Family Reunion

The Indian born with a Czech name meets its elder with an Iranian name and Indo-Czech descent

- Kyle Pereira

This faceoff just had to happen; pitting the biggest, most powerful Yezdi ever to hit the market (which is a grand way of saying that they sold about 700 of them) with the new Jawa that was unveiled a year ago. Some of you might ask, then, why a Yezdi and not a Jawa Type 354 or 360? Well, for one, the Jawa round-block parallel-twins were never assembled and sold in India, and secondly, the Yezdi in question was a parts-bin machine which used the frame and tinware of the Monarch, but its heart was a Czech-built Jawa two-stroke twin from the Type 634.

The Yezdi Twin, as it was known, put out 21 bhp from its pair of blocks, both of which were fed by a single carburettor. Ignition was of the contact-breaker points type and the lubrication was taken care of by oil which was premixed with the petrol. All that was good enough for the company to brag about a top whack of 125 kph with a 0-60 kph sprint taking 3.8 seconds.

A number of reasons contributed towards its poor sales. Mechanics didn’t quite know how to set the ignition timing of the twin and the Yezdi never quite had the allure or the visceral performance of the Rajdoot RD 350. Besides, labour issues at the plant ensured that its maker, Ideal Jawa, didn’t live long enough to actually push the bike hard enough. But thanks to the labours of Anand Mahindra, Boman Irani (who is the son of one of the original founders of Ideal Jawa) and Anupam Thareja, Jawa was reborn a year ago. And one of the two variants, simply called the Jawa, was the bike that we introduced to the old Yezdi 350.