Advertising The “New” India in Post-Liberalization India: Creating New Consumers With Advertising Images
BY NAYANTARA SHEORAN
Advertising has traditionally been the machinery that has affected change in the thinking of people. Advertising in post-liberal India took on the task of creating consumers. This article originates from a conference presentation where a semiotic analysis was employed to examine the visuals in some Indian advertising campaigns, which aimed to affect a change in the post-liberalization of the Indian masses. I open by highlighting the tropes deployed by the advertising agencies to ensure their vanguard position in India and present a critical examination of these devices. I then propose that advertising in India, despite its claims of protecting visually unsavvy Indians, is like every other advertising industry in the world in forwarding the capitalist ideology. The masking of consumerism under the garb of swadeshi 1 takes place in order to promote a consumerist agenda while claiming to protect consumer interests. Finally, a demystification of advertisements in India provides us with a project that demands attention and a robust discussion.
ADVERTISING IN INDIA: GLOCAL, HYBRID, NEGOTIATED, AND RESISTED?
In his book titled Shoveling Smoke, William Mazzarella states that the post-liberalization appeal to consumerism by multinationals and Indian firms was a harder sell than at the initial opening up of India’s market. While Mazzarella’s seminal text concentrates on the production of advertisements in India by way of an ethnographic examination of advertising agencies, it also clarifies the vanguard position the advertising industry assumes itself to be taking. As the self-proclaimed protectors and negotiators of what the Indian masses can/ should/may be exposed to in terms of visual messages, they insist that in the production of advertisements they strive to make multinational corporations’ advertisements “glocal.” A combination of global and local, “glocal” is an appeal to local sensibilities with global aspirations to ensure an Indianized flavor to global products. At the same time, these very same advertising agencies also propose “hybrid” advertising images and messages where the local context is morphed, taking into account the multiple localities of the audience and the advertisement itself. Glocal and hybrid advertisements have become the mainstay of the Indian advertising industry as justifications for the mass promotion of material that is only accessible by a fraction of the population. Additionally, these glocal and hybrid advertisements are hailed as progressive advertisements and mirrors into the future of a “progressive” India where multiple localities are first merged and then further submerged in the global.
While this idea of glocal and hybrid in advertisements and images is the focus of other texts, I will refrain from addressing them here. I would like to focus on the issue of resistance and negotiations offered by advertisements to cultural homogenization in the globalized economy. In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai proposed that globalization has enabled “culture” to exist and thrive in locations separate from their point of origin, while acknowledging that it is the forces of globalization that cause the initial separation. He also proposed that cultural homogenization is a fallacy, as globalization has created a scenario where the human imagination creatively subverts or altogether avoids the hegemonic tendencies of capitalism. So the negotiations and/or resistance as applied to the advertising industry (which is part of the Indian mediascape) leads us to believe that Indian advertisements, in reaction to the forces of the globalization, are in fact spaces/texts where negotiation or resistance are offered to a global consumerist ideology. Resistance and negotiations are professed to be offered within these texts on behalf of the viewing masses. By the advertising industry’s account, the cultural reflections in Indian advertisements are not that of a globally homogenized India, but rather a progressive India. Of course, rarely is the question asked as to what progress is and who has historically defined progress?
ADVERTISING: THE IDEOLOGICAL APPARATUS
Advertising in India, despite it claims, is the ideological apparatus at play. Ideology was a term coined to talk about the structuring of culture in such a manner that it enables the group holding power to exercise maximum control with minimal conflict. This is not a deliberate attempt to oppress people or alter their consciousness; rather, it is a matter of how dominant institutions in society work through values, conceptions of the world, and symbol systems to legitimize the current order. Ideology operates by naturalizing, historicizing, and eternalizing oppressive social structures. It makes them appear natural and as having no rational alternative. Ideological structures appear to be historical progressions—primarily uncontentious historical developments with the assumption that the present state of affairs is the eternally optimum state—and any kind of change not in accordance with reigning ideologies is in fact a regression. Ideology operates as a mystification of social relations and lived realities of people. As one of the most pervasive social institutions, advertising forwards a capitalist ideology that is both unproblematic and unquestioned.
To propose that glocal and hybrid advertising is in fact a better form of advertising for the masses as compared to purely global or local advertisements is problematic in two ways. First, the global is masked by the local. The local is employed for purposes ranging from humor and ridicule to patriotism and pride, while the global ideology remains intact. When the global is masked, ambiguity in the message and image leads to an ascription of the ideology rather than a critical inquiry. Second, the insistence of advertising agencies to generate global and hybrid messages plays into their own profit margins. As long as these advertising agencies can insist on glocal and hybrid advertising messages they ensure their mainstay in the market, thereby raising doubts about their motivations for such devices. Not only is the global masked by the local, but the outwardly altruistic motivations of advertising agencies mask their profit motivations. They themselves are blind to their cog-like positions as ideological apparatuses. Glocal and hybrid messages may appear to be acts of subversion, however, in reality they are the essential elements of promoting an ideology.
Similarly, to propose that advertisements, in opposition to the homogenizing effects of globalization and consumerism, offer negotiations and resistance to such an ideology is a fallacy. In the new Indian advertisements, the negotiations are not between the local and global; they are, in fact, between the erasure and over-exposure of social relations.
Advertisements, in their supposedly contrary stance, use social relations as a commodity that is either erased from the image and message or over-Indianized to the point of ridicule. A negotiation between the two is reached to ensure palatable advertising. In terms of resistance offered in Indian advertising to the homogenization of culture, the biggest issue becomes the images used to offer this resistance. Images of labor, the problematic everyday, the social relations of conflict and compromise, and of the lived realities of a billion people all become appropriated by capitalist machinery. The agency or resistance, as professed to be offered in advertising, is appropriated to forward the capitalist ideology in advertisements. To continue to suggest that advertisements in India, in their Indian garb, are, in some fashion, negotiations or acts of resistance to a globalized consumerist ideology would be detrimental to any robust discussion of globalization and the role of advertising media in the propagation of the capitalist ideology.
DISCUSSION
Advertisements unquestionably have a purpose—to sell. Advertisements are unarguably there to forward the capitalist ideology; however, in the Indian advertising world there is a myth that the advertising industry is in a protective role rather than an exploitative one. Herein lies the problem. To profess to take a position, which claims a subversion of the system, all the while subjecting the masses to that very same system, is more problematic than just blatantly confessing to be propagators of the capitalist ideology. Additionally, Indian advertisements, unlike the slow progression as experienced in the West by advertising copy and design, have seen a rapid explosion.
For a visually unsavvy public, this overwhelming image extravaganza is leading to a blind subscription to ideology rather than a critical analysis. Beyond consuming (as this is determined by the ability/capital to consume), the ideological shift in a nation’s mindset is affected by such advertisements. These masked advertisements create imaginary relationships between the subject and his/her lived reality. This, in turn, leads to a form of alienation, originating in the sphere of production and cemented in the sphere of consumption.
The ideological apparatus at play in India is very similar to the role of advertising industries in many developing nations. The masses of developing nations like India and China, with their large populations and consumption potential, are becoming the consumed-consuming subjects. Such a situation demands a critical view of “liberalization” in India, globalization, and the ideological apparatuses employed to forward the capitalist ideology. It would be prudent to point out that this article is only a brief section of a thicker semiotic analysis of advertising in India. Furthermore, the analysis focuses on meaning making processes as understood from a privileged position, and is not ethnographically grounded in research that engages how meaning making occurs in the everyday. Finally, further research aims to combine the production, reception, consumption, and regulation of these glocal and hybrid advertising images in light of a semiotic analysis that highlights the ideological framework these images operate within.
Nayantara Sheoran (nsheoran@gmu.edu) is a doctoral student in Cultural Studies (http://culturalstudies.gmu.edu). This article was first published in print and citations have been removed due to space limitations, but are available from the author.
- Swadeshi – self-sufficiency based on reliance of one’s own land. In the Indian context, the term swadeshi was used by Mohandas Karam Chand Gandhi when boycotting foreign products and encouraging the use of Indian products at the time of the Indian freedom struggle against the British colonial rule. [↩]
