50 years on, Nirma reworks its iconic jingle for a changed India

“Washing powder Nirma, washing powder Nirma… Hema, Rekha, Jaya aur Sushma.”

Few lines in Indian advertising have travelled as far, or lasted as long. First aired in the late 1970s, the jingle, a creation of Poornima Advertising, did more than sell detergent. It embedded itself into popular culture, turning Nirma into a shorthand for affordability and mass appeal. At its peak, it helped a homegrown brand challenge Unilever’s Surf and claim space in millions of Indian homes.

But by the mid-2010s, the very asset that had made Nirma famous had begun to limit it.

Every new film featuring the jingle carried the same grammar. Four women came together to solve a problem. The jingle guaranteed recall, but it also enforced repetition. “There was a sameness that had started to show,” recalls Anand Karir, founder and chief creative of Boing Brandvertising, the creative agency behind Nirma’s latest campaign. “The story always had to be about four women doing something together.”

The challenge was not creative fatigue alone. It was strategic.

Letting go of Yellow

When Boing Brandvertising first engaged with Nirma in 2014, the brief was simple. The brand was still advertising its flagship Nirma Yellow powder, leaning heavily on the iconic jingle. At the same time, it had another product in its portfolio, Nirma Advance, priced slightly higher and positioned as a tougher stain-fighter.

The agency’s recommendation was to stop advertising Nirma Yellow altogether and shift focus to Advance.

The logic was clear. Yellow already enjoyed unshakeable brand equity. Advance offered room to experiment without the baggage of nostalgia. Dropping the jingle from Yellow would invite trade pushback, but it would also free the brand creatively.

The gamble worked.

Advance ran without the jingle for years, first through non-celebrity films and later with Hrithik Roshan and Akshay Kumar as brand ambassadors. Throughout, the brand maintained a consistent behavioural cue: whoever dirtied the clothes washed them. The labour was never quietly shifted off-screen.

By the time the celebrity cycle ran its course, Nirma found itself at a crossroads again. The sonic identity was gone, but the memory remained powerful. The question was no longer whether to bring the jingle back, but how.

If it returns, it must return like a hero

By the early 2020s, Nirma’s leadership began pushing to revive the jingle. Karir and Boing resisted a straightforward revival. Playing the same tune in 2025, they argued, would trigger nostalgia but not relevance.

“This could not be the exact same jingle,” he says. “It has a very strong nostalgic value, but it would not speak to Gen Z and millennials the way it did to earlier generations.”

What followed was a two-year process that began in 2023. Five to six fully produced jingle options were created, evaluated and discarded. The brief was not to remix the past, but to expand it.

“If the jingle was coming back, it had to come back like a hero,” he explains. 

Crucially, the revival would live on Nirma Advance, not Nirma Yellow. Yellow continued to sell, benefiting from the rub-off of the Nirma name, but Advance was the growth engine the brand wanted to push.

A jingle that evolves, not repeats

The final film retains recognisable strains from the original jingle but reworks them with new lyrics and a new hook line: “Tujhsa hi Nirma hai”.

Vaishali Samant carries the familiar female portions, triggering instant recall. Daler Mehndi enters with the newer lines, lending weight and momentum. The choice of voices was deliberate.

The team explored voices such as Shankar Mahadevan and Sukhwinder Singh but felt they lacked the weight the expanded jingle needed. Daler Mehndi was brought in closer to production for his rooted, high-impact vocals, paired with a familiar female voice to bridge nostalgia and reinvention.

“We wanted very Indian voices, something slightly heavy,” Karir says. “When Daler Mehndi’s voice comes in, it does not feel like a remix. It feels like an expansion.”

Importantly, the female voice never sings “Washing powder Nirma” in this version. The jingle now belongs squarely to Nirma Advance, a subtle but strategic repositioning. The idea was not to distance the brand from its past, but to signal movement.

Selling to a different India

Visually, the two-minute commercial abandons the familiar template of four women solving a shared problem. Instead, it stitches together multiple vignettes of contemporary India.

A record-breaking limbo skater. A cloud kitchen entrepreneur. Everyday moments of effort, risk and ambition unfolding across regions.

The insight driving these stories is simple: India has changed.

The film reflects that decentralised ambition. Livelihoods are no longer inherited. Careers are restarted mid-life. Passion is often prioritised over security. The ad does not dramatise struggle. It normalises risk.

Inclusivity here is not a checklist. The casting spans geographies and identities without calling attention to itself. The intent, the agency says, was to reflect the range of India as it is lived today.

Designed for scale, edited for memory

The campaign has been built with multiple viewing contexts in mind. While the longer film allows for a gradual build-up, television edits place the familiar lines upfront. The moment Vaishali Samant’s voice enters, viewers are expected to hum along.

“That hook is essential,” he notes. “People will stay with the film because they recognise it.”

The media plan mirrors the ambition. The film is being rolled out across 100 television channels in prime time, around 2,000 cinema screens, and across OTT and digital platforms. The campaign has been released in association with Poornima, the agency that created the original jingle and has remained closely associated with the brand for decades.

Nostalgia, with guardrails

For Nirma, nostalgia is both an advantage and a risk. Lean too heavily into it, and the brand risks sounding dated. Ignore it, and it forfeits one of Indian advertising’s most powerful sonic assets.

The new campaign attempts a middle path. It acknowledges the past without freezing in it. The jingle returns, but it has been stretched, reworded and relocated.

Fifty years on, Nirma is betting that its most famous tune can still move with the times. Whether the gamble pays off will be seen over time.