The Rajah Gaadi Returns with Its Classic Design

The resplendent royal ride is back. Enfield's Classic 650 is more handsome and faster but not as sweet a ride as its smaller sibling

- Rishad Saam Mehta

When I was in my 20s in the 1990s, the Royal Enfield Bullet 350 was considered the raja gaadi (king's carriage), especially the black and chrome Machismo variant. No other company made a motorcycle with a higher cubic capacity.

The Machismo, in spite of its infuriating idiosyncrasies—oil leaks, false neutrals, vicious back kicks—had undeniable road presence. Dripping with chrome and emitting its signature "dhak dhak" exhaust note like a heartbeat, this Royal Enfield was the most majestic motorcycle until the last years of the analogue era. From the doodhwalla to the college dude and from the family man with four onboard to the foreigner riding in the Himalaya to find himself, the Bullet was a fusion of form and function.

I bought the Machismo in 1998 because I had to ride from Pune to Mumbai and back every weekend and there was simply no other motorcycle that felt stable on the highway, had a generous seat, and could comfortably cruise at 70kmph. In the five years that followed I did road trips with that motorcycle from Mumbai to Delhi, Ladakh and Kashmir.

Since then, the motorcycle market has transformed. The influx of higher cubic capacity motorcycles, cruisers and adventure motorcycles, including those from the revitalised Royal Enfield, meant that the Bullet 350 sank to the lower echelons of the motorcycle hierarchy. In 2019, when I first rode the Royal Enfield Himalayan and the Royal Enfield Interceptor, I remember thinking that both, though delightful, were such a deviation from that classic Royal Enfield design DNA.