning a marketable narrative into cultural truth.
There are women who hate cooking, or are bad at it. There are people who aren’t moms or grandmoms, but cook anyway. What about the mom who cooks simply because she has no choice — stuck with a mundane, thankless task no one else at home will do, or even help with? There are tired, grumpy ajjis. Tired, frustrated moms. Tired, frustrated daughters. Working women with no time to cook. Maids who cook to earn a living. There are countless stories that connect food to a wide range of identities — across gender, familial roles, class, and age. But the myth we keep repeating — the one that brands default to — is the one that propagates the status quo by reinforcing a narrow ideal and preserving the assumptions baked into gender roles and class expectations.
I remember a Kannada poem I read back in junior college — P. Lankesh’s "Avva." It stood out because it didn’t offer the usual glorified image of motherhood. Instead, it gave us a real woman: flawed, complex, tired, and human. Lankesh presented a raw and unflattering portrayal of his mother, challenging the idealised image of motherhood so often seen in society, media, and literature. The poem explored the burdens and realities of motherhood, the nuances of the mother-son relationship, and the unspoken emotional weight that real women carry. In stark contrast to the smiling, nurturing archetypes used in branding, Lankesh’s mother had depth. Not all maternal love is soft-edged and photogenic — and that’s exactly what makes it real.
One may argue — why bother telling these messy but honest stories instead of the helium-balloon, happy-as-hell caricatures that seem to have universal appeal? Sure, branding is about selling, and businesses want to appeal to as broad a customer base as possible. But do these myths really resonate as widely as we assume? What happens when we keep repeating them without question?
By flattening complex maternal experiences into emotionally soothing symbols, we erase entire spectra of real lives. This symbolic reduction doesn’t just distort memory — it disciplines behaviour. It teaches women what kind of motherhood is loveable, what kind of labor is valuable, and what kind of legacy is worth preserving. Over time, it scripts gender roles into culture as common sense.
As Roland Barthes writes, “Myth is a type of speech.” Branding turns culturally and emotionally complex women — ajji, paati, amma — into mythic figures, stripped of context and contradiction. They are no longer people with inner lives, but symbols made to sell comfort. The feel-good shorthand hides exhaustion, resentment, class difference, and coercion that shape many real women’s experiences in kitchens. It erases the fatigue of the maid cooking someone else’s food, or the working mother heating a frozen meal after a full day of unpaid and paid labor. Branding that constantly leans on feminine nostalgia doesn’t honor women — it confines them to the roles they were once forced into. It keeps us telling the same story. And in doing so, it stops us from imagining better ones.
The grandma branding trend might also be tapping into something generational. Millennials and Gen Z — more individualistic and busier than the Gen X and boomer generation — often carry a quiet guilt about drifting away from older relatives. They know they owe them time and memory, but maintaining real connection is hard. The emotional frameworks have shifted. Older generations don’t always understand the pace or complexity of modern life, and younger people often feel too scattered to bridge the gap. In that space of tension, branding steps in. It’s easier to connect with a soft, smiling ajji on a label than confront why we haven’t called our real ones. The mythic ajji becomes a comforting stand-in — one who doesn’t challenge, misunderstand, or demand anything back.
This could also be a cultural counter-reaction. With global snacks and fast food saturating the market, perhaps there's a sincere urge to reclaim something "ours": a longing for rootedness, for continuity. But when that urge gets funnelled through the same tired image of a smiling, sari-clad grandma, it stops being about reclaiming tradition and starts becoming a performance of it. The nostalgia is real — for childhood snacks, for cultural pride, for continuity — but the story we reach for is insincere, tired and boring. The longing is valid, but the story is lazy.
Honest stories would recognise that food, care and culinary labour show up in many ways - a son cooking dinner for his working mom, a grandmother ordering in to spend time with her friends (yes, she has her gang of friends over), or murukku munching with Netflix— there's no dearth of ideas here. The world is your oyster. There are so many stories to tell — real and imagined, mundane and surprising that reflect who we are and who we want to become. Stories with the power to shift how we see family, labour, identity, and care. If we want better culture, we’ll need better stories — and a little more courage in choosing which ones we tell.