Parle-G Baby

Parle-G (formerly Parle-Gluco) is a glucose biscuit brand manufactured in India that has become a household name inextricably linked to the quintessential consumer environment of India’s snack and food industry. In 2011, it reigned supreme as the most-consumed biscuit brand in India, topping global charts as well.[1] Synonymous with children’s snacks and teatime short eats, the cookie — and, by proxy, the cute baby mascot — has ingrained itself within Indian culture as a symbol of daily life. Following Parle-G’s journey to integrate the brand name into domestic settings requires us to examine its history, the way in which cute food mascots introduce commercial products into the fold of the home, and what kinds of cultural phenomena are made permissible through cuteness and cute mascots. Ultimately, this article hopes to explore how the Parle-G Baby as a mascot enabled the biscuit to create a powerful platform for positive brand perception.

The Parle-G Baby’s story begins before India gained independence. From 1858 to 1947, British Imperial rule (i.e., the British Raj) lasted as a colonial power within India, primarily to extract natural resources and spices from the region.[2] India’s geographical propensity for agricultural exploitation lent itself to the production of grain crops but was dominated by rice production, with much of the wheat being used to produce preservable foodstuffs. As an artifact of the highly regulated British wheat trade, the wheat flour biscuit became a cultural symbol of the elite because it was a product simply unavailable to the average Indian.[3] It quickly grew synonymous with British sociocultural artifacts of tea-time, daily consumption as a dessert, or an expensive general snack. None of these acts of leisure were made accessible to lower-class Indians, and by virtue of its price, neither was the biscuit itself. Archives recording communications from Calcutta in 1900 place wheat at 8.4375 kilograms on the rupee, and rice at 12.5 kgs for the same, highlighting that wheat was not the cheapest carbohydrate staple at the time.[4]

With founder Mohanlal Dayal’s establishment of the House of Parle company in 1928, the first Indian-produced biscuit hit markets in 1939 — during World War II — in the form of simple flour-and-sugar glucose biscuits known as Parle-Gluco.[5] The Parle-Gluco biscuit was an intentional move into the untapped market of cheaper, mass-produced biscuits for lower-income strata whose markets British brands had not previously catered to.[6] From its inception, Parle-G was intended to be Desh ka apna biscuit, or “India’s own biscuit.”[7] Its mascot at the time was a woman raising cattle on a farm, dressed in a blouse that called upon images of traditional Indian saris or the shalwar kameez. The woman also had markedly Indian features.[8] By all means, the whimsical style of this image could be considered “cute,” yet it remained decidedly Indian in the face of colonial rule. 

Parle-Gluco was directly intended to challenge British systems of socioeconomic power with its message, advertising itself as the common Indian’s food — antithetical to the elite British confectionery the biscuit represented. Hence, its advertising needed to similarly reflect an innate desire to transgress social norms imposed by colonial rule. Cuteness, as an aesthetic, makes this transgression uniquely permissible in the realm of material objects. In exploring the means by which cuteness has become a vehicle for sociocultural refusal and rebellion, we can turn to Megan Catherine Rose et al.’s analysis of Tokyo’s decora fashion style, whose practitioners wear “clashing, vibrant, electric colours, and a wild variety of kawaii versions of monsters, characters, and food which appear as motifs on their clothing.”[9] These decora fashion practitioners stand in stark contrast to the mainstream urban fashion of metropolitan Japan. Through decora, cuteness allows for the transformation of the “mundane material world into one occupied everywhere by the sensate and the sociable,” suggesting that the material (or matter itself) is a significant social actor engaged by individuals on an emotional and ontological level.[10]

For Rose et al., decora fashion is a means of engaging with self-presentation in radical, deeply personal ways, thereby creating a sense of freedom and agency upon engaging with material in ways that enrich the self. Under New Materialism, the social actor of material/matter allows otherwise unassuming goods to elevate themselves beyond mere commodities and become symbols of self-expression, giving individuals the agency to consider new consumptive lifestyles that would otherwise be inaccessible. Bestowing agency through its consumption, the cute aesthetic empowered the Parle-Gluco brand during a period when many Indian goods were inaccessible to actual Indians. The humble glucose biscuit’s branding afforded consumers “‘freedom to’ new ways of being” that allowed them to find pleasure in their own consumption habits.[11] For Indians, cute branding enabled a soft, unspoken agenda of rebellion against British rule that could bypass more overt structures of power, such as the associated press or political demonstrations, by giving consumers the choice to consume what would have otherwise been impossible to access.

Through its marketing as a soft refusal of British rule via its cute branding and pro-Indian advertising, Parle-Gluco made permissible the idea of a biscuit for Indians and by Indians. However, it must also be noted that this function of the commodity as a social player that creates agency and possibility can perform the same “making permissible” of other sociocultural agendas. For example, Parle-Gluco was a major provider of military-grade glucose rations to British-Indian troops during World War II, playing a significant part in militant efforts.[12] Moreover, Parle-Gluco’s original branding features a background of flowing grass and slope-roofed cottages that strongly touches upon the pastoral idyll found in British agrarian landscapes compared to the flatter, earthy rice fields of India. Just as the biscuit gave consumers the choice to consume and created a soft sense of agency for Indians during a period when independence was firmly rooted within India’s collective consciousness, it also continued to perpetuate subtle signs of colonial aesthetics and militant power structures that Indians were attempting to escape from. As a means of turning commodity into a social player, cuteness often makes action permissible in more ways than one, and the function that Parle-Gluco played during Pre-Independence India remains far more nuanced than a simple one-sided empowerment of the Indian people. 

Parle-Gluco biscuits remained close to the Indian person’s heart following Independence through its creation of an invisible hand of refusal against larger structures of power. Once obtaining Independence, however, it would quickly become apparent that this sentiment would not last. Recognizing the profound impact cute aesthetics can have on influencing social fabrics, the term “soft power” is often used to communicate how cuteness and other minor aesthetics can “influence behaviour… through cultural or ideological means,” and Parle-Gluco had evidently found its footing in Indian markets through this “soft power.”[13] How, then, could it retain its image within the Indian populus? In the 1960s, advertising designer Everest Brand Solutions introduced the now-iconic Parle-G Baby to the wrappers of Parle-Gluco biscuits from the sentiment that “when one spoke about biscuits, the first thing that came from the housewives was, ‘We buy biscuits for our children’.… [which then] leads to consumption across the family.”[14] This was, in fact, an explicit move to connect the Parle G product with childhood through the use of a child figure. 

The Parle-G Baby is a young girl around three or four years old, with close-cut hair, a pudgy face with fingers held up to their face, and a frock often worn by young girls in India. Her haircut, skin tone, and clothes all paint a clear picture of the quintessential Indian baby girl, and biased as that picture may be, it aims to mimic the aesthetics present in households with children from the 1960s. The face and fingers themselves have been hotly debated among buyers, but a popular theory is that the child had just licked her fingers clean after eating (hence, the proximity to the mouth) and is looking up with a mischievous grin. More subtly, it appears as if the baby has just finished eating biscuits without a parent’s permission and is now caught in that ever-endearing position, hands fresh from the cookie jar. The child seemingly holds a disarming, charming pose that asks the viewer not to be too upset with her, as if it was not her fault that the biscuits were so tasty. It is through this type of familiar, affection-inspiring imagery that brand appeal is created: the Parle-G Baby’s pudgy features, thin smile, and mischievous pose appeal to the consumer, much as a real infant instinctually compels an individual to care for it and feel a certain degree of emotion and attachment toward even an unfamiliar child. 

Such an active attempt at creating a cultural story for this imaginary child directly “courts consumer empathy” through cuteness, “generating a structure of emotional response that assimilates consumption into the logic of adoption” when considering how cute objects function as social actors that can engage with, and effectively penetrate, a given social fabric.[15] In this case, the Parle-G Baby performs several layers of cute tropes familiar to the Indian aesthetic(s) surrounding childhood, snacking, and affection that quickly attach said “structure of emotional response” to the glucose biscuit’s branding. The commodity itself, then, gets quickly “adopted” into cultural norms in being deemed attractive for consumption. Thus, upon “adopting” the Parle-G Baby, we have now allowed the familiarization of the biscuit into our daily lives as well. Nadia de Vries explains how, upon attachment to a product, purchase is a natural response as an attempt “to close the distance between ourselves and that object” as we conflate possession and consumption.[16] Indeed, the phrase “‘You’re so cute I could just eat you up’” remains concrete in our lexicons.[17] Bringing in anthropologist Anne Allison’s perspective of cute objects creating “enchanted commodities,” the Parle-G Baby creates a certain whimsy and comfort that reinforces this inherent attachment to the product from an angle of “attractive fantasy.”[18] The subtle feelings of mystery in what the child might be doing with her fingers or where she might be looking penetrate a consumer’s imagination, allowing them to foster a new intimacy with a commodity unique to them and them alone in their interpretation of it. Thus, the bond between product and purchaser is further strengthened by an added layer of personal intrigue and surrealism to the more “natural” instincts of consumption attached to the packaging’s featuring a child, as well as the (ethnic) closeness found in the biscuits’ branding as an ally to the struggling working-class Indian.

The Parle-G Baby, as a child on a biscuit wrapper, seems to have allowed the biscuit itself to enter the social fold of Indian snack markets. The biscuit was once wholly foreign to the Indian consumer-culture as a mass-produced artifact of the elite British imperialist. To children, however, it is now relatable and sweet; to adults, it is the little cute snack they enjoy with afternoon tea; to India, it is a soft, subtle sign of freedom and luxury for the working laborer. The Parle-G Baby has created an opportunity to equate the non-anthropomorphic, less familiar biscuit with the kinship it creates as a mascot. Evidently, the mascot adopts certain defining physical features of cuteness in her rounded cheeks, mischievous smile, simple plaid dress, pudgy fingers, and wide eyes, all of which embody the construct of “cuteness” as per the concept of Kindchenschema. With psychological and behavioural research suggesting that “adults form more positive aesthetic judgments of infants with a higher incidence of these features,” the mascot’s cuteness invites adults to purchase Parle-G out of positive association.[19]

A non-anthropomorphized commodity such as the glucose biscuit is not inherently familiar in domestic settings and may operate outside the bounds of the “family” from a maternal perspective. The biscuit lies within the realm of the radical Other due to its lasting unfamiliarity, without any attached emotions or sentiments that could generate closeness. Thus, it remains alien to the consumer and ostensibly undesirable. Yet today, members of the Indian diaspora purchase Parle-G in bulk and have it shipped overseas to put that biscuit back onto their shelves. From an Indian teenager who has grown up in the United States and not yet set foot in their ethnic country to someone who has never touched biscuits and tea in their life, most Indians would indeed recognize the name and brand of Parle-G. 

Neither the biscuit’s recipe nor its role as a key Indian snack has changed since its inception. Parle-G has cemented itself within our consumer subculture. The little baby girl that has become the biscuit’s mascot has perfectly performed her role of facilitating the “assimilating [of] commodity desire into a structure of familial, expressly maternal, emotion” through the cute, remaining affixed within the adult eye as something not fully realized as human, yet still cute.[20] In “emphasizing human physical… characteristics in different products… to increase sales and the likeability of goods,”[21] Parle-G’s mascot performs the subconscious bridging between the non-human biscuit (i.e., the Othered commodity) and the consumer, affording it a certain familiarity that makes it more permissible to purchase and place on countertops or cookie jars, brought and accepted into the fold of the home. Ultimately, whether speaking to national sentiments of class-based revolt from Pre-Colonial India or entertaining the maternal emotions behind cuteness and the purchasing of commodities, the Parle-G Baby presents a compelling case for how cute consumerism makes permissible a dissolving of product and non-product. In establishing itself as a focal point within the Indian social fabric, the Parle-G Baby has inevitably shaped cultural aesthetics, and by proxy, created a profound degree of marketability, generating revenue by generating familiarity. 

Published: 8/8/2025

Notes

[1] Ratna Bhushan, “Parle-G World’s No 1 Selling Biscuit: Nielsen,” The Economic Times, March 3, 2011, https://archive.ph/20120714041312/http:/articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-03-03/news/28650799_1_parle-products-parle-g-glucose-biscuit.

[2] Elizabeth Vanderven, “National Education Systems: Asia,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Education, ed. John L. Rury and Eileen H. Tamura (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 222.

[3] Sharanya Deepak, “Indian Biscuits: 1947-2022,” Vittles, May 9, 2022, https://www.vittlesmagazine.com/p/indian-biscuits-1947-2022.

[4] Prices taken from extracts found in Englishman’s Overland Mail from 1900. Preserved by The British Newspaper Archive.

[5] “About Us,” Parle, accessed April 14, 2024, http://www.parleproducts.com.

[6] Deepak, “Indian Biscuits.”

[7] “Parle-G: The Humble Biscuit That Became the Taste of India,” The Economic Times, September 1, 2023, http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/cons-products/fmcg/parle-g-the-humble-biscuit-that-became-the-taste-of-india/articleshow/103279991.cms?from=mdr.

[8] “Can Parle Energize India’s Consumer Explosion?” AJVC, April 17, 2022, http://www.ajuniorvc.com/parle-bisleri-case-study-history-brands-positioning/?print=print.

[9] Megan Catherine Rose, Haruka Kurebayashi, and Rei Saionji, “Kawaii Affective Assemblages: Cute New Materialism in Decora Fashion, Harajuku,” M/C Journal 25, no. 4 (2022), https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2926.

[10] Rose, Kurebayashi, and Saionji, “Kawaii Affective Assemblages.”

[11] Rose, Kurebayashi, and Saionji, “Kawaii Affective Assemblages.”

[12] Deepak, “Indian Biscuits.”

[13] Christine R. Yano, “Wink on Pink: Interpreting Japanese Cute as It Grabs the Global Headlines,” The Journal of Asian Studies 68, no. 3 , (August 2009): 683.

[14] “Parle-G’s Mascot Enhances the Biscuit Eating Culture in India,” ET Brand Equity, October 31, 2021, http://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/advertising/parle-gs-mascot-enhances-the-biscuit-eating-culture-in-india/87386158.

[15] Lori Merish, “Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom Thumb and Shirley Temple,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Rosemarie Garland Thomson (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 187.

[16] Nadia de Vries, “Under the Yolk of Consumption: Re-Envisioning the Cute as Consumable,” in The Aesthetics and Effects of Cuteness, ed. Joshua Paul Dale et al. (New York: Routledge, 2017).

[17] Sianne Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 4 (Summer 2005): 820.

[18] Anne Allison, “Enchanted Commodities,” in Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006).

[19] Jason Dydynski and Nelly Mäekivi, “Multisensory Perception of Cuteness in Mascots and Zoo Animals,” International Journal of Marketing Semiotics 6 (2018): 7.

[20] Rose, Kurebayashi, and Saionji, “Kawaii Affective Assemblages.”

[21] Dydynski and Mäekivi, “Multisensory Perception of Cuteness,” 9.