Advertising, Middle Class and Consumption in Post-Reform India
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Parables of the Market: Advertising, Middle Class and Consumption in Post-Reform India Vishnupad Mishra Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Columbia University 2012 @2011 Vishnupad Mishra All rights reserved ABSTRACT Parables of the Market: Advertising, Middle Class and Consumption in Post-Reform India Vishnupad Mishra This dissertation presents an ethnography of market dynamics in India, following state-directed economic liberalization during early 1990’s. The decade of the 90’s convulsed Indian society deeply through an aggressive and top-down economic reform program, while at the same time, militant Hinduism and lower caste movements sought violently to capture and dominate social space. Engaging this social context my dissertation looks at the market forces, which hitherto were a subordinate partner to the paternalist Indian state in the cultural production of meaning and identities, take the center-stage and move out of the shadows of a tactically receding Indian state, and strive to re-establish hegemony in a highly contested, fraught and charged politico-cultural field. The dissertation then analyzes the corporatist understanding and viewpoints of contemporary India’s economic standing and prospects, highlighting their own projects and ambitions that appear uniquely tied to their self-imagination of the role they are poised to play in the emerging shape of economy and society in India. In the process, I show that the concepts, frameworks and classificatory schemas used by corporate houses to understand, capture and represent the Indian social, which first and foremost involved constitution of an immense ethnographically based epistemological cartography of Indian society, are neither neutral, nor transparent, but rather, inflected and laden with a desire to conquer a social field that is already ideologically rife with neo-liberalism and Hindu fundamentalist motifs. I suggest that the aforementioned strategies of publicity and advertising – and the advertising industry is the focus of this dissertation- are not averse to symbolically borrowing and encoding neo-liberal and religious faith as everyday commonsense. By extension I show how the production of their vision of the ‘new India’ quite undermines the Nehruvian vision of secularism and its juridical schemas of inter- religious tolerance and co-existence, of socialism and its ethic of labor and production, displacing it with a late-capitalist, neo-liberal, middle class conceptions of consumption and enjoyment. Table of Contents Chapter 1 Introduction 1-74 Chapter 2 Kal Par Control: Thinking Risk and Life Insurance in Contemporary India. 75-126 Chapter 3 Kare Bhitari Shakti Ka Vikas: Dabur, Advertising and an aesthetic of body and health 127- 171 Chapter 4 Branding India 172-241 Conclusion 242-256 Bibliography 257-271. i LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Picture I, Fevicol--------------------------------------------------------------------P. 53 Picture II, Fevicol-------------------------------------------------------------------P. 54 Picture III, ICICI Retirement Solutions-----------------------------------------P. 99 Picture IV, ICICI Retirement Solutions-----------------------------------------P. 100 Picture V, Dabur New Logo-------------------------------------------------------P. 146 Picture VI, Dabur, Veer Ras-------------------------------------------------------P.168 Picture VII, Dabur Veer Ras------------------------------------------------------ P.168 Picture VIII, Tajmahal ------------------------------------------------------------- P. 192 Picture IX, Himalayas -------------------------------------------------------------- P. 200 Picture X, Thar Desert ------------------------------------------------------------ P. 201 Picture XI, Bengal Tiger ----------------------------------------------------------- P.202 Picture XII, Yoga -------------------------------------------------------------------- P.202 Picture XIII, Irada Ek Naye India Ka -------------------------------------------- P. 217 Picture XIV, India Shinning ------------------------------------------------------- P.218 Picture XV, India Shinning ------------------------------------------------------- P.218 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Some debts are never settled howsoever much we try, some are accrued so that they never be settled. Intellectual debts, to my mind, fall in the latter category. My debt to my dissertation committee is one such. While deciding on graduate schools, I was invited by Nicholas Dirks to meet him at his office at Schermerhorn Extension in Columbia. Although the meeting lasted over half an hour, in the first three minutes I had decided I wanted to work with him; and ever since I have not rued the decision. What stuck me about him was his humility, and care for a nondescript student notwithstanding his stature as an intellectual giant in the field of South Asian studies in United States. Brinkley Messick on the other hand stood by me through my graduate tenure from the time I made the first presentation in his class, and wrote that first paper on Clifford Geertz. He conveyed, and in no uncertain terms, that he saw promise in my work and thought, and compelled me to maintain fidelity to it. Partha Chatterjee was the original reason for my interest in anthropology department at Columbia. The versatility of his scholarship and interests has shaped my intuitive and intellectual sense of South Asia, and the world at large, in ways that will endure lifelong. Proximity to him, and his attention to my line of thinking is one of the experiences I will cherish through my life. To Val Daniel I owe his friendship, intellectual, emotional and otherwise. His excitement over my engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis, and theoretical works generally, re-consolidated my investment in these matters. These immense intellectuals beyond everything else, have taught me something very specific: that academic world with all its competitiveness, ego- clashes and bickering, can and should be a humane place, that ethical conduct of self a sine qua non and non-negotiable in most trying circumstances. Paige West was one of the first readers of my chapters; her enthusiasm and unstinted support for the work of graduate students and for mine, made me a fan of hers. Arvind Rajagopal’s generosity with his time especially around the time of defense was exemplary. He has redefined the ways in which the studies on political effects of mediatic forms in India are being construed, and effects of which are easily discernible in the pages of this dissertation. Amongst others in the department, I would like to note my debts to Michael Taussig and Rosalind Morris’ version of ethnographic and theoretical writing, which this dissertation strives, I might admit somewhat unabashedly, to imitate and repeat. Without the friendship of Arvind Mohan I will not have finished my ethnography. Aside from providing a most hospitable ambience at the agency, he time and time again came to my rescue- providing access to resources, to corporate houses and elusive professionals, inviting me to innumerable in-house gatherings and meetings, and to conversations with corporate clients. If I could finally stick to an agency and continue with my ethnography the onus is entirely his. I also wish to thank Kunal Sinha for providing me the initial entry to the corporate world and his subsequent support throughout the project. Without the encouragement of my family and siblings the work will not come to fruition. I would like to take a moment and thank my sister Rita and my brother-in-law Murtuza Ahmed for providing a home away from home in Delhi through the different periods of my stay in India, as well as my in-laws for the very same reason. I made iii several friends amongst colleagues and students at Hampshire College, one too many to name individually; their contribution during the time of writing this thesis has been immense. And finally my debt to Vandana is incalculable for staying with me through the highs and lows of this project. This work is dedicated to my parents. iv DEDICATION To my mother and father. v 1 Chapter I Introduction “The animal urges of Indian entrepreneurs were “uncaged”’, Atul Kohli1 The place, which an epoch occupies in the historical process, is determined more forcefully from the analysis of its insignificant superficial manifestations than from the judgments of the epoch upon itself… The basic content of an epoch and its unobserved impulses reciprocally illuminate one another” Sigfried Kracauer2 “Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.” Mark Twain. “Speaking is not seeing”, Maurice Blanchot3 “It is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say” Michel Foucault4 This dissertation notwithstanding appearances is not about advertising or just about advertising. Or more appropriately, is about advertising only insofar presumably as “insignificant superficial manifestations” it illuminates, and is symptomatic of, the contemporary epoch constituting the Indian social. Following Kracauer remarkable assertion, I would argue ads, as insignificant manifestations, or more forcefully, precisely because these are insignificant manifestation, they manage to index and convey the emerging nature of changes in attitudes, cultural forms and social relations, or what might be referred to as processes of subjectivation and ascendant notions of sociality. And it