Anglo Swiss Watch Co.
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Briefly
Nikita Mohta, July 3, 2025: The Indian Express
With an eyeglass strapped to his forehead, Sajid Ismail is deeply engrossed in repairing a watch. Its owner waits patiently at the counter, set to depart for Odisha the next morning. Ismail’s dedication to his craft mirrors the loyalty of the customer, who refuses to go anywhere but the Anglo Swiss Watch Co.
Established in 1908 on BBD Bagh in central Kolkata, the Anglo Swiss Watch Co. is now in its third generation. Ismail pauses his work to apply eye drops. “After all these years spent repairing watches, my eyes have turned dry,” he tells indianexpress.com, setting aside his flat-head screwdriver for a moment.
His desk, cluttered with pouches of watches awaiting repair, sits at the centre of the shop. On one side is the retail section; on the other, the workshop. “The workshop is where I am needed the most,” Ismail says, adding, “My team and I repair about 15 watches a day and replace the batteries in at least 30.” The wall behind Ismail’s desk is adorned with certificates from Rado, Tissot, and Longines, marking the years they appointed Anglo Swiss Watch Co. as one of their service centres in the city.
Despite its pocket-watch collection and history, little about the Anglo Swiss Watch Co. feels antiquated. Yet, it continues to uphold its legacy as one of Calcutta’s oldest watchmakers.
How it all began
According to Ismail, a Swiss watchmaker and jeweller named Hammond Gramitter fell in love with an Anglo-Indian woman during his visit to Calcutta in the early twentieth century. Soon after, Gramitter married her and established the Anglo Swiss Watch Co. at its current location. “The name is testimony to their love,” Ismail says with a smile.
Upon Grammiter’s death in 1943, his wife decided to leave India. “She sold the store along with its trademark name and the remaining inventory to my grandfather, SM Sayeed,” Ismail said.
Sayeed, however, shut the jewellery business and focused on Swiss watches alone. He frequented Switzerland for work, where he sourced Swiss watches for export to India. “Back then, the dial and the case had to be purchased separately, assembled and engraved with ‘Anglo-Swiss’ before being shipped to India,” recollects Ismail. On one such trip, Sayeed met a Swiss woman named Miss Anna Louisa. The couple married in 1946 and together ran the Anglo-Swiss Watch Co. in Calcutta.
In The Business Of Time: A Global History of the Watch Industry (2022), French interior designer Pierre-Yves Donze extols the ability of Swiss watch merchants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to establish themselves in distant markets, “thanks to their commercial dynamism and the adaptability of their products.”
British electric clock companies also rapidly established agencies in India before the First World War. “For example, Gent & Co of Leicester supplied clocks for major stations on the Bombay, Baroda, and Central India Railway, the East India Railway, and the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, as well as clocks for town halls, hospitals, and legislative buildings,” say historians James Nye and David Rooney in A General History of Horology (2022).
Colonial Calcutta was dotted with similar establishments. Some that Ismail could recollect include Hamilton Watches, Cooke & Kelvey, J. Boseck & Co. Interestingly, what favoured Anglo Swiss Watch Co. was its location. “The American Red Cross Club used to be on the first floor of this building, where British army officers came to relax. Accompanied by either their girlfriends or wives, the officers first purchased something at the store and then went to the club,” laughs Ismail.
The golden era
The years after India’s independence were prosperous for Anglo Swiss Watch Co. “Between the 50s and 70s, we used to sell around 1000 watches a day. You see, the Anglo-Swiss watches were the cheapest and most accurate,” Ismail says. Customers and watch sellers from neighbouring cities, such as Burdwan and Siliguri, flocked to the store.
Pausing the audio-recording device, Ismail opens the drawer to his left to bring out a rectangular plastic box. Lowering his voice, he says, “This has both antique and vintage watches that I have collected over the years.” When asked about the distinction between the two, he elaborates, “Broadly, there are three categories — antique, vintage, and modern. A watch that is a hundred years old or more is considered an antique, while those that are around 40-50 years old are vintage pieces.” Among the antiques, he said, pocket watches were the most common.
Returning to the period of the 50s-70s, he quickly warned: “Don’t think that the watches being sold were all wrist watches.” Wrist watches, he explained, didn’t gain popularity until the latter half of the 20th century. “They were also quite expensive,” he added. Hence, every major public space, including offices and railway stations, had a clock on their premises — “clocks they purchased from Anglo Swiss Watch Co.”
The economic turbulence of the 70s and 80s
West Bengal weathered a range of economic upheavals in the following decades, compelling businesses to change course. During the decade of 1966-76, West Bengal’s industrial landscape was impacted by two central government policies: freight equalisation and import tariffs. “Along with these, a radical trade unionism backed by leftist intellectual support…brought in a militant frictional atmosphere in the industrial arena of Bengal which scared away new private investment to a significant extent,” note academics Deepita Chakravarty and Indranil Bose, in their journal article, Industrializing West Bengal?: The case of institutional sickness (2010).
“Through my childhood, in the 70s, I witnessed labour union strikes which took a toll on our business. Further, the government ban on imports in the 80s completely dwindled our watch import business,” Ismail says. The Government of India was moving towards a socialist path, and demand for expensive goods, like watches, was declining.
Summarising, Donze argues, “Until the end of the 1950s, imports of timepieces remained possible but were subject to quotas. The main exporters were Switzerland for watches, Germany for alarm clocks, and Japan for clocks.” However, he says, the Indian authorities then decided to launch the country’s own watch production. “The conditions imposed on a watch investment in India (majority of Swiss capital, Swiss management, sale only of complete watches, export ban, guarantee against the risks of nationalisation, guarantee of repatriation of profits to Switzerland, etc.),” according to Donze, dissuaded Swiss companies.
In such circumstances, SM Sayeed began manufacturing wall clocks and punching clocks in his factory in the Paddapukur area of central Kolkata, staffed with 200 people. Punching clocks were machines where one could insert a card to record the time of arrival and departure at work, much like the biometrics of today. Ismail explains, “Once you punch 100 punches, the clock automatically winds up.”
The Sayeeds imported expensive machinery to manufacture punching clocks, while continuing with the repair and maintenance work. “Indian watch production began in 1962 and was booming. Between 1965 and 1980, it grew from 208,000 to 4.8 million pieces. As a result, Swiss watchmakers saw a sharp drop in exports to India,” suggests Donze.
In 1984, the Tata Group decided to invest in watchmaking, with the foundation of the joint venture Titan Industries, with Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation (TIDCO). Donze adds, “The first watches were launched on the market in 1986 and the Titan brand was registered the following year.”
Keeping family tradition alive
SM Sayeed passed away in the early 1990s, when a young Ismail joined the business. Having learned watchmaking at the store, he decided to get a formal degree from Switzerland. In 1997, Ismail joined the Swiss Watch Institute: Watches of Switzerland Training Education Program (WOSTEP). “There’s so much to learn about watches, it is truly a science of its own,” he exclaims.
Ismail envisions a similar path for his son, who is to depart for his studies in Switzerland next year. “It is a family tradition,” he asserts.
Ismail also expresses his disapproval of smart watches that have captivated young minds today. “They’re not watches, they’re gadgets,” he remarks, adding, “You have no idea what kind of radiation these gadgets expose your body to. Watches were never meant to be this harmful.”
When Ismail returned to India in 1998, automated biometric systems had been introduced across the country, making punching clocks obsolete. “We eventually shut the factory and decided to retail other brands such as Titan while continuing to sell some of our own products, and here we stand today.”
