Boroline

Boroline is a thick, faintly scented white cream sold in a slim bottle-green tube with a black cap, marked with an elephant. It is an antiseptic: a mixture of boric acid, zinc oxide and an emollient base, rubbed into cracked lips and heels, chapped hands, small cuts and rashes. In eastern India it is kept in almost every household, and Bengalis joke that it will cure anything.

It was the work of Gour Mohan Dutta, a Calcutta merchant who made his living importing English cosmetics until the Swadeshi movement, the campaign to replace British goods with Indian ones, turned him to making his own. In 1929, with advice, the company says, from the chemist Prafulla Chandra Ray, he began mixing the cream at home with his wife, Kamala Bala, filling small tins for his shop in Burrabazar. He called it Boroline, from boric acid and the Latin oleum, oil, and chose the elephant as its mark for strength and good fortune.

The cream sold as a matter of national pride. During the Second World War it went out in whatever containers could be found, labelled to say the contents were unchanged. On Independence Day in 1947 the company advertised in the Calcutta papers and gave away a lakh, a hundred thousand, tubes. Later it sponsored football tournaments and Durga Puja, and in villages where few could read the label it was known simply as the cream with the elephant.

The company has stayed with the Dutta family, now led by the founder's grandson, and says it has never changed the formula. The elephant and the dark green tube remain, joined by a small tub. Boroline is made in two factories, outside Kolkata and at Ghaziabad, and still accounts for most of the firm's sales, nearly a century after Dutta first filled his tins.