Between Love and Valentine

Courtesy of Archies Cards on sale at an Archies outlet in Delhi.

Back in my hometown of Ranchi, it was outside the Archies Gallery in the Church Complex that the angry-eyed young men of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s militant wing, the Bajrang Dal, positioned themselves on Valentine’s Day. Except all they found was a sad trickle of people - those habitually late, and those who were the utterly naïve. Everyone else would have come a week earlier, edging past shelves overflowing with Linda Goodman mugs and George Michael posters to the special corner that lay at the far end of the shop where a placard â€" in red, obviously, and shaped like a heart â€" would announce: “14 Feb is Valentine’s Day.€

In India, one’s love wasn’t one’s Valentine until a small company in the dusty Delhi district of Naraina that dealt in song books and leather patches decided it was about time we made that cultural leap. In 1988, Archies Greetings and Gifts Ltd., founded in Delhi nine years earlier and making comfortable and increasing profits with its Holi and Diwali greeting cards, published the first batch of those meant for Valentine’s Day - the beginning of its redefining, for a sizable section of Indians spread all over the country but concentrated in smaller towns, of love and how to go about it.

“Baby, I want to be kissing or touching you every waking moment/but I’m trying to hold myself back just a little/because I also want more time to get to know you/all your hopes and dreams/and how I can make them true,” is just one example, from hundreds of similarly cloying messages, of how the cards informed men that they must make their woman feel special.

It wasn’t straightforward, though. The cards’ approach, inspired from expressions of intimacy in Western pop culture (Shania Twain, in particular, has a lot to answer for), often clashed harshly with what was then being passed down to us from our primary source of reference, Bollywood - where men, mostly, either demanded love in the most entitled manner or acted indifferent to women serenading them, maintaining that nose-in-the-air contempt throughout seven-minute songs.

And, correspondingly, the messages on those cards taught girls how to hold their own in relationships (“I thought we meant more to each other”) or to reassure a man about exactly how undying their love was (“Nothing can change what we have been and will always be to each other”).

Archies didn’t just have a card to express every exact feeling or bump in the road (“you are just the one for me/we might have something more special than friendship/ we will sail through this rough patch”), but often helped identiy them first, too.

And it made famously awkward young Indian men spruce up their wooing at long last, like for one secret admirer in my school who, one Valentine’s Day long ago, placed an Archies card in the hands of the girl he liked without saying a single word before - or, sadly, after.

If you were a teenager in the 1990s, breaking with the past by learning to romance each other through dates at “nonfamily restaurants” and shyly exchanging cassette tapes titled “Greatest Love Songs Volume XX”, your training was incomplete without the timeliest of tips from Archies.

Except for a terse “we follow trends closely,” the company has never specified how it keeps up with the demands of a youth culture that changes more quickly than anything else in fast-growing India. A clue may lie in one job advertisement online for Archies copywriters, which lists the desirable qualities: “dexterous wordsmith, exquisite craftsman, avid reader, perfectionist, with a sense of humor.”

Work! ing with a creative team of 30 to 40 in Delhi, Archies has emerged, over the years, as the unchallenged player in the Indian greetings card business, with a firm grip on half the market and turnover of 2 billion rupees ($37.3 million). It also has a sizeable presence in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. Archies is also among the biggest brands in the Valentine’s Day retail industry, worth nearly 50 billion rupees.

Indeed, ownership of one day was not enough to satisfy the company; it wanted the entire week. Over time, Archies has introduced greeting cards and merchandise for what it calls Valentine’s Week, which, in case you were hitherto blissfully unaware, includes Rose Day, Propose Day, Kiss Day and oddly diffident Hug Day.

The company has managed to stave off global competition, too, by joining forces with its rivals. It had an old partnership with Gibson Greetings in the United States, and in 2011 Archies entered into a licensing agreement with its only real competitor in India, HallmarkCards. Soon, the Archies will open stores especially for the global chain all over India.

Like other greeting cards, Valentine’s Day cards have pretty much been destroyed in the West, by a combination of the Internet’s convenience and the ironic sensibility it seems to have delivered to everyone under 30. Indians, however, having recently discovered these good old soppy greetings, are far from ready to let them go.

The practice of sending cards may be quaintly old-fashioned, but the cards themselves aren’t. This year, the company introduced, by popular request, musical love cards, which were said to be flying off the shelves. Only a few were actually left at the Khan Market Archies Gallery on the afternoon of Valentine’s Day.

The branch manager, Rajeev Bhutani, told me that people usually bought Valentine’s cards months in advance, especially in Khan Market, “because here almost everybody’s partner is abroad, so they courier it much before.”

The volume of sales! , he said! , doubled in February: “If we make 10 lakh [1 million] in a regular month, we make 20 in February.”

Mr. Bhutani said he just didn’t have any time to figure out exactly what sort of inscribed messages scored over others, as he produced the bill for Jasdeep Singh’s purchase: a massive musical card that folded in 10 smaller cards inside, each highlighting a particular emotion that ranged from “care” to “desire.”

Mr. Singh, who is based in Canada, said he was back home just to be with his girlfriend on Valentine’s Day. I asked him why he didn’t think of bringing her a card from Canada.

Outraged, he said: “It is a part of tradition.”