The Yezdi motorbike makes a comeback after twenty-six years
Rustomjee’s Boman Irani teams up with Anand Mahindra and Anupam Thareja to reintroduce Yezdi
On January 20, 2022, Classic Legends reintroduced the Yezdi motorbike in India, launching the three variants, Roadster, Scramble, and Adventure, costing around two lakh rupees. Classic Legends followed up its Jawa re-launch in India in 2018 with the recent Yezdi launch, catering to the nostalgia of both brands among Indians across the country.
Times of Urbania details the story of the Jawa motorbike, its successor, the Yezdi, and the decline and resurrection of Yezdi. Rustomjee Builder’s chairman and managing director, Boman Irani, has a family connection to Yezdi bikes and has been involved in the re-launch of both Jawa and Yezdi as one of the three co-promoters of Classic Legends.
The inception of Ideal Jawa Motors: Boman Irani’s family hails from Yazd in Iran. His father, Rustom Irani, started the trading business Yazdani and Company, which imported and sold food products like toffees and cookies in India. Rustom Irani and his partner Farrokh Irani started the Ideal Jawa in 1960 to import and sell the Czechoslovakian Jawa motorcycles in India.
Subsequently, Ideal Jawa set up their factory at Mysore in 1961 to produce the 250 Types with a license from Jawa of Czechoslovakia. Jawa’s reputation in India for being rugged, simple, and unbreakable made their Jawa 250 a popular urban youth choice, with many owners winning biking races on their machines.
Twelve years after starting to manufacture Jawa in India, in 1973, Ideal Jawa changed the name of their brand to Yezdi, which they manufactured with technical assistance from Jawa. By then, Jawa motorcycles were a globally popular and big hit among motorcycling enthusiasts, with the Perak and Californian being among its top international brands.
Yezdi is a phonetic transcription of the Czech verb “jezdí,” which means rides. Interestingly, Boman Irani’s family hails from Yazd or Yezd in Iran, and one of his cousins is Yezdi! Rustom Irani was an artist who drew the Yezdi logo at their home with a pencil on the family’s dining table.
Boman Irani rode his Yezdi Road King bike from Mysore in the mid-eighties of the last century. Boman had finished his twelfth standard, and when he drove Mysore to nearby Coorg and Ooty, he had to navigate the ghat roads on his bike with the silencer scraping the road at the hairpin bends.
Stoppage of Yezdi production: Ideal Jawa stopped production in 1996 thirty-five years after the Governor of Mysore H.H Sri Jayachamaraja Wadiyar, the Maharaja of Mysore, had inaugurated its factory in 1961.
Ideal Jawa exported its motorbike to more than sixty countries, including Turkey, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Guatemala, Ghana, Venezuela, and Abu Dhabi. Jawa and Yezdi bikes have remained popular since their inception. You can easily find riders using Jawa 250, Yezdi 250 ‘B’ Type, Yezdi 250 Roadking, Yezdi 350 Twin, and Yezdi 250 Monarch India even when some of those motorbikes are more than fifty years old.
At its peak, the Ideal Jawa factory employed two thousand people and produced forty thousand motorcycles in a year. However, in 1996 Ideal Jawa stopped its production at its Mysore factory owing to labor trouble and its two-stroke engine motorbikes being unable to comply with pollution control norms. With the arrival of Japanese motorbike brands Suzuki, Honda, and Yamaha in India in the nineties, Indian consumers chose lighter, more fuel-efficient, and less polluting motorcycles. Ideal Jawa produced the 175, Monarch, Deluxe, Road Kings, and CL II models when it stopped production.
When Idea Jawa stopped producing its bikes, its customers created rider clubs to keep alive the spirit of the Yezdi brand. As a result, more and fifty Jawa Yezdi clubs across India have owners who collectively own more than ten thousand bikes of those two brands. Bangalore, Mumbai, and Pune have the most enthusiastic Jawa Yezdi supporters.
The revival of Jawa and Yezdi: Anupam Thareja was a banker who worked at Royal Enfield from 2005 to 2008, helping that brand successfully reintroduce the Bullet brand in India, making it a major commercial success. Thareja teamed up with his friend Anand Mahindra of Mahindra and Mahindra (M&M) for the re-launch of Jawa in India after both had been in discussion about it for nearly a decade. When they approached Boman Irani, the second-generation owner of the Ideal Jawa brands in India, Boman wanted to be part of that venture, Classic Legends. The company is now owned by M&M, Anupam Thareja, and Boman Irani and manufactures its products at an M&M automotive plant.
Coincidentally, all three men behind the revival of Jawa and Yezdi are avid bikers and biking enthusiasts, which is one of the reasons for the project’s success in resurrecting three yesteryear brands. Thareja and Mahindra are older than Boman and thus familiar with the Jawa and Yezdi brands, whereas Boman, the brand owner, had access to the bikes at home. Boman also brings his links with the Jawa Yezdi clubs to the table as the brand now seeks support from its fans to re-establish itself in the Indian two-wheeler market.
The Yezdi tagline “Forever Bike, Forever Value” is now “‘Not for the saint hearted.” Classic Legends has positioned the Yezdi bikes as a collector’s item that targets a small segment of the Indian motorcycle market. With the runaway success of the Royal Enfield Bullet, India now has a big fan following of motorcycle enthusiasts looking for brands of nostalgic value into which the Bullet, Jawa, BSA, and Yezdi brands fit in well.
The secret to the runaway success of Bullet reintroduction has been the retro image that Royal Enfield combined with technological superiority to deliver an affordable product to the target group of young consumers (though even older men also still hanker after the iconic Bullet brand). In the case of Jawa and Yezdi, Classic Legends used the M&M design facilities at Pune and Varese in Italy for the bike that the company makes through M&M’s two-wheeler factory near Indore at Pithampur.
Classic Legends ran into supply and quality problems after huge demand for their Jawa bikes they re-launched in 2018. Hence, the company is likely to accept fewer bookings for Yezdi to avoid delivery problems and prevent booking cancellations like Jawa.
Boman Irani maintains the websites of the two iconic brands, Yezdi and Jawa, that his family brought and produced in India. He has now revived along with his Classic Legends co-promoters.