ADVERTISING, POLITICS AND THE SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION OF THE INDIAN CONSUMER

ADVERTISING, POLITICS AND THESENTIMENTAL EDUCATION OF THE

INDIAN CONSUMER

ARVIND RAJAGOP AL

G.\NG\ SOAP1

A shot of the river Ganges at dawn from the ghatsof Benares, with a broad expanse of serene, unruffledwater shown in soft yellow light. A boat glides by,symbolizing in its effortless movement the harmonybetween humans and nature in this scene. The framedissolves, and we see a vessel being immersed in theriver to be filled with water. The camera draws back toshow a flock of white doves fluttering up into the sky,

against the majestic beauty of the bathing ghats. Thereis a chorus/bhajan voice-over, extolling the pure,health-enhancing Ganga. Cut to a close up of a pack-aged bar of Ganga soap, sky blue with swirling waterpatterns, and water spiashing aii around it. A womananoints her forehead with vermilion powder from asilver receptacle and covers her head with the pallu, i.e.,the end of her sari, in orthodox upper caste fashion. Achild is showering in a blue-tiled bathroom, as thesoundtrack switches to a high-pitched ululation. A

A mother washes her son with the auspiciously named Ganga soap. Credit- MudraCommunications.

14 Volume 14 Number 2 Fall-Winter 1998 Visual Anthropology Review

woman (the same one, we presume, although we do notsee her face) pours water onto the child's head with atraditional brass lota or mug. As the child sets off,escorted to school, he turns and calls his mother, "Ma?"He taps his cheek expectantly. She has not given himher goodbye kiss. The song rises to a crescendo as thedesired benediction is delivered. Auspiciousness, pu-rity, and the bond between mother and son, are togethersealed with a chaste kiss, and signaled by Ganga soap.

The ad evokes the river Ganges, and by staging thescene at the Benares ghats, indicate that the evocationis one of a particular approach to the river, traditionaland ritualistic rather than say naturalistic or scenicmerely. The Ganga is of course, sacred in Hindumythology, and bathing in its waters is consideredredemptive and purifying not only physically but spiri-tually too; indeed the distinction between the two is notclear.2 The sale of Ganga water is an old practice, onewhich Ganga soap repeated: A small percentage of theriver water was claimed to be included in the soap'spreparation, and posters for the soap beckoned: Gangase snan kar le (Bathe in the Ganga). However, thephysical cleansing properties of the river have for manyyears now been held in doubt at least by rationalists, dueto an extraordinary amount of industrial and humanwaste pouring into the river all along the length of theGangetic plain (Kapoor 1993). When the Congress (I)government led by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi cameto power in December 1984, Rajiv's first address to thenation included a declaration of his intent to clean theGanga river (Healey 1989:42). The purification projectwas meant as a symbolic exercise of national renewal,with an ecological component for good measure. Therelatively artless and ponderous nature of the effort,which went little beyond press releases and misspentpublic monies, was a lame follow-up to a skilfulcampaign by the Hindu nationalists. Only a few monthsprior to Rajiv Gandhi's campaign, the cultural arm ofthe Hindu nationalist party (the Bharatiya Janata Party,or Indian People's Party) had conducted a year-long,nation-wide campaign, called variously the EkatmataYatra, Unity Journey, or Ganga Jal Yatra, Ganga WaterJourney. Samples from local river water were mixedwith Ganga water and taken on processions across thecountry, and as they were sold, people were asked to pay

homage to Bharat Mata, Mother India, a syntheticnationalist icon portrayed as a Hindu goddess. It was thefirst nation-wide test of a Hindu nationalist campaignin post-independence times, and its success in drawinglarge crowds confirmed, for the Hindu nationalists, thetimeliness of their approach, and sanctioned a continu-ation of religious mobilization.

The public use of Hindu themes signaled a newcontext, one in which three sets of events converged.Firstly, there was the dismantling ofthe "license-permitraj" that had ruled over the domestic economy, begin-ning in 1985, indicating a turn towards the marketreforms sweeping across the world. The prevailingofficial consensus had until then been in favor ofautarkic economic development, with allowance forredistributive goals, but this was an increasingly hollowconsensus, amidst the failure to lift large sections ofthecountry out of poverty. The shift away from a welfare-state approach was in a rightward direction, with amorebusiness-friendly regime held as the answer to devel-opmental difficulties. Secondly, the institution of na-tional television beginning in 1982 created a singlevisual regime right across the country for the first time,presenting a political opportunity waiting to be utilized.With the establishment of television, the context for allother media was transformed, since by virtue of itsreach across barriers of language and 1 iteracy, it becamethe leading medium. For advertisers bent on maximiz-ing their market share, television offered by far thecheapest as well as the most effective means to reachthe largest number of people, and thus drew revenueaway from other media, and fuelled television's owngrowth. Television highlighted the way in which mediaand political contexts were now fused together, in somesense, and forced the advertising industry's long-delayed confrontation with a larger, more diverse andunpredictable popular realm. Finally, although theCongress Party sought to seize this advantage, playingthe Hindu card, it was the Hindu nationalist BharatiyaJanata Party that succeeded in changing the terms ofthepolitical debate, ushering in an era of authoritarianpopulism more suited to the brave new world ofeconomic liberalization.

The Hindu nationalists insisted that religious asser-tion responded to Hindus' long-denied participation in

ArvindRajagopal is Associate Professor, Department ofCulture and Communication, New York University and Member,School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (1998-99).

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 14 Number 2 Fail-Winter 1998 15

the polity, so that the exercise of faith could become anassertion of political will. By making unprecedenteduse of the newly enlarged circuits of mediaand markets,the Hindu right likened political expression to selectedpractices of commodity consumption. While greaterdegrees of commitment were of course welcome, littlechange in behavior was in fact required to declare one'sallegiance with the Hindu camp, in this style of cam-paigning (and unlike earlier forms of Hindu mobiliza-tion). A newly public form of Hindu identity thusbecame open to all irrespective of caste or sect, whilepresenting itself in orthodox revivalist garb.

Religious appeals had of course been used beforein advertising. In the new context, however, the rever-berations amidst which such appeals were being made,and the responses they were likely to provoke, gavesuch appeals political significance. In their attempts toextend markets, advertisers were following the cues ofthe electoral field, and drawing on new modes ofaddressing citizen-consumers. The broadcast of suchads signaled a new kind of visibility and availability ofHindu ritual and imagery, deployed on a novel scale,and used for agglomerating constituencies in the publ icdomain, for electoral or commercial gain.3

In this paper, I examine advertisements screened onIndian television in the wake of the introduction ofliberalization after 1985, and the increased entry ofmultinationals, to understand emergent aspects of theculture of globalization in India. As the political projectof making modern Indian citizens is threatened by thelegitimation crisis of the political process on the onehand, and the ascendancy of an illiberal Hindu nation-alism on the other, the pedagogical task of the state isincreasingly taken up through the market itself. Withthe disintegration of an earlier secular developmentalconsensus, and amid the worldwide ascendancy of neo-liberal regimes, markets come to be seen as both ameans and a model for renewing the political process.Advertising, as a language that extols the virtues ofbuying specific goods, at the same time educatesconsumers into particular technologies of the self, andspecific modes of comportment. This tutelary activityhardly occurs in a vacuum, but tends to follow the cuesof the political sphere proper. With the institution ofnational television beginning in the 1980s, and increas-ingly as liberalization advanced, the numerous discretemarkets within the country were perforce brought intoconversation with each other, through a new visual

regime. The contours of this visual regime were largelyshaped in a struggle between the Hindu Right and itssecular opponents, where, it is fair to say, the HinduRight gained most ground. It was from this reformu-lated political consensus that advertising culture drewits fundamental understandings of the mode of signify-ing relations between the diverse classes and commu-nities that comprise Indian society. Through advertise-ments we can see reflected the changing shape of anincreasingly Hinduized public. The greater circulationof Hindu imagery is understood to provide its ownsanction, and to signal popular consent; meanwhileconsumers learn to objectify these images and poten-tially, to form new, more individualized modes ofrelating to them. Meanwhile, the increased circulationof desire, capital and images inflect and reshape exist-ing class and caste configurations. As new consumersare brought into the orbit of expanding global markets,how is the libidinal economy re-inserted into thematerial economy?

Contemporary Hindu nationalism clearly signalsthe attempt to reformulate the nationalist pact alongmore sectarian lines, amid regional and left challengesto this attempt. With the unraveling of the post-independence secular consensus, and the unassuagedghost of Hindu orthodoxy eager to capitalize on theresulting crisis of political legitimation, more particu-laristic languages now abound in the public sphere. Themanner in which Hinduized imagery is taken up inadvertising narratives thus deserves analysis.

When advertisers seek to persuade consumers ofthe virtues of their products, they do not merely sellgoods. Especially in as-yet nascent consumer markets,they simultaneously offer a particular mode of percep-tion, and a pattern of behavior commensurate with it,while picking their way through prevailing socialdivisions, inhibitions and proscriptions. By construct-ing scenes of desiring and desirability, advertiserscreate a sense of autonomy and independence, and aperception of the achievability of individual wishes,that is critical in constructing the subject of consump-tion. Locally rooted relationships of dependence, basedon caste, community and gender, are gradually linkedin generalized relations of commodity exchange, asmore insular regional markets are transformed andconsolidated within a more global market. In theprocess advertisers transcribe fragments of localknowledges within a wider orbit of intelligibility.4


There is a two-fold character to this operation.Advertisers tend to seek appeals that are familiar andrecognizable, and that avoid arousing the prejudices oftheir audiences. At the same time ads inflect the sociuswith a new set of possibilities and connections, andoffer new circuits along which individual desires mighttravel. In the process, existing ritual or community-centered bases for consumption become suffused witha new consciousness of publicity, and an awarenessabout the specific kinds of public they constitute, in ashift from earlier, more transcendentally rooted reli-gious practice. If this is only part of a much largerprocess of social change, ads are at any rate useful intransforming "otherwise opaque goings-on," inGoffman's phrase, "into easily readable form"(1976:27). Advertisements constitute an archive ofefforts at microecological changes in social orientationthat has often not received its due attention.5

To summarize my argument briefly. The counter-part of an elite secular consensus in the political spherewas a relatively westernized advertising culture, cater-ing to a small urban middle class. As the character ofthis political consensus changed, and economic liber-alization proceeded, there developed a search for newsources of value within advertising, with local cultureincreasingly used to endow goods with symbolic dis-tinction. If Indian advertising had evolved a set of codesto address a limited elite audience, who fashionedthemselves as standing for the nation as a whole, thesecodes now had suddenly to be brought into alignmentwith a truly nation-wide market. What would be theterms on which this genuinely mass market would beincluded, into what had hitherto been an elite public,and what kind of public would be constituted as a resultofthis engagement? Although Indian advertising scarcelyconceived of its mission in these grandiose terms, someof the burden of solving this vexing historical-politicalconundrum willy-nilly fell to its lot, with the failure ofpolitical elites to fulfill their own tasks. Without doubt,advertisers sought to maximize market share, and towin as many new consumers as they could. They werehowever limited by their long recalcitrance in refusingto perceive the enormous plurality of consumers thathad for decades lain under their noses. As well, theywere constrained by their political timidity, in imagin-ing alternative modes of configuring the socius, thatwould disrupt the existing mode of distribution ofcapital.

An advertising executive in Mumbai observed:

"Analyse the history of advertising in India and you'llrealise that it was, till recently ... the last whistle stopof English colonialism ... [and] ... until the advent oftelevision, ... the privy of the English-speakingcrowd.. .."6 The reluctance of agencies to commissioncopy in any language other than English could onlyhave been sustained with relatively limited print audi-ences. Limited communications both reflected andexpressed the limitations of the domestic market, andarose from a elite political consensus whose seculardevelopmental ism could not survive the challenges ofmarket forces on the one hand and of Hindu nationalismon the other, without considerable revision. An analysisof the character of advertising practices, situated as theyare at the intersection of the realms of economy andculture, helps understand how ads mediated betweenthe two competing sets of forces mentioned here.

INDIAN ADVERTISING AND ITS VOCABULARIES OFDESlREf

Advertising narratives assist in accumulating sur-plus, through representations of desired values. Partlythrough the genre of advertising, television promotes alibidinal economy that helps secure and reproduce thephysical economy and is interwoven with it. Ads canilluminate how markets are being reshaped - not onlyin terms of divisions of price and income segmentation- as in ads for low end versus premium products, forinstance, but also and perhaps more importantly, in theaesthetic forms and rhetorical structures through whichthe attention of consumers is sought, and their desiresaroused. Advertisements, being at the interface ofeconomy and culture, help illuminate the realm whereaesthetics and utility are made to merge.7 If argumentsbased on the economy veer to the utilitarian, theimportance of advertising reminds us of the excess thatnevertheless characterizes ihe distribution and sale ofgoods, of the surplus of meaning that ensures thetransformation of surplus value into profit.

Ads do not reflect the economy, rather, theyelucidate, or strain to apprehend and delineate thefunctional limits of the economy, insofar as individualaction goes. In this respect, advertisements stand inrelation to the economy as the sphere of ideology. Theseare not to be understood in conventional Marxist terms

t Portions ofthis and of the following section appeared inan earlier version (Rajagopal 1999a).

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as akin to base and superstructure. Rather, each has aspecific form of materiality, in Balibar's terms, arisingfrom their mode of production and mode of subjectionrespectively (1995:88). Each tells the story of the other,ideology of the economy, and the economy that ofideology. The economy is the efficient cause ofideology's effects, just as in turn, the kinds of subjectpositions, the narratives of economic and politicalaction, the relationship ofclasses one to the other andto authority, that are portrayed in ideology, turn out toinfluence and impel events in the economy. Thus wemay say that the economy works through the rhetoricof the image (as instanced in advertising), while theimage itself works through the rhetoric of the economy.

Here the symbiotic relationship between marketsand media can be noted. Markets enable the circulationof value, together with the information broadcast throughmedia. This information helps endow goods with value,while at the same time securing the common under-standings that enable relations of interest to be sus-tained. From this perspective, media are an indispens-able technological supplement of the market, advanc-ing the reach of market relations, and generating sociallinks necessary to these relations but at the same timecomplicating them.

How do advertisements signify the cultural spaceof desire and ownership/possession that consumersinhabit? There immediately arise complicated anddifficult questions of representation peculiar to anunevenly developed postcolonial society. Since thenarrative must culminate in a latent or patent messageof commodity consumption, the actual contradictionswithin relationships cannot be depicted without neces-sarily carrying them through to their own internalresolution. Some process of working through actuallyexisting relationships is therefore unavoidable.

Now, the conversion of traditional relationships ofpatronage and clientism and of truck and barter, intorelationships of commodity exchange and cash transac-tions traces one of the most fundamental dynamics ofmodern social transformation. The transformation ishowever, never complete, and for important reasons.Commodity relations are seldom introduced or ex-tended in terms of naked self-interest. Rather, they tendto be described as particular instances of larger net-works of mutual dependence and obligation. Since thenature of this mutual dependence undergoes change atthe same time, however, the terms in which individualsenter into them are themselves ceaselessly being re-

vised. Advertisements provide a valuable record of theways in which businesses seek to negotiate socialcontradictions while expanding markets, and thus illu-minate the ongoing process of transformation.

In doing so, however, advertisers face a problem.Advertisers seek to show individuals in situ as it were,crosshatched with prevailing caste, community andgender relations, to create a reality effect, and enableviewers to recognize themselves in the ad narratives. Atthe same time, however, they must necessarily tran-scend existing reality if new practices of consumptionare to be introduced. How are they to do so withoutlosing their audience?8 The efforts of businesses tocoach consumers in the appropriate styles of expendi-ture, and to render ubiquitous the signposts that equateconsumption with the good life, make it clear that theoutcomes are thought to be anything but inevitable.

The anxiety attending this pedagogical effort sug-gests that here is no purely free market transactionbetween equals. The transformation and expansion ofthe domestic market is apolitical as well as an economicprocess, resignifying as it does the relations of produc-tion and consumption within a given historical conjunc-ture. If individuals are coached in new habits ofconsumption, they must at the same time be taught toconceive of the larger affective relations within whichthese practices are enacted. If consumer longing mustbe evoked, like any desire, it has to be couched in aparticular language. Given the austerity of the hithertoprevailing public culture, as well as its limited reach, itwas to religion that advertising reached, obedient to theexample of the electoral sphere. A given market con-figuration is simultaneously expressive of a particularpolitical balance of forces and helps to achieve it. It ishere that the significance of the shift from an elitesecular culture to a more Hinduized national culture canbe registered, as advertisements themselves fashionspecific idioms from indigenous culture to cast morespecific and targeted appeals to consumers. A discus-sion of the specific characteristics of the Indian adver-tising industry will illuminate how this shift occurred.

THE INDIAN A D INDUSTRY

Indian advertising grew in a protected economy,catering to a market that was relatively limited in termsof class and culture. Three points arise consequently. Ina protected domestic market, there was 1 ittle value in thetheme of national culture as in itself a marker of product


difference; multinationals, who spent the most onadvertising goods, were not anxious to draw attentionto their origins. Secondly, the ad industry itself hardlyoperated with exposure to the full rigors of a market, andwas only poorly professionalized. Finally, the domesticmarket was itself understood as small and homoge-neous, and this then further simplified the work of thead industry. In sum, advertising created an image of themarket, as it could be expected to, reproducing certainassumptions about the market that dovetailed with theprevailing political consensus. With globalization, eachof these assumptions came to be exposed, and itslimitations revealed.

Advertising in India has historically been domi-nated by subsidiaries of multinationals. In this it repre-sents a continuity with the consumer goods industry,which is a sector dominated by multinationals. After1974 after the Foreign Exchange and Regulation Actwas passed, placing restrictions on foreign ownership,multinationals outside the 'core' sector were requiredto dilute their equity holding to a minority share.9 MostMNCs chose to stay in this sector where investmentswere relatively low and under little risk. "Globaliza-tion" is in some sense a continuing rather than a newphenomenon in Indian advertising. The difference israther between new multinationals, and in some casesreturning multinationals, such as Coca Cola and IBM,and the 'old' ones such as Hindustan Levers, Nestle,and others. If previously ads harped on becomingsuitably modern, which meant western, and holdingone's ethnic, regional identity in check,10 this was thearticulation of a definite sensibility, of the professionalmiddle and upper classes who relegated the culture oftheir communities of origin to the domestic sphere, forthe most part.

With the second wave of MNC entry coincidingwith liberalization, however, this began to change. Ifthe first time the foreign companies came it was atragedy, this time the nationalist response had all the airof history repeating itself as farce. There were half-hearted efforts to re-ignite a movement for indigenousproduction, or 'swadeshi,' championed by the Hindurightist BJP, but supported by the Communist parties aswell.

Alleging MNCs were being given favorable treat-ment, Indian industrialists claimed they would bewiped out, and began to make demands for a 'levelplaying field,' although their own success had de-

pended on the absence of fair market competition.Meanwhile in their management personnel, foreigncompanies had long ago Indianized, for the most part,and most large Indian companies sought foreign col-laborations to gain know-how. And despite thegovernment's efforts at wooing foreign investment, thevolumes of capital being invested in India were negli-gible compared even to the amounts that neighbors likeThailand and Burma were receiving.

The most significant absolute increase in foreignpresence was registered in television, with the adventof satellite channels, among them STAR, Zee, BBC,[V] and ATN. Although the number of viewers wasinitially slow to grow, because few were willing to paycable fees, as rates lowered and channels increased,cable households have grown to about a quarter of all TVhouseholds, itself nearly 40 percent of the 160 millionhouseholds in the country (Satellite and Cable TVMagazine, July 1999). Freed from the restrictionsplaced on them in the government media, and attractedby the segregation of upmarket viewership, sponsorsbegan to flock to the satellite channels. Broadcastingup-to-date Hollywood soaps such as Santa Barbara andBay watch, they showcased 1 ifestyles of rich westerners,and soon bred imitations in Hindi: Junoon, Virasat,Karm Bhoomi, and so on. It was in the Hindi soaps thatsuch lifestyles truly acquired their visibility. It was inthis context that advertisers were well nigh forced toIndianize their content and styles.

The Indian advertising industry grew slowly fromits inception in the British era. Senior members of theindustry described it as having been a kind of insiders'fraternity, not engaged in a great deal of creative workbut for the most part using American advertisements inIndian settings." Little market research was carriedout, and given the limitations of the market and the lackof competition, it was perhaps not considered neces-sary. Advertising was often seen as an avocation forpoets, artists and others of a creative bent. Numerousad executives testified to the heavily urban, English-language biases of Indian advertising. Some wentfurther and located the majority of advertising's cul-tural sources within South Bombay, the corporate andfinancial capital of the country. At present, while mostoriginal ad copy is written in English, several compa-nies are shifting to "language copywriters" who con-ceive their campaign in Hindi rather than in English.P&G India, for instance, spends a mere five percent of


its ad budget on English advertising. Half of theirbudget is now on Hindi and the rest on other regionallanguages. Several companies now insist that presen-tations be made in Hindi rather than in English (e.g.,Godrej, Levers, Parle and Wipro). With the growth ofsales of packaged goods in the rural sector, companies'moves in this direction have of course been predictable.But whereas most domestic companies have chosen touse translators to convert English language campaigns,newly entering multinationals have commissioned ver-nacular copy, and carried out consumer research ondialectal idiom for use in campaigns, departing to someextent from prevailing Anglophone biases. HindustanLevers has the oldest and most extensive marketresearch of any organization in India, dating from the1950s, but other companies are also beginning to investin it.

The recent entry of MNCs has brought a spate ofmergers, acquisitions and tie-ups to the ad industry. Thebiggest four agencies are HTA, O&M, Lintas andMudra, which controlled 40.3 percent of the total adbusiness in 1990-91, and 38.5 percent in 1995-96. Thefirst three of these firms are wholly owned subsidiariesof western firms, with Ogilvy & Mather and HindustanThompson Associates (subsidiary of J. Walter Thomp-son) being the largest firms (both are owned by WPPgroup, but they remain distinct entities in India). Thelast few years have seen most firms vying for collabo-ration with foreign firms. Thus RK Swamy formed apartnership with BBD&O, Sista's Advertising withSaatchi & Saatchi, MAA with Bozell Worldwide,Chaitra with Leo Burnett, and Rediffusion with DY&R.

The advent of commercially sponsored televisionin the mid-eighties, which raised expenditure enor-mously (and kept them increasing as audiences andrates kept rising) helped impose stricter criteria ofmarket performance, backed by research. Between1990 and 1996, Indian advertising has expanded enor-mously, with an average growth of over 32 percent peryear, reaching a historic high of 49.5 percent in 1994-95 (Singh et al., 1996: 41-48). l2 The size of theadvertising industry is expected to reach Rs. 10,000crore by the year 2000, by which time the growth ratemay stabilize at 25% (Bhattacharjee, 1993). It must bepointed out that, although the gross revenues of theadvertising industry have risen several times over in thepast ten years or so, the increase in the cost of mediaoccupy a large part of this rise, so that the real growth

of the industry is considerably less. At any event,members of the industry agree that it was only from theadvent of television, and more particularly from about1989-90 that advertising in India came to be a businesswhere firms began to be judged by stricter criteria ofmarket performance, backed by research. At the sametime, there are complaints of the rise of MBAs withinadvertising firms, and of management 'experts' coun-termanding those more knowledgeable in advertisingper se, of the race to bill more and more clients, withless attention being devoted to the actual quality ofadvertising work. Although the gross revenues of theadvertising industry have risen several times over in thepast ten years or so, the increase in the cost of mediawould occupy a large part of this rise, so that the actualgrowth of the industry risks being overestimated. Since1990, Indian advertising has expanded enormously,with an average growth of over 32 percent per year, andreaching a peak of 49.5 percent in 1994-95 (Singh etaL,1996:41-48).

Marketers in India constantly refer to the homoge-neous character of the market before liberalization, asopposed to its much more stratified aspect today. Thisis quite misleading unless we realize that what they referto is a middle class market - not the middle class per sebut the middle class of the marketers' imagination,which was indeed homogeneous. The market itself ishighly segmented, but what allows the illusion ofhomogeneity is its price segmentation - and price is theprincipal means by which the Indian market is seg-mented. Inthe West, if the difference between economyand premium brands in many categories is about 1:3, inIndia it can be as high as 1:8, or nearly three times ashigh. What resulted with the institution of televisionand commercial sponsorship, especially after satellitetelevision in mid 1994, was of course that the econom-ics of conveying messages was changed completely,with one platform becoming available for all pricesegments. Simultaneously, the relationship betweenincome and affordability that had earlier been estab-lished was disrupted, as consumers in low incomesegments reach out for products advertised for higherincome groups.

Traditionally, advertisers have not attempted to gobeyond highly patronizing modes of address in sellinggoods to lower income sections of society. Thus forinstance in advertisements such as for Wheel detergent,Levers' low-cost answer to their competition Nirma'


women were 'shown' that their earlier soaps wereineffective, by a man lecturing to them, that the newsoap was the answer to their unceasing struggle forwhiteness. Ads adopted an explicitly pedagogical strat-egy, and if any aesthetic value was contained in the ads,it was in terms of the score, usually something approxi-mating a folksy jingle or a Hindi film tune. If one couldrisk an overly general statement, one might say thatutility was presented as the most salient aspect ofconsumer messages for the lower middle and workingclasses, while aesthetics remained the province of thetheir betters, the middle and upper classes. It was forthem that the finer particulars of appearance, individualsatisfaction and self-actualization were important. Notthat these aspects were entirely omitted in ads for lowerincome segments, but if we examined the amounts ofmoney spent in creating those ads, a clear stratificationwould emerge. What occurs in recent times is thatattention is finally paid to the insistent demand made bythese (hitherto neglected) segments, a demand that wasnoticed because of their size and capacity, and theirability to reward businesses for catering to them.

As down market consumers wean themselves fromunbranded and regionally branded goods, they enter anew regime of consumption whose contours are notself-evident or readily available. Rather, it has to beconstructed, by dint of advertising and marketingeffort, through new modes of signification and styles ofreading that consumers must then learn to deployefficiently. A selection of ads thus reveals not merelya class-stratified range of texts to match a price-stratified array of products. We can find, as well,appeals that can be distinguished in terms of differentaudio-visual semantics, according to the character ofthe publics sought to be addressed or constructed (theassumption of a particular kind of address tending overtime to form its own object). If advertisers envision theestablishment, sooner or later, of a universe populatedentirely by international brands, the pathway forged forthe purpose must still negotiate intractable nationalhistories. Ads within a protected domestic marketevinced a clear stratification, between a visual aestheticfor the upmarket consumers and utilitarian appeals fordownmarket consumers (Rajagopal 1999:79). The dis-tinction of the latter, more inexpensive ads emergedrather in the audio, through the jingle, which would bebased on Hindi film or folk tunes. As the regime ofconsumption is resignified to manage an expanding

class spectrum, the relationship between class-strati-fied appeals has to be reworked, and indeed takes on adifferent character with television.

Ads work through a constant indexing of meanings,pointing to things whose significance depends on theirbeing inferred rather than stated, in effect coaching theviewer in the practice of decoding ads, and in tracingthe circuit of exchanges through which the narrative isthreaded.13 Broadly, the distinction that emerges isbetween a more self-conscious reading style madeavailable for upmarket products as opposed to thosedownstream. In the former, the desirability of theproduct is linked to the perception of the viewingpleasure of the ad text itself, whereas ads aimed at newerconsumers, and for mid-range and more downmarketproducts tend to reinforce narrative enjoyment withmore assured and sanctified visual signs, of indigenousculture, religion and nationality.

Below, I analyze some recent ads from Indiantelevision as exercises in pedagogy, i.e., as exercises inthe sentimental education of consumers. I will begin bydiscussing two ads for upmarket products, the first forPepsi and the second for premium condoms.

PEPSI: SACHIN'S LOVE LETTER

Sachin Tendulkar, India's greatest cricketing star,is unable to compose a love letter to his fiancee Anita.Vinod Kambli, his teammate, spies his difficulty in thenumerous crumpled notes scattered on the floor. Sachin'sfeelings have not found their vehicle, just as the litterhas missed its proper receptacle. Picking a tall, coldPepsi from a row of neatly arrayed Pepsis in therefrigerator, Kambli begins extemporizing, as he un-screws the lid and gazes at the foaming cola. There andthen, he begins a soulful declaration of love, addressedto the Pepsi bottle. Sachin, raptly focused on the glassof Pepsi Kambli has poured for him, finds his owntongue loosening, and begins to chime in. Together,with hands crossed over their hearts, they avow eternaldevotion to the "chulbuli, bulbuli haseen" - the frolic-some, bubbly beauty, before them. Thus a pair ofmuscular and normally inarticulate sportsmen begin togush with the inspiration provided by the Pepsi, al-though in fact neither of them has tasted a drop yet.Intercut with this sequence are images of Anita and afriend of hers, doubled over in girlish merriment as theysavor the letter from Sachin. The moments of the

Visual Anthropology Review Volume 14 Number 2 Fall-Winter1998 21

composition of the letter and its reception are placedside by side. As each phrase is composed, we are treatedto the spectacle of its delighted consumption. Althougha love letter has been simulated from a frank adorationof soda pop, it appears entirely to have fulfilled itspurpose. Or has it? At the conclusion of the letter,Anita's friend remarks to her - "You must feel sospecial!" To which she replies, with a slightly discon-certed look on her face, "1 feel like a ... a Pepsi."

The ostensible message, albeit humorously deliv-ered, is that the desire for Pepsi can be spoken withoutinhibition, and is a desire everyone can recognize.There are many reasons that might make it difficult tospeak one's feelings, but perhaps the most obviousreason it could take a Pepsi to provoke this outpouringis that there can be no fear of rejection (meanwhile ofcourse, images of Pepsi's desirability are ubiquitous).Anyone can thus immerse themselves in a fantasy ofacceptance and desirability. This is a privilege enabledin the private space of commodity consumption, and ina tongue in cheek manner, the ad dramatizes this point.

KAMA SUTRA PREMIUM CONDOMS

The Sanskritic name stands out against the West-ernized narrative and imagery of this ad, in which blueand white are the predominant colors. A solitary mancomes in by boat on a foggy night, pulls the boat ontoshore, walks into an unguarded house, strips and walksinto a shower. Within the stall is a woman who holdsa shower hose caressingly in her fingertips and appliesthe jet of water over herself languorously. For thepleasure ofmaking love -just ask for KS, concludes thisad, notable as the first to boldly present condoms asinstruments of sensual satisfaction as the burden of atedious civic duty. But the way in which passion issuggested is not by any expressed or visible desire foranother, but by its opposite, a restraint of passion, onthe expressions of the actors, and indeed on all thehuman surfaces before us. The house is gaunt and bare,except for a few angular beam formations, highlightingthe stripped-down, elemental quality of the scene. Onlynature is eloquent. The soundtrack suggests a sea inhigh tide, and spray scatters through the air. Then thereare the taut, exposed bodies of the man and the woman,he walking towards the house and she in the shower.The rapid intercutting between the two set up theexpectation of an encounter. When they converge,

however, amid the clouds of steam, they caress them-selves rather than each other, although stills of the adshow him kissing her. (She does not kiss back in any ofthe pictures, preserving astill-indispensable "Indianness"in her manner, it would seem.) As the music rises to aclimax, the woman's hand turns on the cold water,indicating that the temperature within has achieved itspeak, and the narrative concludes.

The name Kama Sutra of course evokes the legend-ary treatise on sensuality, the body and intimate eti-quette, now understood mainly as a sex manual. It is aparadoxical reference. The invocation implies, Wewere sexually liberated before the West, and the nameof this essentially Indian text is proof of it. This goesalong with the characteristic one-upmanship of culturalnationalism, which is to say that India was modernbefore today's moderns. The theme of the ad, however,brings up the limit condition of such claims, namelysexual behavior. Indianness is located in its traditions,even if they are traditions that are modern avant lalettre, and chief among them is certainly the purity ofits women. No "good" woman could behave in explic-itly provocative ways, therefore. We thus have an"Indian" sexuality where virtually all specifically In-dian signs are erased from the scene, including clothing,decoration and caste marks of any kind. (The man,however, in one frame, is shown wearing ayantra, aprotective amulet, around his neck, discreetly suggest-ing the legitimacy of a gendered (male) Indian sexual-ity.)

In the first ad, Sachin's letter is ostensibly ad-dressed to Anita, but really it is to Pepsi. Or is it reallyto Pepsi and only ostensibly to Anita? The viewer isasked to hold these two possibilities in suspense asparallel narrative tracks, the pleasure of the text residingin part in the uncertainty of meaning, and in theequivalence suggested between two very unlike things.The characteristic indexing function of ads (e.g., in-vesting products with desirability) is laid bare here,'andmade into a humorous story, so that the viewers may atonce learn and enjoy the lesson, while complimentingthemselves on their reading skill. Whereas this addepicts a celebrity's mock worship of the brand thesecond does not display the product or vouch for itsqualities. Rather, it attempts to equate the visual evocation of a kind of smoldering passion with the productwhose name we hear repeated in voiceover From thescenes, we can imagine the unseen, while through the


In an effort to fight foreign competition, Bajaj scooters'ad offers a liberalnationalist message, identifying the product with rich and poor, and withsome minority groups as well. Credt: Ammirati Puris Lintas.

insistent sibilantw h i s p e r ,KamaSutra, we mayhear echoes of whatis imagined. Bothads place a questionmark against theassurance of thereader's knowledgeabout the world,substituting for thiscertitude the plea-sure of engagingwith the text's ownsignifying process.It is this set of fea-tures that marksthese ads as belong-ing to the premiumsegment. On theother hand, thoseads addressed tolower reaches of themarket seek to per-suade consumers of the importance of new kinds ofknowledge, and new habits of consumption. They tendto do this by extrapolating familiar signs in newdirections, endowing old names with new meanings. Assuch, the character of screen-literacy invoked is differ-ent, as we will see in the following two ads.

BAJAJ SCOOTERS

A bare-waisted man is praying beside a hillsidetemple, and a Bajaj scooter stands parked beside him,with a marigold garland on it. A woman performs aratito a Bajaj scooter. A milkman on a scooter wends hisway through a village path, a large milkcan suspendedfrom the vehicle's side. Women carrying pots on theirheads walk alongside him, conveying a picture ofvillage or small town life, comfortable in the diversityoftheir transport systems. A bearded sadhu is talkingvigorously, his confidence and certitude in his wordssuggested in the way he shakes his white locks. Thisglimpse of a traditional figure of Hindu authority isunconventional not only for its appearance in an ad, butas well for the casual style of its acknowledgment.There follows a shot of the Gateway of India (in

Mumbai), withscores of pigeonsfluttering into theair as a Bajajweaves its waythrough. Severalhelmeted riders setoff on Bajaj scoot-ers, as if on a rallyor a race, with am a g n i f i c e n ttemple in thebackground. AParsi man, identi-fiable by his head-gear, is showncleaning his Bajaj,blowing on it andpolishing it withpride. This med-ley of shots thatare all product-re-lated, suggest itsweaving into the

fabric of daily life. Here is a series of activities, ofpeople with no relation to each other. The sequence isaccompanied by a background song:

Yeh zameen yeh aasman (2)Hamara kal, hamara aaj (2)[This earth, this sky,Our yesterdays, our todays.]

The words gesture and point without seeming to saymuch - this earth, this sky. But their brevity, and theirrepetition, suggest feelings too deep for words. Thenext line invokes a collective subject, and a sense ofshared destiny, linked to the shared horizon of acommon territory. In the visuals, no narrative sequenceis manifest except for the recurring appearance of aBajaj scooter; the words immediately provide a logichowever, conveying, along with the pictures, the senseof a multitudinous oneness. The lack of connection ofdisparate people and activities becomes precisely thebasis of their connection, asserted and repeated throughthe collective pronoun, in a characteristic paradox ofnationalist argumentation. The ad concludes with thefollowing words, sung, BulandBharatki buland tasveer,


The excitement of translating fleeting glimpses of lives in a densecityscape into a familar narrative of brand recognition, in an ad forCharms MiniKings cigarettes. Credit: Enterprise.

Hamara Bajaj: thegreat portrait/im-age of our greatIndia, our Bajaj.Viewers are thustaught to see "In-dia" in the diversescenes presented,while moving be-tween two sensesof the word tasveer.both portrait(India's tapestry)and symbol (Bajaj).

The HamaraBajaj campaignmarked a momentof corporate defen-siveness, signalingthe market leader'sunpreparedness forforeign competi-tion. Bajaj scoot-ers were based onan old Italian design from Piaggio, whose brand Vespahad earlier been licensed to the Indian company. Bajajcame to dominate the Indian market, marginalizingcontenders, and handling waiting lists that were so longthat a huge black market developed for its scooters.Once import tariffs were lowered, Piaggio and othercompanies, including Honda, began to offer productstechnically far superior to Bajaj, who had not investedtheir profits in upgrading the product or keeping it in anysense abreast of advances in the two-wheeler industry.The company (whose chairman used to be a vocalmember of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya JanataParty) derived an extended lease of life, a fact attributedin part to the success of this ad, and other ads made asvariations on the same theme.

There is a liberal aspect to the ad's gesture ofrecruiting lower middle and rural classes in the makingof a national ist statement. However, we do not see thesefigures sharing an intimate, interior space. Rather, thereis a sweeping inclusion of a motley cast of charactersin the "grand tapestry" of India, one in which the prolificpresence of Hindu imagery is noteworthy. We mayunderstand this as a purely nominal gesture, in its failure

identity assertion.The power of thisnominal gesturehowever is not tobe understated,closing as it doesthe differences be-tween urban andrural, rich and poor,scooter-riders andthe scooterless, byinvoking a collec-tive identity. Thereis no indecisionhere, nor any sus-pense, about theparallel sets ofmeaning (Bharatand Bajaj), unlikesay in the Pepsi ad.The words insteadencourage the iden-tification of"Bharat" (i.e.m In-

dia) with visual montage of its apparently dissimilarparts while offering assurance that the sum of theseparts is something known and familiar.

CHARMS MINI KINGS CIGARETTES:

The beat of a vigorous folk song inaugurates thispiece (music associated with Durga puja, and hencesignifying Calcutta-ness to those who know it). Eachshot by itself is mundane and inconsequential, but blackand white film and rapid cutting give it a documentaryimmediacy. A newspaper delivery boy tosses the paperonto an upper balcony. Smoking his morning cigarette,a man catches it. A man hops off a streetcar. The camerapans to a cricket match taking place just off the road.Someone applauds the batsman's stroke. A passerbypuffs on his cigarette as the rickshaw-puller takes himthrough the street. A vendor at a food stall in a cornerexpertly stir fries some vegetables. In another corner,a street side barber is giving a man a shave. With therapid cutting, we absorb the breadth and variety ofurban life, and the simple pleasures that make it up,adorned, in nearly every frame, by a smoker. We sense

to address the terms of inclusion other than through the masculine camaraderie of the crowded streets, the


casual intimacy of its strangers, and the freemasonry ofsmokers who can wordlessly demand and be given a1 ight. People make the space of the lanes and al leys theirown, as they play cards or chess, chat and argue withone another. Here is an urban kaleidoscope too vast tobe comprehended in its entirety, but here each part islike the whole. What is referred to is perhaps moreaudible than visible, in the festive exultation of the beat.The outdoors setting reinforces the coding of theproduct as male. This follows the polarity that relegatesthings feminine to the domestic sphere, and so codes themale intimacy here as "safe." The shots are the glimpsesof a Baudelairean flaneur glimpsing the ephemera ofurban modernity, their very fleetingness creating a kindof poetry. The class coding of the characters is, how-ever, firm. In the multitude of exchanges that thecamera pans across, we see varieties of services beingdelivered to men as they smoke; the worker in each caseis faceless, although their labor is visible. These effortshowever come to fruition in the visages of their custom-ers, whose serenity is confirmed in the white clouds ofsatisfaction they emit. The final flourish - "CharmsMini Kings - Calcutta's only cigarette," spoken inBengali, associates the uniqueness of Calcutta's publicculture with the quality of the cigarette.14 A story aboutthe beedi, the indigenous hand-rolled cigarette used asa badge of identity by working classes, would besomewhat different, of course. The distinct Bengalibeats help cue the reader to the message of "Calcutta-ness" sought to be conveyed across the variety ofscenes, which share nothing more than successive shotsof smokers.

In both the above ads, we see a new process ofreading being set up, as viewers see a series of discon-nected frames whose synthesis needs to be secured atan abstract level, not necessarily transparent from themovement of the sequence itself. The fragmentaryquality of modern experience is summoned, but anacknowledgment of the modern reader's self-con-sciousness would also require a suspension of theoutcome of reading, and confer a more open quality tothe text than in fact we are granted. Instead there is aninsistent audio track to each of these ads that closes itsobvious gaps and slippages, claiming instead a coher-ence and unity to each of them, as Hindu/Indianness, oras Calcutta-ness. The zealousness of advertisers' ef-forts to steer their readers is even clearer in the adsdiscussed below.

AVTAR WASHING POWDER

The dhobis [washermen] are on strike, and aremarching in procession, waving placards and shoutingslogans, calling for a ban on Avtar washing powder. Afair-skinned, high caste woman, hanging her wash outon the line in her front porch, watches the men go by.She explains to a neighbor that the dhobis are threatenedby unemployment; since Avtar washing powder is soeffective, no one requires the dhobis' services anymore.One dhobi passing by overhears her and comes closerto eavesdrop. The woman goes on to remark that forpeople to continue to patronize them, the dhobis shoulduse Avtar. Avtar ka kaam aur dhobiyon ka naam, shesums up - the work of Avtar and (along with) the nameof dhobis. The dhobi, a swarthy, mustachioed man, isvisibly impressed by the wisdom, and in an aside to thecamera, professes he had never thought of this. In thenext scene, the strike has been changed into a publicservice announcement, with the dhobis calling out,

Maaon, behennn, suno pvkarHamare pas bhi hai Avtar[Mothers, Sisters, listen to us!Avtar is now with us too!]

From her front porch, the woman smiles to herself.Upper caste rights to the dhobis' labor have now beentaken away by Avtar washing powder. But it is thedhobis who are up in arms about it, since it is they whoneed patronage; their former customers appear morethan satisfied with Avtar as replacement. The dhobis'march has the connotation of class insurrection, but anythreat is deftly thwarted by high caste feminine intelli-gence. What's in a name, after all? Dhobis should becontent to stay in the background, and cede the place ofhonor to Avtar, which has swept the market, at least inthis account. If they do so, dhobis can persuade custom-ers to retain their services. Thus the laborer is reducedto his name, and his function is usurped by the brand,which is now itself held to perform the work. Thearbitrariness of this semiotic switch is however, natu-ralized as upper caste womanly wiles, and presented asa triumphant outcome. This ad neatly demonstrateshow a brand name can be encoded with caste and genderconnotations, with Avtar washing powder symbol izingthe labor and the virility of dhobis, subordinated to the


intellectual power of upper castes. At the same time, itis through a woman's superiority to men that the casteorder is signaled. The hierarchy it represents is thussoftened or sexualized.

John Berger has argued that advertisements ex-press the culture of an industrial society that has moved"halfway towards democracy and stopped."15 Thussocial aspiration becomes widespread, even if oftenfrustrated. Envy then becomes a widespread emotion,something absent in a society that has not knownmobility as a routine possibility. In Indian visual culture,envy has typically been depicted inthe figureofademon,the buri nazar wale, the one with the evil eye, evil in thiscase being caused by covetousness. Ads for Onidaappliances dramatically invert its signification, showingthe product's worth as directly proportional to its desir-ability to others. At the same time, envy is shown as adestructive force, and embracing it is implied to be an actof iconoclastic individualism.

In the Avtar ad, the dhobi is deferential, evenobsequious, while the woman is peremptory in hermanner. The gulf between them is too great to bebridged; indeed their differences are heavily accentu-ated, in terms of costume, complexion, demeanor andtone. Although they occupy the same frame, they do notspeak to each other. Cultural difference, for the audi-ence imagined for this ad, is of the order of nature,dense, overwhelming and immutable. The labor re-quired to separate the sign from its referent for such anaudience would be hard indeed, and this text does notventure very far.

The Pepsi ad discussed above skirts any involve-ment with cultural difference: Tendulkar and Kambli,identifiable as light-skinned brahmin and dark-skinnedlower caste respectively, are teammates and comrades,and indeed it is Tendulkar who takes dictation fromKambli. In contrast, the ad sponsored by the indigenouscompany (JVC Group, an investment company havingrecently diversified into consumer products and enteredthe national market) appears relatively tactless in itssocial conservatism. By the same token, the Avtar adhas the virtue of candor, in suggesting how upper castesmight envision the expansion of branded markets undertheir protection.

Market expansion by multinationals has perhapsbeen most fiercely challenged by indigenous manufac-turers of low-cost laundry detergent. The ads resultingfrom this competition offer in a distilled form of the

logic advertisers have sought to use in addressing newconsumers.

WHEEL DETERGENT POWDER

An advertisement for a women's radio in a maga-zine aimed at advertisers carried a photograph of awoman with large eyes and parted lips, and the caption,No One s Home - Seduce Her Now\l6 If empathy withexchange value is what advertisers are struggling toevoke, sexual desire becomes the easiest means withwhich to approximate this goal. The product thereforetakes on attributes of a sexual predator of sorts. Thus adsfor Surf detergent (made by Lever), where a smartwoman shopper explains, in conversation with anunseen male voiceover. why she pays more for lessdetergent powder (i.e., for Surf). Accompanied by herlittle son, and possessed of a stern voice and anintimidating manner with shopkeepers, she does notappear at first sight as feminine prey. Her body lan-guage, however, tells another story. The unseen maleannouncer calls her by name, "Lalitaji." When she isnamed, she looks directly, full face, at the camera. Herfacial expression is mischievous, and her lip move-ments are suggestive. She interjects her answers to hisquestions with coquettish movements of her head andeyes, and atone of voice that a woman might ordinarilyuse for a child, or with someone intimate whom one wasengaging in a form of play.

Surf i s a detergent powder for the premi urn marketAdopting the rhetoric of seduction for downmarketconsumers, however, is less common. Market researchexecutives spoke of the extraordinary difficulty theyexperienced in researching the attitudes and tastes ofwomen from low-income families, due to what theydescribed as the extremely patriarchal and conservativenature of the hoseuholds. The women would oftendecline to come out of the house, no matter what theinducement, even if invited by other women.17 Usingthe same strategy for them as for the consumers ofpremium detergents could be hazardous, then. How-ever, when Lever began to market Wheel detergentpowder, to combat the challenge from an indigenousmanufacturer, that was the first method it used.

The first ad for Wheel shows a woman hanging herwash out in her back yard, and a man passing bycomments on the whiteness of her wash. The nature ofthe encounter is an odd one: for a respectable woman


to engage in conversation with a stranger would beinappropriate, from a conservative viewpoint. He turnsout to be a salesman, offering an alternative product. Hegets her to demonstrate the use of his product, Wheel,and wins her over. Her final line, when she reveals sheis persuaded is: "Then who will be interested in ordinarypowders?" She flashes a dazzling smile at the salesmanas she says these words.

This ad, however, was ineffective in addressing thechallenge posed by indigenous manufacturers of deter-gents, specifically, Nirma (Rajagopal, 1999b). Therewas then a shift from a didacticism of content to adidacticism of form. Subsequent ads became melodra-matic, borrowing from Hindi film codes to structure thesequence, with greatly exaggerated histrionics and loudviolins signaling each phase of the narrative. Thepractice of a man lecturing to the female consumer wasdropped, and instead, the ad sought to make themessage emanate from the progression of the storyitself. But the device for introducing the new product(Wheel) remained to be settled. It could not be seen toemerge from any conflict within the family itself,because the man of the house would interpret that as achallenge to his authority.18 The ad settled on a voicefrom heaven, offering Wheel as a solution to theintractable problem of the husband's dirty shirts, adifficulty threatening his survival as a salesman. Themain narrative focused on boosting the self-image ofthe working or lower middle class housewife. Accord-ing to market research, women in this class position relyheavily on the men of the house for reassurance, andnever receive the affirmation they need. In the narra-tive, the man first abused his wife and then turnsadoring, at her successful accomplishment of house-hold chores. In this way the ad attempted, improbably,to boost women's self-esteem within the terms ofprevailing misogyny. Not surprisingly perhaps, it did1 ittle to address Wheel's competition. It was through theaddition of lemons and chakras, spinning wheels,religious fetishes both, that the ads began to turn thesales of Wheel around, and helped to combat thechallenge of Nirma. Tests were said to reveal thatresults were directly proportional to the number oflemons and the three-dimensionality and velocity of thespinning wheels. Neither were integral to the ad's overtnarrative, although claims were made for lemon'scleaning power (these claims were merely notional,however). A rendition of a popular film song (Arre aisa

mauka phir kahan milega [Oh when will we get achance like this again?] from An Evening in Paris,starring Shammi Kapoor) was used for the happyending, here rephrased Arre aisi bibi aur kahan milegi[Oh where would I find a wife like you?]. Once the shirtswere washed clean, the man stood ready to reward hiswoman. In one variation of the ad, the man went so faras to doff his turban on a ceremonial occasion and putit on her head, a sign of her symbolic accession to astatus equivalent to her husband's, albeit as his favor toher.

As businesses seek to educate new consumers in thetransmissibility and substitutability of meanings, andso into the traffic in exchange value, the path beforethem is uncertain, since these consumers represent amarket segment they have little experience with. Sincethese consumers are believed to be more conservative,and less suggestible to changes in lifestyle and habit,their habits of reading, i.e. of deciphering social codes,are thought to be decided by custom rather than by theirown impulses. It is then by expanding the reach offamiliar sign systems, and extending their applicabilityto new configurations of people and things, that thetransition to a new regime of consumption is beingindexed.19 In the process of this transition, a new scaleof social legibility is achieved, creating a kind oftransparency effect in communication, as the logic ofthe cultural realm and of the market swing into closeralignment. Such an effect is both the result of politicalchange, wrought for instance by the Hindu nationalists,and has political outcomes of its own.

CONCLUSION

In the now famous correspondence between TheodorAdorno and Walter Benjamin on the latter's work,Adorno wrote of the fruitful tension between theformer's theory of the consumption of exchange valueand the latter's theory about empathy with the soul ofthe commodity (Benjamin, 1997:135).20 Adorno un-derstood commodity consumption as being not so muchabout the things in themselves as it was about the ideathey stood for, of equivalence and the power thisrepresented. Citing Adorno's remark, Benjamin ob-served that empathy with the commodity was nothingother than empathy with exchange value itself. By thishe meant that in consuming exchange value, ideas ofequivalence and an open-ended availabil ity were hardly


apparent as conscious or palpable benefits of consump-tion. Rather, individuals could identify with the com-modity and the sense of promiscuous possibility itconnoted, of a many-sided and costless engagementwith an infinitely various world.

I take the insight resulting from this debate ascrucial in understanding the task of advertisements,which work by proferring identification with shiftingobjects of desire. Although the commodity opens outinto an endless series of equivalences, the commoditycannot in fact be signified without mystification throughparticular images of longing. This is a reminder thatalthough commodification is universalistic in concep-tion, it can only be a phase in "the social 1 ife of things,"becoming thereafter, gifts in exchange, and/or objectsin use or disuse, and part of affective networks ofinterdependence and domination (Appadurai, 1986).Advertisers, however, maintain the fiction that thespace of the commodity is one of freedom, and that todraw consumers into the realms of branded goods is toset in motion a process of improvement. The moreconsumers are drawn up to the heights of upmarketprivilege and sophistication, the more realized they are,in this view, as they learn how to perceive their ownneeds.21 But even if advertisers seek to improve con-sumers in the mass market as a whole, they at the sametime reproduce the cultural dynamics that maintainclass differences, and thus act as a brake on anypedagogical process. Thus they tend to mirror a givenconfiguration of consumption patterns without ac-knowledging their complicity in the political balance offorces that any such configuration must represent.

Advertising culture in India in the 1980s and beforewas marked by the absence, by and large, of a popularaesthetic for the majority of the consuming population.This was symptomatic of an elitist politics that Hindunationalists both capitalized upon and overcame, asthey drew on religion and ritual to indigenize thelanguages of politics, in an attempt to forge a newhegemonizing ideology.22 Advertisers in India, longidentified with a colonial boxwallah culture, havebegun to follow this lead. Religio-ritualistic imageryoffers valuable resources in endowing brands with theaura they lack for new entrants into the global market.A spectrum of uses of religious or cultural symbolismcan be noted, ranging from fetish imagery for inexpen-sive goods to abstract Sanskritic/classical evocations(e.g., KamaSutra) for premium products. Advertisers

thus appear to prescribe different modes of reading fordifferent classes as they adapt their erstwhile approachto the constraints of a single visual regime. Ads forpremium products are most explicit in acknowledgingthe pleasures of the text, and the gaps and slippages tobe negotiated in arriving at its meaning. Indigenoussymbols tend to appear here as class markers, burnish-ing the aura of the brand rather than creating it, adorningthe narrative rather than underpinning it. This is incontrast to ads for mid-market and downmarket prod-ucts, where such symbols tend to be used as massmarkers (to coin a phrase), and to form a kind ofreference or ground, absorbing and reconciling thetrajectories of different segments of the text. In suchads, then, indigenous imagery is understood by adver-tisers in a relatively literal manner, correspond ing to theliteral character of belief they attribute to the intendedreaders of these ads. In this way, advertisers continueto imagine a public whose internal divisions are harmo-nious with respect to each other. However, the produc-tion of a unified visual field across an antagonisticsocial terrain (consisting not only of contradictory classand caste formations, bul of Muslims and other minori-ties as well) complicates such assumptions.

Through the late 'eighties and the early nineties, therise of Hindu nationalism was feared to presage the endof democratic politics in India, as an aggressive "syn-dicated Hinduism" came to the fore. What emergedinstead was an era of more federated politics and morepowerful regional parties, with voters discriminatingmore keenly across a galvanized national electoralfield. It is safe to say now that the methods of Hindunationalists contradicted some of their stated goals;what has proved most influential has been their experi-mentation in new methods of exercising power. Promi-nent among these new stratagems has been the produc-tion of what we may call retail Hindu identities,excavated from the ritual and hierarchical context ofcaste, and shifted to a national media context and tourban public spaces (Rajagopal, forthcoming). Hindunationalism has thus sought to provide the political andcultural facade of Hindu society "liberalizing" withoutafrontal challenge to the illiberal ordering of caste. Thisis however, a deeply contradictory project, certain torun up against unresolved caste, class and religiousconflicts.

I have argued that the pedagogical project ofmaking subjects into citizens is assumed not only by the


state, but as well and increasingly, by the market, in anageof economic liberalization. The state seeks to utilizethe rhetorical device of nationalism, through whichlocal tradition is acknowledged while orienting indi-viduals towards an indigenous modernity. But thestate's failure to carry through on the rhetorical possi-bilities of nationalism, and the resulting ossification ofan increasingly official form of nationalism, strength-ens market-led initiatives in this respect. Advertisers'progress as pedagogues quickly reaches its limits,however, given their parasitism on the prevailingpolitical dispensation on the one hand, and their mis-leading conception of the market as an autonomousspace of freedom, on the other. Religious imagery isreformulated to provide a class-stratified sign system,as advertisers seek to accommodate diverse readingstyles in one visual arena. In this process, the symboliclimits of a public based on Hindu imagery are reinforcedrather than opened up, as advertisers endow theseimages with an iconic status to reach new consumers.As a result, even as Hindu nationalists fail to secure thekind of political power it was feared they wouldachieve, we may have images of "soft Hindutva"circulating in public life, representing the unreconciledcontradictions of Hindu orthodoxy with modern socialreform. If new publics then take shape under thedispensation of older images of caste Hindu authority,the internal contradictions developing inthe process arelikely to increase over time. While advertising narra-tives of desire and fulfillment are powerful in germinat-ing modern forms of consciousness, it is only in thepolitical realm that the logic unleashed by them can findtheir resolution.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Support from a Fellowship for Research and Writingon Peace and International Security at the John D. andCatherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and from theAmerican Institute for Indian Studies, assisted in theresearch for this paper. I am indebted to DonaldBrenneis for his detailed and insightful response to anearlier version of this paper, presented at the Depart-ment of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz. I would alsolike to thank Brian Larkin and J. David Sapir for theircomments, and for their patience in bringing this essayto fruition.

NOTES

1. The soap, released in 1992, was made by an indig-enously owned company, Godrej; the following year,Godrej was taken over by Proctor and Gamble, a newentrant into the Indian market. The campaign was thenchanged from a religious appeal to one based on celebrityendorsement, to the detriment of the product's marketshare.2. To quote the well-known chronicler of Indian folk-lore, William Crooke, "Ganges water is carried longdistances into the interior, and is highly valued for its usein sacrifices, as a remedy, a form of stringent oath, anda viaticum for the dying." (William Crooke 1896: 37).3. In this paper, I draw from fieldwork in the advertisingindustry in Mumbai, with interviews performed be-tween January and March 1997. The names of execu-tives have been withheld. Various ad executives I spoketo denounced this campaign for drawing on a reserve ofimagery that ought to be proscribed from advertising,invoking as it did explicitly religious sanctions for pro-moting private consumption.4. In this respect, ads reproduce the structure of urbanexperience, exposing the individual viewer to fragmentsof the lives of strangers, whose past and future remainunknown. Goffrnan makes this point, but refuses togrant the distinct character of advertising as a discoursewith a specific end. (Goffrnan 1976:22).5. A growing body of scholarship is beginning to remedythis defect. See, e.g., McClintock (1995), Burke (1996),Daniel Miller (1997).6. Kiran Khalap, "Chasing the rainbow: A two-colour,one decade catechism on the hunt for advertisingexcellence in a pseduomature market," Advertising &Marketings 30 June 1995, p. 27. Khalap is senior vice-president of Clarion Advertising in Mumbai, India.7. As Siegfried Kracauer has argued, the inconspicuoussurface-level phenomena of an age, while not providingdefinitive accounts of its overall logic, do provide accessto basic facts about its nature and substance. To quoteKracauer, "The fundamental substance of an epoch andits unheeded impulses illuminate each other recipro-cally" (1995: 75).8. Not only advocates of market society, but many criticsas well, often assume that most populations are some-how waiting to be modern consumers, needing only thepresenceofreally desirable commodities, often broughtto them from the West. The withdrawal or the assertion


of state intervention of state intervention is then positedas the answer, according to the conception of theproblem. In addition to the question of the state,however, is the issue of cultural mediation, and the lackof transparency of local cultures to new influences.9. Under the 1974 Foreign Exchange and Regulation Actof course, foreign companies were required to dilutetheir equity to 40% or below unless they were in coresectors of the economy.10. Air India, the government-operated internationalairlines, was one of the few companies to forefrontnational identity in its ads, through its figure of theMaharajah, a small rotund figure with moustaches anda turban. With his aristocratic demeanor and his courtlyhumor, however, the messages perhaps highlightedmore of an Orientalist than a specifically national formofidentification.11. This section draws on fieldwork in Mumbai, October1996-February 1997, including interviews with adver-tising and market research executives. There is littlepublished research on the Indian advertising industryitself that I have found useful for my discussion here.12. The survey was based on 143 agencies that madetheir financial details available to an A&M study. Theircollective gross income in 1996 was Rs 632.48 crore,and total capitalized billings totaled Rs 4218.64 crore.13. I thank Donald Brenneis for alerting me to theimportance of indexicality as a concept through whichto think of the work of advertisements.14. The cigarettes, sold in a denim colored pack by VazirSultan Tobacco Company, a subsidiary of a multina-tional, was able to capitalize on a new young urbanprofessional niche, till then unexploited.15. John Berger etal. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin,1972, 92.16. RP Goenka Group's FM Radio Women's Hour. InAdvertising & Marketing magazine, January 1997.17. Interview, market research executives (Names with-held). January 1997.18. Here it is interesting to note that overt social rivalryas a motive for consumption tends not to be used as ameans of pitching new products. The explanation maybe that advertisers are unsure how to handle the depic-tion of social difference in the lower castes. Are they toshow it as something to be bridged and superseded, oras something consumers should strive to respect? Ineither case, there is the risk of running up againstresistance, or of stumbling upon trip-wires of caste or

community boundary-maintenance. (In this respect, theAvtar ad is striking in its portrayal of social inequality.)19. Even with respectto familiar sign systems, the levelof socialization is very uneven, it should be noted. Thusthe leadership of the Hindu nationalists perceive thepublic use of Hindu ritual as a means of drawing lesseducated Indians, to say nothing of minorities, into thenational mainstream.20. Here I will forbear from delving into the extremelyi mportant debate between the advocate of the overarchingnecessity of theory (Adorno) and the adherent of anapproach influenced by surrealism (Benjamin), whereintruth could be glimpsed via a confrontation with theobjects themselves. See op. cit., 110-141.21. This view received its most influential formulationwith Abraham Maslow, whose "hierarchy of needs"presented primitive and laboring peoples as brute, andmanagerial executives as becoming self-actualized.22. It may be argued that the Indian film industry hasaddressed and resolved the questions of the depiction ofdesire and fulfilment, and thus represents a fully devel-oped public culture in post-Independence India, but thisis not necessarily correct. Social conflicts as depicted infilm narratives are invariably resolved by a mode ofexternal intervention, either of the law or of the local orfamily patriarch, and often in an alliance of the two. Theactual contradictions within relationships may thereforebe depicted without necessarily carrying them throughto their own internal resolution. In advertisements, bycontrast, such a device is unsatisfactory, since thenarrative must culminate in a latent or patent message ofcommodity consumption. The entire sequence of the adhas to build up to this conclusion, whereas the film'sworth is not so dependent on its ending. Some processof working through actually existing relationships istherefore unavoidable in ads.

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Note: Digital images, in color, from this paper can be seen on VAR's web site:http://etext.virginia.eduA/AR/arvind-r/arvind-r.html


ADVERTISING, POLITICS AND THE SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION OF THE INDIAN CONSUMER

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