Long before Lakmé became synonymous with Indian beauty counters, fashion weeks, salon chains, and the unmistakable pink-and-black branding of aspirational middle-class India, it was an opera. And before it was an opera, it was Europe’s fantasy of India — fragrant, dangerous, sensual, mystical, and tragically feminine.
A French opera built on colonial imagination would eventually inspire independent India’s first major cosmetics brand that helped Indian women reclaim beauty on their own terms.
The tale starts in 19th-century Europe, when "the Orient" was significant. Poets infused it with eroticism, and composers presented it. India's picture that lived in the European minds had snake charmers, ringing temple bells, holy rivers, super-spiritual women, unbearable heat, and love that was tragic. Lakmé was introduced around this time, created by Léo Delibes and first performed at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in April 1883. It was a swift success, and audiences came back many times. The opera ultimately achieved over 1,500 performances at the same location, which was a remarkable achievement in the history of opera.
Its story unfolded in British India. Lakmé who was the daughter of a Brahmin priest called Nilakantha, became infatuated with Gérald, a British officer. Their love story was fated for failure from the start — caught in the midst of colonial invasion, religious obligations, and the opera’s thirst for sorrow. In the concluding act, Lakmé takes poison and perishes in sacrifice upon realising that Gérald will eventually go back to his British regiment.
The opera dripped with exoticism. Delibes’ score used shimmering orchestrations and stylised “Eastern” motifs that sounded intoxicatingly foreign to Parisian ears. Lakmé herself embodied a familiar European trope: the beautiful native woman, spiritually pure yet fatally fragile. India in the opera was sacred, sensual and visually lush.
The roots of the opera lay partly in the writings of Théodore Pavie, a French Orientalist who had travelled extensively through India in the late 1830s after studying Sanskrit. Théodore visited Madras, Bombay, Poona, Calcutta, and Pondicherry, spending nearly two years absorbing the country at the height of colonial expansion.
The experience inspired his collection Scènes et récits des pays d’outre-mer (“Scenes and Stories from Overseas Lands”), a set of tales filled with revenge, devotion, love, mysticism, and moral conflict. These stories later informed the libretto for Lakmé. But nobody had actually bothered to properly tell Pavie.
Years later, when the opera toured Pavie’s hometown of Angers, Delibes and librettist Philippe Gille reportedly found themselves in an awkward situation at a dinner gathering. Someone casually asked where the inspiration for Lakmé had come from. Gille vaguely admitted it came from “some Pavie.” The room informed them that Pavie lived in the very same town.
The creators had never formally sought permission, nor meaningfully acknowledged him. Fearing embarrassment — or worse, confrontation — they invited Pavie to the opera performance. That invitation became, effectively, his only royalty.
Nearly seventy years later, newly independent India faced an unexpected economic challenge: beauty products. In the 1950s, India, following its independence, was determined to reduce dependence on imports and promote local production. The government banned the import of soaps, perfumes, and cosmetics to protect foreign exchange reserves. But India barely had a cosmetics industry of its own. Women still associated beauty and glamour with imported European products. French powders, British creams, French perfumes represented sophistication in an India emerging from colonial rule but still psychologically entangled with Western prestige.
By the 1950s, independent India was trying to cut down on imported luxury goods, including cosmetics and perfumes. But Indian women were still buying foreign beauty products because there were barely any Indian alternatives that carried the same aspirational appeal. That is when Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru reportedly turned to J. R. D. Tata and encouraged him to build an Indian cosmetics company. The choice made sense. J.R.D. Tata was born in Paris to a French mother and a Parsi father, and moved comfortably between Indian and European worlds. When Tata later collaborated with French companies to launch Lakmé in 1952, the brand carried both those influences naturally.
At the time, the opera Lakmé happened to be playing in Paris. Someone linked to the French collaborators proposed naming the cosmetics line after the opera. The name had a French ring to it, yet it also linked to Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess representing beauty, prosperity, and wealth. Crucially, it enabled Indian women to purchase something for daily use without feeling they were sacrificing elegance.
Lakmé-the-brand presented Indian women as urban, mobile, fashionable, professionally groomed, and visibly modern. Here were women who wore lipstick not because Europe told them to, but because independent India now had the economic and cultural confidence to manufacture desire for itself. India was no longer merely the setting of someone else’s fantasy. And perhaps that is the strangest, most compelling part of Lakmé’s journey. A colonial-era opera that once reduced India into spectacle ultimately gave independent India a vocabulary for self-fashioning. The exotic object became the creator.
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