There-and-back Globalization

I bought my first motorcycle, a 1977 Honda 360T with a kick-starter (since the electric starter was on-and-off) in 1984, and always kept a bike to get around places with difficult parking (like Boston). I bought my first new motorcyle in 1986: a Honda Nighthawk S CB700SC – back then, I was deciding between the Honda and a BMW R60 (a mid-size boxer engine), and the hydraulic everything on the Honda won out. I did have instant buyer’s remorse – and promised that my next bike would be a BMW.
I got rid of that 1986 Honda three years ago, and have missed riding – especially in the south, where I can ride all year (it was harder to ride year-round in Boston, but I did it when I was young and foolish). So a few months ago, I started to again look at motorcycles, to see what is around. The standards that I prefer seem to have gotten bigger; the BMW boxer that I have pined over since 1986 are only available in a 1200cc version. They have also gotten a lot more expensive – the BMW R1200R is around $14,000, the price of a car.
That’s when I ran into the Royal Enfield, the bike that you see pictured here. It has a wonderful story that I will summarize, but you can read about it here on Motorcyclist magazine’s webpage.
Royal Enfield, a company that started building motorcycles in 1909, was one of the famed British motorcycle companies (like Norton and Triumph) that were pushed out of business by the rise of Japanese motorcycles in the 1970s. The Royal Enfield motorcyle, however, lived on – not in Britain, but in India. In 1955, when Royal Enfield was still a strong company, it set up a factory in Madras to make the 500cc Bullet in situ; Indian workers were brought to England to study the manufacturing techniques, and the machine parts to make the Bullet were transferred to India. So after Enfield went out of business, the Indian factory continued to crank out 1955 Enfield Bullets, into the 21st century. Now this Indian company is exporting a British classic all over the world, including back into the U.K. and to the United States.
So what we have here is a story similar to cricket, as described by Arjun Appadurai and many others, of a cultural item being exported along the British colonial lines, and then being re-imported back into its origin, or there-and-back globalization. This classic British motorcycle is now truly Indian, retaining a lot of its familiar British style, but with modern Indian engineering.
I visited a local Royal Enfield dealer last weekend for a test-ride, and hope to soon get back to riding on this new classic. With its factory in Chennai, where Davidson has its India program, I hope to someday visit and see this production of nostalgia for myself.