An entire generation of school students writing their exams can easily remember arguing with their parents to get them the stylish, silver Apsara pencils that claimed to get you ‘extra marks for good handwriting’, instead of the humble red and black Nataraj. But did you know that both these ‘rivals’ are actually the products of the same brand?
In 1958, three friends—BJ Sanghvi, Ramnath Mehra, Mansookani travelled to Germany, fascinated by the concept of making pencils. The same year, they came to lay the foundation for Hindustan Pencils Ltd, with their first product, the Nataraj 621 HB writing pencil. The Nataraj pencil was built to be sturdy, reliable and within reach of every Indian household—three qualities that would go on to define the brand's DNA for decades.
The early years tested the friends’ resolve. Sourcing consistent raw material and building a distribution network across a young, fragmented Indian market meant the company grew slowly and deliberately. It wasn’t until 1970 that the company decided to launch their product that would make heads turn. The sleek, bold and silver Apsara. What happened next is why Hindustan Pencil became a marketing case study instead of a regular pencil manufacturing. The brand launched two products that belonged to the same category and let it out in the market to fight their way to the top.
Nataraj stayed anchored in affordability and mass durability, while Apsara was positioned as upmarket—first as a specialist drawing pencil, later stretching into a full premium stationery range spanning erasers, sharpeners, scales, crayons, oil pastels and watercolors.
At a time when Indian manufacturers of that generation built one brand and defended it, Hindustan Pencils built two and let them compete in public while cooperating in private, each subsidising the other's shelf space and pricing power. Nataraj's affordability opened doors in kirana stores and rural markets where price sensitivity ruled every purchase whereas, Apsara's premium positioning captured the urban, exam-conscious buyer willing to pay more for a perceived edge. The company effectively owned both the value shopper and the aspirational one, without either brand cannibalising the other's story in the customer's mind—a segmentation exercise that continues to be cited as a textbook case in Indian brand strategy classrooms.
Advertising did the rest of the work. Nataraj's ‘Phir Se Champion’ conceptualised by Studio Eeksaurus spoke about resilience and everyday grit, while Apsara built its identity around academic aspiration, a promise later crystallised in the long-running ad legend Piyush Pandey’s ‘Extra Marks For Good Handwriting’ line, which is still recalled with nostalgia nearly two decades on. Long before either tagline, though, it was Nataraj's animated, cricket-mad ‘...aur yeh laga sixer’ commercial that lodged itself in a television generation's memory, at a time when the brand had otherwise gone quiet on mainline media for years.
Although for most of the early years, Hindustan Pencils depended on different agencies to push their brand account itself has passed through some of Indian advertising's biggest names until Ogilvy & Mather won creative charge of both Apsara and Nataraj in a six-agency shootout against Contract Advertising, McCann-Erickson, Ambience Publicis, Euro RSCG and Triton Communications. They went on to produce print work such as the ‘Superior Lead Matters’ campaign that leaned into product craft over sentiment.
Behind the marketing sits a manufacturing scale few categories in Indian FMCG can match: Hindustan Pencils makes over 8.5 million pencils a day, commands close to 45 per cent of the domestic pencil market, and ships to more than 50 countries. Much of that starts far from Oukhoo, Jammu and Kashmir's very own ‘Pencil Village’ located in the Pulwama district, where three factories cut the wooden slats that eventually become a Nataraj or an Apsara pencil.
Nearly seven decades on, the company remains family-run: Harendra and Kirti Sanghvi serve as Managing Directors, with the next generation, Bhowmik and Dhruman, already active in day-to-day operations. In an increasingly screen-first India, that continuity of ownership, paired with two competing yet complementary brands built from a single idea, is the quieter half of the Nataraj-Apsara story—proof that a rivalry, carefully engineered, can be as durable a growth strategy as any single hero brand.
