This 140-Year-Old Soda Brand from Pune Is Older Than Coca-Cola
Effervescent is an apt way to describe both the fizzy drink at the legendary ‘Ardeshir’s’ in Pune and its fourth-generation charge d’affaires, Marzban Irani (54), who enjoys retelling the antics of his great-grandfather Ardeshir Khodadad Irani: “He would light a charcoal bhatti (furnace), generate the carbon dioxide, dissolve it in water, and that’s how he made the soda water.”
Ardeshir does seem an alchemist. But history will argue that it was his entrepreneurial imagination that gave Pune its very own soda water manufacturing unit in 1884. This severed the cantonment city’s reliance on mules, on whose backs soda was ferried into the city from Mumbai (then Bombay).
Why go to such lengths? Well, if the history of the drink and the fizzy web it has spun across the ages tells us anything, it is that soda was a coveted luxury.
Born out of English chemist Joseph Priestley’s 1767 watershed experiment of infusing water with carbon dioxide gas, carbonated water was commercialised by the brand Schweppes in 1783. The bubbled bliss amassed quite a cult following. In Bombay, an aerated water factory, Rogers started in 1837 to cater to the rising demand.
Soda couldn’t be delayed, or there was pandemonium, as Ardeshir witnessed for himself one evening when he stumbled upon a bar brawl.
“Why the commotion?” he asked.
“The mules are late. There is no soda,” he was told. And so Ardeshir decided to come up with an experiment that would sate Pune’s soda appetite. He found a way to produce carbonated water. Soon, sugar and flavour found their way into the drink, and Ardeshir’s was born, a bottled range of fizzy cheer that even predates Coca-Cola, which, by most estimates, was invented in 1886 — two years after Ardeshir’s started in 1884 in a small rented barrack in Pune.
A constant on Pune’s chequered dining tables
Storytelling and a penchant for intrepidity run in the family DNA, I deduce. I’m listening to Marzban’s tale as he narrates his great-grandfather’s itinerant history. These stories are juxtaposed against the lores of the Zorastrian migration following the Arab conquest in 651 AD.
His voice assumes a low register as he details Ardeshir’s escape from Yazd in Iran to Quetta (now in Pakistan) to Pune with just Rs 8.
“My great-grandfather was quite a prominent person in his village of Yazd. One day, while on his way to work in his savari (the elite would ride donkeys back in the day), he came across an inebriated Muslim beggar who demanded he get down from the donkey and show some respect to him.” Ardeshir refused to. Thus followed an altercation, which ended with the beggar being hurt.
Now, hurting a Muslim was a grave offence.
Marzban contextualises this, referencing the religious persecutions that were rampant at the time. “Zorastrians had to practice their faith in hiding. To further humiliate them, a law had been passed that, whatever a person’s status, if they were on their way and should come upon a Muslim, they had to get off their safari and tip their hat and do salaam (offer a greeting).”
Ardeshir had clearly flouted the law. Fleeing seemed the only solution.
“So he grabbed that era’s equivalent of Rs 8 and fled by boat out of Yazd to a place called Quetta, where his aunt lived,” Marzban goes on to detail how Ardeshir detested those months. He moved once more, this time with his sights trained on the docks of Bombay. But a few months of toil taught him this was not his cup of tea. He moved again. This time, he landed in Pune, spotted chaos unfurling at one of the bars, causing him to ideate an experiment that gave the city an indelible piece of fizzy history.
Ardeshir’s in Pune has some bestseller drinks like orangeade, lemonade, raspberry and ice cream soda and teekha (spicy) ginger, Picture source: Ardeshir’s
I marvel at how Marzban pauses at the cliffhanger bits, allowing suspense to hang in the air. As he reveals, he’s always enjoyed a good story. When he was little, he’d often concoct some of his own while “polishing off bottles” of Ardeshir’s fizzy drinks. While Ardeshir had invented quite a few classics, Marzban’s dad added the orangeade, lemonade, raspberry and ice cream soda and teekha (spicy) ginger to the list when he took over. Marzban explains that while his father took charge of Ardeshir’s, his uncles oversaw the running of Frams — also a flavoured drinks business — which was started by Marzban’s grandfather, Framroze.
A browse through the current menu at Ardeshir’s reveals a caffeine-free cola, peach, pineapple, green apple, jeera masala (a drink featuring cumin powder), masala kala khatta (java plum juice) and tonic water. These are Marzban’s innovations — tradition with a wink, if you will.
A yellowing recipe and a hefty legacy
Step into one of Pune’s Iranian eateries, and you’ll spot a familiar silhouette. The Ardeshir’s bottle is unmistakable. It’s also a weighty legacy to carry forward, Marzban learnt when entrusted with the business in 2013, following the passing of his father. “I did not know anything at the time. How do I make the flavours? What do I do? And then, I came across an old yellow notebook where my father had scribbled down the formulas for the drink. I started going through his files, deciphering the scribbles, experimenting, tweaking and attempting to do justice,” he recalls.
Neither time nor the emergence of other drink alternatives has weathered Ardeshir’s popularity. Marzban learnt this one afternoon, when he was paid a visit by an elderly gentleman from the United States. “He’d been hunting long for the place — we don’t have a board, you see. Finally, someone told him where he could find the sodawala (the man who makes sodas),” Marzban shares.
The gentleman regaled Marzban with stories of how he’d gulp down bottles of Ardeshir’s on his way back from school. At the time, the drink retailed for 35 paisa.
He’d come to take a crate back to America with him. The success of the drink is in its flavour. “We try to use natural ingredients as much as possible,” Marzban points out that much before sustainability was the buzzword it is now, Ardeshir’s was ahead of the curve. The ‘returnable bottle’ model — a deposit of Rs 360 is charged for a case of 24 glass bottles — is very much still in place. “The deposit is returned when the bottles are returned to us, meaning that the customer is only paying for the product. That’s also why we don’t retail across India. It’s because, if I don’t get empty bottles back the next day, I don’t have anything to fill the drinks in,” he reasons.
With success reflected in its numbers — Ardeshir’s retails around 300 cases a month — it’s fascinating how an unpredictable series of events crescendoed into giving Pune its favourite drink. But as Marzban emphasises, it’s just the magic of old-fashioned goodness in a bottle.
Edited by Khushi Arora
News