Amrutanjan Pain Balm

Amrutanjan Pain Balm is a yellow ointment sold in a small squat jar with a yellow screw lid; in the 1980s it came in yellow glass. It is pungent, smelling of camphor, mint and wintergreen, and is meant to be rubbed into the forehead for a headache or onto the throat and chest for a cold. The maker lists ten active ingredients, all plant oils and extracts, in a perfumed base coloured yellow.

Its inventor, Kasinadhuni Nageswara Rao, was a Telugu graduate of Madras Christian College who had learned to compound medicines in Calcutta before moving to Bombay. In 1893 he began making his balm there, and is said to have handed it out free at music concerts until it caught on. It sold for ten annas. By 1914 a survey of southern Indian commerce called it famous, a remedy for all the aches and pains to which mortal flesh is heir.

The balm paid for much else. Rao founded the Telugu newspaper Andhra Patrika in Bombay in 1909, moved it and the business to Madras, financed Congress work, joined the salt satyagraha and was jailed for it, and led the movement for a separate Andhra state. He died in 1938, a millionaire, and is commemorated by an Indian postage stamp. The company he founded became Amrutanjan Limited in 1936 and Amrutanjan Healthcare in 2007, still led by his family.

Advertisements across the twentieth century show the same proposition: a jar labelled 'The Pain Balm', relief from colds and aching joints, and, by the time the balm was famous for over seventy-five years, ten powerful medicaments including menthol and camphor. The current jar says Extra Power and carries a modern logo with 'Since 1893' beneath it, but the yellow balm inside, ten ingredients strong, is still the one Amrutanjan is known by.