Understanding India : Cultural Influences on Indian Television Commercials 2014001697, 9788132113928

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Understanding India

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Understanding India Cultural Influences on Indian Television Commercials

Rohitashya Chattopadhyay

Copyright © Rohitashya Chattopadhyay, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published in 2014 by SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B1/I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044, India www.sagepub.in SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320, USA SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483 Published by Vivek Mehra for SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd, typeset in 10.5/12.5 pt Utopia by Diligent Typesetter, Delhi, and printed at Saurabh Printers Pvt Ltd, New Delhi. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chattopadhyay, Rohitashya, 1975–   Understanding India : cultural influences on Indian television commercials / Rohitashya Chattopadhyay.   pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.   1.  Television advertising—India.  I. Title.  HF6146.T42C43    659.14'30954—dc23    2014    2014001697 ISBN: 978-81-321-1392-8 (HB) The SAGE Team: Shambhu Sahu, Isha Sachdeva, Rajib Chatterjee, and Dally Verghese

Contents

Preface vii 1. Going Home • Introduction • Scope of the Study • Television Commercial Production Process • The Role of Images • Television Commercials as Cinema • The National Context • Outline of the Book

1 1 3 5 7 10 13 17

2. India Changing • Introduction • Liberalization and the Public Sphere • Consumer Socialization • SBI Mutual Fund: Creating the Small Town Investor • SBI Mutual Fund: On the Road • The Four Scripts • Consumer Socialization Revisited • Conclusion

25 25 27 29 33 37 41 42 48

3. Visualizing India 56 • Introduction 56 • Choosing the Director 57 • The SBI Mutual Fund Appearance: Simulation and Framing 59 • The SBI Mutual Fund Appearance: Role of Referencing 65 • The SBI Mutual Fund Appearance: Visualizing India 70

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• The Tata Indicom Appearance: Indian Visuals 76 • The Tata Indicom Appearance: Mass Appeal as Difference 79 • The Tata Indicom Appearance: The Script and Animation 82 • The Tata Indicom Appearance: Visualizing India 85 • Conclusion 88 4. India Batting 96 • Introduction 96 • Two Forms of Cricket 98 • Reebok: Pedagogical and Performative Citizenship 101 • Reebok: Imagery of the Male Body 105 • Reebok: The Body as In-between 109 • Conclusion 115 5. Feminine India • Introduction • The Alpha Female • The Female Assistant • The Female Model • Conclusion

119 119 121 127 132 134

6. Consuming India • Introduction • Visual Representation and Culture • Mediation of Consumerism • Creating the Spectacle • The Role of the Filmmaker • Consuming India • Conclusion

141 141 142 145 148 150 151 153

Glossary of Terms 159 Selected Bibliography 166 Index 170 About the Author 176

Preface

Writing this book has involved a series of conflicting experiences, as I have shuttled from feeling intellectual at one moment to feeling like a child at the next moment. When I felt intellectual, it was associated with a belief that I was writing something important as this was a book that would make an important contribution to our understanding of both television commercial production in India and contemporary Indian identity. The childishness was associated with a sense of fear that maybe the desire to write this book was an immature whim, rather than a serious endeavour that would ultimately be read seriously. After finishing the book, I continue to suffer from these contradictory feelings that will linger till enough readers have read and commented on my work. This book has evolved out of research that I conducted for my Ph.D. dissertation. I received a Ph.D. in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. After obtaining my degree, I was fortunate enough to work at the World Bank Headquarters in Washington D.C. and at Quantum Consumer Solutions, one of Asia’s leading consumer insights firms. The latter job took me back to Mumbai and New Delhi, where much of the research for this book had been conducted. The experience of living in these cities, once again, rekindled my interest in the dissertation topic and inspired me to write this book. At a subconscious level, however, the foundations of this book were shaped by my experience of growing up in India during a phase when cable television was introduced and the economy was opened up to foreign investment. Later, at the University of Pennsylvania, I did not consciously plan an

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ethnographic study on television commercial production. I was initially interested in the mediation of cultural identity and how multiple cultural influences shape the identity of groups, such as people of Indian origin living in North America. My advisor, Paul Messaris, influenced me to return to India and work with film production houses that make television commercials. I picked up his suggestion easily because I had been interested in both advertising and film production since high school. At the time, in fact, I was working on a textual analysis of Indian television commercials and this paper got published in Advertising and Society Review. The larger challenge, as I saw it, was dealing with the study’s focus on the visual language of a television commercial or how the visual language is shaped according to the communication goals of the television commercial. This emphasis derived from my advisor’s work on Visual Communication and Visual Literacy, which discusses the use of images to communicate messages that we otherwise hear in words. It was particularly challenging due to the decision to observe film production, as I had to understand how technical production decisions were impacting the visual language of a television commercial. More importantly, since the goal was to analyse the use of visual language in the socio-political context of India, the technicalities of visual language had to be filtered through the lens of theoretical tools that I borrowed from fields such as Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Marketing, and Mass Communication. While planning the study, the first hurdle was contacting film production houses in India while still based in United Stated (U.S.). Surprisingly, I got a number of positive replies even though I had written to them without any special references. That is, quite a few production houses informed me that I could contact them when I reached India and they would assist me with my research. I used these replies to establish the feasibility of the study when I presented the research proposal to my dissertation committee. Mumbai was the natural choice as the primary location for conducting the research, as this city is the filmmaking capital

Preface  ix

of India. It is where most of the film production houses are located, and it is the city where many of the stalwarts of Indian advertising are based. I started the research in New Delhi, however, as it is the other city where important advertising decisions are taken. Being the political capital of India, moreover, New Delhi brought a national perspective to the study by making me more aware of some of the economic and political changes that have impacted the country during the last two decades. Apart from the ethnographic observations that were conducted for this study, I also conducted interviews that were focused on understanding key production decisions. Often the interviews substantiated the ethnographic observations, so, for example, I clarified certain observations by asking questions about them. Many interviews were also conducted without any associated ethnographic observations. In these cases, rather than clarification, I had to spend more time trying to dig up new data regarding television commercials that the interviewee had been involved with. The observation of television commercial production occurred at a few production houses where I was given access to the shooting floor, production meetings, the editing room, and the post-production facilities. Of these production houses, I spent the maximum time at Equinox Films, Mumbai. I was fortunate that I got their telephone number through a documentary filmmaker friend, and even more fortunate that Ram Madhvani (Director at Equinox Films) liked this study’s focus on visual language. Thankfully, Sumantra Ghosal (Director at Equinox Films) and Manoj Shroff (Producer at Equinox Films) were equally supportive and did not mind my presence. The interviews were conducted with television commercial directors, producers, editors, animators, and advertising professionals, such as copywriters. Most interviews were an hour long, although many important interviews were much longer. The interviews were semi-structured, since I had a basic script that I followed while I was also improvising and adding questions wherever required. Often, apart from the interview

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itself, there was ethnographic value in the experience of visiting an office to conduct an interview. I got a chance to overhear conversations, look at office décor, and to meet other people in the same office. The interviews were not conducted in any particular order, and I met people as and when they agreed to spare time. The website afaqs.com was an extremely useful source of contact information and contacts were also gathered through acquaintances, friends, and other interviewees. The ethnographic observations were scheduled around these interviews, so I was either busy with observation sessions or interviews. As will be evident in this book, my ethnographic tale has been narrated through the framework of certain key campaigns that I followed in detail. I hope that both the comprehensive information and my analysis will help the reader understand the visualization process that is at the core of television commercial production. I also expect that the overall narrative will leave the reader better informed about contemporary India, and I expect my readers to include those based in India and those reading this book outside India. I acknowledge, however, that India based readers might find certain sections of the book commonplace because they are well aware of these aspects of India. These sections had to be included, nevertheless, for the sake of those unfamiliar with India. Before proceeding to the first chapter, I want to thank a host of individuals. In India, I thank each and everyone who agreed to speak to me while I was conducting research for this project and especially those who allowed me to peak into their daily production work. I also thank Ritesh Ghosal at Tata Teleservices Ltd and Mayank Shah at Parle Products Pvt. Ltd for giving me permission to use images. At Coral Research Services, I thank Priyanka Desai and Shakti Banerjee for hiring me while I was writing this book. At Quantum Consumer Solutions, I thank the Board of Directors and Tirthankar Dash for giving me an awesome job.

Preface  xi

At the World Bank, I thank Diana Chung, Johanna Martinson, and Sina Odugbemi for the opportunity to work at a renowned institution. At SAGE Publications India, I thank Shambhu Sahu and R. Chandra Sekhar for believing in this book and the three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Among my professors, I thank Barbie Zelizer, Carolyn Marvin, James Anderson, John Jackson Jr, Mary Strine, Maureen Mathison, Paul Messaris, and Robert Avery for a wonderful education. For help with industry contacts, transcription and housing in India, I thank Amitava Mazumdar, Anirban and Sanghamitra Chakravarty, Aniruddha Guha, Frank Chater, I. Kannan, Kavita Dasgupta, Partha Mukherjee, Prabhat Mishra, Pronab Mazumder, Subhash and Nandita Chakrabarti, and Tilak Chowdhury. At home, I thank my wife and son for all the affection and support, the cooking and cuddling, and for dealing with my long stints in front of the computer. This book is dedicated to my parents. I thank them for bringing me up and allowing me the freedom to think and write.

1 Going Home

“In a documentary you have to tell the story in half an hour or one hour, whereas in a television commercial you have to tell the story in thirty seconds; but it is the same story, you know what I am saying.” Television Commercial Director1

Introduction During flights to India, from Europe or North America, I have always found myself searching for that extra bit of Indianness. It is a time, when the red wine and pasta are less inviting than the Indian or desi selections on the in-flight menu. Yet the lure of the foreign does not disappear either, both for me and the other Indian passengers whom I see around me. Foreign perfume and alcohol, for example, continue to be bought from the duty-free shops located at the airports. My mother-in-law, in fact, had even commented that it does not feel like a foreign airline if they do not serve you a sandwich. This particular trip home, on a flight from New York to New Delhi, was to conduct research for my dissertation on Indian television commercial production.2 Travelling back home as a researcher made me particularly inclined to observation and interpretation, and the habit was exaggerated by my choice of interpretive anthropology as the genre of research that I would try to emulate. This is because interpretive anthropology emphasizes the need to make sense of the local situation, while arriving at conclusions regarding cultural behaviour.3

2  Understanding India

Clifford Geertz, the Cultural Anthropologist who is widely recognized as the pioneer of interpretive anthropology, explains that the object of ethnography lies in between the surface explanation of behaviour and their culturally coded significance. It is “a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures” 4 that allows the ethnographer to interpret behaviour in a particular cultural context. Uncovering these structures, Geertz explains, by understanding behaviour from the actor’s perspective, is the goal of the ethnographer. The famous example used by Geertz (who is drawing from the writing of Gilbert Ryle) is the distinction between a twitch (an automatic or non-voluntary action) and a wink (an action done voluntarily or on purpose) when an observer notices eye movement that could be either. An eye movement, in other words, could appear to be a twitch without incorporating the codes of a culture, while knowledge of cultural codes might reveal that it is in fact a wink: “contracting your eyelids on purpose when there exists a public code in which so doing counts as a conspiratorial sign is winking.”5 These two forms of interpretation are represented by the terms “thick description” and “thin description”6—the former incorporates the cultural context, while the latter is a form of interpretation that does not take the cultural context into account. An understanding of the cultural context, that is, results in description being transformed from a thin to a thick one. As also mentioned earlier, the cultural significance of behaviour has to be understood from the actor’s perspective. Thus, even if one is an outsider to a cultural context, it is important to be able to see through an insider’s eyes if one’s descriptions are to indeed become thick. On the flight from New York to New Delhi, I was clearly an insider among fellow Indian passengers travelling to India. Yet, even as an insider I could be making the mistake of misunderstanding the significance of the behaviour that I observed around me. The subtlety of this kind of analysis is an issue that Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty addresses through his discussion of the Indian politician’s habit of wearing khadi— “the coarse, homespun cotton that Gandhi popularized

Going Home  3

in the 1920s.”7 He phrases this practice “the desire for an alternative modernity,”8 which has remained in the minds of Indians as a consequence of having been fed anti-capitalist ideology during the colonial struggle against the British. According to Chakrabarty, this habit, however, should not be read as a sign of the politicians consciously believing in their purity. The practice remains almost out of inertia, rather, so it has an involuntary aspect. Readers will perhaps notice, in this explanation, a similarity with the recommendation made by Geertz that it is important to distinguish between a twitch (involuntary) and a wink (voluntary). In other words, instead of opposing modernity through action that is voluntarily committed, to express and maintain one’s distance from modernity, khadi wearing is like the involuntary twitch that looks like a wink but is not.

Scope of the Study The indeterminacy and promiscuity of the meaning associated with human behaviour is a phenomenon that has baffled and continues to baffle scholars, non-academic professionals, and students from all across the world. Another example is an incident that occurred during the first evening in New Delhi when I had the first opportunity, during this fieldwork trip, to observe Indian life. That evening, I noticed cultural complexities that added to the curiosity and interest, which had already developed on the long flight to a place that I still called home, even though I had been a non-resident Indian (NRI) for nearly ten years. When the lady of the house—where we (my wife and I) had been kindly accommodated for that night—offered me a fork before dinner, I wondered what she might have been thinking. Was she disappointed that I did not appear to be Indian enough to use my hands? Was she worried that I might have been uncomfortable eating at her place? Was it important to display her knowledge of American or European habits?

4  Understanding India

Like many others, these questions also remained unanswered that evening. These questions, nevertheless, inspired me to keep observing Indian life and questioning the cultural implications of the human behaviour that I saw around me. The study that I was embarking on was ethnography of television commercial production, but I also wanted to understand India through the television commercials that were being produced for Indian consumers. So, while the immediate goal of the ethnography was to observe television commercial production, the larger goal was to understand India through the lens of these commercials. In this endeavour, I was following a long line of Media Anthropologists, such as Arvind Rajagopal,9 Brian Larkin,10 Lila Abu-Lughod,11 Purnima Mankekar,12 Shoma Munshi,13 and Tejaswini Ganti14 who have looked at nations such as Egypt, India, and Nigeria in the context of media production, media reception, and the historical development of media. These authors showed me the way, so to speak, while I was planning the methodology of the study and trying to hypothesize about the role of media in contemporary India. Also helpful in this respect were anthropologies of advertising by authors such as Brian Moeran,15 Daniel Miller,16 Stephen Kemper,17 and William Mazzarella.18 Apart from an overall introduction to the field of media anthropology19 as well as an understanding of how media industries, media texts, and media audiences can be studied using anthropological methods, there were some specific insights that I gained from these authors. These insights shaped the way that I approached the core research topic—television commercial production in India—and, so, the overall scope of the study was impacted as well. The nation building role, for example, played by media institutions in postcolonial settings is discussed by most, if not all, of the authors mentioned above. One of the goals of this research, thus, was to understand television commercials in the context of a country that was rapidly changing economically and in other respects. The heterogeneity of national identity, similarly, is a topic that resurfaces frequently in the books

Going Home  5

written by these authors. This research was, thus, multi-sited20 and it attempted to understand the articulation of Indianness at multiple locations, to gauge the differences in expressions of national identity at these various locations. The political influence of mediated imagery, such as on television or in advertisements, is another issue that is at the forefront of the writing of these authors. This research was, thus, planned in a way such that the political stakes involved in the construction of the advertised image could be understood to the fullest extent possible. This research was also designed to be a study of visual persuasion. This is because the images in an advertisement are meant to be an aid to selling a brand or product, so they have an important persuasive role to play. I was, thus, ambitious in trying to utilize the tools of media anthropology to understand visual persuasion within the cultural context of contemporary India. Unlike print advertisements, however, television commercials comprise moving images rather than one or a few still images. The typical television commercial’s visual grammar, moreover, as will be evident from discussions in later chapters of this book, is similar to the language of fictional films that are usually much longer in length. So the challenge was to understand how cinematic language is used by television commercial producers to create persuasive selling messages.

Television Commercial Production Process The study was planned with a basic knowledge of the television commercial production process. I somewhat knew that the advertising idea for a brand or product passes through many hands before it emerges as a television commercial. Initially, the marketing or marketing communications department of the manufacturing company appoints an advertising agency to plan, execute, and manage the advertising for this brand or product, unless the company has a pre-appointed advertising agency to handle all of their advertising.

6  Understanding India

The appointment process often involves an exercise where the agencies pitch for the account, so to speak, by presenting their versions of how to advertise the brand or product. An agency is chosen after all these pitches are evaluated, that is, and then the chosen agency proceeds to further elaborate on their approach to advertising the brand or product. The television commercial production house usually enters the scenario at a later stage, after the advertising agency and manufacturing company may have already developed a coherent advertising strategy. These production houses were the focus of my research because I studied the cinematic reproduction of the advertising idea rather than the development of the advertising idea itself. Existing anthropologies of advertising tend to be focused on the initial development of the advertising idea, so I wanted to instead focus on television commercial production that had been a relatively neglected area of study. Rather than the television commercial production house as an organization, moreover, I was primarily interested in how the production houses use cinematic language to convert an advertising idea into a television commercial. After starting the research, I soon realized that this process of cinematic articulation, as it was, is often not as neat and well defined as it may seem on paper. One cannot expect, in other words, that the television commercial director will be easily able to describe the cinematic style chosen for a particular commercial. The articulation is easier, however, when production houses have to present their envisioned treatment of the film before one of them is chosen for the project, quite like the way advertising agencies pitch for an account as mentioned earlier. I realized, moreover, that one of the ways the cinematic style of a commercial can be decoded is through the cinematic and cultural references that have been used to create the commercial. A direct reference would be the use of the Charlie Chaplin character, for example, or a similar character from Indian cinema. The character, that is, takes the television commercial viewer into a cultural world, which is connoted by the set of films that the character is famous for.

Going Home  7

An indirect reference would be the use of the style of silent filmmaking that was predominant in the cinema of Charlie Chaplin, without showing the Charlie Chaplin character. So the cinematic style is an implicit reminder of Charlie Chaplin, and the use of this cinematic form adds meaning to the television commercial by incorporating the humour, for example, which was prevalent in Charlie Chaplin’s silent films.

The Role of Images Images, as cultural texts, are useful in this process of cultural referencing and the process of adding cultural meaning to the consumption experience. This is because images have iconic and indexical qualities. These features derive from the terms—icon and index—used by C.S. Peirce to represent two kinds of signs. An iconic sign possesses certain characteristics of the object represented. An indexical sign provides evidence regarding an object’s existence.21 An advertiser benefits from the iconicity of images because this feature can be used to induce emotions22 from consumers. Since an iconic sign carries characteristics of the represented object, these characteristics can be used as stimuli to draw out emotions that are already attached to the object. So, for example, the photograph of a beautiful female face is an iconic sign that carries the beauty of the object represented, and the attraction and desire generated by this beauty can help to sell a beauty product like a lipstick. These stimuli, for drawing out emotions, can be reproduced through both the intrinsic features of the images, moreover, as well as the manner in which they are filmed. The notion of film style, to be discussed later in this chapter, assumes heightened importance due to this premise that filming technique can influence the meaning communicated to the audience. Advertisers benefit from the indexical nature of images as well because, as an index, the image substantiates the information being conveyed and it assumes a documentary quality.23 Black hair, for example, can be an index for youthfulness.

8  Understanding India

So a black-haired model can be used in an advertisement to sell health products that promise to reduce the rate of physical aging of the consumer. Images also have an aesthetic attribute, which plays a key role in enhancing the emotional and visual appeal of television commercials. The evolution of aesthetics occurred when tools had reached the peak of their functional utility24 and then the form of these tools could be improved: “having become divorced from function, form was free to develop according to new principles or laws—those laws and principles, which are now called aesthetics.”25 In the case of Indian television commercials, it is not clear whether the development of the form occurred after the functional utility had reached its peak.26 As a number of interviewees explained, however, the use of aesthetics is connected to an overall trend of Indian television commercials being designed to appeal to the aspirations of consumers. The aesthetics of the imagery are meant to make the commercials look larger than life, in other words, and they reflect what the average consumer would ideally like to be. Even without this feedback from interviewees, it is not difficult to see that many Indian television commercials look far more glamorous than the Indian reality visible off the screen. It is more likely that an Indian car commercial will show clean empty roads, rather than the traffic congestion routinely faced by millions of Indians. Chevrolet recently released an Indian commercial, for example, which I viewed in February 2012, and it shows a young man driving down an empty highway that is spotlessly clean. I would argue, having travelled extensively in both urban and rural India over the last five years, that such driving conditions are a rarity in contemporary India. Similarly, in tune with its emphasis on the aspirations of consumers, Indian television commercials tend to downplay the difference between the infrastructure of a typical Indian city and that of a city in wealthier nations. The aesthetics of the imagery, in other words, is used to polish these commercials and downplay the deficiencies in India’s infrastructure. A commercial for a Cadbury malt beverage, for example, which

Going Home  9

I viewed in February 2012, shows a young boy practising gymnastics in an empty indoor stadium that is a rarity in contemporary India, but may not be in the U.S. The polish is physically incorporated, partly, during the process of editing these television commercials. Although the editing process may not be very lengthy, I was impressed to realize how much effort is given to create the desired appearance. It was somewhat like watching a jeweller working on an intricate piece of jewellery. Having never had any formal training in film production techniques, it was not easy to understand every piece of this process. With the help of my own reading of books on production techniques and the explanation of respondents, I managed to develop the understanding that was needed for this ethnography. A key to this understanding was the ability to make a connection between cinematic language and the larger narrative of a piece of visual communication. The usefulness of fast editing, for example, while showing an intense chase sequence in an action packed thriller, or the relevance of mellow light, for example, in a scene where the supressed romanticism of a male character is being revealed, or the contribution of a hand-held camera as opposed to a camera on a trolley, for example, in a scene set inside a crowded marketplace. Marketing Theorist Jean-Noel Kapferer explains that an important task of a brand is reflecting the customer “as he/ she wishes to be seen as a result of using a brand. It provides a model with which to identify.”27 His explanation suggests a rationale for polishing television commercials to appeal to the aspiration of consumers. The brand, that is, does not represent the target audience as they really are, but as they would ideally like to be. The politics of the advertisement’s imagery is directly related to this practice, of appealing to the aspirations of the consumer and creating an idealized reality by adding the polish. Media Sociologist Michael Schudson, thus, compares advertisements to the art form known as socialist realism that was used to perpetuate socialist ideology in the former

10  Understanding India

Soviet Union. As the capitalist counterpart, advertisements are termed as fitting into a genre known as capitalist realism. Advertisements idealize consumerism and free choice, that is, which are the hallmarks of a capitalist society.28 Cultural Theorist Raymond Williams forwards a similar explanation and considers advertisements to comprise a “magic system,” which obscures the dissatisfactions of the capitalist system. He argues that advertisements associate consumption of specific products with the fulfilment of desires, such as companionship, which might not be related to the product but are demanded by a society nevertheless. The role played by capitalism in leaving these needs unfulfilled, however, is camouflaged and the culprit appears to be the saviour.29

Television Commercials as Cinema The cinematic medium is particularly useful for advertising a product and luring consumers because the grammar of cinema can be utilized strategically to achieve these ends. The classical Hollywood style, for example, is distinguished for its goal of maintaining a realist illusion—it seems like reality rather than a film.30 When the transparency of the film’s mediation is maximized, that is, this increases the chances of the viewers getting absorbed in the narrative and forgetting that they are watching fiction.31 Classical Hollywood cinema depends on the continuity system of editing in order to uphold this façade of reality. A typical scene shot using the Hollywood style of filmmaking comprises an establishing shot, which sets up the scene, and it is followed by multiple space cutting and analytical editing. Multiple space cutting involves switching from the establishing or master shot of the scene to various other views of the same scene. Analytical editing is used to organize this procedure of multiple space cutting. The continuity system is aligned with a narrative that maintains causality centred on the character’s actions rather than other causes such as natural events. The character causality, moreover, and each

Going Home  11

subsequent effect create a narrative coherence that helps sustain the continuity system. The constant cycle of cause and effect also helps to absorb the spectator into the narrative, and this absorption culminates in the narrative’s closure. 32 Apart from the classical Hollywood style, television commercials regularly use various European styles of filmmaking as well. One of the most widely used European techniques is the montage filmmaking style, which was developed by Sergei Eisenstein who was based in the country formerly known as the Soviet Union. While the classical Hollywood style helps to create a realist illusion within a television commercial to attract consumers, the montage style is particularly helpful for adding context and meaning to a product. The Soviet montage technique was a method of joining a set of images to create cumulative meaning, which was unlike or greater than what each individual frame meant. One of Eisenstein’s specialties was to also synthesize antithetical images, instead of presenting parallel images like some of the other Soviet directors did, to create meaning that could not be perceived by viewing these images individually: “montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots– shots even opposite to each other.”33 A major influence on Eisenstein’s work was the films of the American filmmaker, D.W. Griffith, who was perhaps the first filmmaker to use a montage of spatially separate images as opposed to analytical or continuity editing to convey a narrative.34 Other European styles, such French impressionism and German expressionism, are also used in television commercials. Instead of an entire genre of European filmmaking, moreover, certain specific elements of European filmmaking—such as a single shot mis-en-scene or detailed staging within a single frame—could also be used. A European style, such as French impressionism, can be useful in producing a television commercial that wants to highlight the emotions of the characters. This is because the key characteristic of the French impressionist films is their conception of art as expression. In these films, thus, the cinematic language is used as a medium

12  Understanding India

that presents a particular picture of reality, reflecting the director’s viewpoint and the characters’ subjectivity, instead of a medium that merely mechanically records reality: [F]ilm techniques are bent to the purpose of stressing the filmmaker’s interpretation of the filmed material. More often, it is characters’ psychological states which are expressed through the camerawork, mis-en-scene, optical devices, and editing. Camera distance, angle, and movement present either a character’s optical point of view or represent a state of the character’s feeling.35

Similarly, film styles from other parts of the world—such as China, Japan, and India—can also be used to create the appearance and visual grammar of a television commercial. Chinese and Japanese films, in general, are known to possess certain aesthetic features that have been attributed to the influence of Chinese and Japanese art characterized by features, such as multiple perspectives, lack of rigid framing, and use of empty spaces, which are unlike Renaissance Europe’s linear perspective painting that influenced the classical Hollywood style.36 The frontal low angle is a good example of the use of a Japanese cinematic style in advertising.37 The Japanese film Director Ozu Yasujiro may have borrowed this technique from Japanese portrait paintings where figures are often seen from a frontal low angle.38 Indian cinema is characterized by extra-diegetic features such as song and dance sequences that are not only entertaining, but also work towards “delaying the development of the plot, distracting [the viewer] from the other scenes of the narrative through spatial and temporal disjunctions [while] bearing an integral link to the plot.”39 The Indian cinema industry produces a large number of social melodramas that use Hollywood continuity codes to create a realist appearance, but these films can include iconic images40 as well as static tableaux.41,42 Also, diverting from grammar of the Hollywood style, Indian cinema—through the influence of Indian art—is known to use the technique of full frontal address43 and this technique can be useful in television commercials as well, due to the impact it creates on the screen.

Going Home  13

The cinematic aspects of television commercials can, thus, be particularly useful as strategic moves to make a piece of visual communication more effective at selling products. While conducting this ethnography, my objective was to understand these strategic moves as they took place on the planning or editing table, for example, as well as to understand them through the words of those who utilized such cinematic techniques. In line with the larger goal of the ethnography, however, my main concern was regarding the visual implications of these strategic moves rather than the technicalities of the cinematic language per se.

The National Context As suggested earlier, this study was planned and executed in the interpretive style that not only includes an interpretation of the production practices being observed, but also an interpretation of how the media producers themselves are interpreting the world that they are representing.44 This genre of ethnographic enquiry, as suggested earlier, is usually associated with Clifford Geertz: This new perspective took cultural representations and their meanings as its point of departure. Calling for “thick description” of particular events, rituals, and customs, Geertz suggested that all anthropological writings were interpretations of interpretations. The observer had no privileged voice in the interpretations that were written. The central task of theory was to make sense of the local situation.45

The importance of the local situation became obvious to me as soon as I landed in New Delhi. Sitting at my desk in Philadelphia, it was easy to think of an Indian city as a neat cultural container, but this notion was soon demolished as I discovered the multiple cultural milieus and cultural layers that a city contained. While this did not diminish the importance of the local situation, it certainly made it a more difficult task to decipher the local situation.

14  Understanding India

In New Delhi, for example, my residence shifted between the quiet and spacious sophistication of Pandara Road and the noisier and less spacious mediocrity of Chittaranjan Park, which is famous for being a neighbourhood dominated by Bengalis, the natives of West Bengal—a state in Eastern India, as many readers might be aware. Apart from these locations, I had the opportunity to visit numerous other sections of New Delhi and these experiences, in combination, created the local culture of New Delhi for me. At the end of my stay in New Delhi, however, I did not know where to look or what to highlight as being representative of New Delhi culture. There were too many examples, as I saw it, of what makes New Delhi the kind of city that it is. The situation was exacerbated by the presence of the television, which provides a platform for multiple cultural domains to exist simultaneously: Television stitches together a plurality of fields through a currency of images, instituting a system of representation that cuts across society. Within it, the distinct symbols of each social field can be “realistically” portrayed in all their uniqueness, while ignoring their constitution within a newly homogenized system of representation. It thus permits the unobtrusive accumulation of economic as well as symbolic capital on an unprecedented scale.46

Marketing Communications Expert Santosh Desai, whom I interviewed later in New Delhi, mentioned: “if you were to transpose your television experience into the rest of your life, I think much of the change in India is a televisionising of India.”47 From the first evening that I spent in India it became clear to me that there had been an obvious growth in Indian television compared to the nineteen nineties when I was growing up in India, and television was now indeed ubiquitous in both private and public spaces.48 The televisionising process not only increases the influence of multiple cultures, as mentioned, but it also enhances the simultaneous visibility of numerous locations of India and probably the ability to imagine the nation as a community

Going Home  15

living side by side.49 So the viewers are able to simultaneously view, during any given hour of viewing time, images of East, West, North, and South India. People from various parts of India, thus, could debate a given topic, for example, without being physically present at the same location. During the first evening in New Delhi, while we ate dinner, the television made me feel like I was in touch with the rest of India—although it had been only a few hours since I had landed—as news poured in from various parts of the country. The significance of this connectivity will be better appreciated if one considers the deep cultural and linguistic differences that exist within India, irrespective of the cultural flows from outside the country. The food and language of a Southern state like Tamil Nadu, for example is completely different from that of a Northern state like Uttar Pradesh. The national imaginary of the country may, thus, have been less unified than is desirable although the idea of the nation or the Idea of India,50 to use the title of a well-known book, has existed since or even before national independence in 1947. Many of the television commercials discussed throughout this book have a vision of Indianness embedded within them. This book is concerned with a particular aspect of these visions of India as observed within television commercials that can be seen as the visual representation of a new consumer culture emerging due to economic liberalization. This aspect is the dialectic between an old Indian identity and a new Indian identity, as it emerged through the images of the television commercials being produced for a new economically liberalized India. Since this is a study of television commercial production, this issue was observed through the eyes of the television commercial producers and directors, as they made strategic use of production techniques to create visual narratives that reflected a certain kind of Indian identity. One trend connected to this dialectic is the confluence of foreign and Indian cultural influences within the space of the same television commercial. In some cases, Indian television commercials reflect the foreign connection while trying to retain the aura51 of a more long-standing Indianness. Reflecting this foreign connection can be useful for a brand in

16  Understanding India

an economically liberalized marketplace where foreignness can be seen as trendy, but an Indian essence is also important for connecting with consumers who are innately Indian. I remember discussing this issue with an Executive Producer* of a film production house. She explained that Indian filmmakers recognize this challenge and carefully camouflage foreign cultural influences within an Indian appearance due to the use of the Hindi language and characters that looked and dressed like Indians do. Similarly, Media Anthropologist Christiane Brosius writes: “The question whether Indianness can be preserved only if westernization is cleverly circumvented, is one that mistakenly assumes an either/or situation whereas, as we shall see here, in fact both are at work simultaneously (though not necessarily in harmony).”52 Using Geertzian terminology, one could say that Indianness might appear to be an innate feature or an involuntary twitch, while it is actually an artificial creation or a voluntary wink.53 Indianness could, thus, be the camouflage for a larger cultural movement that involves multiple cultural influences. Being Indian, similarly, could be an outer mask that helps the average consumer lead a more global life. These masks may have been progressively strengthened, moreover, by advertisers attempting to lessen the Indian consumer’s anxiety of losing their cultural essence. So, while being Indian could be the mantra of this generation of Indians, it may well be a path to a new phase of Indianness that is more global rather than Indian. In this book, I hope to demonstrate that we live schizophrenic lives in an era of globalization, constantly battling the urge to be at home yet be citizens of the world.54 The television commercial production process reflects this schizophrenia that also gets transformed into a battle between wanting to be artistic yet working for commercial ends, a battle between promising the consumers a happy and peaceful life yet socializing them to the complexities of consumerism, a battle between wanting to be Indian filmmakers yet speaking a language of cinema that is almost completely global. *Name of interviewee withheld on request.

Going Home  17

Outline of the Book The academic literature on advertising, such as the works of Schudson and Williamson already discussed,55 lacks studies that are specifically focused on the cinematic techniques used to make advertisements. While the work of Visual Communication Scholar Paul Messaris is a notable exception in this regard,56 he represents a body of literature57 that can be classified as textual analysis of visuals used in advertisements rather than research that is backed by data collected through interaction with the directors or producers of advertisements. Experimental work58 in this area might be more empirical, but it also lacks the production perspective that I intend to add through this book. Ethnographic studies of advertising59 reduce this deficiency as they are often based on participant observation at advertising agencies, but these studies largely focus on print advertisements rather than television commercials. Their focus, moreover, is more on the socioeconomic context of advertising production rather than the visual techniques used for production. Indian advertising, of course, has been the focus of studies conducted by Cultural Anthropologist William Mazzarella and Linguist Tej K. Bhatia among others.60 This work has been particularly useful in furthering our understanding of India, since marketing texts have rarely been studied by scholars of South Asia. They add to a growing body of literature on the emerging India,61 in a post-economic liberalization phase of its postcolonial journey. A section of this literature is specifically focused on visual culture, 62 and the work on advertising enriches our understanding of Indian visual culture. Sensing a lack of emphasis on the techniques used for the production of Indian visual culture, however, while thoroughly inspired by scholars such as Christiane Brosius, Shoma Munshi, Tejaswini Ganti, and William Mazzarella, in this book I have chosen to dig deep into the production end of contemporary Indian visual culture.63 Although this is an ethnography of media production, the central narrative of the book is structured around the issue of

18  Understanding India

Indian identity, in its various shades, as it has emerged after the country has experienced economic liberalization. I structure the strategic manoeuvres related to television commercial production, in other words, around these identity-related themes. I, consequently, hope that this book will appeal to readers interested in media production and readers interested in contemporary Indian identity. In the next chapter, I elaborate on the book’s larger context that has already been introduced in this chapter. Specifically, I discuss the socio-economic changes experienced by India after the reduction of the state’s control on the Indian economy, an event that is commonly referred to as Indian economic liberalization. A growing post-liberalization Indian economy required companies to socialize citizens to a new consumerist culture. Advertisements have been important vehicles of consumer socialization, but, as argued, this is a difficult task in a country that had never experienced fullfledged consumerism as an independent nation. A particular campaign for the mutual fund of a government-owned bank is discussed in this context to demonstrate how small town consumers are socialized to the culture of modern financial investing. In the third chapter, continuing the narrative about the same campaign that had been introduced in the previous chapter, the discussion focuses on the visual aspects of this campaign. In particular, the chapter explains how the commercials took on a certain visual appearance and the roles played by the Director and Cinematographer in executing the advertising agency’s vision about the campaign. In the next section of the chapter, a similar explanation is presented about another television commercial that was filmed for a different campaign. For the latter, the planned visual appearance was described as being authentically Indian, as it was modelled on Indian miniature painting, while the former campaign had a more global or universal look. The chapter concludes with a comment that the move to neatly compartmentalize Indianness, through a particular aesthetic style, is perhaps forced and inauthentic because we live in a world of cultural hybridity.

Going Home  19

In the fourth chapter, the focus shifts to cricket-themed commercials and the mythic dimension of cricket in a postcolonial setting. It is argued that cricket provides a means of self-expression to Indians and particularly those who might be suffering from the anxiety of cultural colonization. In this context, the role of cricket in the performance of democratic citizenship is discussed. In India, it is argued, just like cricket has existed in two forms—erstwhile Victorian cricket that was detached from material gains and contemporary commercialized cricket—Indian identity is also a confluence of a nationalism handed down by a postcolonial state that had a nationalized economy and a new Indianness that has emerged after economic liberalization. In the fifth chapter, the representation of women in Indian television commercials and their role within the Indian television commercial production industry are discussed in the context of a growing economy where an increasing number of women are joining the workforce. Initially, as a model of womanhood, the alpha female is discussed with reference to a few television commercials. Next, the prominent role of women as executive producers in film production houses is discussed as a paradigm of contemporary Indian femininity. Finally, the generic female model is discussed with a focus on her change from being a physical object of gaze to a multidimensional personality. The sixth chapter concludes the book, tying together the various comments and inferences made throughout the book. This chapter forwards the argument that television commercials connect consumerism with the nation-state, and, thus, offer the viewer their country in a consumable form as well. This derives from the role played by television commercials, as mediators of consumerism in a post-economic liberalization context, in socializing Indians to a consumption-oriented lifestyle. While the celebration of Indianness is currently a dominant trend within this consumption-oriented lifestyle, the argument continues that Indians are equally exposed to foreign culture through these television commercials, which are driving the country towards a more globally oriented future.

20  Understanding India

Notes and References   1. Interview 15. Name of interviewee withheld on request.   2. In India, like in many other parts of the world, television commercials are typically thirty, forty-five, or sixty seconds long. Television commercials are a filmed version of an advertisement that may also appear in print form and as an audio advertisement for radio. For an overview of the television commercial production process, see Ivan Curry, TV Commercials: How to Make Them or How Big Is the Boat? (Boston: Elsevier, 2005). Also see the chapter on television commercials in Jeremy G. Butler, Television: Critical Methods and Applications (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002).   3. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, “Introduction: Entering the Field of Qualitative Research,” in Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials, eds. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2007), 18.   4. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 6.   5. Ibid., 5.   6. Ibid., 6.   7. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 52.   8. Ibid., 64.   9. Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Nationalism: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 10. Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 11. Lila Abu-Lughod, Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 12. Purnima Mankekar, Screening Culture Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 13. Shoma Munshi, Prime Time Soap Operas on Indian Television (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010). 14. Tejaswini Ganti, Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 15. Brian Moeran, A Japanese Advertising Agency: An Anthropology of Media and Markets (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai Press, 1996). 16. Daniel Miller, Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach (New York, NY: Berg, 1997). 17. Stephen Kemper, Buying and Believing: Sri Lankan Advertising and Consumers in a Transnational World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 18. William Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

Going Home  21 19. For an overview of the field of Media Anthropology, see Mark Allen Peterson, Anthropology and Mass Communication: Media and Myth in the New Millennium (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2003); Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin, Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002); Eric Rothenbuhler and Mihai Coman eds., Media Anthropology (London: SAGE, 2005); Kelly Askew and Richard R. Wilk eds., The Anthropology of Media: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 20. I was thus following a strategy of multi-sited ethnography that was outlined by George Marcus, Ethnography through Thick and Thin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 21. Charles Sanders Peirce, Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotics by Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. James Hoopes (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 22. For more on the role of emotions in advertising, see Stuart J. Agres, Julie A. Edell, and Tony M. Dubitsky eds., Emotion in Advertising (London, Quorum Books, 1990); John O’Shaughnessy and Nicholas J. O’Shaughnessy, The Marketing Power of Emotion (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2003); Richard C. Maddock and Richard L. Fulton, Marketing to the Mind: Right Brain Strategies for Advertising and Marketing (London: Quorum Books, 1996); Ted Brader, Campaigning for Hearts and Minds: How Emotional Appeal in Political Ads Works (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Kevin Roberts, Sisomo, The Future on Screen: Creating Emotional Connections in the Market with Sight, Sound, and Motion (New York, NY: Powerhouse Books, 2006); Kevin Roberts, Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands (New York, NY: Powerhouse Books, 2007). 23. Paul Messaris, Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1997). 24. Herbert Read, “The Origin of Form in Art,” in Module Symmetry Proportion, ed. G. Kepes (New York, NY: George Braziller, 1965). 25. Rajat K. Baisya and G. Ganesh Das, Aesthetics in Marketing (New Delhi: Response, 2008), 43. 26. For a short history of creativity in Indian advertising, see Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke, 106–115. 27. Jean-Noel Kapferer, Strategic Brand Management: Creating and Sustaining Brand Equity Long Term (New Delhi: Kogan Page, 2000), 103. 28. Michael Schudson, Advertising the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1986). 29. Raymond Williams, “Advertising the Magic System,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture, ed. Raymond Williams (London: Verso, 1980), 170–195. 30. Paul Messaris, “Visual Culture,” in Culture in the Communication Age, ed. James Lull (New York, NY: Routledge, 2001); Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

22  Understanding India 31. J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 32. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Cinematic Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1985), 202. 33. Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1949), 49. 34. David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 35. David Bordwell, French Impressionist Cinema: Film Culture, Film Theory, and Film Style (New York, NY: Arno Press, 1980), 145. 36. Desser and Ehrlich, Cinematic Landscapes. 37. Mesaris, Visual Persuasion. 38. Sato Tadao, “Japanese Cinema and the Traditional Arts: Imagery, Technique, and Cultural Context,” in Cinematic Landscapes, eds. David Desser and Linda C. Ehrlich (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994), 165–186. 39. Lalita Gopalan, Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 2002), 19. 40. These are symbolic or mythic representations, like Marilyn Monroe in American Culture. 41. This is a fixed image, which has a narrative structure embedded into it, and the image should ideally control the viewer’s attention, so he or she can read the underlying story. 42. Ravi Vasudevan, “Shifting Codes, Dissolving Identities: The Hindi Social Film of the 1950s as Popular Culture,” Journal of Arts and Ideas 23–24 (1993): 51–79. 43. Tejaswini Ganti, Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004); Kapur, Geeta, When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000). 44. See Peterson, Anthropology and Mass Communication, 186–193. 45. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, “Introduction: Entering the Field of Qualitative Research,” in Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials, eds. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE), 18. 46. Rajagopal, Politics after Nationalism, 11. 47. Interview 10. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Indian television industry’s yearly revenue was $3.4 billion in 2005, and according to Zenith Optimedia, advertising spending on Indian television increased 21 per cent a year between 1995 and 2005 when it was $1.6 billion. This data was reported by Vikas Bajaj, “In India, the Golden Age of Television is Now,” in The New York Times Online, 11 February 2007, accessed 21 June 2013, from http:// www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/business/yourmoney/11india. html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Going Home  23 48. See Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), for an analysis of television’s presence in public spaces. 49. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York, NY: Verso, 1991). 50. Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998). 51. The term is borrowed from Cultural Critic Walter Benjamin, who writes that “we define … aura … as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, that branch.” Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1968), 222–223. 52. Christiane Brosius, India’s Middle Class: New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption and Prosperity (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), 12. 53. Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures. 54. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone, 1984). 55. Among authors not mentioned is Communication Scholar Sut Jhally who uses psychoanalysis and political economic theory to analyse advertising. See, for example, Sut Jhally, The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society (New York, NY: Routledge, 1987). 56. Messaris, Visual Persuasion. Messaris also discusses visual grammar in another book, Visual Literacy: Image, Mind, and Reality (San Fransisco, CA: Westview Press, 1994). The latter belongs to a larger tradition of visual literacy and interpretation related writing that has been pioneered by scholars such as Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: The Folio Society, 2000/1950) and Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976). 57. A representative example is Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1988). This genre of writing should ideally be read in combination with more formative work on visual culture per se—see for example, Richard Howells and Joaquim Negreiros, Visual Culture (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012); Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall eds., Visual Culture: The Reader (London: SAGE, 1999); Maria Sturken and Lisa Cartwright eds., Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York, NY: SAGE, 1999). 58. For an overview, see Linda M. Scott and Rajeev Batra eds., Persuasive Imagery: A Consumer Response Perspective (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence

24  Understanding India Erlbaum, 2003). A particularly relevant example is Joan Meyers-Levy and Laura A. Peracchio, “Getting an Angle in Advertising: The Effect of Camera Angle on Product Evaluations,” Journal of Marketing Research 29 (1992): 454–461. 59. For example, Miller, Capitalism; Moeran, A Japanese Advertising Agency; Kemper, Buying and Believing. 60. Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke; Tej K. Bhatia, Advertising in Rural India: Language, Marketing Communication and Consumerism (Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2000). 61. For example, Brosius, India’s Middle Class; Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray eds., Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011). 62. For example, Munshi, Prime Time Soap Operas; Christiane Brosius, Empowering Visions: The Politics of Representation in Hindu Nationalism (London: Anthem Press, 2005); Patricia Uberoi, Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family, and Popular Culture in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009). For similar work on the Middle East, see Christiane Gruber and Sune Haugbolle eds., Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East: Rhetoric of the Image (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013). 63. Apart from ethnographies of advertising, I have learnt a great deal from a tradition of anthropological research on media industries. This line of work is widely believed to have started by Cultural Anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker who worked in Hollywood–see Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood: The Dream Factory (Boston, MA: Little Brown and Company, 1972). Recently Media Anthropologist Tejaswini Ganti has published a book, on the Mumbai based Hindi film industry, which is perhaps the latest entrant in this tradition of research–see Tejaswini Ganti, Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). Other notable books in this tradition include Media Scholar John T. Caldwell’s study on the Los Angeles based film and video production workers—see John T. Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

2 India Changing

“In our days there was no course in advertising, no one respected you unless you were a doctor or an engineer, now things have changed, there are many courses in advertising, parents have become supportive, the media industry is booming …” Creative Director1

Introduction Like the theatre troupe’s dress rehearsal and the student’s mock examination, my New Delhi fieldwork was almost like a practice for the fieldwork that was to follow in Mumbai. As Indian readers and those familiar with the Indian film industry will recognize, this is because the television commercial production industry is much larger in Mumbai, which is the filmmaking capital of the country.2 Although I was aware of this fact, I had chosen to spend time in New Delhi to make sure that I was not missing out on any North Indian idiosyncrasies of the Indian television commercial production industry. I had judged that there was a possibility of New Delhi being a centre for, specifically, North Indian television commercial production. My judgement was wrong, as I realized very soon after beginning work in New Delhi. A number of New Delhi based interviewees warned me that I could be wasting valuable time by not getting to Mumbai, where the majority of Indian television commercials were produced. Mumbai, I was explained, was

26  Understanding India

where the production units were so efficient that they could even put up an entire tree on the set within a few hours if the director wanted one. There was a touch of frustration, moreover, when these New Delhi based professionals made such comments because they were unhappy that New Delhi was not as efficient. Yet, many of these professionals had consciously chosen to stay back in New Delhi even though numerous colleagues had moved to Mumbai, as advertising professionals or television commercial directors or producers. So, there was a genuine bond with the city—“their city”—and hidden within their suggestion (about me moving to Mumbai soon) was that touch of frustration because their pride had been hurt by the fact that New Delhi had failed to become one of the main filmmaking centres of the country. My days in New Delhi, although brimming with anticipation and curiosity regarding whom I would meet and what I would find out, ended up being longer than I had expected because there was not enough happening in terms of television commercial production. Soon I could sense that the frustration, which I had noticed among the interviewees I met, was creeping into me as well and for some of the very same reasons. Like them, I could hear a part of me complaining about why more filmmaking was not happening in New Delhi, as that might have increased the number of television commercials being produced in this city. The frustration also stemmed from the realization that I was not finding what I had set out to find, so my work had become more difficult without a set of North Indian cultural influences that I, unfortunately, did not observe in the television commercials being produced in New Delhi. It suddenly felt like being an ethnographer without an anchor, standing in a puddle of data but directionless and unsure about where the study was heading.3 My patience was, thus, tested quite early on in the study. Some hot afternoons were spent transcribing the first few interviews or writing field notes, while others were spent in one of the many cafés, which have sprung up across urban India, whenever I was not engaged in fieldwork. I now realize that the transcription, field note writing, and coffee drinking

India Changing  27

were useful endeavours, as they helped me assimilate into the Indian setting and understand the larger context of every marketing strategy or filmmaking technique that I observed over the course of the fieldwork. In this chapter, I elaborate on this context that has already been introduced in the previous chapter. Specifically, I discuss the socio-economic changes experienced by India after the reduction of the State’s control on the Indian economy, an event that is commonly referred to as Indian economic liberalization. A growing post-liberalization Indian economy required companies to socialize citizens to a new consumerist culture. Advertisements have been important vehicles of consumer socialization, but, as argued, this is a difficult task in a country that had never experienced fullfledged consumerism as an independent nation. A particular campaign for the mutual fund of a government-owned bank is discussed in this context to demonstrate how small town consumers are socialized to the culture of modern financial investing. The ethnographic narrative draws the campaign planning trajectory, as it unfolds in the meeting room of a film production house and on the road when the film crew were out to observe possible filming locations.

Liberalization and the Public Sphere The months in New Delhi opened up the Indian public sphere in front of my eyes and I tried to decipher it as I sipped my coffee, sat in an autorickshaw,4 or jogged on the roads around where I was living. Certain elements of the public sphere, such as the foreign brands5 being visibly used by Indians, were expected and an obvious outcome of the liberalization of the Indian economy. What was less expected, and more pleasant to my eyes, was the growing richness of the Indian public sphere in terms of the variety of activities and opinions, attires and styles, ideologies, and culinary choices that could be seen in any of the many markets of New Delhi.

28  Understanding India

Along with these attires, the overall glamour quotient that characterized the Indian people and their public spheres was also noticeably higher than ten years ago. This was quite like the glamour of advertising, which is created through focused attention on bringing alive every pixel of advertising space, as a group of television commercial directors and producers* explained to me. We were casually chatting in a rooftop room, also known as a barsaati in New Delhi, which they used as their office. I was trying to understand the difference between low-budget commercials made by amateur filmmakers and those made by the professionals who light up our television screens every evening. They used the example of a washing machine commercial,† which they had shot recently to explain why the big-budget television commercials look so attractive and sleek. For this commercial, they spent seven hours on only the product shot at the end because every square inch of the washing machine’s exposed surface had to be lit up carefully, making sure that the light on one portion did not leak into the next and there was a pleasant mixture of tonalities in the way the entire surface had been lit up. The amateur filmmaker, in contrast, as they explained, would simply focus a few bulbs on the objects to be filmed and start filming.6 Maybe the desire to emulate these carefully produced visuals was the reason that the Indian public sphere appeared more colourful, eclectic, and exuberant than what I remembered it as being like, based on my memories of the nineteen eighties. Maybe behind those made up faces were dreams that those same commercials had planted in the many minds that walked out every day to show the world that even they know how to look good and get noticed. Maybe the Indian government, too, had realized that the twentieth century would have to be a combination of Nehruvian development and showbiz glitz, so those lit up roads and shopping malls were, now, a part of their agenda as well. As Media Anthropologist Christiane Brosius writes: *Names withheld on request. † Name of brand withheld on request.

India Changing  29

In some ways, Benjamin’s observations, made more than 70 years ago, about the European metropolis Paris in the nineteenth century, parallel what India’s megacities witness today in terms of new emerging economic classes, new spaces and activities linked to the Erlebnis, the experience of modernity, of which the key experience is the consumption of fetishes, and the cultured, hedonistic flaneur—the protagonist of emerging modernity and urbanity, taste and distinction.7

The liberalization of the Indian economy 8 in the early nineteen nineties, among other effects, has also increased the size of the private sector.9 Earlier, the Indian private sector was smaller, so lesser number of products and services were being sold, fewer jobs were being offered, and the Indian consumer base was smaller as well.10 A larger private sector not only increases the number of products and services being sold and the number of jobs being offered, but it also sells to more consumers and simultaneously needs to increase the consumer base being sold to. This, latter, need is particularly relevant to the domain of advertising because of the role played by advertising in the socialization of consumers to draw them into the realm of consumerism. Such socialization includes the roles of highlighting consumption needs, associating rituals with consumption, introducing markers of distinction attached to the consumption of certain products, and breaking down existing barriers to consumption.11

Consumer Socialization Prior to India, advertising has played a similar role in other countries. In the U.S., for example, advertisements produced in the early twentieth century played a role in constructing a notion of citizenship that furthered the interests of mass industry: By defining himself and his desires in terms of the good of capitalist production, the worker would implicitly accept the foundations of modern industrial life. By transforming the

30  Understanding India notion of “class” into “mass,” business hoped to create an “individual” who could locate his needs and frustrations in terms of the consumption of goods rather than the quality and content of his life (work).12

The American advertisements of this era, moreover, created a particular sort of middle class lifestyle, which was biased by the characteristics—such as belonging to the Anglo-Saxon race—of the creators of these ads.13 In Zimbabwe, similarly, hegemonic discourses about bodily hygiene, manners, and visual appearances, which were created during colonialism, were then reasserted through the advertisements produced in the nineteen fifties and sixties. For example, the advertisement for a brand of soap “established associations between African masculinity and dirt, between labour and pollution, between professional success within the colonial system and rigorous hygienic purification.”14 In addition, post-war consumerism sought to engage the local population in buying habits that would make them lead a European way of life.15 In the case of India, the task of socialization to consumerism is made difficult by the fact that Indian identity, postindependence from British rule, has been closely linked to practices that are anti-consumerist.16 Among other possible reasons, this can be attributed to the ideologies of both Mahatma Gandhi 17 and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru 18 who played key roles in the shaping of Indian socio-economic policies after independence. Readers are possibly aware that the Mahatma had led an ascetic life for many years prior to Indian independence in 1947, and he had spoken against the lures of materialism. Pandit Nehru was a firm believer in the benefits of planned development that is closely monitored by the government whose regulations guide the functioning of the marketplace and unbridled capitalism is discouraged. Being the architects of Indian freedom, their visions of India had been, for many of us growing up in pre-liberalization India, sacred words that were meant to save the Indian poor from the corrupt influences of capitalism, believed to be driven by more powerful foreign nations. There was an effort, in other words, both consciously and unconsciously, to guard India or

India Changing  31

keep it protected. My childhood memories of New Delhi, for example, are strongly intertwined with this vision of a clean, pure, and protected India where the government rather than private corporations were the supreme authority. This was a phase prior to the emergence of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), moreover, so New Delhi seemed to be perpetually under the control of the Congress Party. Such a strong association with the Congress Party, which was Gandhi and Nehru’s, and his daughter Indira Gandhi’s party, heightened the link that the feeling of visiting New Delhi had with the experience of postcolonial independence, as defined by these Congress Party leaders. Many Indians argue that there was more than a dose of hypocrisy in this feeling of purity, however, because conspicuous consumption and greed existed, but it tended to stay under the covers, so to speak, due to the taboo against capitalism.19 Remembering that era, Columnist Mukul Kesavan writes: But because my childhood happened in an autarkic India, committed to the twin gods of self-sufficiency and high tariff barriers, it was the things that we didn’t have that I remember better than the ones that we did. Orange bars, HMV records, Godrej refrigerators, bond paper, Cadbury Fruit & Nut, Naga shawls, Phantom peppermint cigarettes, and ugly walnut tables from Kashmir were nice but they were available (if your parents had the money to spare) and therefore not nearly as desirable as the things you couldn’t have except from that supermarket in the sky called Foreign.20

Indian economic liberalization, in nineteen ninety one, coupled with the rise of the BJP21 as a formidable political force and the vision of technocratic nationalism22 introduced earlier by former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi,23 created a significant change in Indian socio-economic policy. The most important change was the renewed stance regarding India’s economic relationship with the rest of the world. Foreign companies started doing business in India and gradually Indian companies started going abroad as well instead of being an economy that was protected by government regulations, such as steep

32  Understanding India

import duties. Indians were now dreaming of creating an economy that would be open to foreign investments, but still be one of the most powerful economies in the world.24 Another significant change, maybe less in terms of policy implementation and more in terms of overall attitudes to Indianness, was a sudden urge to revisit India’s Hindu past. As is now widely recognized, this was largely influenced by BJP’s model of cultural nationalism that propagates a specifically Hindu version of Indian identity.25 Simultaneously, the rising economic strength of India heightened the confidence of being Indian without worrying about appropriateness: Indianization is a reflection of your comforts with your own needs, and your own desires, and who you are, and if I eat this in front of this that is fine, you know; the assertiveness and the self-confidence, which increasingly you will find in consumers, you will find in the political system.26

India today is, thus, a wealthier nation, a more Hindu nation,27 and a nation that is more confident and proud of its past and present than it was in the nineteen eighties, when I was a student in school. India, however, is also more open to foreign influences that flow in through foreign television stations, for example, which were not allowed in preliberalization India.28 In those days, the government operated television station, Doordarshan, was all that we could watch in Kolkata, unless we managed to receive some signals from neighbouring Bangladesh where the government allowed foreign programming, so some of us watched television serials that had been produced in the U.S. I would argue, moreover, that in India’s case economic liberalization has been successful because it occurred alongside resurgence in Indian, and more Hindu, identity. In other words, since economic liberalization has also increased global influences within Indian society, the enhancement of local identity was important to create a balance and reduce the anxiety of cultural colonization. Advertisements have contributed to the strengthening of Indianness, through their task of socializing Indians to consumerism, because

India Changing  33

post-liberalization India has witnessed a rise in Hindi language advertisements and an increase in the use of local idioms within Indian advertisements.29 These changes have also been accompanied by the trend of being more experimental and spontaneous while filming television commercials, instead of using an established filmmaking style handed down from Europe or the U.S., as many television commercial directors explained to me. During these conversations, furthermore, I realized that these individuals were not simply following the dictates of a client while creating a television commercial. Rather, this was a dialectal process where the viewpoints of numerous parties were shared, tossed and turned, blended, filtered, and finally poured out as the commercial that someone would be seeing on their television screen.30 The larger goal of socialization to consumerism, moreover, could have been an underlying driving force for a campaign, like it was for the campaign to be discussed in this chapter, but that does not necessarily lead to a direct association of the product or service with Indian culture.

SBI Mutual Fund: Creating the Small Town Investor This campaign can be seen as a good example of “the imagery of liberalization”31 that has been a dominant feature of postliberalization Indian visual culture. This imagery is both explicitly and implicitly involved in socializing consumers, through techniques such as the association of existing rituals with consumerism and the creation of new consumption rituals, establishment of markers of distinction that are attached to the consumption of certain products and services, weaving of Indian identity with the act of consumption, and the easing of apprehensions regarding consumption. This imagery is also geared towards marketing India as a globally renowned destination, a country with a long history, and a community of citizens who are simultaneously global and Indian.32 This is a

34  Understanding India

visual announcement, in other words, of the arrival of Indians on the global landscape. I got involved in this campaign shortly after arriving in Mumbai. The Mumbai monsoons were still pelting the city, and I got my first taste of a packed Mumbai suburban train ride from Kandivali to Mahalaxmi station. Perspiring and with muddy shoes, I walked into a meeting where the Creative Director33 from the advertising agency was to discuss this campaign, for State Bank of India Mutual Fund or SBI Mutual Fund, with the Director of the four television commercials that had been planned for this campaign. While I was trying hard to make the transition from being a student to someone who appeared to be a young corporate executive, and could easily blend into a meeting or walk into an office, the others were visibly more relaxed and even cracked jokes that may not have been acceptable in a more formal setting. Their conversational tone was in tune with the overall campaign because the underlying goal of the campaign was to make the image of the bank more youthful and publicize SBI Mutual Fund. The bank considered airing these commercials, since many Indians were relying on various forms of nonregulated saving schemes—such as chit funds—instead of using an instrument that was offered by an established financial institution. One of the reasons for the reluctance to use a bank’s savings scheme was a perceived distance from the bank as an entity. For those living in small towns, this perception might have stemmed from the notion that the banks based in big cities are far away. If the bank, thus, elopes with a small town investor’s money there is no way one can pursue it. The neighbourhood chit fund manager, in comparison, could always be questioned if the money was missing. The SBI Mutual Fund television commercials were planned with an overall goal of removing “the fear of mutual funds from the small town Indian guy.”34 However, the immediate message was more specific. In fact, four separate attributes of the bank’s mutual fund were conveyed through four different commercials. These were identified as stimuli “to get the

India Changing  35

target audience to change their mind.”35 The first was the transparency of the mutual fund. The second was that the mutual fund allowed customers to save taxes. The third was that the bank had experts who would help a customer invest in the mutual fund. The fourth was that a customer needed to be able to spare only 500 rupees in order to start a mutual fund. During a later conversation, the Creative Director Bhaskar Mani‡ mentioned that the primary challenge was to be able to communicate this information to potential investors who could not be expected to possess any knowledge of the financial world. There was an assumption, moreover, that those not investing with this bank were perhaps also put off by its pre-liberalization image of being a public sector enterprise. The agency, J. Walter Thompson (JWT), thus, decided to use humour as a tool to convey the information about the four features of the bank’s mutual fund. In other words, the humour was meant to smoothen out the bank’s image, and make potential investors less fearful of investing with the bank: “hey we are young again, we are cool again, we are approachable again, we are not that cob web ridden place, your grandfather’s bank.”36 In addition, financial jargon was omitted from the script because the target audience members were not regular investors. The meeting, which I attended on that rainy morning in Mumbai, was a pre-production meeting for the third commercial of this campaign.37 Such pre-production meetings are, typically, located in the first half of the trajectory that an advertising idea passes through, between the time that the idea is born on the advertising agency desk, so to speak, and when it emerges as that thirty or forty five second television commercial. During this trajectory, which was outlined in the previous chapter, the client (SBI Mutual Fund, for example), the advertising agency, and the film production house are the three key entities that shape this idea.38

‡ Bhaskar Mani was Senior Vice President and Creative Director at J. Walter Thompson, Mumbai, when this campaign was planned and executed.

36  Understanding India

The agenda for this meeting was to finalize the plan for filming the third commercial of the campaign. The Assistant Director, Frank Jacob,§ and Executive Producer, Manoj Shroff, sat in the meeting, as they would be crucial players in executing the instructions of the Director, Ram Madhvani.39 In India, an Assistant Director for a television commercial is usually both an apprentice and an administrator, using both sides of his or her brain simultaneously, and he or she learns the art of film direction while undertaking a range of comparatively mundane tasks such as scouting for possible locations and collating clips of films and commercials that the Director can use as reference. The Assistant Director is also supervised by the Executive Producer, apart from the Director, since the Executive Producer is usually the administrative head of the film production house.40 The meeting was not particularly intense because the agency had a lot of faith in the Director who had successfully completed the two earlier commercials of the campaign. It was, thus, largely a process of figuratively ticking off on the blueprint of how the film production house was going to execute the scripts of the third and fourth commercial. This blueprint, moreover, had yet to be fleshed out completely although, in an ideal world, the plan should have been sealed and stamped at this meeting. For me, a meeting of low intensity was partly fortunate because it gave me a chance to speak to Bhaskar Mani. Since the planning work was still in progress, moreover, it gave me an opportunity, over the next few weeks, to understand how the campaign evolved over the various stages of the production process. The weeks in New Delhi had sharpened my understanding of the vocabulary of the advertising and film production industries and more importantly, given the goals of my work, it had alerted me to certain visual techniques used to sharpen the communicative potential of a television commercial. I had been socialized to the habitus, as the Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would have remarked.41 The use of a Matrix (1999)—directed Real name withheld on request.

§

India Changing  37

by Andy and Larry Wachowski—style background, for example, in a commercial for a career counselling service,|| was geared towards attracting youth who would be able to identify with the aesthetic style of the movie. While I felt armed with this knowledge, it had also heightened my expectations when I began work in Mumbai. The SBI Mutual Fund campaign, however, had no creative frills or visual techniques that impressed me immediately. When I looked at the campaign scripts for the first time, they looked like short plays that could have been written for a school competition. As the student who had a group of professors to answer to, back in the U.S., the last thing I wanted was to be inundated with straightforward advertising like the detergent commercial that was being filmed at a Noida studio near New Delhi. This was a commercial where a dress was being dipped into two buckets of soapy water; one bucket was meant to contain the brand of detergent# being advertised, while the other contained detergent made by an unnamed competing brand. The final commercial was, thus, a short fifteen second clip, which used the indexicality of the image to establish that the dress is whiter when washed with the brand of detergent being advertised. I wanted exciting camera movement, instead, along with complicated lighting and suave editing that would impress the readers of my dissertation.

SBI Mutual Fund: On the Road It got more interesting, soon enough, as we embarked on a recce—or reconnaissance trip—to check out locations where the third and fourth commercials of the SBI Mutual Fund campaign could possibly be filmed. The same city that can make you curse and cry when you are cramped into a local train compartment seems glamorous and interesting when you are sitting in a spacious sports utility vehicle (SUV) with one Name of brand withheld on request. Name of brand withheld on request.

||

#

38  Understanding India

of the more famous television commercial directors of India and his crew. It is that moment when you feel like you have finally found what you flew all the way for, till you also realize that the work has just begun. On the way we picked up the Cinematographer, Rafey Mahmood, who had been working on this campaign. He was an elderly man who specializes in filming television commercials and who mentioned, during a later conversation, that he had learnt a lot from Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 by Gilles Deleuze, the French Philosopher who had also written these two books on cinema. Rafey was being taken along so that he could comment on the suitability of a location, given the planned camera movements and visual appearance of the commercial. In addition, this was an opportunity for him to discuss cinematographic details of the television commercial with Ram. This was, thus, a multitasking exercise and another task, which was part of this list, was reviewing a tape that had screen tests of a set of candidates who wanted to play the role of one of the main characters in the third commercial. They played the tape on a video recorder that had been sent by the casting agency who conducted the screen tests. A cab followed us all through this road trip because it had brought the tape and video recorder and would be taking them back. I sat on the front seat next to the driver as Ram and Manoj, the Director and Producer, reviewed the tapes sitting on the two seats behind us. Overhearing their comments that day and observing other casting sessions later in the fieldwork process, I realized that the casting exercise is perhaps one of the most underrated aspects of the television commercial production process. It is much simpler when production houses have a small pool of actors from whom they recruit, instead of conducting an elaborate casting exercise, and this was more likely in smaller centres such as Chennai and Kolkata than in Mumbai. The difficulty of casting derives from the lack of time and defined parameters that can be used to choose or reject a candidate. If athleticism is a desired feature in a character, for example, and there are eight well-built men who are short listed on the basis

India Changing  39

of their physique, from a larger list of fifty men who took the screen test, then how does the director narrow it down further and ultimately choose one of these eight men? As Ram quickly looked through the tape that day, he spent less than thirty seconds on evaluating each individual. He added a descriptor to many of these individuals, such as “wannabe” and “Delhi type,” and this suggested that he was reading them as signifiers within Indian or even global visual culture. Although he was not explaining how we was analysing descriptors to make his judgement, I understood that he had a deep understanding of Indian visual culture to be able to quickly place a face or a mannerism within this visual field,42 and judge where it stood on a particular qualitative axis.43 This particular character, in the third commercial, was supposed to look like a typical young Indian male who is a regular biker, and in the commercial he appears in biking uniform on the way back from a ride on his bike. So, the Director was searching for someone who projected the appearance and personality of a young Indian urban biker and actual biking experience was not a criterion being used for selection. Strength and athleticism were, ostensibly, two traits that would be useful for such a projection, but Ram was also looking at the overall appearance and speaking style while making his judgement. It was evident that by this stage of the production process, the Director’s personal interpretation of the script played a key role in how the visual language of the television commercial would turn out. The Creative Director, Bhaskar Mani, in fact, was busy and did not even participate in the casting and location inspection exercise. Once at the locations, which were being assessed as possible sites for shooting a commercial, the focus was on the spatial and visual characteristics. Whether the space allowed them to stage the commercial, that is, and if the visual characteristics of the location were appropriate. The third commercial where a car breaks down, for example, was shot in the driveway of a tall residential building located in one of the wealthiest suburbs of Mumbai. Among other reasons, this site was chosen because of the visual characteristics of the location that matched the

40  Understanding India

sort of imagery, which they wanted to associate with the bank. Due to the quality of the construction, at least in the Indian context, even the driveway had an “upper class look,” so to speak. It, thus, provided the appropriate visual context, and the class connotations of the location got associated with the characters as well as the bank. The location for the fourth commercial, featuring a wedding procession, was a site within the Goregaon Film City, and it was chosen instead of other alternatives because it was considered most appropriate for the mis-en-scene that the Director had planned. Another location, which was considered almost as appropriate, was discarded because of administrative problems regarding renting the place. The Goregaon Film City location was an open space in front of an old house. There was also a divider, filled with grass, which ran through the open space. This space, incidentally, was adjoining the studios where the Hindi version of the American television programme, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, was filmed every week. This open space was considered appropriate for filming a wedding procession due to a number of reasons. First, the divider could be decorated to make the road look like a regular road in an Indian city. Second, the old building, which served as a backdrop for the shots used in the commercial, could be lit up with lights, and it is a common practice during Indian weddings to decorate houses with lights. Third, there was enough space for the wedding procession to pass through one side of the divider. While at these locations, sketchy versions of some of the planned shots were taken using a video camera. The appropriateness of the shots was tested, in the process, because they got a sense of how the final shot would look like at a particular location. The Director, Ram Madhvani, spent a lot of time, in addition, discussing possible camera angles and positions, for the various shots, with the cinematographer. Occasionally, Ram spoke aloud about how he was envisioning a particular shot. Of the four commercials, the fourth one was the most Indian in sensibility because the wedding procession was made to look

India Changing  41

thoroughly Indian, and the cinematic style of this commercial has certain similarities to Indian commercial cinema. This includes the use of a long shot, which is rarer in television commercials, as well as the lavishness of the art decoration and the loudness of the music, which are reminiscent of Indian commercial cinema. In comparison, the other three commercials are less Indian in appearance as they portray a modern and urban look that would be difficult to associate with any specific country or culture.

The Four Scripts The first script, which conveyed the transparency of the mutual fund, was about a man passing through the security check point of an airport. The thought started, the Creative Director explained, as that of a man stripping and the idea of the security check point came later, as the location where this could be occurring. Instead of the security personnel taking the initiative to check the man’s body, that is, for hidden items, he scripted the man to be voluntarily opening his clothes so the security personnel could easily check whether he had hidden anything. The idea, as may be obvious, was to represent the mutual fund through the passenger who is willing to reveal all and keep nothing hidden. The second script, which conveyed the tax savings benefit of the fund, presented different situations where people are buying food. Here the customers are meant to represent the potential investors in the bank’s mutual fund. The humour, moreover, derives from the fact that those who are selling the food are also taking a bite from it, while the buyers, instead of complaining, are happily thanking them for it. The Creative Director explained that the script evolved from the commonly used phrase, “taxes are taking a bite off my money,” and while he had an apple cart in mind during the initial phase of ideation, he had to convert it to more upscale settings that fitted into post-liberalization urban India. Here the act of buying food and thanking someone for taking a bite off it, thus, represents

42  Understanding India

the common tax payer’s practice of giving away part of what they earn. Such an interpretation, of this annual ritual, is meant to make the common taxpaying Indian realize how they can save some money by investing in this mutual fund. The third script, which conveyed the expertise of the mutual fund managers at this bank, was about a woman’s car breaking down. Three men passing by, one after the other, try to help her hoping that they will be able to impress her with their expertise. The outcome, unfortunately, is quite the opposite. None of the men are able to fix the car, and they also dirty the woman’s face with engine fluids that spray out of the car’s engine while they try to fix it. The commercial is trying to tell potential investors that the mutual fund experts at this bank would not let the same mishap happen to their investments. The fourth script, which conveyed the fact that only 500 rupees are required to start an investment at this bank, was about a wedding procession. It is a common practice, particularly in many North Indian communities, to garland the groom with money while he rides on a horse to the bride’s house to get married. Often there is an entire brass band that accompanies the groom’s horse, and members of his family, dancing to the music, are part of this procession as well. This is quite the scene that was scripted for this television commercial. A young man passing by, on his motorbike, notices the procession, and he makes his way into the dancing crowd before proceeding to steal money from the groom’s garland. He takes 600 rupees from the garland, counts the money, and gives 100 back to the groom, since he needs only 500 to start a mutual fund at this bank. They had to include the act of returning the money because the thief had to be a “good thief” in order to be socially acceptable.

Consumer Socialization Revisited The Creative Director and his team came up with these four scripts after discarding numerous others, as is often the case in the advertising industry. I remember talking to a New

India Changing  43

Delhi based copywriter, Shubho Sarkar, after he had finished a round of writing, and he had just come back to office after recovering from a couple of sleepless nights. He interrupted our conversation to ask a colleague in the corridor, “so liya?” which means “did you sleep?” in Hindi. For the SBI Mutual Fund campaign, the Creative Director narrated a similar story and thanked his team for the support they provided through the ideation process. The client, as mentioned earlier, was primarily trying to make the young, small town current and potential investors invest in SBI’s mutual fund. The advertising agency had adopted a commonly used strategy of depicting everyday situations in a humorous manner and communicating the message through this humour. The humour, it was hoped, would reduce the small town customer’s apprehension about investing in this mutual fund. Research had shown that this apprehension was making them choose chit funds, for example, because the fund manager lived in the same town and they could easily contact them. The urban bank, in contrast, was a faceless entity and they would not know who to contact if the bank were to run away with their money. Clotaire Rapaille, Cultural Anthropologist and Marketing Expert, defines a cultural code as “the unconscious meaning we apply to any given thing—a car, a relationship, even a country via the culture in which we are raised.”44 I had suggested earlier that consumer socialization in a country like India, which was colonized for nearly two centuries after the Industrial Revolution started, and where consumerism was somewhat dormant for the first forty years of its independent life, requires the alteration of certain fundamental cultural codes associated with money, consumption, and capitalism. Examples from other cultures, such as that of Papua New Guinea and Colombia, where cultural beliefs can be starkly different from that of our own, demonstrate the challenge of the task of altering cultural codes and make us “sensitive to the superstitions and ideological character of our culture’s central myths and categories, categories that grant meaning as much to our intellectual products as to our daily life.”45

44  Understanding India

In Papua New Guinea, during the introduction of money into the economy, extensive education had to be imparted to communicate issues, such as the process of minting coins and printing paper notes, “to dispel the dangerous idea that things, including money, were not produced, but rather somehow delivered readymade—say, by benevolent ancestors or by potent magic.”46 Similarly, the convenience of using money and the benefits of saving money were communicated through pamphlets and short films. The overall goal was to create modern identity surrounding money, an identity that gave importance to both individual wealth creation as well as belonging to a community.47 The Papua New Guinean example suggests that the moneybased economy and the social structures surrounding it are taken for granted by those who have never lived elsewhere, yet they are considered unnatural by the first generation of citizens who witness the introduction of money into a society. Writing about the landless wage labourers, similarly, who have been stripped of their status as peasant cultivators, in rural Colombia, the Cultural Anthropologist Michael Taussig suggests that their attitudes towards the wage economy is shaped by a conflict between being habituated to a “use value” mode of thinking but being forced to assimilate into an way of life that is dictated by “exchange value.” The peasant mode of production differs from the capitalist mode in fundamental ways. Under capitalism, the proletariat work force lacks the control over the means of production that peasants exercise. The peasant uses cash, not capital, and sells in order to buy, whereas the capitalist uses cash as capital to buy in order to sell at a profit, thus adding to capital and repeating the circuit in an ever-increasing scale lest the enterprise die.48 These examples from Papua New Guinea and Colombia are unusual because the context is one of a complete change from one economic mode to another. Many readers might argue that the Indian situation is comparable because economic liberalization changed the fundamental structure of the economy. I would assert, however, that the Indian situation

India Changing  45

is different because money exchange and capitalism has existed since the colonial era. The SBI Mutual Fund example suggests, nevertheless, that Indians have a proclivity for depending on personal relationships, rather than impersonal social institutions, for monetary dealings or to conduct business. Sociologist Anthony Giddens would describe this as a lack of modernity because he propagated the theory that modernization leads to the birth of “abstract systems which both empty day-to-day life of its traditional content and set up globalizing influences.”49 It is this perceived emptiness of abstract systems that is often the reason, as I understood, behind institutions such as modern banking having trouble establishing themselves in traditional societies. To counter this hurdle, like in case of the SBI Mutual Fund campaign, over the last five years I have observed numerous campaigns for personal banking, insurance, and investment products routinely using the technique of making the abstract system look personal in order to lower or eliminate the apprehension of consumers looking to purchase these products and services. Indian television commercials for personal banking, thus, often depict the banker as a friendly adviser—similar to a neighbour, for example, one would meet at the local market rather than a stiff and formal professional—who is always available to help the customer. Indian commercials for insurance products often depict traditional family relationships, so insurance purchase is seen as a step towards taking care of one’s family and preserving the cherished traditional Indian family. Indian television commercials for investment products use these kinds of techniques as well but they tend to contain more technical information, since investors need this technical information to make a purchase decision. The SBI Mutual Fund campaign was similar, but, as mentioned earlier, the financial jargon had to be minimized because the target audience was the average small town non-investor. It is also important to realize that there were two related tasks that this campaign was attempting. The first task was to change the image of the bank and make it appear more friendly and youthful.

46  Understanding India

The second task was to ease apprehensions about investing in a bank’s mutual fund. These tasks, in combination, were expected to change the cultural code that these small town investors associated with mutual fund investments that banks were offering. The move to personalize a bank’s image and its mutual fund by using humour and narratives set in everyday Indian situations might seem commonplace now due to the sheer volume of advertising of this kind that is produced in contemporary India. At the time, however, a governmentowned bank was quite reluctant to tread this path in its attempt to reach out to the small town investor. The advertising agency, moreover, did not have a finished television commercial that they could use to convince the bank to use the marketing strategy being recommended by the agency. Although a round of persuasion got the advertising agency a go ahead signal from the bank, they nevertheless proceeded with an apprehension that the television commercials might be rejected after they had been produced.50 The agency’s next task was to choose everyday situations that could be used to communicate the four key features about the bank’s mutual fund. The four scripts, presented earlier, should have made clear what the chosen everyday situations were. The humour in these situations, as the scripts may have also revealed, was expressed through an act of transgression that the script added to each situation. The campaign starts with a film where the transgression, of someone stripping at an airport security checkpoint, is being committed by the bank. In the second film, the transgression of taking a bite of the customer’s food is being committed by the Income Tax Department. In the third film, the transgression of walking up to a lady’s stranded car and then showering engine fluid over her is being committed by ordinary citizens who lack expertise. In the fourth film, the transgression of stealing money from the groom is being committed by someone who is about to start a SBI Mutual Fund. Ritualistic transgression has traditionally been useful for the subversion of the dominant social order or social boundaries,

India Changing  47

and, thus, many assert that it has had a dual function of reducing repressed needs and ultimately maintaining order by demonstrating the reality of a disorderly situation. The carnival, famously, is the occasion for ritualistic transgression in many cultures across the world.51 Even without an event or an occasion, however, transgression plays a symbolic role when represented within cultural texts such as a television commercial. Since the carnival is an occasion for consumption, symbolic transgression is likely to be useful—given the appropriate context—for inducing consumption of a product or service being advertised. For the SBI Mutual Fund campaign, it was important to remove the psychological boundary that lay between the small town investor and an established government-owned bank. Taken literally the depiction of transgression may have been inconsistent, but at a symbolic level the transgression seems to have been effective in removing or lessening that psychological boundary. As the Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud might have remarked, the humour loosened the stiffness regarding investing in a mutual fund and made it easier to perceive the bank as an entity with which one can develop a close or intimate relationship.52 During the initial screening of the first two television commercials, at the client’s office, the Managing Director of SBI Mutual Fund and the Creative Director, Bhaskar Mani, were both equally nervous. The former was nervous because he was supposedly worried about losing his job if the campaign was seen as being too frivolous and sarcastic, as some colleagues from the marketing department had suggested after seeing the commercials for the first time. The latter, more obviously, was nervous because the campaign was his creative offspring, his attempt to revive a bank’s image, and a product whose success he had predicted even though the Managing Director had reservations regarding the use of humour. A few months later, sitting in his South Mumbai office, Bhaskar was still basking in glory even though visibly fatigued on a Friday afternoon as he mentioned that the bank employees loved the film. More interestingly, the employees had

48  Understanding India

mentioned that these films depicted the internal culture of the bank, although from the outside this government-owned bank seemed like a stiff and old patriarchal entity. While I am in no position to verify the truth of that statement as my work did not deal with the internal culture of Indian government-owned banks or institutions, it does suggest to me that the humour of the commercials was being appreciated instinctively, since the viewers could identify with the transgression that was being depicted on the screen.

Conclusion In a changing India, changing consumption habits might change certain cultural codes and make Indians look at their daily lives differently. The SBI Mutual Fund campaign suggests, however, that rather than a complete break with the past, a changing India is holding on to the past while embracing the transformations that consumerism has brought about. Advertising, similarly, has to package the new in the guise of the old or package the foreign in the guise of the Indian, to make Indians feel comfortable in becoming consumers of the twenty first century. The emerging Indian modernity, one could argue, is a continuation of the past rather than being a break from the past. The SBI Mutual Fund campaign, similarly, uses the humour and transgression to speak in a language and tone that is familiar to the small town Indian, yet it simultaneously invites them to start a new investment practice and join a new financial culture. The narrative of the campaign, however, is only the first half of the entire communication exercise that an advertising campaign undertakes. The second half comprises the task of converting these scripts into a film. In this chapter, the focus has been on the first half and this narrative has been discussed in the context of India’s economic liberalization process. In the next chapter, I will focus on the filming of the third and fourth commercials and I will continue the discussion from

India Changing  49

where I left off on the road when the cinematographer and director, along with his crew, had gone to choose locations for these films. I will also discuss the filming of another commercial for a mobile phone service provider and, in combination, through these examples I hope to demonstrate the role played by visual rhetoric in sharpening or strengthening the message of an advertising campaign and in socializing the Indian audience to consumerism.

Notes and References   1. Interview 12. Name withheld on request.   2. On an Indian website, “afaqs!” that focuses on the Indian advertising, marketing, and media industries, there are 177 film production houses listed as being based in Mumbai, while there are forty-four listed film production houses that are based in New Delhi, accessed 14 November 2011, www.afaqs.com. This listing does not mention whether all these organizations make television commercials, but the contrast in numbers substantiates that Mumbai is a far busier filmmaking centre. Filmmakers in New Delhi mentioned, moreover, that they often travel to Mumbai for production work although a television commercial might have been planned in New Delhi. This practice adds to the amount of filmmaking work happening in Mumbai.   3. See Steven C. Caton, Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2005) for an example of the challenges of gathering data as an ethnographer on a difficult terrain.  4. An autorickshaw is a motorized version—that is, it has an engine and gears—of the hand pulled rickshaw, a form of public transport that was particularly common during the colonial era and continues to operate in the city of Kolkata that is located in West Bengal, in the eastern part of India.   5. Between the years 2000 and 2005, there was a remarkable increase in the number of brands being advertised in India. The numbers increased from 14,800 to 75,900, according to one estimate as reported by Jenny Mish, “A Heavy Burden of Identity: India, Food, Globalization, and Women,” Consumer Culture Theory: Research in Consumer Behavior 11 (2007): 165–186.   6. Interview 6. Name withheld on request.  7. Brosius, India’s Middle Class, 57.   8.  The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in India expanded 7.7 per cent in the second quarter of 2011 over the previous quarter. Historically,

50  Understanding India from 2000 until 2011, India’s average quarterly GDP Growth was 7.45 per cent reaching an historical high of 11.80 per cent in December of 2003 and a record low of 1.60 per cent in December of 2002. India’s diverse economy encompasses traditional village farming, modern agriculture, handicrafts, a wide range of modern industries, and a multitude of services. Services are the major source of economic growth, accounting for more than half of India’s output with less than one third of its labor force. The economy has posted an average growth rate of more than 7 per cent in the decade since 1997, reducing poverty by about 10 percentage points.

As reported on the website, Trading Economics. Accessed 14 November 2011, www.tradingeconomics.com/india/gdp-growth   9. The private sector’s share in the overall economic growth of India is much higher than that of the public sector. In 2006, for example, among all developing nations India was most successful in attracting private sector investment, according to a World Bank estimate. As reported in Gridlines, March 2008. Accessed 14 November 2011, www.pppinindia. com/pdf/gridlines.pdf 10. For some interesting insights, from an advertising professional, regarding the changes that private sector growth has brought about in India, see Dheeraj Sinha, Consumer India: Inside the Indian Mind and Wallet (New Delhi: Wiley, 2011). 11. Readers interested in a broad overview regarding how consumers behave can see Marieke de Mooij, Consumer Behaviour and Culture: Consequences for Global Marketing and Advertising (London: SAGE, 2010) or one of the numerous text books on consumer behaviour; for a theoretical discussion regarding consumer culture, see Don Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1997). 12. Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 42–43. Also see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Post-War America (New York, NY: Vintage, 2003). 13. Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985). 14. Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 153. 15. Ibid. 16. See Sinha, Consumer India for a similar argument. 17. For an overview of Mahatma Gandhi’s life and philosophy, see Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi, Gandhi an Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth trans. Mahadev H. Desai (New York, NY: Beacon Press, 1993) and Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas ed. Louis Fischer (New York, NY: Vintage, 2002/1962).

India Changing  51 18. For an overview of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s life and philosophy, see Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New Delhi: Penguin, 2004/1946) and Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography (New Delhi: Penguin, 2004/1936). 19. There is a joke among Indians that “more bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label were sold in India than were distilled in Scotland,” when foreign liquor companies were not allowed to sell in India, thus implying that illegal production thrived due to excess demand, Shashi Tharoor, The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the Twentyfirst Century (New Delhi: Penguin, 2007), 8. 20. Mukul Kesavan, “Remembrance of Things Past: Capitalism in a Time of High Tariff Barriers,” in The Telegraph Online, 6 May 2012, accessed 25 May 2012, from http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120506/jsp/opinion/ story_15457508.jsp#.T77YTlLwSSo 21. For more on the Hindu Right Wing movement, see Brosius, Empowering Visions; Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind: Ideological Development of Hindu Revivalism (New Delhi: Rupa, 2005); Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Madhu Kishwar, Religion at the Service of Nationalism and Other Essays (New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998); Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies, and Modern Myths (New York, NY: Berg, 2001). 22. Technocratic nationalism currently thrives in India and critiques of this ideology are not the most vocal in the public sphere. However, Indian historians have been extremely vocal in their criticism of what they see as the British using Science and Technology to strengthen their dominance on the people whom they colonized. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 23. Some readers might be unaware that Rajiv Gandhi was the son of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and, thus, the grandson of former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Rajiv Gandhi was a trained pilot and flew commercial aircrafts operated by India’s government-owned domestic carrier, Indian Airlines. Rajiv Gandhi was elected Prime Minister of India after his mother was assassinated, in 1984, and the country was suddenly left without a leader who had ruled for over a decade. However, Rajiv Gandhi was sadly assassinated in 1991 and he did not live long enough to fully implement the policies that he had envisioned for India. For more on Rajiv Gandhi, see Bhabani Sengupta, Rajiv Gandhi: A Political Study (New Delhi: Konark Publishers, 1989). 24. For more on the contemporary transformation of India, see Rama Bijapurkar, We are Like that Only: Understanding the Transformation

52  Understanding India

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

of Contemporary India (New Delhi, Penguin, 2009); Mira Kamdar, Planet India: How the Fastest Growing Democracy is Transforming the World (New York, NY: Scribner, 2007); Edward Luce, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India (London: Abacus, 2006); Anand Giridharadas, India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking (Noida: HarperCollins, 2011); and Tharoor, The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cellphone (New Delhi: Penguin, 2007). There are numerous similarities between this Hindu Right Wing Movement and the Islamic Revolution in Iran. A recent ethnography of contemporary Iran discusses how Iran was converted into an Islamic country. See Roxanne Varzi, Warring Souls: Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in Post-Revolution Iran (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Interview with Santosh Desai. As a researcher, my inference about India’s Hindu-ness is corroborated by the experience of seeing my son grow up in Mumbai and New Delhi over the last four years. He is familiar with a wide range of Hindu mythological characters, due to television viewing and discussions at school. Yet, he is completely unaware of characters or narratives belonging to any other religious tradition. Santa Claus is, perhaps, the only exception because Christmas has been so successfully commercialized into a family occasion throughout India. For an understanding of how economic liberalization has connected Indian visual culture to the global landscape, see Melissa Butcher, Transnational Television, Cultural Identity, and Change: When STAR came to India (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2003); Vamsee Juluri, Becoming a Global Audience: Longing and Belonging in Indian Music Television (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2003); Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel, Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire (London: Routledge, 2002). Two good examples of this trend are campaigns for Coca-Cola and Fevicol, which each comprise a series of television commercials that were produced before my fieldwork had started. These campaigns were supervised by two contemporary stalwarts of Indian advertising, Prasoon Joshi and Prasoon Pandey, respectively, who are known for the Indianness of their creative ideas. Many readers might be aware that Prasoon Joshi is also a well-known lyricist in the Hindi film industry and that the Coca-Cola television commercials featured the Hindi film superstar, Aamir Khan. William Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke, 153, writes that “what emerges is a view of the dialectical dynamic of the production of commodity images, a process of commodity production that takes the form of a series of interactions and negotiations both within the agency and between the agency and client.” For a similar discussion on the negotiations

India Changing  53

31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

that occur during advertising production in India, see Julien Cayla, “A Passage to India: An Ethnographic Study of the Advertising Agency’s Role in Mediating the Cultural Learning and Adaptation of Multinational Corporations,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Colorado 2003, ProQuest Digital Dissertations, 64 (04). (UMI No. 3087527). Interview with Bhaskar Mani. For more on this genre of imagery, see Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke; Brosius, India’s Middle Class; Christiane Brosius and Melissa Butcher, eds., Image Journeys: Audio-visual Media and Cultural Change in India (New Delhi: SAGE, 1999); Sumathy Ramaswamy, ed., Beyond Appearances? Visual Practice and Ideologies in Modern India (New Delhi: SAGE, 2003). Throughout this book, designations are mentioned in upper case letters when specific television commercials are discussed, for example, the Director of this biscuit commercial. When the industry is discussed in general, however, the designation is mentioned in lower case letters, for example, creative directors in the industry come from varied backgrounds. Interview with Bhaskar Mani. Interview with Bhaskar Mani. Interview with Bhaskar Mani. The first two commercials had been produced before this research had even begun, so there was no opportunity to follow those projects. The production of the third and fourth commercials, however, was observed in almost its entirety. In addition, the market research agency may enter the picture as a fourth entity although I did not interact with any market researchers during my dissertation fieldwork. However, during the three years that I worked as a market researcher in India, after completing my Ph.D. dissertation, I had the opportunity to gather consumer feedback regarding television commercials that had been produced for the Indian market. During these projects, our market research findings would be communicated to the advertising agency and client who would, then, take a decision regarding whether the television commercial required any alterations. Indian television commercial directors make between six and twelve commercials each year, on an average. Some of these directors are graduates of the country’s National School of Design (NID or the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), but there is no correlation between the education of a director and his or her success in this industry, and many of the well-known directors do not have any formal education in filmmaking. Indian film production houses are usually owned by the directors who make the television commercials. A single director or a set of directors could own the organization, and in some cases the producer of the film production house co-owns the company with the director(s). I was told

54  Understanding India that another organizational structure that is more prevalent in Europe and U.S., than it is in India, is to have a board of directors who make television commercials, while the film production house is owned by a separate set of people. This structure is followed by an Indian film production house that even has two foreign directors on its board, apart from Indian directors. The foreign directors fly in from their home countries whenever they need to make a television commercial. 41. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Also see, Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke, 33–34. 42. This is similar to the practice of choosing one sign from among many that comprise a paradigm of signs, and then making sense of that one sign in the context of that paradigm–for example, a silk jacket in the context of all jackets in a culture. The paradigm, however, usually does not exist in a material form but, rather, it exists in the mind of the members of a cultural group. In this case, the director was using the knowledge of his culture to mentally compare a descriptor of an actor with the paradigm of comparable descriptors—for example, a particular facial gesture with similar gestures known to exist in his culture. See Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, Semiotics and Communication: Signs, Codes, Cultures (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993). 43. See Arlene Davila, Latinos Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 88–152, for a discussion on the visual representation of Latinos in U.S. In particular, the creation of a standardized Latin look that is hard to define. For a broader discussion on the role of images within visual culture, see Ewen, All Consuming Images and Messaris, Visual Persuasion. 44. Clotaire Rapaille, The Culture Code (New York, NY: Broadway Books, 2006). 45. Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 6. 46. Robert J. Foster, Materializing the Nation: Commodities, Consumption, and Media in Papua New Guinea (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 39. 47. Ibid. 48. Tausig, Devil and Commodity, 25. For more on use value and exchange value, see Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1967). For a critical look at the global financial industry, see Karen Zouwen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 49. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 3. 50. This is supposedly a fear that advertising agencies and film production houses have to constantly deal with, while working on projects. An amusing incident that I heard in this regard is about how a commercial, which is now remembered as a particularly successful one, was initially

India Changing  55 rejected by the client and the Director had to spend nearly ten hours discussing every section of this commercial in order to convince the client to accept it. 51. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). See also, Mikhael Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984) and Barbara Babcock-Abrahams, ed., The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978). 52. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. & ed. Peter Strachey (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 1960).

3 Visualizing India

“When you see the work of twenty television commercial directors you get an idea about the quality of their work—their choice of locations, the quality of their clients, the length of their films, how they plan up the script, communication of the central idea, is it easy to relate to the commercial …” Advertising Agency President1

Introduction A film speaks in two voices. The first voice is of the narrator and the dialogues, which put words into the story that the film is conveying. The second voice is of the visuals that are filmed and edited to create the film. In Indian television commercials, the first voice usually comes from the advertising agency that hires a director to make a television commercial. This director and his film production house bring in the second voice. In the previous chapter, I explained how the first voice was created for the SBI Mutual Fund campaign. In this chapter, the focus shifts to the second voice.2 In this chapter, the second voice is discussed for two separate campaigns that represent somewhat divergent views regarding how the new Indian consumer culture created by economic liberalization can be represented visually. The first campaign, which is the SBI Mutual Fund campaign introduced in the last chapter, was visually executed in a manner such that the cinematic style did not contribute to adding any cultural

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flavour to the television commercials. The second campaign, however, used a cinematic style that the director envisioned to be adding a distinctly Indian flavour to the television commercial produced for the campaign. These divergent film styles are presented, in this chapter, as two contradictory views on how Indian identity should be expressed through the visual language of television commercials, as Indians get socialized to consumer culture.

Choosing the Director The shift of focus to the second voice, thus, brings with it a focus on film style as an object of study, since this voice is intimately connected with the cinematic style used to make a film. Film Theorist David Bordwell writes that “style is, minimally, the texture of the film’s images and sounds, the result of choices made by the filmmaker(s) in particular historical circumstances.” 3 Following this definition and given this study’s overall emphasis on the visual language of television commercials, one can proceed with an understanding of the second voice as the use of images, which are filmed and edited together into a narrative, to create a certain cinematic appearance. Over the course of the fieldwork, I realized that directors are differentiated according to the type of style that they bring into the television commercial. Most well-known television commercial directors have a signature cinematic style that leaves an impression on the commercial, even if the advertising agency provides a detailed script and also a shot sequence that is commonly known as a story board. The reason why they leave an impression should become clear as various stylistic techniques are discussed over the course of this book. In short, this stylistic impression can be described as a pattern used to present the message of a television commercial and, thus, guide the viewer’s reading of the message. In other words, it is “how a shot is staged and composed, how the images are cut together, how music reinforces the action … [it] is not simply

58  Understanding India

window-dressing draped over the script; it is the very flesh of the work.”4 The directors are also aware of what they are selling as a style. One such director* mentioned that their film production house tends to make television commercials that have a strong human drama element because they are known for their ability to understand and depict human characters.5 In case of the SBI Mutual Fund campaign, the Creative Director had three directors in his consideration set. Ram Madhvani was chosen because of his ability to narrate a script well, and this quality allowed him to edge out the other directors being considered. In cinematic language, this skill would translate into a style that is transparent or somewhat like the classical Hollywood style, which is known for its illusionism created through the proverbial invisible camera.6 This style has been traditionally seen as being appropriate for the narration of a script because the camera is somewhat submissive to the verbal dialogues, so the first voice does not lose its dominance to the second voice created by the camera—“the story events seem to exist objectively, while the camera seems to do no more than give us the best view and emphasize the right things.”7 The person who might have been chosen instead got discarded because the agency judged that his directorial style would not allow the innate voice of the script to remain untouched. This director, whose name was not revealed to me, was known for his ability to add elements such as humour and sarcasm to the script. This could be done through the acting or camerawork among other techniques. The Creative Director, Bhaskar Mani, unable to describe this director’s cinematic style in technical language, mentioned that he must have been one of the more wicked kids while growing up. The stress on the word wicked and the joyful grin on Bhaskar’s face, when he uttered the word, were meant to communicate that it was a characteristic that had impacted this director’s cinematic style. Additional humour, however, was not something that the advertising agency wanted because they believed that their *Name of interviewee withheld on request.

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script was funny enough. This director, thus, was not chosen even though Bhaskar was extremely fond of his work.

The SBI Mutual Fund Appearance: Simulation and Framing Ram Madhvani had realism on his mind when he had started working on this project. This was in line with the advertising agency’s brief, of narrating the script in a simple, straightforward, and transparent manner, and ostensibly one of his key strengths as well. One of the first strategic moves that the Director introduced was the decision to use multiple colour temperatures, since in daily life we are exposed to such multiple colour temperatures that get distributed according to the shades of sunlight reaching us or the types of lights that are lit around us.8 The Cinematographer, Rafey Mahmood, explained that he, too, had approved of this technique instead of lighting everything uniformly or using strong contrast within the same colour palette. His initial suggestion had been to use a wider range of colours, but Ram narrowed it down to two colours as it is easier to draw the attention of the viewers with only two colours than when a wider range of colours are used. While the realism of the film was perhaps curtailed due to the use of only two colour temperatures, it made the visual identity of the commercials more specific and this contributed to the overall task of visual branding9 that television commercials undertake, either explicitly or implicitly. Since branding10 is a process of signification that is geared towards giving a product an identity, developing a relationship with the customer, and communicating certain core attributes of the product, television commercials—being texts that communicate using multiple media, images, sounds, and words— are well suited to this endeavour as suggested in Chapter 1. I am emphasizing the visual aspect of branding due to the heightened richness of the visuals of television commercials

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and the acknowledgement that advertisements of all kinds have enhanced the visual component of the information processed by us on a regular basis.11 Such visualization of information, moreover, has made the information processing more immediate as compared to “traditional narratives (stories, novels, etc.), which have to be processed over a period of time and, thus, require reflection.”12 For the SBI Mutual Fund campaign, the Creative Director, Bhaskar Mani, mentioned that he started ideating in images rather than words, as he usually does ever since television has taken over from newspapers as the primary medium for advertising. He had a frame in his mind, that is, and he tried to fill this frame with actions and objects, which would communicate the message of the campaign. Bhaskar also stressed, to clarify the point he was making, that he was not thinking in words any longer like he used to when he had started as a copywriter before the spread of Indian television. While copywriting is still an important function of the advertising agency, Bhaskar Mani’s comment suggests that Indian advertising has taken a visual turn after television started being used widely across India. So, the layer of meaning that advertising adds to a product13 is now more a function of the images than of the words. He recalled his ex-boss telling him one day that television enhanced the reach of advertisements, so now it is more likely that an advertisement would reach both a learned professional and an illiterate slum dweller. The visual turn, instigated by the spread of television, coupled with the need to cater to both the literate and illiterate consumer, has changed the character of Indian advertisements, Bhaskar explained. For the SBI Mutual Fund campaign, as outlined in the previous chapter, the advertising agency had the objective of rebranding SBI while marketing the mutual fund of the bank. Apart from reducing the inhibition of investing in an urban financial institution, that is, the advertising agency was trying to uphold an aspirational and youthful image of the bank. It was ironic, thus, that while out on the trip to check out possible locations for the third and fourth SBI Mutual Fund

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commercials, we were heading away from the southern section of Mumbai that everyone aspires to live in, and moving towards the suburbs that house the majority of Mumbai’s middle and lower middle classes.14 I realized later, however, that there were sections of the Mumbai suburbs that had been redeveloped into upscale neighbourhoods, such as Powai where the third SBI Mutual Fund commercial was shot within the compounds of the swanky Hiranandani Estates, comprising a group of tall buildings. 15 I could sense, nevertheless, that the film production team was slightly uncomfortable about being outside their familiar territory of South Mumbai. There were multiple conversations about which route to take, for example, and there was an overall anxiety about getting late; a worry that is unexpected from professionals who are used to hectic schedules and frequent travel. Although some of them lived in suburbs, none of them lived in the neighbourhoods that we visited and we had taken a rarely used route from Powai to Goregaon Film City where the fourth SBI Mutual Fund commercial was shot. While on this route, the Director commented in his characteristic sarcastic tone, followed by a shrill laughter, that it felt like one of those “escape from New York” movies to communicate that it was a road that he would associate with a rough neighbourhood in New York City rather than his own city. To me, this was a telltale comment as it revealed a lot about the disparities of India and Mumbai about how our own backyards can be more alien than foreign countries that we see on our television screens, and how this alienness might be reinforced by the simulated environments that various forms of mediation introduce into our lives on a daily basis. I would argue, using the SBI Mutual Fund campaign as an example, that television commercials are particularly lethal weapons of simulation because they usually retain a semblance of reality, while also corrupting that reality according to the marketing task at hand. As the Cultural Anthropologist William Mazzarella concluded in his book on Indian advertising that advertisements do not lie but they display partial reality in the guise of the universal.16

62  Understanding India

For the third commercial in this campaign, the task at hand that afternoon was to choose a location where a car could be parked as if broken down, while the lady car owner in distress would be helped by a series of people passing by. For the fourth commercial, similarly, the team needed a location where an entire marriage procession could be filmed. These were, however, merely the basic requirements that numerous locations could have fulfilled. The better locations are the ones that go beyond these basics and also provide additional benefits, such as an appropriate background facade, space for the extras to wait when another shot is being completed, and enough room to comfortably move the camera around. The Powai location, as mentioned earlier, had a parking lot that was plain and simple in appearance, yet extremely well finished and well maintained by Indian standards. In an understated way, thus, the background, seen by the viewers, had the potential to appeal to the aspirations of the small town investor without coming across as being done up specifically for a television commercial. The Goregaon Film City location, used for the fourth commercial, was a strip of road with a divider in between, so the numerous extras could use one side of the divider to wait while the road on the other side was being used to film a shot. This was a particularly useful feature for this television commercial because it involved filming an entire wedding procession that required numerous extras, so the management of extras was seen as a major task by the production team. This location had a concrete structure in the background, in addition, on one side of the road, which could be used to hang decorative lights that are a common feature during Indian weddings. Arenas like the Goregaon Film City are stark reminders of how filmed environments are simulated according to the needs of a film or television commercial.17 This is because the Film City is a bare environment in the middle of what seems like nowhere to an outsider like me, and the bareness reminds the visitor that every frame shot here would require immense work to create an appearance of being somewhere else. In comparison, other outdoor locations may not require

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as much work as the inbuilt features of these locations would contribute to the task of simulation. This was the case at the Powai location where the third commercial was shot, since the features of the parking lot, as already mentioned, were adequate to create an appearance of the “somewhere else” where the commercial would aim at taking the viewer while appealing to their aspirations. The location, however, is only the starting point in the process of building up a setting where one or multiple shots of the television commercial can be taken. Layers of simulation are introduced, thereafter, through factors such as the main cast, the extras, the lighting, and the cinematography. It is important to realize, moreover, that the simulation, although a deceptive act of reality construction, could be geared towards achieving a realist aesthetic. In the case of visual productions aiming to project a realist aesthetic, that is, the simulation is required in order to create the reality that the story upholds. The simulation, consequently, contributes to realism and the deception is, in effect, invisible like the invisible camera of classical Hollywood cinema.18 The realism of cinematic styles such as classical Hollywood cinema is linked to the indexicality of photographs that stencil reality, so to speak, since “whereas other arts present reality through symbols, cinema’s photographic basis permits it to produce tangible, unique events.”19 Given the connection of this indexicality to the trustworthiness of photographs, cinema, too, I would argue, enjoys a certain rub off from that same pool of trust.20 For the advertising industry, trust is a valuable commodity that can go a long way in helping brands communicate more clearly and persuasively with their audience. Photographs and cinema, thus, are strategic weapons of the advertising industry. Television commercials are strategic weapons as well, being clips of cinema and turning into a photograph when paused into a single frame. Due to the relatively short length of a television commercial, moreover, each frame has to be planned carefully because even minor aberrations can dilute the larger message being communicated. For the third SBI Mutual Fund commercial,

64  Understanding India

for example, one of the characters originally created to be walking up to help the lady, whose car has broken down, was a dhobi or, as Indian readers would know, someone who makes a living out of ironing clothes. During a pre-production meeting, the Creative Director requested that this character should be removed from the script because he did not fit into the aspirational imagery that was being created for the small town consumer. The planning of frames, within a television commercial, is similar to the concept of framing a message that has to be communicated. While the framing of visuals is a more wellknown concept, following the painting and picture frame that is a palpable object, message frames, being imperceptible, are less recognized and more often the topic of academic discussion among communication scholars: Framing essentially involves selection and salience. To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.21

Like framing a message, the framing of a cinematic shot involves choices regarding what to show, emphasize, and what to omit. At each location that we visited, during the trip to scout for locations, I noticed how Ram and Rafey, the Director and Cinematographer, spent a significant amount of time with their palms raised, framing shots through the square gap created between the two outstretched palms. Ram even shared his thoughts with Rafey regarding camera placement and movement during specific shots within each television commercial. This exercise helped to determine the content of frames and also to evaluate these locations on the basis of this content. So the second voice, as it were, was getting formed as they spoke and I could notice the excitement on Ram’s face suggesting that he really enjoyed the work that he did. The enjoyment was also related to the satisfaction of being

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recognized as is probably true for most successful professionals. Yet each film was a new challenge and an opportunity to get recognized all over again. While Rafey, the Cinematographer, was comparably laid back and keener on getting the job done, rather than aim at achieving larger glory, Ram, the Director, had his mind set on adding to his already large stock of accolades. Comments made by Ram during the road trip confirmed that he was indeed invested in making sure that he became as successful as he wanted to be. At one point, while we were stuck in traffic, he explained to Rafey that earlier he would consume alcohol regularly and he would have been drinking by that hour of the evening, but he had controlled his consumption considerably as part of his efforts to lead a more disciplined life. During a later conversation with me, he narrated the trajectory of his own career and explained how he had worked hard to write off critics who had predicted that he would never become a famous television commercial director. In one of his more aggressive tones, the Director had explained: “without fanaticism you cannot do anything worthwhile.”22 Moments of glory were, thus, carefully cherished as they had been earned over months or maybe even years of hard work. One such moment, coincidentally, had been scheduled for that evening itself and it was tragic that we got stuck in a nasty traffic jam in Bandra—a trendy midtown Mumbai locality, as some readers would know—while returning to the South of Mumbai. Sandwiched within piles of cars, I could see the frustration on Ram’s face as the possibility increased of missing his television interview, to be telecast that evening, and he called his wife to convey the sad news.

The SBI Mutual Fund Appearance: Role of Referencing Such hunger for fame, I realized, is only expected in an industry that is associated with showmanship. Yet, through this ethnography, I also realized that Indian television commercial

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directors have a characteristically different sort of hunger for fame as compared to the film directors of the commercial Hindi film industry. This is largely because Hindi film directors are explicitly and extensively recognized by the media whenever their films are released in theatres, whereas, other than advertising industry publications, television commercial directors are rarely publicly recognized for their work. In addition, the film director’s creative authority over his product is much greater than that of the television commercial director who has to work according to the larger marketing communication plan put in place by the advertising agency. The television commercial director is, thus, a hired hand and recognized as being hired for his or her knowledge of filmmaking. The television commercial director, in other words, enters the team with a clear agenda of turning someone else’s script or story idea into a film. This is the dominant frame used to define a television commercial director’s work. These directors along with their film production house team are, consequently, constantly thinking about how to visualize or give a face to an idea. At one moment, for example, while we were at the Goregaon Film City, the Director raised his palms to depict a subjective shot and explained that he was going to portray the thief stealing using a James Bond style. He meant, as I later realized, that the subjective shot, showing the viewer the thief’s perspective, would be as suspenseful as a James Bond movie rather than being a direct copy of a James Bond movie. This example illustrates, moreover, that while the practice of referencing existing cinematic texts might be common during television commercial production, in India at least, such referencing is not necessarily geared towards directly copying this cinematic text. Rather it could be helpful merely to develop an overall approach to filmmaking, as is common among academic writers when they refer to the work of other academics to develop an approach to their own work. In other cases, referencing is more technical in nature and the referenced texts are used to get technical cues regarding a particular cinematic execution, such as the use of colour temperatures in the SBI Mutual Fund campaign. For this

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execution, Ram Madhvani, the Director, had instructed his team to look for references from films and advertisements that had also used two to four colour temperatures. The films that were primarily used were Traffic (2000) directed by Steven Soderberg and the Three Colors Trilogy (1993 and 1994) directed by Krzysztof Kies´lowski. Yet another kind of referencing occurs habitually or subconsciously, as people associated with filmmaking consume visual texts, for leisure or work, without any explicit objective of using these as a reference. One cinematographer† mentioned, rather poignantly, that he watches a film every day because it is his oxygen. Another cinematographer‡ explained that some films have inspired him so much that he has even stayed up at night, thinking about the cinematography and direction. The more one watches, moreover, as numerous cinematographers and directors explained, the more one grows as a professional. Thus, one of the benefits of attending a film school such as the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) is that students are exposed to a wide range of cinema from all across the world. 23 Ram Madhvani had also benefited from such exposure, but without attending a formal film school, as he had been an avid film viewer from a young age. This early exposure had influenced him to focus on the visual style of his films and contribute visually, as the television commercial director, from a young age and this urge to get his work, the second voice, noticed had led to unpleasant experiences. He was criticized for changing the face of campaigns and altering the initial script provided by the advertising agency, rather than filming it effectively. Later in his career, he had acknowledged his mistake and started following the advertising agency’s script more carefully instead of trying to reinterpret it through his own direction.24 The change in strategy had clearly changed his image in the industry since Ram was chosen for the SBI Mutual Name withheld on request. Name withheld on request.

† ‡

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Fund campaign as someone who is able to narrate the script well by ensuring the invisibility of the second voice, that is, and maintaining the prominence of the first voice. While a completely invisible camera should theoretically lead to a perfectly realist aesthetic, which presents reality in an authentic form, in practice this is a tenuous concept. Since the framing of shots, the placement of the camera, the choices of lens, and the use of lighting are among the many factors that influence the reality that is captured by the camera, the television commercial director tends to leave a mark on the film. The specificities of a story, moreover, may demand certain cinematic treatments that influence the appearance of the television commercial. For the fourth commercial of the SBI Mutual Fund campaign, for example, long shots were used to film the wedding procession. In addition, the suspense of the narrative—of a passerby stealing money from the groom’s garland—was captured through the use of subjective shots that depicted the male protagonist’s viewpoint, as he saw the wedding procession and made his way into the crowd. If the cinematic treatment is, thus, not well-aligned to the needs of the script, then the underlying emotions of the script may not get expressed properly. The humour of the third commercial, for example, did not emerge adequately and the Director had to convert the visual appearance of the film and make it look like a silent film from the Charlie Chaplin era. It was a last minute damage control operation, moreover, after the film had gone through the post-production stage of editing and colour correction because Bhaskar Mani, the Creative Director, thought that the television commercial was not funny enough. The role of the second voice in communicating the television commercial’s message is rather clear when the brushstrokes are thick, so to speak, and a visual technique is glaring like the silent film style used for the third SBI Mutual Fund commercial. It is more difficult to get a grasp on the role of the second voice when the visual techniques being used are less obvious or seemingly non-existent. Even an obvious technique, furthermore, may not give away the rationale behind its use.

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In the case of the SBI Mutual Fund campaign, one of the key contributions of the second voice was to create a chic and modern look that would rub off on the brand. This was the least explicit visual technique, however, as this appearance had to be blended into the apparent realism of the campaign in order for it to have the intended impact on the audience. The use of colour temperatures, discussed earlier, was meant to contribute towards creating this appearance and the Director, in fact, complained that the Cinematographer had not implemented this technique as well as he would have liked.25 The practice of referencing other visual texts is meant to ease the process of visual expression, so Ram was expectedly frustrated that Rafey had failed to deliver a good product although he had been shown films to follow as cues. This led to a crisis during the post-production colour correction stage, as the Director had to work with the technician to, now, artificially incorporate the desired appearance that the lighting should have already created. An interesting discussion arose, in this context, about whether to keep a brighter or subdued colour palette for the third commercial. The consensus among Rafey Mahmood, Bhaskar Mani, and Ram Madhvani was that the brighter palette created an “Indian look,” while the subdued palette created a “foreign look” that loosely refers to the appearance associated with Europe and North America. The former—Indian look—was chosen after considerable deliberation and multiple changes in decision. Although poorly defined, the rationale behind the choice was that the brighter look would be more engaging and appropriate for Indian tastes. It was interesting that the Canadian technician§ working at this colour correction laboratory did not agree with this categorization, as he did not see anything particularly Indian or foreign in either appearance. The disagreement highlighted the possibility that the visualization of Indian identity from within could be very different from the way it is visualized by those disconnected from Indian culture. The question of authenticity arises, consequently, as one Name withheld on request.

§

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wonders whether the mediation of identity signifiers, through Hindi cinema and television serials, for example, play a role in attributing a simulated identity to those consuming these signifiers. The Canadian gentleman, that is, may have been using a different set of signifiers as his reference for Indianness. The need to differentiate the Indian and foreign, although not always explicitly expressed, seemed to be particularly relevant in a context where advertisers were conscious about the changing cultural fabric of the Indian market. The indigenization of Indian advertising, after all, was one of the most talked about events in the industry, and this had occurred alongside, and perhaps due to, the heightened Indianness that advertisers noticed in the Indian consumer.

The SBI Mutual Fund Appearance: Visualizing India There was also, in addition, the influence of the change in the demographic characteristics of the typical Indian advertising professional. In casual conversation and without any statistical reference, it is difficult to describe this change accurately. The broad trend, however, that was repeated over various conversations was an increase in the number of advertising professionals who are rooted in Indian culture. An advertising professional,|| for example, himself well trained in English literature, explained that now you can have someone from a remote small Indian town working with you, while this was very rare earlier. Relevant in this context is a joke that I heard over the course of my fieldwork in Mumbai. This was a joke that a famous Mumbai based advertising personality of the nineteen seventies supposedly spoke “Erdu,” or a version of Urdu that was heavily laced with English, rather than authentic Urdu, the language primarily spoken by Muslims in West Asia. The joke certainly makes a statement, as most jokes do, but it also ||

Name withheld on request.

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implicitly differentiates between India’s past and present. In the case of advertising, this past was supposedly dominated by individuals who were more conversant with British than Indian literature, and this directly influenced the advertisements that they created. Characters from English movies in Indian advertisements, Marketing Communications Expert Santosh Desai remarked, seems quite bizarre in the year 2006 although this was not unusual till only twenty five to thirty years ago. 26 During these twenty years, he continued, numerous advertising professionals have changed the cultural complexion of Indian advertising because these individuals are much more rooted in Hindi and the other vernacular languages of India. From being visibly British or American in the past, thus, Indian advertisements are now visibly Indian. The new genre of Indian advertising, one could argue, was re-visualizing India or visualizing the new India, much like Hindi cinema has done over the last sixty odd years after Indian independence from British rule. Watershed moments, as an advertising agency insider# suggested, explaining his own transformation (much like the Creative Director of the SBI Mutual Fund campaign) from word based to visual thinking, were campaigns such as that for Asian Paints, a brand of paints for home interiors. One of the campaign television commercials, set in rural Rajasthan, a state in Western India, shows a lady pointing at the turban of a villager to communicate, to her husband, her choice of blue colour for the interiors of their house. This commercial speaks through the imagery of rural Rajasthan and was, thus, an appropriate example of a heavily visual piece of communication that also turns to rural India.27 Yet this rhetorical move was often accompanied by an equally strong emphasis on technical sophistication and cinematic quality that could compete with the best of the world’s advertising when it was showcased at Cannes28 every year. Much like India’s anticolonial nationalism that Political Anthropologist Partha Chatterjee writes about, this was a Name withheld on request.

#

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combination of inner cultural essence, which was leaning organically towards India and outward material strength, which was drawing from the best that the world had to offer: The material is the domain of the “outside”.… The spiritual, on the other hand, is an “inner” domain bearing the “essential” marks of cultural identity. The greater one’s success in imitating Western skills in the material domain, therefore, the greater the need to preserve the distinctness of one’s spiritual culture. This formula is, I think, a fundamental feature of anticolonial nationalisms in Asia and Africa.29

The SBI Mutual Fund campaign followed this pattern, although there was nothing explicitly rural about the imagery of the campaign. As the Creative Director, Bhaskar Mani, explained that the imagery of the campaign was, rather, purposely chosen to represent urban India in the posteconomic liberalization phase. The security checkpoint of the first commercial, the food stores of the second commercial, the car breakdown location of the third commercial, and the wedding procession setting of the fourth commercial were all iconic representations of this phase of Indian history. This imagery was largely decided by Bhaskar’s team at the advertising agency, moreover, so the film production house had to convert his ideas rather than think afresh about the visual landscape of the campaign. The Director and his production house contributed through their ability to execute the filmmaking and adding cinematic elements, such as the subjective camera of the fourth commercial, to the visual landscape. The film production house, however, is indispensable in this advertising campaign creation process, even though the advertising agency may have been visually descriptive while conveying the marketing communication plan: For example, we may not know how best to capture a particular part of the film. We say that we have understood, show two faces and make each talk … they will do it differently. They will show one girl talking like this and then you realize that somebody else should be talking in front. They might want to shoot it

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from above. They make two girls talk and cut them and show it separately, while we may not do like that.30

The visual turn in Indian advertising has further enhanced the role of the film production house because there is a greater demand on the visuals to speak on behalf of the product and service as well as the brand. There is, thus, increased importance given to the crafting of visuals, the transition across visuals through editing, and the non-verbal expressions used within visuals. Given the overlap of this change with the enhanced Indianness of Indian advertising, the visuals have also taken on the responsibility of projecting this added Indianness. This projection of Indianness varies across Indian television commercials. While some commercials are obviously Indian because they show farmers in a rural setting, other commercials may not be as obviously Indian because they show urban India scenes that are culturally universal—such as someone riding a bike—rather than being specifically foreign or Indian. In the SBI Mutual Fund campaign, there were two dominant aspects to the India that were visualized through filmmaking. The first aspect was the allure of the consumer culture that was depicted, and this allure was heightened by the filmmaking process because advertisements tend to glamorize public settings even if the overall style is realistic. The second aspect was the chaos within this consumer culture due to factors such as the large population, the flaws in the governance system, and manufacturing defects in products. The visuals needed to include both aspects in order for the story of the commercial to get communicated properly. From this perspective, the story of the fourth commercial was easiest to convert into a film because a typical North Indian wedding procession has elements of glamour and chaos inbuilt, whereas the airport security checkpoint, the food stores, and the car breakdown location have neither element. The shooting location of the fourth commercial suggested likewise, as there were numerous extras in garish uniform crowding this part of Goregaon Film City, there were wedding lights, there was a horse dressed up for the wedding procession,

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and in the middle of it all the film production crew seemed to be stretched beyond their abilities while trying to make sure that the shooting proceeds according to schedule. This itself was a vision of India, I realized, as much as any movie or television commercial might have attempted to uphold a slice of Indian life in front of the viewer. During one of the breaks from filming, as I heard one of the extras sing an old Hindi film song, which I could not recognize but had heard before, it occurred to me that these songs, the movies that they belonged to, and the on screen and off screen characters that they were attached to, had all played important roles in constituting our identities as Indians. This gentleman’s singing, for example, had rekindled in me certain memories of my childhood, of listening to Bengali and Hindi songs with my parents. These were all memories that were intimately linked to my identity as an Indian, so my Indian identity was suddenly heightened as well.31 Experiences such as these were important contributors to making the shooting floor seem like a microcosm of the India that existed outside Goregaon Film City. Even without this experience, moreover, it was amazing how the production team had managed to convert the shooting floor into a wedding like setting, to the extent that there was something joyous about the exercise of observing the filming during two overnight sessions. The glamour and the chaos, and the importance of both being present simultaneously, were apparent to me as I observed the Director and his team shoot the television commercial. This was controlled chaos, furthermore, which had to look natural and attractive to the eyes of the small town investor. The same strategy was evidently at work for the third commercial, which was filmed at the car parking garage at the housing complex in Powai, a Mumbai suburb. Yet the challenges of filming the two commercials were different because of the differences in the two settings and the two storylines. The wedding procession shoot was more cumbersome because the entire set of extras had to be rearranged when the Director wanted to take a shot a second time or change the camera position and shoot from a different angle. If the groom’s

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horse and the brass band had stepped five steps forward, for example, then it had to step back five steps for another take of the same shot. In the car breakdown shoot, in comparison, there were mostly one or two people in the frame at any given moment, so there was not too much of rearrangement required. The only exception was the portion where car engine fluids were spilling on the lady driver’s face because the passerby who was supposedly going to help her had ended messing up her car engine even more. If a shot had to be retaken here then the face of the lady had to be cleaned and made up again before the next take when the lady would have to look as if her face had never been messed up. For both these films, I noticed that the Assistant Director, Frank Jacob, was the man in charge on the ground, making sure that issues such as the movement of extras and the car engine fluid spilling mechanism had been taken care of. He was helped by the Executive Producer, Manoj Shroff, of course, who had rolled up his sleeves a little extra for these films. The Director, Ram Madhvani, had to reserve his energies to focus on the quality of acting, the camera movement, and to make sure that the overall appearance of the commercial was at par with what he had planned and expected. Ram was responsible, ultimately, to make sure that the Creative Director Bhaskar Mani’s vision was converted into reality through his cinematic language. Although he had an entire team helping him, the lack of film literacy and general literacy among the film crew was a key obstacle in communicating instructions and maintaining production quality. Ram mentioned that he has trouble relating to his film crew because many of them cannot understand the cinematic moves that he plans and executes while directing a commercial. He continued that in the U.S., this problem is less pronounced because a larger proportion of the film crew understand cinematic language, so they follow instructions with a certain involvement. The Director also believed that literate and urban Indians like himself benefited from having been exposed to both EuroAmerican and Indian culture:

76  Understanding India A lot of therefore my work and everybody else’s work is actually a short circuit of various influences, of connections that are there in our heads; uniquely Indian, at the same time uniquely international. Why? Because we know our French cinema, we know our Bob Dylan, we know our thumri, we know our Indian classical music.32

He, thus, implicitly implied that the same exposure was not evident when one interacted with people who were a few steps down on the socio-economic ladder. Ram explained that from his elevated socio-economic position, he felt more like a British Asian looking at his own country and culture rather than a rural Indian who might be living amidst a far more organically Indian setting than his own whereabouts in South Mumbai. Yet he did not see a contradiction between being removed from the heart of India and wanting to be more Indian in outlook or wanting to use Indian texts as references for television commercials. Other television commercial directors expressed a similar desire and so did a few animators who wanted more Indian animation styles to develop in the country. Sumantra Ghosal, an experienced television commercial Director, mentioned, as we drove towards the famous South Mumbai neighbourhood of Colaba, that he had received an Anglo-Saxon education in school and college, so he had never been rooted in Indian culture. The term Anglo-Saxon is rarely used by Indians to describe the education system, so his use of the term was quite novel, and he had used it to distinguish a foreign education system from an Indian one. He was asserting, furthermore, that he should have had the opportunity to get a more Indian education.

The Tata Indicom Appearance: Indian Visuals It was with such a desire to be more Indian in outlook, style, and taste that a television commercial was directed for a mobile telephone brand called Tata Indicom.33 For this commercial,

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the Director used Indian miniature painting as the main reference. In other words, the characteristics and style of Indian miniature painting were used to create the visual appearance of the commercial. National identity and pride could be expressed through Indian miniature painting because it was an aesthetic expression of an Indian way of life. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Indian miniature painting is the lack of linear perspective style that evolved out of European Renaissance painting. This European style has influenced Indian painters as well, and much of contemporary Indian visual culture loosely adheres to a style that is modelled on American and European visual texts, such as films and television programmes, which have also been influenced by linear perspective painting. Indians, in contrast, have rarely attempted to develop an indigenous aesthetic style that could be used for their animation and cinema. Apart from literate Indians, however, who have read about various schools of art, even illiterate Indians can recognize Indian art because it is used widely in religious iconography and in temples. Indian artists and sculptors, moreover, would certainly be knowledgeable about Indian aesthetics. Memories of growing up in India suggest that Indian art and sculpture were ubiquitous because many calendars used Indian art and religious iconography and idols were present in every neighbourhood temple. Such art and sculpture, in addition, were also displayed in wealthy living rooms due to the cultural pride associated with these products. Indian aesthetics can, thus, certainly make a more prominent mark on Indian visual culture if professionals such as this Director can use this art strategically. The Director, Ram Madhvani, explained that unlike American and European cinematographers who get inspired by their own painters—such as the chiaroscuro of Rembrandt’s paintings—Indian cinematographers have not developed a habit of digging into their own visual past, which is arguably rich enough to teach a few tricks to anyone. He has, thus, made it a point to incorporate Indian visual styles in the television commercials that he makes. He jokingly mentioned that it is now part of his mission statement.

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The Animator, Kushal Bhat,** who worked on the Tata Indicom commercial mentioned that Indians are yet to develop a distinct animation style.34 He seemed to agree with the Director’s viewpoint that a lot more work is needed to develop a distinct Indianness in contemporary forms of visual expression, such as animated films.35 Since Indians have already been subjected to foreign influence for a number of decades, however, the question remains whether it is at all possible to develop a characteristically Indian visual culture. Ram Madhvani made an attempt to do so by creating an Indian aesthetic that dominated the Tata Indicom commercial. A key feature of this aesthetic was the use of flat lighting, which was meant to avoid shadows and create a visual appearance that was similar to the miniature style’s maintenance of the same object size all across the canvas. This method conflicted with the linear perspective style’s variation of object dimensions based on their distance from the viewer. Ram believed that the miniature painters’ technique of envisioning the image was novel and commendable.36 While the flat lighting style has been earlier used in Hindi cinema and Indian television commercials, it has not been the dominant trend in Indian visual culture for at least five years before the Tata Indicom commercial was produced. The Director, thus, chose a senior cinematographer with whom he works rarely, but who could be relied upon to light a set using flat lights while also ensuring that it looks attractive. The Cinematographer, Barun Mukherjee, joked about how he was given the instructions for this commercial: [M]y director said.... I am going to give you something very difficult to do ... you’ll have to light this film as flat as possible, I really want a very very flat look for this film. I said yes that is difficult, slightly ... but I tried and did it.37

The use of Indian miniature painting was even more prominent in the animation used for this commercial, since the design of the animation was directly modelled on the **Real name withheld on request.

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Rajasthani style of Indian miniature painting (or the style evolving from Rajasthan, a state in north-western India). As the Animator—a young artist who was hoping to start his own company soon—mentioned, it was solely the Director’s initiative that led to the use of this animation style. Initially, for this commercial, Kushal had drawn examples of images that had nothing characteristically Indian about them. Ram, however, had asked him to revise the same images using the Indian miniature painting style.38 Ram explained that the initial inspiration came from a pair of artists called the Kaur sisters—Punjabi ladies who have consistently used Indian miniature style in their work. One of the reasons their art, such as the portraits of the late Princess Diana and Mother Teresa, had impressed the Director was that it displayed a certain combination of “completely modern sensibility, with completely rooted sort of Indianness to it.”39 The Director believed that it was this combination of modernity and tradition that was extremely important to succeed in contemporary India and this mobile phone campaign was no exception.

The Tata Indicom Appearance: Mass Appeal as Difference The Tata Indicom account was handled by McCann Erickson, Mumbai, who had commissioned the television commercial production. McCann Erickson’s creative team, handling the Tata Indicom account, explained that the brand faced a difficult marketing problem when it entered the market. The problem was that the market was completely saturated with at least five other mobile phone service providers who had been doing business for up to ten years. They, thus, figured that one of the ways Tata Indicom could gain market share was by making the market more democratic and developing new customer bases. In other words, they had to offer their plan to all sections of society instead of catering to niche segments, as was the strategy used by existing brands.

80  Understanding India Figure 3.1: Tata Indicom: Indian Visuals

The niche segments, which had been catered to, happened to be the wealthier sections of society. It was, thus, the carpenters, masons, and drivers of [the] country who had been left out. There was nothing surprising about this trend, since Indian consumerism has only recently percolated down to the lower and uneducated classes. After a series of brainstorming sessions, the creative team decided to project “sabse zyada baat (the longest talk time)” as the brand’s unique selling proposition. This is because they recognized that one of the most effective ways to sell to a low-income segment of consumers would be to reduce the price and offer them more time to talk: The main thing they are concerned with, is not whether I can download a ring tone, whether I can download a wallpaper, whether I can surf the net, whether I can do this or that; the main thing is mein kitna baat kar sakta hun (how much can I talk).40

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The original offer, when the campaign was launched, was that calls would not be rounded to the nearest minute. Customers would, thus, be able to talk for every second they had paid for. The competing brands were forced to react to this scheme, so Tata Indicom, as a newcomer, was considerably successful in being able to secure its presence in the market. The brand continued to try and keep up the momentum, which the “talk time” campaign had given the brand. The same goal led to the creation of the offer, which was being advertised in the Tata Indicom commercial where Ram Madhvani used Indian miniature painting. This was an offer of two years of free incoming calls, so if someone called the subscriber then they would not have to pay for the time talked, and this was a novel offer at that time as none of the mobile service providers were offering free incoming calls to its customers. While the differentiation of the Tata Indicom brand hinged on this service offer, it was the responsibility of the advertising agency to communicate the news to customers in a manner such that the service offer created a significant impact on both increasing sales and also strengthening the brand’s equity in the market. The account was being handled by a senior member†† of McCann Erickson’s creative team. Having seen his earlier work, I was aware that he had been influential in making Indian advertising more Indian and Hindi in appearance and style. The Tata Indicom commercial, of course, was tailor made for Indianness since the larger objective was to appeal to the lower socio-economic segments of the market. Yet the challenge was to be noticeable in a pool of advertisements that were already quite Indian in the way they looked and sounded. The mass appeal of the Indianness, in other words, needed to be different and it needed to make the brand come across as being different. As many of those I met over the course of my fieldwork mentioned, the heightened Indianness of advertising was a trend that had already been around in India for a while. It was, thus, no longer enough to just appear Indian in advertisements; brands also needed to differentiate Name withheld on request.

††

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themselves within that crowd of Indianness that characterized the Indian advertising industry. In the case of the Tata Indicom commercial, the advertising agency had chosen a narrative that was drawn from Hindi commercial cinema, which often shows ordinary young men becoming successful and wealthy due to their determination and hard work. 41 The rationale was that a simple story, resembling a Hindi film, would draw the attention of the audience. The strategy had worked for two other commercials that Ram Madhvani had directed. In this case, while planning the television commercial, the advertising agency had recommended that they use animation so Ram used an Indian animation style, as already explained, to match the Indianness of the story.

The Tata Indicom Appearance: The Script and Animation The Tata Indicom script fitted into the genre of television commercials that demonstrate the superiority of the advertised brand by comparing it to another—usually nameless—brand. Tata Indicom is here, thus, compared to an unknown and effectively nameless mobile phone service provider. The two phones are being used by two vegetable vendors who have shops in the same market. Both of them get phone calls from customers. Only the vegetable vendor who is using Tata Indicom can receive the phone call, however, while the one using the unknown brand cannot receive the call because his account is out of money. The Tata Indicom subscriber, consequently, benefits from the two years of free incoming calls scheme. The ability to receive that call and sell vegetables leads to a series of successes. Soon the successful vegetable vendor is seen living in a large mansion where he and his wife are ready to host a party for guests who are bringing in more business. At one point during the party, the other vegetable vendor is seen looking through the mansion door. The successful vegetable

Visualizing India  83 Figures 3.2 and 3.3: Tata Indicom: Indian Visuals

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vendor goes out, hugs the other guy, and gives him the Tata Indicom phone, which is the secret to the successful vendor’s wealth. The Director used an animated border for every shot of the commercial. The borders maintain a thematic consistency throughout the commercial, and the theme derives from the Rajasthani style miniature art that was used to design the animation. The borders also play an important role in creating an appearance of the visuals being packaged in miniature art. Apart from the borders, animation is extensively used to depict the wealth acquisition of the vegetable vendor who is a Tata Indicom subscriber. The Director, that is, utilized the miniature style motif and added animation in a way, so that the design contributes to communicating the idea of achieving success, which is a central theme of the commercial. While in other parts of the commercial, only the border is animated; in this portion, the entire background is filled with patterns drawn from the same miniature style. In addition, an animated representation of the successful vegetable vendor and his wife fill the centre of the screen. They are seen riding on bicycle, which changes to a motorbike, and further to a Mercedes Benz. The transition to better vehicles is meant to represent the class transition that the couple is passing through. These transitions are shown through an animated version of the dissolve, which is commonly used to visually represent the passage of time.42 Once the wealth acquisition has been shown, another animated transition shifts the setting to the interior of their mansion where the vegetable vendor and his wife are ready to receive important guests. The guests are all foreigners—one of them is a white man, and two of the others are identified as a Japanese and Chinese—who are potential clients. After the guests arrive, there is an initial set of introductions, which leads to a dance sequence that is synchronized to the theme music of the commercial. The dancing is an exaggerated expression of the joyousness of the occasion. An earlier comment about new business deals might make a viewer interpret the dancing as a celebration of these transactions with the guests. Here the

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commercial takes on the appearance of a Hindi film because song and dance sequences are very common in Hindi films during such situations. This similarity, of course, is all the more evident, since the vegetable vendor and his wife—played by Ajay Devgan and Kajol—are leading stars in the Hindi film industry, as many readers may be aware. In fact, they are also married in their offscreen lives and had jointly signed on as brand ambassadors for Tata Indicom. The commercial, moreover, is narrating a “rags-to-riches” tale that is quite common in Hindi films. Ram Madhvani, quite characteristically, was extremely proud about how he had brought together this piece of visual communication. He used the metaphor of the relay race baton to explain how he took the advertising agency’s ideas, and then built the commercial to an extent that was way beyond what the advertising agency envisioned: I then take that baton and I will run that baton so fast, and so far … I will make it cute, I will make it Indian, make it seem like as if it is ... at the same time, I will bring in tarakki (success), I am not just doing the animation, I am doing basically, hey yaar wo log cycle pe theye, abhi to wo Mercedez Benz ageyi yaar … (man, those guys were on a cycle, now a Mercedes Benz has come in).43

The Tata Indicom Appearance: Visualizing India For the Tata Indicom commercial, as explained in the above quotation, the Director did well to utilize the animation to bring out the rags-to-riches storyline that formed the bedrock of the narrative. He was even able to make a statement, in the process, about Indian identity through the use of Indian aesthetics that framed the success of an ordinary Indian vegetable vendor. As mentioned earlier, moreover, Ram believed that his attempt was geared towards correcting the problem of Indian visual culture continuing to be dominated by a foreign method of visualization.

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While the rags-to-riches story had been a staple of Hindi movies for decades, and understandably so in a poor country going through a phase of postcolonial development, the Director explained that rarely had Indian cinema and television productions been as influenced by Indian painting. It was an appropriate moment to introduce this novelty, furthermore, because the mobile phone brand needed to stand out in a crowded market. This was not a poor man’s vision of India, however, as Ram Madhvani also explained, perhaps expecting such an inference given the combination of the storyline of the commercial and the use of miniature painting. He went on to mention that he did not believe in going to rural Rajasthan to make television commercials that looked and felt Indian. From his perspective, the Indian aesthetic was an urban elite view of India—a viewpoint that he termed “exotic ethnic.”44 The regular viewer, unaware of the Director’s perspective, might have read the commercial differently, seeing the Indian art as being kitsch, for example, rather than an evolved technique of visualization. This is even more likely because the actor and actress, who were playing the role of the vegetable vendor and his wife, are leading names in the Hindi film industry that, as readers might be aware, has traditionally celebrated the common man and street culture.45 Part of the filming of the Tata Indicom commercial, in fact, took place on a pre-constructed studio set that was used for filming a Hindi soap opera, which, along with Hindi cinema, is another key component of contemporary Indian popular culture. The set was that of the interiors of a large two-storied house, with a staircase coming down the middle of the living room. This is a living room set up that has been used in Hindi cinema as well, for the last fifty years. It was meant to signify the wealth of the vegetable vendor who had used the Tata Indicom phone and utilized the free incoming calls facility to make deals and move up in life. It is in this wealthy living room that he and his wife entertain foreign guests who were potentially giving them more business. While entertaining the guests, incidentally, the vegetable vendor’s wife is wearing a Japanese kimono and not an

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Indian dress. The kimono symbolizes a cultural affinity between the Indian hosts and the guests who are mostly East and Southeast Asians. By assuming an Asian, rather than Indian, identity, for that evening, at least, the host couple also represents wealthy Asians. So the Tata Indicom commercial can also be read as an expression of Asian wealth, and many wealthy Asians of the twenty first century have indeed experienced the “rags-to-riches” tale. The commercial, thus, visually communicates the identity of a rising civilization as not only having wealth, but also the ability to express itself through its own aesthetic. While the SBI Mutual Fund campaign, discussed earlier, also represents an upwardly mobile India, the aesthetic style used to visualize India was more universal and less authentically Indian, while also depicting slices of Indian life in the contemporary post-economic liberalization era. The Tata Indicom brand is associated with an Indian aesthetic, but the visualization of India is less realistic because the characterization and narrative is excessively dramatized. Looking back, it almost seems like the Director of the Tata Indicom commercial had been inspired by the Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s attempt at provincializing Europe: To attempt to provincialize this “Europe” is to see the modern as inevitably contested, to write over the given and privileged narratives of citizenship other narratives of human connections that draw sustenance from dreamed-up pasts and futures where collectivities are defined neither by the rituals of citizenship and nor by the nightmare of “tradition” that “modernity” creates … for these dreams are what the modern represses in order to be.46

Fellow Historian Sanjay Joshi, writing in the same vein, mentions that by provincializing Europe historians of nonEuropean countries would be able to write about their modernity without comparing it with a supposedly ideal type of modernity that grew out of Europe.47 This is important, according to this school of thought, in order to contradict a widespread belief that, somehow, the secular modernity of Europe is placed farther down the path of historical progress

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and those who have, thus, not reached this point are suffering from a lack of progress. Chakrabarty and Joshi argue that modernity is actually fractured or multifarious, so there is no ideal modernity. 48 The Director, Ram Madhvani, too believed that Indian miniature painting produced a vision of India that was commendable in its own right, and it need not be compared to the European linear perspective painting. Linear perspective painting, in other words, need not be idealized as the perfect way of looking at the world because it captures a rational and secular worldview that grew out of Renaissance era Europe.49 The Director was certainly not alone in this endeavour. As Art Historian Christopher Pinney explains, due to their use of tactile surface effects, postcolonial Indian photographs can be characterized as being “denarrativized” and “deperspectivalized.”50 This is because, through the implementation of techniques such as the use of backdrops, gestures, costumes, and props, the project of realism is subverted. Almost as if it is an attempt to parody or experiment with modernity and decolonize oneself visually. Pinney terms this “vernacular modernism,”51 and similar practices, such as gazing directly at the camera, have been observed in other postcolonial countries as well.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have attempted to juxtapose two television commercials that had numerous similarities, but they were completely different in terms of the visualization styles used by the Director. While there was nothing striking about the visualization of the SBI Mutual Fund commercial, moreover, the Tata Indicom commercial was quite unique in the way miniature painting aesthetics influenced the cinematography and set design. Yet even the former commercial had been planned with a goal of maintaining an Indian ethos. During one of the pre-production meetings for the SBI Mutual Fund campaign, for example, the Creative Director,

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Bhaskar Mani, was very forthright that the humour in the third commercial should be loud and, thus, Indian. He specifically wanted to avoid any understated humour that he considered to be too British. Neither is the construct of loud humour being Indian defined in any text, however, and nor does it exist universally in the minds of all Indians. Such characterizations can, thus, be criticized as examples of auto-orientalism or the application of orientalist thought on one’s own society.52 Regarding aesthetics, similarly, innovative and unique styles that depart from the European linear perspective painting have existed and continue to evolve all across the world, including Europe. The Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, famously, created cubism sitting in the heart of Europe. I would argue, thus, that unique visualizations of the world may not be the appropriate way to differentiate an inherently Indian outlook with a European one. Even Art Historian Christopher Pinney, who has carefully delineated the unique techniques used by Indian artists and photographers, explains that there were numerous similarities between Indian and European styles. Indian photographic styles, Pinney asserts, are not markers of an “unchanged Indian psyche,” but are complicated “modern” attempts to formulate visual identities under specific historical and political conditions.53 There was nothing inherently Indian, moreover, about the film crews that produced the SBI Mutual Fund commercials and the Tata Indicom commercial. They were, rather, all English-speaking Indians and so was I. During meetings, road trips, and film shoots, the conversation was mostly in English and this, once again, suggested that we were far from shedding the British influence that tended to make us uncomfortable. We had, instead, learnt to use this British influence to our advantage by becoming global citizens on the one hand, while remaining ambassadors of India on the other. As the Director mentioned, this ambivalence or duality was evident in much of his work as well, which was thoroughly modern in terms of the use of technology and overall appearance, but it was also steeped in Indianness.

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Cultural Anthropologist Arlene Davila, writing about the stereotyping of the Latin consumer in the U.S., discusses the dangers of using “binaries and polarized extremes” and explains that this obliterates “variations” and “reduces cultural complexity to two extremes.”54 In case of India, as suggested above, it is important to acknowledge that there exists a range of cultural types, and much of the content produced by the Indian media industry—cinema, music, and television, in particular—is hybrid because it combines foreign and Indian influences. As the Chinese Studies Scholar Jing Wang notes, referring to contemporary Chinese brands, it is important to acknowledge the hybridization of global culture rather than merely trying to decipher whether a brand or cultural product is local or foreign.55 It is also important to realize, in addition, that India, the Indian people, and Indian identity have not developed in a silo. Foreign influences have been instrumental in making the country and its people what they are today, although many Indians may be unhappy about being subjected to these influences. In some cases, foreign influences have been appropriated to the extent that they appear almost completely Indian. Cricket, for example, is a game that was introduced by the British, but it is now considered to be a wholly Indian game; playing and following the game are key social pastimes for numerous Indians, and India’s impressive performance at the international level has created a strong connect between Indian pride and the national cricket team’s performance. In the next chapter, the focus turns to Indian television commercials that use cricket within its central narrative and, thus, can be termed as cricket-themed commercials.56

Notes and References   1. Interview 125. Name withheld on request.   2. Although this book is more concerned with the second voice, it is important to understand the first voice because it influences the second

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  3.

  4.   5.   6.

  7.   8.   9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

voice and this influence could be strong enough to make it appear as if the second voice is following the dictates of the first voice. David Bordwell, On The History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 4. On the same page, Bordwell earlier specifies, in addition, that he sees style as “a film’s systematic and significant use of techniques of the medium. Those techniques fall into broad domains: mis-en-scene (staging, lighting, performance, and setting); framing, focus, control of colour, values, and other aspects of cinematography; editing; and sound.” Ibid., 8. Interview 51. Name withheld on request. David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Cinematic Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1985). Ibid., 24. Also see Andre Bazin, What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1971). Interview with Bhaskar Mani. An example of the power of visual branding is the success story of the Chinese health drink manufacturer, Apollo (Taiyang Shen). It used a logo “resembling the Chinese character of ‘humans’ set against a bright red disk,” and a sentimental theme song, “when the sun rises, our love for you is eternal” that converted the health drink from a relatively small village enterprise to a household name across China. The strategy was used after the company adopted a management tool from Japan. This tool had been initiated by IBM and is known as the Corporate Identity System (CIS), with Visual Identity (VI) being one of three components of the tool. The other components are Mind Identity (MI) and Behaviour Identity (BI). Jing Wang, Brand New China: Advertising, Media, and Commercial Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Seminal books on branding are David Aaker, Building Strong Brands (New York, NY: Free Press, 1995); David Aaker, Managing Brand Equity: Capitalizing on the Value of a Brand Name (New York, NY: Free Press, 1991); Kapferer, Strategic Brand Management. For a non-scholarly overview of how advertising works and how advertisers take strategic decisions, see Max Sutherland, Advertising and the Mind of the Consumer: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2008). Ron Beasley, and Marcel Danesi, Persuasive Signs: The Semiotics of Advertising (New York, NY: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002), 37. This book deals with this process of meaning addition in detail. For more on this topic, see Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson, Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising (New York, NY: Guilford, 1996); Judith Williamson, Decoding Advertisements and Robert Goldman, Reading Ads Socially (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992).

92  Understanding India 14. Apart from this divide between the south of the city and the suburbs, Mumbai harbours other kinds of segregation such as that between those living in slums of various kinds, including a particularly urban version of the slum known as a chawl, and those living in fully developed concrete housing with amenities that differ according to the price of real estate and the area of the city. In this way, Mumbai follows the trend of other Indian cities like Delhi—see Brosius, India’s Middle Class, 40–142—and cities in other countries like Brazil’s Sao Paolo—see Teresa Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in Sao Paolo (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000). 15. According to the 2011 Census, conducted by the Government of India, Mumbai City has a population of 3,145,966 people while the Mumbai Suburbs have a population of 9,332,481 people. As reported on the web site, indiaonlinepages.com. Accessed 2 January 2012. http://www. indiaonlinepages.com/population/mumbai-population.html 16. Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke. 17. It is important to keep in mind, in this context, that the visual grammars of cinema and television have numerous similarities and differences. Media Theorist Marshal McLuhan classifies a movie as a hot medium and television as a cool medium because the former is packed with data, according to him, while the latter is not as packed and, thus, cool; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004/1964). For more on the visual grammar and structure of television, see Jeremy G. Butler, Television: Critical Methods and Applications (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002) and Robert C. Allen (ed.), Channels of Discourse, Reassembled (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 18. Ray, A Certain Tendency. 19. Bordwell, Film Style, 71. 20. See Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke, 49–51. 21. Roger M. Entman, “Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm,” Journal of Communication 43 (1993): 51–68. 22. Interview with Ram Madhvani. 23. The Creative Director of the SBI Mutual Fund campaign, in fact, had taken a film appreciation course at the FTII after the Indian advertising industry took a visual turn due to the need to produce advertisements for television, which started growing rapidly in India from the nineteen nineties. He explained that he had taken this course to improve his ability to think visually. 24. Interview with Ram Madhvani. The director narrated an incident from his own life to explain how he had realized his mistake. The incident supposedly occurred as he was on his way to a meeting with friends at an advertising agency. A beggar woman picked up a stick and hit him on his shoulder; then she laughed and ran away. The Director walked into the advertising agency in obvious pain. Later he used his imagination to interpret the act as that of a copywriter hitting him because he

Visualizing India  93 had messed up his or her script while converting it into a television commercial. 25. Interview with Ram Madhvani. 26. Interview with Santosh Desai. 27. Interview 78. Name withheld on request. 28. This French city hosts the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity (formerly known as the International Advertising Festival) every year. India, in 2013, won thirty-one medals at this festival (eight gold Lions, five silver Lions, and eighteen Bronze Lions). India won fourteen Lions in 2012, twenty-four Lions in 2011, and seventeen Lions in 2010. 29. Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, 6. 30. Interview 78. Name withheld on request. 31. Particularly relevant in this regard is the notion of collective memory and its role in community formation. For an overview of the literature on collective memory, see Barbie Zelizer, “Reading the past against the grain: The shape of memory studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995): 214–239. Also see Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 32. Interview with Ram Madhvani. 33. Thanks to Mr Ritesh Ghosal, Head of Brand Marketing at Tata Teleservices Ltd, for giving me permission to use images from this Tata Indicom commercial. Thanks to Mr Ajay Verma, Chief Growth Officer at Draft fcb+Ulka, Mumbai and Mr Sanjay Tandon, Chief Operating Officer at Draftfcb+Ulka, Delhi for speaking to Tata Teleservices Ltd on my behalf. Thanks to Mr Manoj Shroff at Equinox Films for providing these images. 34. This is a viewpoint shared by a television commercial director who had graduated from the National Institute of Design (NID). This filmmaker mentioned that a recent Indian animation film (Hanuman)—one of the few made in the country—was influenced by the Disney animation style, instead of developing a characteristically Indian style. He thought this was unfortunate, but continued to discuss recent work, by NID students, which has used indigenous styles. 35. Interview 49. Name withheld on request. 36. Interview with Ram Madhvani. 37. Interview with Barun Mukherjee. 38. Interview 49. Name withheld on request. 39. Interview with Ram Madhvani. 40. Interview with member of McCann Erickson Creative Team. Name withheld on request. 41. Interview with member of McCann Erickson Creative Team. Name withheld on request. Also see Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema for a chapter (“Rage on Screen”) on the birth of the angry young man as the urban hero in commercial Hindi cinema. This discussion, centred on the film

94  Understanding India Deewar (1975), should help the reader better understand the social roots of the two archetypes used for the male characters in the Tata Indicom television commercial, although the police officer brother in Deewar is a stronger character than the less successful brother in the Tata Indicom commercial and the successful vegetable vendor in this commercial is not quite as angry and rebellious as the typical angry young man character of Hindi commercial cinema. 42. Messaris, Visual Persuasion. 43. Interview with Ram Madhvani. 44. Interview with Ram Madhvani. 45. Ashish Nandy, “Introduction: Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum’s Eye View of Politics,” in The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema, ed. Ashish Nandy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1–18. 46. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 46. 47. Sanjay Joshi, “The Spectre of Comparisons: Studying the Middle Class of Colonial India,” in Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes, eds. Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011), 83–107. 48. Ibid.; Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. 49. For a broader overview of approaches to modernity, see Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity,” in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 172–196. For a critique of modernity, see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 50. Christopher Pinney, “Notes from the Surface of the Image: Photography, Postcolonialism, and Vernacular Modernism,” in Photography’s Other Histories, eds. Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson (Durham, NC: Durke University Press, 2003), 202–220. 51. Ibid., 216. 52. See Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke, 138–145. The notion of “orientalism” was made popular by the Literary Theorist and Middle Eastern Studies Scholar, Edward Said. In his book, Orientalism (London: Routledge, 1978), Said writes that the European colonizers used a discourse that constructed the colonized people as being fundamentally different. Auto-orientalism, thus, is a discourse that is used by formerly colonized people to construct their own societies as being fundamentally different. 53. Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 96. 54. Davila, Marketing and Making, 100. In this context, also see Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: SAGE, 1997); John L. Jackson Jr, Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 55. Wang, Brand New China. See also, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), where they

Visualizing India  95 explain that localization is often produced by globalization, and in the interests of capitalist expansion, rather than being a successful strategy of resistance to capitalism. Also see Mark Allen Peterson, Connected in Cairo: Growing up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011) for more on the cultural politics of neoliberalism. 56. This chapter has been inspired by an earlier article that I had written and published on a similar topic; Rohitashya Chattopadhyay, “Batting and Buying: Cricket as a Visual Metaphor in Indian Advertising,” Advertising & Society Review 6, no. 1 (2005).

4 India Batting

“Visual content went amiss for twenty or thirty years, but now I feel there is a conscious effort to put the visual content back on track by some thinking minds.” Cinematographer1

Introduction In the previous chapters, I have explained that economic liberalization in India led to the need to socialize Indian consumers to a new consumer culture, which represented a new phase in independent India’s quest to become a more self-sufficient and successful nation. In this discussion, I highlighted the need to maintain an Indian identity as the country was exposed to new foreign cultural influences. In this context, I mentioned the recent trend of the heightened Indianness of the country’s advertisements and narrated the production of a television commercial that used a distinctly Indian visual style. While this book is primarily an ethnographic study of television commercial production, a key concern, as mentioned earlier, is the dialectic between an old and new Indian identity as observed within television commercials. The SBI Mutual Fund campaign demonstrated this dialectic as it was trying to introduce a new culture of financial investing while maintaining a traditional Indian ethos represented by the marriage procession, for example. The Tata Indicom

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campaign demonstrated this dialectic by celebrating modern entrepreneurialism while using a traditional Indian visual style. During the participation observation sessions surrounding both campaigns, moreover, I noticed that considerable effort was made to maintain the Indianness of the television commercials. This need for Indianness, I would argue, stems from an anxiety that derives from the contradiction of having the freedom to modernize as an independent nation, on the one hand, yet not having an independent voice or indigenous language to express that modernity, on the other. This anxiety could get expressed as a concern regarding certain aspects of one’s lifestyle or certain social institutions that could be perceived as being unjustly influenced by a European way of life. Even in the arena of interpersonal interaction, both in official and personal settings, similarly, certain Indians could be anxious about having to communicate in a manner that they see as being determined by a European perspective.2 The anxiety was evident while the Tata Indicom commercial was being planned in Mumbai, and the same anxiety led to the Director choosing Indian miniature art as an indigenous motif that would shape the visual language of the commercial. This was a reaction, in other words, to the feeling of being colonized by a style of visualization that had been derived from European linear perspective painting. In this chapter, the issue of self-expression will be considered through the lens of cricket-themed commercials because as Postcolonial Scholar Ashish Nandy writes, cricket is recognized for “having introduced into Indian society a new and unique means of cultural self-expression.”3 I will argue in this chapter that cricket represents the duality of contemporary Indian identity and, thus, works as a means of self-expression. This duality, the combination of an old and new Indian identity, which is the focus of this entire book as well, is manifested within cricket as a combination of selflessness and playing for material gains. The selflessness corresponds to erstwhile Indian identity, which existed prior to the liberalization of the Indian economy, while the desire for material gains corresponds to a new Indian

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identity, which exists in this era of economic liberalization. Through the discussion of a cricket-themed commercial that was produced during my fieldwork in Mumbai, I will argue that contemporary Indian identity is a combination of the old and the new. In cricketing terms, selfless cricket exists alongside the practice of playing the game for material gains. The correspondence between cricket and contemporary Indian identity is more easily identifiable due to the phenomenon of cricket having reached a level of popularity, within India, which is perhaps only matched by the popularity of Hindi cinema.4 So, sitting in India, cricket can seem like an Indian game rather than a global one as evident from comments such as “cricket is an Indian game accidently discovered by the English.”5 The Indianization of cricket is not surprising, given the long history of the game in the Indian subcontinent as documented by Cricket Historians Boria Majumdar and Ramchandra Guha.6 Cricket is, consequently, a popular medium of expressing one’s affiliation to the nation, of expressing one’s belonging to an Indian cultural community, and of expressing Indianness or Indian ethnicity. The huge success of the Oscar nominated Hindi film Lagaan (Land Tax) (2001), which was based on the story of a group of Indian villagers teaming up to beat a seasoned English cricket team, further corroborates the close link between Indian identity and cricket. This also leads to the connection between cricket and masculinity, since cricket is a male-dominated sport and the national team players, in India, at least, are usually respected like warriors fighting for the country. Cricket, it can be argued, is thus an arena for the expression of Indian masculinity when the Indian cricket team is battling it out for the honour of the country.

Two Forms of Cricket As already suggested, as a form of public performance, cricket has existed in two forms in India. In its traditional form, cricket was a Victorian game that was less of a competitive sport and

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more of a game that was meant to be enjoyed for the selfless virtues associated with the act of playing cricket. 7 There was a surprising similarity, moreover, between the Indian, predominantly Hindu, worldview and the selflessness of Victorian cricket. During the colonial era, thus, the colonized Indians could use the anti-competitive sentiment of Victorian cricket to criticize the conquering mission of the empire. Cricket was, consequently, opposing the “colonial worldview” while being an inherently colonial game.8 During the last sixty years after Indian independence, cricket has been commercialized around the world and this phenomenon has impacted Indian cricket as well. Cricket’s transformation into a consumable commodity, in India, has been observed to be assisting the proliferation of a new paradigm of democratic citizenship that is closely aligned with consumerism.9 This is connected to the role that cricket plays as means of self-expression, allowing consumers to experience, express, and perform their identity through the medium of cricket. This ability—of expression—is itself a democratic freedom, which is connected to consumerism when cricket is represented within advertisements or television commercials. The culture of commercialized cricket has further strengthened after the launch of the Indian Premier League (IPL), which is an international cricket tournament involving the best players from across the world and attracting millions of dollars in player fees and corporate sponsorship. Journalist James Astill’s forthcoming book, mockingly titled The Great Tamasha, takes a critical look at this phenomenon in the context of India’s rise as a new economic superpower. 10 Marketing Professionals Shyam Balasubramanian and Vijay Santhanam discuss the rise of sports marketing in India, with a special focus on cricket, and they estimate that the sports marketing industry has grown to a size of over two billion dollars largely due to the commercialization of cricket.11 The contrast between erstwhile Victorian cricket and contemporary Indian cricket has, thus, arguably never been starker. Significant in this regard are cricket’s fresh representations within television commercials, which move it away from its Victorian connotations. As cricket becomes more of a

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consumable commodity through these fresh representations, the game has been noticed to be changing in certain fundamental ways. The ethical dimension of the game, for example, reduces in importance due to the demands of commercialization. In professional sports, moreover, one team’s loss is another’s gain: it is often a zero-sum game. Also as a consumable sport—as opposed to a playful sport—cricket strengthens hyper-competitiveness rather than humane values, such as disinterested competition and sportsmanship. Professional sports, thus, can project a reality that is more competitive—due to the importance of victory—than the everyday reality of the viewers.12 The commercialization of cricket, like the commercialization of other sectors of Indian life, has not escaped criticism and sarcasm as Indians have not been unanimously in favour of economic liberalization. An example of this negative reaction to economic liberalization is an Indian television commercial— produced for the the Times of India—that parodies the practice of cricket players endorsing brand names and, thus, it takes a critical look at the commercialization of daily life in India. An important feature of the visual language of this television commercial is the heightened pace of the batsman’s movements that serves as a code for the hyper-competition being depicted on the screen. The television commercial is edited in a manner such that every ball faced by the batsman appears to be a new commercial in which he is modelling. Except for one, intended, solitary instance, thus, the batsman is never seen facing an actual cricket ball and the act of modelling in an advertisement replaces the act of hitting a cricket ball. This analogy between playing cricket and endorsing brands is made visually evident, moreover, as the batsman wears the same attire while batting and appearing in various commercials. Even while appearing in an advertisement for clothing, the batsman wears his cricketplaying uniform although he also wears a jacket and tie over it. This analogy between batting and brand endorsements can be read as this television commercial’s attempt to comment that the commercialization of cricket has made playing the game tantamount to modelling in an advertisement. The batsman, moreover, looks and speaks like one of India’s most

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successful batsmen, Sachin Tendulkar, and the commercial mocks his brand endorsement activities rather than respecting him as a talented batsman. The critique of the game’s commercialization can be seen as deriving from this attempt to be derogatory about such a famous batsman, almost as if the commercial is suggesting that he should be paying more attention towards playing the game rather than the money he is making from the game. While this is a legitimate critique and one that should be taken seriously, I would argue that it does not correspond to the reality of how the commercialization of the game has percolated within Indian society. Instead of obliterating respect towards the game or reducing the need to play the game well for one’s country, the commercialization of the game occurs alongside the players paying their homage to the nation by performing for the country on the cricket field. The viewers, similarly, while enjoying the commercialization of the game, pay their homage to the nation by supporting the national team wholeheartedly. During the 2011 Cricket World Cup, for example, the patriotism expressed by Indian viewers while watching the matches and the patriotism expressed by the players throughout the tournament was remarkably high even though the commercialization of the game also occurred in full swing. Citizenship, in other words, appeared to be a combination of working hard and playing hard; the work bringing in the money, that is, to allow one to consume and have a good time.

Reebok: Pedagogical and Performative Citizenship Echoes of this form of nationalism can be found in Cultural Theorist Homi Bhabha’s writing about the modern nation state. Bhabha explains that the borders of the nation state contain an ambivalent modernity that is a combination of the unifying current of nationalism and the dispersive current of individual identities that go against the grain of a monolithic

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and preordained national culture. The unification occurs through nationalist pedagogy, while the dispersion occurs through the performance of cultural identities: Such a shift in perspective emerges from an acknowledgment of the nation’s interrupted address articulated in the tension between signifying the people as an a priori historical presence, a pedagogical object; and the people constructed in the performance of narrative, its enunciatory present marked in the repetition and pulsation of the national sign. The pedagogical founds its narrative authority in a tradition of the people … the performative intervenes in the sovereignty of the nation’s selfgeneration by casting a shadow between the people as image and its signification as differentiating sign of Self, distinct from the Other of the Outside.13

Cricket, of course, has played a pedagogical role in the formerly British colonies, such as India, because it was meant to spread a notion of civility that the colonized were supposed to inculcate, partly due to “the social and moral disciplines of the playing field.”14 There was a surprising similarity, moreover, between this notion of civility, being spread by the British, and the civility associated with the Brahmanical tradition of Hinduism that has been practised in South Asia for centuries. Both schools of thought abhorred virile competitiveness, for example. Cricket also has an important performative dimension that is connected to it being a medium of expression, of emotions for example, related to the experience of playing the game and watching the game being played. The performative dimension also includes participation, both as a player and a spectator, in the materialism associated with the game. It would be difficult to separate the pedagogical and the performative dimensions of cricket, as it exists in contemporary India, as I have already argued when I mentioned that selfless cricket and playing for material rewards merge with each other. Prior to economic liberalization, however, the performative dimension of cricket was relatively subdued as the commercialization of the game was limited and the primary

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emphasis was on playing the game selflessly for one’s country. Commercialization enhances individual presence as compared to the presence of the cricket team, as a collective, because players are priced differently, so to speak, among other reasons such as more television commercials highlighting individual talent rather than collective presence. Given that cricket is played as a collective, however, the presence of the group tends to penetrate into commercialized representations of cricket as well. The group, in this case, is mainly the Indian cricket team as cricket is dominantly followed at the national level. When used as a medium of expression within Indian television commercials, similarly, the performative dimension of cricket might be carefully meshed with the pedagogical dimension. One such television commercial is the Reebok shoes and sports gear commercial that was produced during my fieldwork in Mumbai. The focus of the commercial is the achievements of a group of leading cricket players who have represented India in international cricket. The central idea is that one has to work hard to achieve a place in the national cricket team and enjoy the benefits of stardom that derive from playing successfully for India. The script tries to communicate the importance of hard work by mentioning that the benefits of stardom do not get you a place in the Indian team. Rather, a place in the Indian team gets you stardom: Playing for India can get you Your picture on page 1, 2, 3 ... whatever A shoe deal A bunch of overfed bodyguards Poster boy status A billion devotees But none of these can get you to play for India But none of these can get you to play for India [Voiceover heard in the commercial]

The pedagogical stares out at the viewer as these lines are read because they warn against the dangers of being too greedy for fame and wealth. The underlying message of

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the commercial, according to the Director, Ram Madhvani, is drawn from Hindu philosophy—one should work hard without any desire for the rewards. Hinduism teaches that one should ideally work hard without desiring material rewards because one should overcome all material desires in order to gain salvation from the constant cycle of being reborn in this world. The Indian caste system has its basis in the idea that the upper castes are enjoying the rewards of good work (karma) done in previous births. The good Hindu, consequently, is one who follows this teaching and maintains proper Hindu ethics (dharma). Since the words are in English, however, the teaching could come across as being universal rather than only Hindu, although even a distinctly Hindu television commercial might have been a good marketing strategy in a country where religious chauvinism and cricket fever often exist simultaneously. Devotion in cricket, moreover, translates into a commitment to the larger good of the community as cricket is a collective game that is played for the victory of an elevenplayer team. Such a message, thus, is potentially unifying as nationalist rhetoric is also ideally supposed to be, and it has the potential to make the brand a totem15 for the consumers to huddle around and experience their affiliation to the nation and national cricket team. The larger marketing strategy, underlying the campaign, had been devised by the brand’s global marketing team as Reebok is a global brand. The American Reebok television commercial, for example, had used American basketball players as brand ambassadors. The script was conceptually very similar in the two commercials, and in the American commercial the achievement or success was represented by “getting a jump shot” instead of “playing for India.” The ability to complete a jump shot, as many readers may be aware, is an important skill in the game of basketball. The performative dimension of this television commercial emerged from the way cricket was represented, as this representation highlighted the individual flamboyance of the players and it linked individual ability to the material rewards

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of playing the game well. In-built within the pedagogical message about the importance of hard work, that is, were images of individual performance that displayed the grace and skill of the cricket player. While observing the filming of this commercial at the Goregaon Film City, it was evident, moreover, that each individual player carries an élan, within the public sphere, which blends with their performance on the cricket field. Their individuality is, thus, both shaped by this performance and it also contributed to how the performance was read by the audience. Of the five players participating in the Reebok commercial, one was a relatively formal gentleman who had also captained the national cricket team. He walked into the studio and shook hands, with the other players, in a manner that was reminiscent of quintessentially formal British behaviour. Another player was a flamboyant, young, and upcoming star of the national cricket team. He utilized some of the free time in between filming sessions to test drive an imported car that a dealer had driven into the Film City compound. A third player was busy trying to schedule a trip to his hometown where a relative’s birthday bash had been planned for the next afternoon. Due to heavy fog in New Delhi, however, he was not sure whether he would be able to reach on time. These differences among the players’ behaviours, even without taking their cricket playing styles into consideration, demonstrates that participation in cricket is as much a ritual of joining hands with a team of players—for the greater good of the country, when it is played at the national level—as it is an act of performing one’s individuality.16 In the Reebok commercial, while the script emphasized the pedagogical aspect of cricket, as already explained, the cricket playing imagery was where the performative dimension emerged.

Reebok: Imagery of the Male Body For a start, each of the five players demonstrated different aspects of the game—bowling, batting, and fielding—using

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distinct physical actions that differentiated them from each other. The representation of cricket as dance, in addition, introduced a poetic metaphor as a descriptor of the cricket playing performance. This dance style was modelled on American ballet, moreover, along with a rather unique colour combination, of the players wearing black costumes against a black background. The articulation of the performative dimension of cricket was, thus, not only creative but it was also graceful. The male bodies floated across the screen in a manner that might have made the former British rulers proud of their formerly colonized subjects. The connection between sports and the civilizing mission of colonialism was largely based on the belief that the emasculated body of the colonized male subject would assume masculine features, and it would become more productive, disciplined, and socially presentable due to participation in sports. This is very similar to the disciplinary mechanisms introduced into French society during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at a time of industrialization and modernization. The French Philosopher Michel Foucault has famously written about this disciplinary regime in his book, titled Discipline and Punish.17 During the colonial era, sections of the Indian population were labelled effeminate so the British rulers in India recommended that they participate in sports to improve their discipline, performance, and chances of success in the colonial order.18 As the Cricket Historian Boria Majumdar explains, participation in a sport like cricket, consequently, was also a means to get recognition and overcome the class boundaries of colonial society.19 The Reebok commercial creates a hyperbole out of the bodily action of playing cricket. The Director wanted this exaggeration because he decided to model the commercial on American commercials where, he believed, the sport stars were depicted as larger than life figures. In India, too, cricket players are regularly used within television commercials, but, as Ram Madhvani suggested, they are often shown as celebrity endorsers of products like writing pens or clothing. The physical or sporting abilities of the players form the basis

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of their authority to stand behind the reputation of products, but these abilities are not necessarily demonstrated visually. The Reebok commercial, through the hyperbole of cricket as a bodily endeavour, holds up the actions of a set of cricket players who can be seen batting, bowling, and fielding wearing black outfits against a black background, while white lighting, somewhat like rim lighting, highlights sections of their bodies against the dark background. The Cinematographer, Kartik Vijay Thyagarajan, explained: [W]hat I chose to do was rather than have a complete rim, rather than having a rim completely outlining the body, have the light hitting only one part of the body, and take it out from the rest of the body … it just ends at a point, so his legs or hands they merge into the black, which I think adds to the whole, the way the film has been made, the way you look at the stuff.20

As players of the national team, these male bodies express the masculinity of the nation in a language that is universal, modern, yet it does not come across as mimicry21 of British or any foreign cricket playing style. Neither is it self-consciously Indian, like the Tata Indicom commercial discussed earlier, or a recent Pepsi commercial featuring players of the Indian cricket team who are outcompeted by a group of rural Indian kids who win due to their street smartness rather than any formal knowledge of cricket. Such street smartness in local settings, as a television commercial director* explained, is a common theme in contemporary popular culture texts such as Hindi cinema that was discussed in the previous chapter. It is one of the characteristics, in other words, which is used to define and distinguish Indian ethnicity.22 The Reebok commercial departed from this trend, perhaps unconsciously, and it fitted with the Director’s desire to break out of the clutter of cricket playing images seen on television. Yet the television commercial evaded any significant criticism of being elitist *Name withheld on request.

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due to the use of cricket players who had already established themselves as sons of the soil. At the pre-production planning stage, the Director had thought of multiple techniques that could be used to highlight the bodily aspect of playing cricket. During the first preproduction meeting, he explained his plan of using Edward Muybridge’s technique of showing human locomotion through separate frames to depict the actions of the cricket players. This following note, found in the Reebok commercial’s production file, explains this treatment more elaborately: Cut to extreme slow motion shot of [player 1] executing a perfect square drive. (He is wearing all black: black full sleeve t-shirt, black slacks, black pads and gloves and black shoes.) This shot will be broken into a fast cut of small shots like a Muybridge human locomotion sequence to underline the precision of the shot. The entire shot is in a black background.

Ram Madhvani later realized, however, that the Muybridge technique would not work well on a television screen, due to its size, and time was another constraint since television commercials are usually between 30 and 60 seconds long. This change took place a few weeks after the first pre-production meeting. Instead, the Director decided to film the commercial at high speed—400 frames per second using a special camera that had to be rented. One outcome of filming at high speed is that the intensity of the images is enhanced, since much more information is packed into one second of film stock. This special effect, as the Cinematographer explained, helped to communicate the story better, and made the players look like heroes who were working seriously: [A]gain when you are saying you had to make them heroes, you had to get out the whole karma that he is talking about, that you have to work for … so I think that 400 frames, what happens is you see each and every thing, if you have sweat coming out, you see the sweat, you see that what it actually lends, it takes the story forward, takes your idea forward, rather than, if we

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had shot this in the normal speed, you wouldn’t have been, you wouldn’t have had the same kind of effect.23

A third twist in the tale occurred during the filming of the commercial because Ram realized that along with the intensity of the images and the rendition of these images in slow motion, which had already been planned, the bodily actions could also be depicted in a dance-like manner. This is because there was a certain dance-like posture in the way the players moved their hands. When he looked at the unedited footage of the film, the Director was even more convinced that he could indeed edit the film in a manner such that cricket looked like ballet. According to Ram, his exposure to American ballet allowed him to make that connection between cricket and ballet. He regretted not having planned this earlier, however, so he could have taken the shots accordingly. To make the cricket playing action look like ballet, the Director instructed the editing team to cut the more dance-like or graceful portions from the original footage. Ram explained that there is a certain “discipline,” “focus,” “concentration,” and “grace” associated with doing one’s work seriously, and a “certain meditative quality” associated with practising something, so dancing was a useful metaphor to represent the players’ dedication and hard work.24

Reebok: The Body as In-between Opposing this dedication were the distractions of stardom and wealth, which were visually represented through animated interludes in between the graceful actions of cricket players. These distractions are the series of rewards that, as may be recalled, the script had listed as an outcome of success: “your picture on page 1, 2, 3,” “a shoe deal,” “a bunch of overfed bodyguards,” “poster boy status,” and “a billion devotees.” The animations were done using a technique known as rotoscopy, which had been used by Richard Lintlaker in a feature film

110  Understanding India Figure 4.1: Cricket as Bodily Expression—On the Field

Figure 4.2: Cricket as Bodily Expression—Off the Field

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called Waking Life (2001)—the principal reference for the animated section of the film. So the deep focus on the body changes in this portion of the film, and the cricket players are seen enjoying the stardom and wealth that was achieved through the disciplining of their bodies. The role of the body, thus, changes from being a sight of discipline to a sight of enjoyment, although the voiceover warns us, as mentioned earlier, about the dangers of desiring these rewards that cannot be achieved without dedicated hard work. Bhabha explains that the performative dimension of national identity “introduces a temporality of the ‘in-beween’.”25 He continues to write that “we are confronted with the nation split within itself reflecting the heterogeneity of its population.”26 Here the performative body intervenes within the pedagogical discourse of bodily discipline, which is essential for success, and the body is split like the nation itself. Economic liberalization, as mentioned earlier, was the key event that created this split between a selfless past and materialistic present of the nation. The in-between space is, thus, a zone where the selfless past merges with the materialistic present of the nation, and as explained earlier, the cricket player’s body, like the game of cricket itself, represents the duality of this in-between space. Cricket is, consequently, able to provide a medium of self-expression as explained earlier, since it represents the duality of contemporary Indian identity—sacrificing for the nation and enjoying the rewards as well. The cricket player’s job is to represent the nation, moreover, so cricket creates a seamless connection between the individual and the nation or individual identity and national identity. One can be Indian and experience Indianness, in other words, through the game of cricket. In the Reebok commercial, similarly, the spirit of male chivalry is articulated as Indian. Apart from working as a means of self-expression, the masculinity of these cricket-playing images can also alleviate the anxiety about national heroes becoming too money minded and, thus, letting the nation down. So this television commercial has immense mythic potential, as a marketing tool in a cricket crazy nation where cricket and nationalism usually exist side by side. Following Anthropologist

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Claude Levi-Strauss, I am using the term myth as a narrative that can resolve social contradictions and maintain the healthy existence of society.27 In this case, of course, the resolution of the social contradiction is the same as the alleviation of the anxiety regarding heightened materialism in Indian society. The contradiction, that is, is the conflict between the culture of self-sacrifice that had helped India gain independence from British rule and the increased desire for personal gain that has been a marked feature of India’s national culture since economic liberalization. Cricket is particularly suitable in this regard because it is an arena where sacrifice for the country is easily visible—cricket players achieve their stardom through their exceptional performance for the country. So, the mythic potential of cricket is also useful in perpetuating the ideology of economic liberalization—the ideology that capitalism is beneficial to national development. From this perspective, one can use Semiotician Roland Barthes’ explanation and understand a myth to be a narrative that helps to naturalize a social ideology and make it appear to be the natural truth that is helpful for the greater good of society.28 The power of this myth is evident from its use by Nike during and around the Cricket World Cup in 2011. This campaign, commonly identified with the tagline “bleed blue,” uses the concept of Indian cricket players bleeding the colour blue—the colour of the Indian team’s cricket outfit. The body, once again, is under focus as the dedicated use of the body, for the country, is what leads to the blue blood oozing out. The campaign, moreover, uses player testimonials, to give it their best for the country or to bleed blue, in the form of pledges that warriors make for the group or nation that they are fighting for. Particularly relevant in this context is the work of Marketing Theorist Douglas Holt who writes about the use of myths in contemporary marketing practices. He explains that marketing strategy has been traditionally dominated by two schools of thought. The first group of theorists have recommended that branding be geared towards enhancing mindshare, so that the brand is firmly embedded in the minds of consumers.29

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The second group of theorists have recommended that branding be geared towards enhancing the emotional connect between the brand and consumers.30 Douglas Holt challenges these viewpoints in his book, titled How Brands Become Icons, which asserts that brands become truly valuable—or iconic: [B]ecause customers look to the brand to perform myths that resolve acute anxieties in their lives. Consumers don’t care whether the brand owns adjectives. They care about what the brand accomplishes for their identities.31

The larger recommendation, in other words, is that branding be based on cultural myths that help consumers deal with anxieties, which they may be facing as an individual or collective. The Reebok commercial, as explained, is based on the myth of self-sacrifice leading to the enjoyment of material rewards. The body located in that in-between space reminds the viewer about the need to be prepared for competition. The importance of competitive representations of cricket, as a tool of mythic marketing, is fairly obvious because privatization has enhanced the need to be competitive as there is a lot to gain, materially, by being a winner in contemporary India. The consumers, consequently, are under pressure to perform for themselves and their families, so a brand can perhaps do well by posing as a partner in this competition.32 There is a need, furthermore, for role models like successful cricket players who have already proved themselves as winners. The wide use of India’s most successful batsman, Sachin Tendulkar, as a brand endorser, is an evidence of this need. Identification with successful cricket players is likely to add a competitive element to the consumer’s identity and lower their anxiety about not being competitive enough. The act of consumption, thus, would be a means to access this competitiveness and feel more equipped to be a winner. Cricket, from this perspective, is the ideal sport for use in television commercials, as numerous Indians are familiar with

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it and the fact that India has performed well in cricket at the international level. The climactic moments of an international cricket match, in fact, are a perfect example of the in-between-ness that cricket represents, as already discussed in this chapter. These are the finishing moments of a day of celebratory cricket viewing, on the one hand, and also moments when the competition can be at its fiercest. An Adidas commercial uses this moment and presents the imagined national community33 in the form of viewers across the country watching the final moments of an intensely competitive international cricket match. The commercial comprises a carefully edited sequence of images, which creates a linear narrative that ends, or climaxes, with the victory of the Indian cricket team. Among those watching the game are nuns in a church, an old lady, young men, spectators inside the ground, and a schoolboy who runs back from school to catch a glimpse of the final ball. The situation on the field is equally serious, and a series of close-ups are used to communicate the tension, as well as the fact that one last ball will be bowled to the Indian batsman. As the last ball is being bowled, the television commercial slows down considerably to lengthen the few moments before the climax of the winning stroke. Each frame of film can, thus, literally be seen as the bowler runs and bowls, while the batsman moves his front foot forward to hit the shot. As the bat contacts the ball, the drink spills, nuns look up, the old lady’s tensed face lights up, the speed of the commercial increases, and the music restarts with a more joyful rhythm. The stroke is good enough to win the game and the batsman takes a wicket as a souvenir of victory, which is a common practice among cricket players. Although depicting a tense moment, which is the culmination of a competitive contest, this commercial also shows the Indian viewer’s passion for the game and particularly as it is expressed and performed in front of the television screen during numerous international cricket matches. Cricket, in its mythic role, is thus both a competition and a pastime, and both these aspects of cricket are relevant to consumers in contemporary India.

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Conclusion This discussion of cricket has brought to the fore the ambivalence of how modernity is experienced by citizens of postcolonial nation states. They perform their citizenship almost out of inertia, on the one hand, through institutions like cricket that have been left behind by the former colonizers. It is inertia, I would argue, because the force and structure of these institutions can seem to be continuing a progression that has its origins in the colonial times, as scholars such as Ashish Nandy, Arjun Appadurai, Boria Majumdar, and Ramchandra Guha have explained. These citizens are also innovating new means of expressing their modernity, and cricket plays a role here as well, since it stands at the cusp of the old and the new. Cricket also represents the two extremes of contemporary Indianness–intense dedication and hard work for success and the desire to enjoy the rewards of success to the fullest. Thus, as explained, cricket is the ideal tool to represent contemporary Indian identity. Cricket, in addition, is culturally neutral as it is a language that is spoken across the globe, so bodily expression using cricket can be appropriated by any cricket playing nation and the use of such expression is evident in the Reebok commercial and other commercials discussed in this chapter. As discussed, moreover, cricket has been going through changes that parallel changes, which Indian society has been experiencing as a whole. Participation in cricket, thus, allows Indians to experiences a renewed Indianness that the game itself embodies. Cricket, however, is a male-dominated sport, so discussions related to cricket may be more applicable to Indian men rather than women. Yet women too have experienced some of the social changes discussed in this chapter, as they have been joining the Indian workforce in larger numbers, and they are also consuming more branded products like other Indians, particularly in urban areas. So women might have to deal with the anxiety of not continuing to fulfil their traditional roles of being mothers, sisters, and housewives, rather than professionals. Women may also have to deal with the anxiety of getting accepted into the workforce by male professionals. This suggests that there is an

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opportunity to use mythic marketing34 for socializing women to consumerism or even merely to increase the sale of products to female consumers. Continuing the earlier discussion of this book, I would argue that contemporary female identity, in India, is also a combination of the old and the new. Traditional female roles intermingle with their modern counterparts to create the identities of contemporary Indian women. In the next chapter, I substantiate this argument by discussing roles attributed to women characters within Indian television commercials, and the role played by women whom I met at the film production houses that I visited for this research.

Notes and References   1. Interview 77. Name withheld on request.   2. For more on this anxiety, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994); Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments.   3. Ashish Nandy, The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and Destiny of Games (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2. Arjun Appadurai adds that “to the viewing public, cricket affords the sense of cultural literacy in a world sport (associated with the still-not-erased sense of the technological superiority of the West) and the more diffuse pleasure of association with glamour, cosmopolitanism, and national competitiveness.” Modernity at Large, 112.   4. For a comparison between Indian popular cinema and cricket, see Nandy, Tao of Cricket, 42–51.   5. Ibid., 1.   6. See Boria Majumdar, Cricket in Colonial India, 1780–1947 (New Delhi: Routledge, 2008); Boria Majumdar, Twenty-two Yards to Freedom: A Social History of Indian Cricket (New Delhi: Viking, 2004); Ramchandra Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport (London: Pan MacMillian, 2003). Also see, Mihir Bose, The Magic of Indian Cricket: Cricket and Society in India (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006).   7. For more on the history of cricket in England, see Derek Birley, A Social History of English Cricket (London: Aurum Press, 1999).  8. Nandy, Tao of Cricket, 6.   9. Kimberly Wright, “Advertising National Pride: The Unifying Power of Cricket Fever, Kashmir, and Politics,” Advertising & Society Review 4,

India Batting  117 no. 1, 2003. Accessed 27 May 2004, from http://proxy.library.upenn. edu:8223/journals/advertising_and_society_review/v004/4.1wright. html 10. James Astill, The Great Tamasha: Cricket, Corruption and the Turbulent Rise of Modern India (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014 Forthcoming). 11. Shyam Balasubramanian and Vijay Santhanam, The Business of Cricket: The Story of Sports Marketing in India (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2011). 12. Nandy, Tao of Cricket. 13. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 147–148. 14. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 92. 15. I use the term “totem” as a symbol for a group of consumers, who are Indians in this case. See Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. C. Cosman (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001); Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, ed. and trans. Peter Gay (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989/1950); and Claude Levi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Robert Needham (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1962) for a detailed discussion of totemism across various tribal groups. 16. “The batsman facing the ball does not merely represent his side. For that moment, to all intents and purposes, he is his side. This fundamental relation of the One and the Many, Individual and Social, Individual and Universal, leader and followers, representative and ranks, the part and the whole, is structurally imposed on the players of cricket” (C.L.R. James, Beyond a Boundary [London: Yellow Jersey Press, 2005], 259). 17. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Vintage, 1979). 18. James Mills and Paul Dimeo, “When Gold is Fired It Shines: Sport, the Imagination, and the Body in Colonial and Postcolonial India,” in Sport and Postcolonialism: Global Sports Cultures, eds. John Bale and Mike Cronin (New York, NY: Berg, 2003), 107–122. 19. Boria Majumdar, Cricket in Colonial India; Boria Majumdar, Twenty-two Yards to Freedom. 20. Interview with Kartik Vijay Thyagarajan. 21. Here I borrow the term “mimicry” from Bhabha, Nation and Narration. A mimic of a foreign cricket playing style would be to copy this style while knowing that Indian cricket players can never actually play like these foreign players. 22. Interview 29. Name withheld on request. Among popular culture texts, recent Hindi films—such as Bunty and Babli (2005) and Kaminey (Scoundrels) (2009)—portray this street smartness that can also be seen on Music Television (MTV) India. Also see Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (New York, NY: Blackwell, 1986), for a detailed discussion regarding the paradigm of ethnicity. 23. Interview with Kartik Vijay Thyagarajan. 24. Interview 42. Name withheld on request. 25. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 148.

118  Understanding India 26. Ibid. 27. Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968); Claude Levi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” The Journal of American Folklore 68, no. 270 (1955). 28. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1972). 29. Books that belong to this school of thought include Aaker, Managing Brand Equity; Aaker, Building Strong Brands; Kevin Lane Keller, Strategic Brand Management (New York, NY: Prentice-Hall, 1998); Sergio Zyman, The End of Marketing as We Know It (New York, NY: HarperBusiness, 2000). 30. Books and articles that belong to this school of thought include Scott Bedbury and Stephen Fenichell, A New Brand World (New York, NY: Viking Penguin, 2000); Marc Gobe, Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm For Connecting Brands to People (New York, NY: Allworth Press, 2001); Susan Fournier, “Consumers and Their Brands: Developing Relationship Theory in Consumer Research,” Journal of Consumer Research 24, no. 4 (1998): 343–374. 31. Douglas B. Holt, How Brands Become Icons: Principles of Cultural Branding (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2004), 111. Also see Julien Cayla and Eric J. Arnould, “A Cultural Approach to Branding in the Global Marketplace,” Journal of International Marketing 16, no. 4 (2008): 88–114. 32. See Chattopadhyay, “Batting and Buying.” 33. Anderson, Imagined Communities. 34. Holt, Brands Become Icons.

5 Feminine India

“Look people are very comfortable with the familiar. Hindi movies have the same plot. Actors change, there are new songs, the look changes, but the plot remains the same. So every time during the briefing session every client says that I want some path breaking stuff, something new, but then the advertising agency team develop cold feet.” Creative Director1

Introduction The Indian independence movement was largely male driven, so the individuals who are thanked and worshipped for freeing the country from British rule are mostly men like Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Yet, as many readers would be aware, one of post-independent India’s most dynamic leaders was a woman, Indira Gandhi, who was the Prime Minister of the country for more than a decade. While the domain of Indian sports, similarly, has been largely dominated by men for over a century, women such as the sprinter P.T. Usha,2 the tennis player Sania Mirza,3 and the badminton player Saina Nehwal,4 have made India proud at international competitions.5 The Indian women’s cricket team,6 too, has performed quite well at the international level, although Indian advertisers continue to primarily use male cricket players as they are significantly more popular than their female counterparts.7

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As a means of self-expression, moreover, male cricket perhaps works better in a society that continues to be male driven. Female presence in the Indian workforce, however, is on the rise8 as mentioned in the previous chapter. A wonderful testimony of this phenomenon is a recent book, by Janaki Krishnan, on the career stories of a group of successful Indian women entrepreneurs.9 This increases the opportunity to market, to female consumers, products as items that can reduce various anxieties related to establishing one’s presence in the public sphere.10 A women’s talcum powder brand, Pond’s, in fact, had utilized this opportunity to depict the use of their powder when going to appear for a job interview. This opportunity can also be utilized by using female celebrities as brand endorsers, as I noticed during my fieldwork and later during my stay in India as a market research professional. This chapter is not only about such representations of women within television commercials, but it is also about the presence and influence of women within the television commercial production industry. These topics are relevant to this chapter because both the representation of women and the roles they play in the television commercial production industry reflect the dialectic—between an old and new Indian identity—that this book is focused on. This dialectic can also be rephrased as a hypothesis that contemporary female identity in India derives from a combination of traditional and modern female roles. My hypothesis is supported by the writings of Cultural Anthropologists Shoma Munshi and Susan Dewey, who explain using empirical data that traditional power structures of Indian society coexist with the new move to create the modern Indian woman.11 Feminist Scholar Jyoti Puri, similarly, writing about her own younger days, explains “while it was important that we not be too traditional by embodying what were consider retrograde traditions—such as marrying too early or lacking self-ambition altogether—it was equally important that we become neither too modern nor too westernized.”12 Traditional patriarchal power structures can be attributed to be responsible for this phenomenon, as these might be barring the unbridled expression of female independence.

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Feminist Scholar Patricia Uberoi’s work enhances our understanding in this regard, as she writes about how the existing patriarchal power structures of Indian society can conflict with heightened social participation of women and the expression of female independence and feminine desire.13 In this context, Cultural Anthropologist Purnima Mankekar explains that Indian women view television teleserials to reduce the pressures of these patriarchal power structures and this ethnography suggests that emancipatory narratives in television commercials can be useful for targeting such a female audience.14 Even during the colonial struggle, as Political Anthropologist Partha Chatterjee writes, India’s anti-colonial nationalism had relegated the issue of women’s modernization to an inner domain, while the political struggle for freedom carried on in the outer domain. This is because “reforms that touch upon what is considered the inner essence of the identity of the community can be legitimately carried out only by the community itself, not by the state.”15 Applied to contemporary India, this can be interpreted as a guarded acceptance of feminism or the position that feminism is considered to be legitimate as long as it stays within the acceptable limits of national culture. Wording it differently, one can also argue that this is an outcome of being reluctant to change what is familiar in the context of female representation and the overall social role of women.

The Alpha Female The possibility of writing about women first occurred to me, when I was observing the filming of a television commercial featuring Kajol, who was, at the time, one of the leading actresses of the Mumbai based Hindi film industry. This was a commercial for Parle Digestive Marie, a brand of digestive biscuits that was being launched across India.16 To make the launch sensational, the advertising agency—Everest Brand Solutions—had scripted the commercial to be showing a commando force going around town and threatening

122  Understanding India Figures 5.1 and 5.2: Digestive Marie: The Alpha Female

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consumers to switch from ordinary biscuits to these newly launched digestive biscuits. The Hindi film actress, Kajol, who had been signed on as the brand ambassador, was playing the role of the head of this commando force. The film production house was left with the task of dressing up this commando force, since art direction is usually their responsibility even though the advertising agency might contribute ideas in this regard. This was an important task, and particularly in this case because the biscuit launch had to be sensational and the visual appearance of the commando force would play an important role in creating this impact. Apart from being trendy, moreover, the commando force had to look physically capable and, once again, the art direction had to be done with this combination in mind. The script had been created for a strong female character to play the lead role, as head of the commando force, and the film production house was able to create a visual appearance for this character by borrowing from a Hollywood produced film, Lara Croft (2001), starring Angelina Jolie. Not only was the all leather and black outfit borrowed from this film, the Hindi film actress, Kajol, also performed physical stunts that were drawn from this film. These elements enhanced the physical presence of the actress, and being quite unusual within female characterizations of Hindi films they added novelty to the commercial and helped to sensationalize the brand. I had walked into the studio, on the first day of the film shoot, quite oblivious regarding the content of the commercial. The Assistant Director, Prakash Singh,* had informed me about their schedule for this production, since I had left my phone number after observing the editing of a commercial that they had filmed in Rome. While I recognized the actress immediately and felt somewhat stiff about being in the same studio as such a famous celebrity, my respect for her abilities increased immediately as I could see how easily she performed the various stunts that I associated with violent films in both English and Hindi. She was also able to physically overshadow her four assistants, who were all well-built men casted carefully *Real name withheld on request.

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for a physically demanding role, and “undermine conventional understandings of the female body.”17 The appearance of these men, incidentally, had been modelled on another Hollywood film, Matrix (1999), so the commercial looked quite foreign due to the influence of two blockbuster Hollywood films. Still in the initial stages of my fieldwork, I was startled to realize that Americanness could be so easily manufactured in a shabby Mumbai studio using an actress who had recently emerged from post-pregnancy rehabilitation. Such skills were among the reasons, I later realized, why so many Indian television commercial directors were so confident about their ability to compete with the rest of the world. This particular participant observation exercise was useful for other reasons as well. The television commercial emphasized the consumer socialization process by actually depicting an effort to forcefully change the consumer’s biscuit eating habit. The consumer socialization was led, moreover, by an alpha female who was confidently threatening the consumer if they did not change to the digestive biscuit brand being launched. The character’s attitude and demeanour was hardly motherly, yet there was a strange similarity to the way mothers teach their children to eat the right products. This exaggerated depiction of the socialization process, moreover, to me seemed to be a parody of how the discourse of consumerism influences consumers to purchase more products. Consumer socialization, in reality, is rarely exaggerated and neither are powerful women characters seen at the forefront of this endeavour. Among Indian television commercials, one of the initial depictions of the alpha female occurred in the nineteen eighties in a commercial for a brand of washing detergent, Surf. In this commercial, the protagonist (Lalitaji) is a housewife who is out shopping for the house and she chooses the brand of detergent being advertised. Although far less aggressive than the lead role of the digestive biscuit commercial, she nevertheless comes across as a strong woman because she talks straight at the camera, she expresses her opinions strongly, and she is not dressed up like women usually

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are in a television commercial, so this lack of finesse, by default, adds to the strength of her character because it reduces her overall femininity. The Director, Ashu Dutt,† explained that she had spent a year in the U.S. before returning to India and then getting the opportunity to work on this television commercial. While in the U.S., Ashu had watched a lot of television commercials that were extremely straightforward and ordinary in appearance,18 because they did not make any effort at polishing the overall look like many Indian television commercials did during those days. It was this style she had tried to replicate while filming this washing detergent commercial. What emerged, perhaps inadvertently, was one of the most popular female television commercial protagonists in the history of Indian advertising. As may be obvious, this commercial also made the Director extremely famous in the industry. This was an era when the Indian economy had still not been liberalized, so consumerism was less rampant and, primarily due to restrictions on imports and foreign investments, the economy was dominated by Indian products. In comparison to the first decade of the twenty first century, thus, women were far less visible outside the domestic sphere. Relatively less aggressive characterizations of women, consequently, fitted into the definition of an alpha woman within the Indian context. The Parle Digestive Marie commercial’s alpha female character, although unusual in contemporary Indian television commercials, suggests, moreover, that larger than life women can be used for the Indian market. For a product launch that has to be made sensational, an exaggerated display of aesthetics or emotions is probably ideal for the task at hand. The digestive biscuit commercial was, indeed, exaggerated and sensational and the alpha female character was not realistic. In the washing detergent commercial, discussed earlier, the alpha female character’s appearance may be realistic but her demeanour is similarly exaggerated. †

Real name withheld on request.

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Such exaggerated depictions of strong women can be found in Hindu mythology,19 in the form of Goddess Kali and Goddess Durga who are two incarnations of the same deity, Goddess Parvati, the wife of Lord Shiva who is part of the trinity of Hinduism—Lord Brahma (the creator), Lord Vishnu (the maintainer or preserver), and Lord Shiva (the destroyer or transformer). In Hinduism, moreover, as many readers would be aware, idol worship is extremely important and this involves a visual embrace or darsan of the deity: “they are a focal point of worship, a lens for darshana, and for a time they are imbued with the full presence and power of the Divine.”20 Art Historian Christopher Pinney terms this “embodied corpothetics” or a form of engagement that involves the body.21 Bodily engagement also blends well with the heightened presence created by exaggerated depictions, as was the case with the leading women in the digestive biscuit and washing detergent commercials. One could, thus, argue that these commercials were in tune with the Hindu visual culture that is dominant in India, as Cultural Anthropologist Shoma Munshi explains in her book about the Indian television soap operas.22 Yet Hinduism also includes numerous female characters that are beautiful but relatively less aggressive. The most famous example is Queen Sita who was kidnapped by the Demon Ravana and then rescued by her husband Lord Ram in the Hindu epic Ramayana. The entire Ramayana had been telecasted, as a television serial, on Indian television about twenty years ago,23 and this version of femininity continues to feature on Indian television through television serials and popular cinema. Television commercials are no exception in this regard, although the trend might be on the way down. During my fieldwork, I rarely met women who were as traditional and submissive as the stereotypical Hindu housewife, perhaps modelled on Queen Sita’s character, but I came across what I would argue is a modernized version of the Ram–Sita paradigm. In this version, the modern Lord Ram is usually the owner and principal film director of a production house and the modern Queen Sita is his wife who plays the

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role of the executive producer of this production house. Unlike the original Ramayana, however, there is no forest exile in this modern version of the epic, and the couple struggles against odds to run their company successfully rather than fighting Demon Ravana.

The Female Assistant The television commercial director, as Lord Ram, plays a role in narrating a particular kind of story; a story that is short yet loaded with immense communicative potential; a story that has to communicate, using visuals and words, within merely a minute or less; a story that has to compete with other commercials, and the viewer’s ability to switch the channel or do something else, for the viewer’s attention and appreciation; a story that should ideally convert into an action of the viewer purchasing the product or service being advertised. This story telling endeavour highlights the challenges of the television commercial director’s work, and it illustrates the reasons for successful television commercial directors being in such high demand. This demand also extends to the television commercial director’s elevation to a position of stardom, as the commercial’s unseen hero, at least within the production house and the television commercial production industry. These directors operate on a difficult terrain, moreover, and they have to repeatedly prove their creative abilities to acquire projects in an extremely competitive industry. It is an industry where there are few defined rules regarding how projects are allotted to particular television commercial directors and their film production houses. Many of these organizations are relatively small in size with around five to ten full-time employees and more than half of these employees could be in their twenties and working in only their first or second full-time job. In such a context, thus, the director often has to be the face of the organization as their individual skills and experience may be all that the organization can depend on to be commissioned new projects.

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The director’s Lord Ram like persona emerges from this important role that they play in driving forward the film production house. His Sita, moreover, as I observed during my fieldwork, is often the executive producer of the production house. In her modern avatar, Queen Sita is no longer within the forest hut where she plays the role of the chief cook and housekeeper. Instead, she is running the show behind the scenes while her husband is busy planning the camera placements, shots, and edits, which create the final television commercial. Queen Sita, thus, emerges as the assistant in this couple and one of her key roles is to make sure that her husband’s work flows smoothly. In some cases, merely a professional relationship could create this director–executive producer pair that features a man and a woman respectively. The Ram–Sita roles remain, as explained, but the couple is not married and they lead separate lives outside the work space. The relevant issue in the context of this chapter, however, is that the woman plays the role of the assistant who provides support to the director. At a film production house that I visited in Bandra, Mumbai, a woman named Jharna Sanyal‡ managed the productionrelated operations and the art direction of commercials that were directed by the male co-owners, Amal Maitra§ and Mrinal Ghosh,|| who were both graduates of the esteemed National Institute of Design (NID) based in Ahmedabad. Jharna lacked such a flamboyant education and she neither appeared to be getting much recognition from clients for possessing the ability to add creative value to a project. Yet she had worked on a number of difficult projects that required her expertise as both an executive producer and an art director. This includes a film shoot in Romania where Jharna flew down with one of the directors, and they had to work with a local crew who had extremely poor English skills. At an earlier job, she had art directed a 360 degree set that was supposed to depict a basketball court set amidst an urban residential area. Real name withheld on request. Real name withheld on request. || Real name withheld on request. ‡

§

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The quality of the set was so good that numerous viewers had asked the crew whether they had flown to a foreign location to film the commercial. The jewel in Jharna’s crown, so to speak, was a set of television commercials that copied Charlie Chaplin films and these had to be art directed with extreme care, in order to create an authentic Chaplin look. She was obviously proud of these projects and a sense of accomplishment laced her words as she spoke. Nevertheless, not being either the owner or one of the directors of this production house, Jharna was primarily playing the role of being an assistant to the directors. During a few of my visits I noticed, for example, that she was in the office before the directors arrived and Jharna was ready with production plans for a particular project. This readiness was a sign, I would argue, of being an efficient assistant and being as morally upright and dutiful as Queen Sita. Women of a similar nature were visible across many of my fieldwork locations. Due to the meticulous planning and patience required for filmmaking work, such women played an important role in the production house that they were working for. Since filmmaking is fundamentally a creative endeavour, moreover, the organization and planning required one to be creatively inclined as well, and many of these women possessed this duality that helped them get noticed in their work. If an executive producer, for example, had to supervise the tailor who was making costumes, then he or she would have to, ideally, understand why the director had asked for a certain kind of costume for a particular character. The question that arose in my mind, however, was why were so many women, and particularly those with previous experience in advertising, theatre, and filmmaking, playing roles—associated with positions such as executive producer and set designer—that effectively made them subordinates to the director who was in-charge of the various faculties of the film production house. The aspiration to become the director was not as evident and neither were female television commercial directors nearly as visible as their male counterparts. The position of assistant director, in fact, although also for someone who is subordinate to the director, is typically taken up by

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individuals who are keen on getting groomed to become the director. The number of male, as compared to female, assistant directors seemed to be much higher. One answer could be that the woman’s housekeeping role, in the domestic sphere, naturally transfers to the production management domain that has a large number of women as executive producers. Some of these women, as already mentioned, are married to the directors of their production houses, so the executive producer role becomes the managerial counterpart to the more creative emphasis of film direction. In other organizations, senior women choose the production management domain and reach the level of executive producer after a series of successful filmmaking projects. This trend, however, could be fast changing as more women join filmmaking schools and learn film direction and cinematography. Relevant in this context is Cultural Anthropologist Jean Renshaw’s study on Japanese women managers, Kimono in the Boardroom, because he discusses the increasing presence of Japanese women as managers in Japanese corporations. Jean explains, moreover, that many male corporate professionals may not recognize the increase in female presence within what they consider to be a firmly masculine domain. One such Japanese male interviewee, thus, remarked that Japanese women are yet to establish themselves as capable managers, and he refused to recognize his wife’s managerial skills although she was the President of one of their family businesses.24 While the situation in India may not be identical, this study on Japan suggests that the phenomenon of Indian women assisting male directors of film production houses may be part of a larger trend, of women establishing themselves as capable managers within India’s corporate domain.25 Whereas this trend can be read as a sign of Indian modernization, and there is historical evidence to demonstrate the role played by women as icons of modernity,26 one could also argue that the women of Indian film production houses have made the move of gaining recognition by working within the existing gender hierarchies of Indian society rather than

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breaking away from it completely. Cultural Anthropologist Saba Mahmood has explained through her study of Islamist politics in Egyptian society that female agency can be constructed within the power structures that constitute female identity within a Muslim society. Egyptian women, that is, were actively involved in a male-dominated Mosque community while also nurturing themselves to become independent subjects within the existing socio-political structure of Egypt.27 As agents of modernization, women are similarly caught between representing modernity—through the use of branded products, for example—and maintaining certain established protocols regarding the national culture of the country they are representing and the gender boundaries that are considered proper. In India, in the nineteen thirties, for example, there was a debate regarding the appropriateness of the consumptionoriented modern woman to the non-violent freedom movement raging in the country at the time. In Indian films, thus, from the nineteen forties there was a noticeable shift to greater representation of women characters that fit into the mould of being a good Indian wife, mother, and sister rather than the outgoing, culturally heterogeneous, and at times morally questionable modern woman of earlier decades.28 In Africa, in a comparative colonial context, consumption was seen as a means through which women could experience agency, but a clear divide existed between proper and improper women within the realm of consumerism. Proper women exhibited appropriate behaviour as sanctioned by religious institutions, and carried out their duties as mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters even though they were active consumers as well, while those considered improper were prone to transgression of social norms.29 Due to such labelling, as Media Anthropologist Tejaswini Ganti explains, heroines working in the Mumbai based Hindi film industry are often careful to assert that they have been educated properly and their families do not belong to the stereotypical illiterate, moneyed, and debauched film fraternity.30 Such labelling impacts television commercial producers as well, since they have to be careful about the female

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representations that they construct on the television screen. The proverbial female model, one of the most sensational characters associated with advertising and an icon of modernity, should ideally maintain the established norms of the culture being targeted by the advertisement. A television commercial director# in Mumbai, for example, who produces commercials for the Middle East market, explained how Muslim norms have to be followed while filming women in Dubai where he works regularly.

The Female Model Dressing up women (or undressing them in a beautiful way) is among the key reasons that women have been objectified for the pleasure of the male gaze, as the Feminist Film Theorist Laura Mulvey argued in a now famous article.31 Feminists across the world have protested against this practice since the nineteen sixties when the first wave of protests erupted in the U.S.32 In the case of Indian television commercials, as a female co-owner and executive producer** of a production house explained, one effect of feminism could have been an increase in the acceptance of female models who look attractive but ordinary rather than being overtly made up. She continued that, in comparison, countries like Bangladesh had not reached this stage yet and they still preferred artificially dressed up women for their television commercials. The attractiveness of female faces, nevertheless, continues to be an important criterion for choosing women as caste members for television commercials produced in India. This is because women, as female models, continue to contribute to the advertising aesthetic and the overall appeal of the product through their physical beauty. While planning the SBI Mutual Fund commercial, for example, which was discussed in Chapter 3, the Creative Director had requested that the car breakdown Name withheld on request. **Name withheld on request. #

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commercial feature a good-looking woman. Her attractiveness would make the script come alive, he believed, because it would add credibility to the narrative about males passing by wanting to help the woman whose car has broken down. In a jewellery commercial similarly, a famous fashion model†† was used and I was fortunate enough to observe the post-production work done on this commercial. This television commercial’s narrative, in fact, emphasizes the beauty of the female protagonist because a man passing by comments that she is extremely beautiful. So the woman gets framed as an object to be admired. During the colour correction and editing done on the commercial, thus, the Director‡‡ focused on heightening the aesthetic appeal of the woman without compromising on her respectability. The liberalization of the Indian economy has been recognized to have influenced the discursive construction of female beauty due to the proliferation of the beauty industry. A related phenomenon is that of female models grooming themselves as per the norms of global beauty pageants, in Indian cities like Mumbai and New Delhi, across multiple facets that include both physical and mental abilities.33 As stunningly beautiful female images circulate across various media channels, Cultural Anthropologist Shoma Munshi explains, there is a greater need to meet up to higher standards of beauty that adds to India’s new and shining face to be paraded in front of the rest of the world.34 The need for female attractiveness is heightened while advertising beauty care products, which are meant to make the user more beautiful. As expected, many such products are endorsed by Hindi film actresses who are both beautiful and popular. Unknown faces or models are also used, in addition, and they are less expensive in comparison to a well-known actress. Over the course of the fieldwork I realized, moreover, that it is rarely enough to only use an attractive, even if popular, face in a television commercial. Given the criteria that are used during numerous screen testing events, which I observed, it Name withheld on request. Name withheld on request.

†† ‡‡

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was evident that it is also important to fit this face within a storyline, choose women who can act out a particular role demanded by a script, and also choose women who have facial features that fit the demographic profile of the role that they are being slotted to play. Being beautiful, in other words, is not enough and, as the norms of global beauty pageants also suggests, the female model offers more than just a face; she also offers a personality, a reputation, and an ability to strengthen the message that the television commercial intends to communicate. These get reflected in the model’s work, in a fashion show or a television commercial. Certain television commercials that are ostensibly involved with physical beauty, similarly, might end up focusing on other aspects of the female model as well. In a recent jewellery commercial for Tanishq Mia, for example, the focus is on the busy professional life of a working woman who might be attractive, but her attractiveness is only one of many features that her character lends to the jewellery brand being advertised. Hair oil commercials, similarly, while displaying good-looking hair, are known to focus on mother– daughter relationships, as was the case with some of the hair oil commercials that I discussed with directors during my fieldwork in India. The importance of the mother–daughter relationship derives from the role that has been traditionally played by mothers in grooming their daughter’s hair care habits.

Conclusion As the name of the well-known Hindi movie, Mother India (1957), suggests, the Indian nation has been traditionally seen as a mother, and the commonly used term ‘Bharat Mata’ reveals the same. The importance of motherly female representations in India is also evident in feminist Scholar Patricia Uberoi’s discussion of calendar art and Hindi movies. Through her discussion of calendar art, Uberoi demonstrates, moreover,

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how a wide range of female images have been used by calendar artists as “signifiers of the national society.”35 She also argues, in the same context, that Hindu polytheism allows for multiple representations of female divinity. Partly due to this phenomenon, Uberoi continues, calendar art contains a plurality of representations of femininity and gender relations. In this chapter, I have discussed a plurality of aspects associated with female identity in contemporary India. My discussion has drawn on observations of television commercial production, interactions with female professionals involved with television commercial production, and representations of women in television commercials produced during and around the time I conducted fieldwork in India. The discussion was aimed at demonstrating the dialectic between an old and a new Indian identity in the context of femininity in contemporary India. The alpha female brings to the forefront an aspect of female identity that is perhaps least expected in contemporary India, given the submissive roles traditionally assigned to Indian women, although Hindu mythology comprises a combination of aggressive and submissive female characters as explained earlier. Even though unexpected, the alpha female is a reality in contemporary India and some might argue that this archetype was evident thirty years ago due to the presence of authoritarian female leaders like Indira Gandhi. The female assistant is more attuned to the nurturing role assumed by traditional Indian housewives. Yet the female assistant can also be considered a pseudonym for a highly efficient manager, who is in control of the logistics of television commercial production. Unable to assert her authority completely, she plays the part of an assistant as observed during my visits to film production houses. The female assistant is, thus, well-suited to embodying the dialectic of an old and new Indian identity as she is both modern and traditional while playing her role. The female model, finally, demonstrates the changes in attitude towards female beauty and the changes in the criteria that make a woman desirable. Once again, the female model embodies the dialectic of an old and new Indian identity as her

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purely physical beauty—an element of traditional beauty— co-exists with other attributes such as her personality and intellect that can be considered to be elements of modern beauty. The next chapter concludes this book by merging discussions from various sections of the book. At the end of the chapter, I predict that the old and new Indian identities, which were discussed throughout the book, will synthesize into a new Indianness that will be global in scope but Indian in essence.

Notes and References  1. Interview 21. Name withheld on request.   2. P.T. Usha participated in various international track and field events during the nineteen eighties. At the New Delhi Asiad, she won two silver medals; at the Kuwait Asian track and field championships, she won a gold medal; and at the Los Angeles Olympics, she narrowly missed the bronze medal in the 400 metre hurdles. As reported on the web site Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, accessed 25 April 2012, from http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Usha   3. Sania Mirza is the first Indian to enter the top thirty of the World Tennis Association’s (WTA) singles ranking and the top ten of their double rankings. In 2011, she reached the women’s doubles finals at the French Open and the women’s doubles semi-finals at the Wimbledon Championships. As reported on the web site Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, accessed 25 April 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Sania_Mirza   4. Saina Nehwal is the first Indian woman to reach the semi-finals of the prestigious All England Super Series, in 2010, she won the Singapore Super Series and the Swiss Open Grand Prix, and she won the women’s badminton singles gold medal at the 2010 Commonwealth Games held in New Delhi. She has been ranked as high as number three in the Badminton World Federation’s (BWF) women’s singles rankings. As reported on the web site Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, accessed 25 April 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saina_Nehwal   5. Particularly relevant in this context is a recent film, Chak De! India (Come on India) (2007), which shows the Indian women’s hockey team winning the World Cup after their coach puts together a team and trains them under trying circumstances. The movie, while thoroughly nationalistic, has a strong feminist subtext because of the depiction of a group of women representing the country and winning a championship.   6. The Indian women’s cricket team has won four Asia Cups; they have reached the finals of the World Cup once; they reached the semi-finals

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  7.

  8.

  9.

10.

twice; and they reached the semi-finals of the Women’s Twenty20 World Cup on two occasions. As reported on the web site Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, accessed 25 April 2012, from http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Indian_women%27s_cricket_team Perhaps the first significant attempt to commercialize Indian women’s cricket is a fitness DVD being created by the current women’s cricket team captain, Anjum Chopra. She was recently quoted as explaining that this DVD might increase interest in women’s cricket, among Indians. She also mentioned, while discussing this DVD, that Indian women’s and men’s cricket cannot be compared as the former need to improve a lot. See Dibyajyoti Chaudhuri, “It’s Very Unfair to Draw Comparisons: Anjum Chopra,” reported in Times of India Online, 2 April 2012, accessed 25 April 2012, from http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/cricket/ women-cricket/news/Its-very-unfair-to-draw-comparisons-AnjumChopra/articleshow/12502816.cms. For a discussion of Indian women’s interest in cricket see a two part article in the online magazine, The Young India. Kartikey Sehgal, “Cricket and the Indian Woman–Part One and Part Two,” reported in The Young India, accessed 25 April 2012, from http://theyoungindia.com/2009/02/14/cricket-and-the-indian-womanpart-one/and http://theyoungindia.com/2009/02/18/cricket-and-theindian-woman-part-two/ For more on this issue see “India’s Female Workforce Grows,” reported in Rediff India Abroad, 5 December 2006, accessed 25 April 2012, from http://www.rediff.com/money/2006/dec/05women.htm; “Women at Top @ Work: India 30 on List,” reported in Indian Express Online, 5 March 2012, accessed 25 April 2012, from http://www.indianexpress. com/news/women-at-top-work-india-30th-on-list/920411/0; Surjit S. Bhalla and Ravinder Kaur, “Labor Force Participation of Women in India: Some Facts, Some Queries,” LSE Asia Research Centre Working Paper, 40. Janaki Krishnan, Breaking Barriers: Success Stories of India’s Leading Businesswomen (Mumbai: Jaico Publishing House, 2013). For an overview of the Feminist Movement in India, see Maitrayee Chaudhuri ed., Feminism in India (London: Zed Books, 2005). Also see Ania Loomba and Ritty A. Lukose eds., South Asian Feminisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Srilar Roy ed., New South Asian Feminisms: Paradoxes and Possibilities (London: Zed Books, 2012). For a history of the emergence of feminism in India, see Padma A. Anagol, The Emergence of Feminism in India, 1850–1920 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005). For a discussion of how the near absence of female athletes in American popular culture and marketing has undergone an amazing reversal over the last twenty years, see Leslie Heywood and Shari L. Dworkin, Built to Win: The Female Athlete as Cultural Icon (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Also see in this context, Jennifer Hargreaves, The Heroines of Sport: Politics of Difference and Identity (London: Routledge, 2001).

138  Understanding India 11. Susan Dewey, Making Miss India Miss World: Constructing Gender, Power, and the Nation in Post-liberalization India (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008); Shoma Munshi, “Introduction,” in Images of the Modern Woman in Asia: Global Media, Local Meaning, ed. Shoma Munshi (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2001), 1–16. Also see Shoma Munshi, “Wife/Mother/Daughter-in-Law: Multiple Avatars of the Homemaker in 1990s Indian Advertising,” Media Culture Society, 20, no. 4 (1998): 573–591. 12. Jyoti Puri, Woman, Body, Desire in Post-colonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), x. 13. Uberoi, Freedom and Destiny. Also see, Patricia Uberoi, “Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Indian Calendar Art,” Economic and Political Weekly, 25, no. 17 (1990): WS41–WS48. 14. Mankekar, Screening Culture. 15. Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, 134. 16. Thanks to Mr Mayank Shah, Group Product Manager for Parle Products Pvt. Ltd for giving me permission to use images from this Parle Digestive Marie commercial. Thanks to Ms Siddhi Shah, Business Director at Everest Brand Solutions and Mr Dhunji Wadia, President at Everest Brand Solutions for speaking to Parle Products Pvt. Ltd on my behalf. 17. Helen W. Kennedy, Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberimbo? available online, accessed 26 April 2012, from http://www.gamestudies.org/0202/ kennedy 18. There is a distinct similarity between this style of television commercial production and the cinema direct and cinema vérité style of filmmaking; both of these are filmmaking styles that move away from the tradition of planning and staging shots through a certain kind of lighting and camera movement among other techniques. The cinema direct style, in fact, is a relatively more raw form of filmmaking used primarily for documentaries that try to capture reality in its authentic form, with minimal camera movement, while the cinema vérité style tends to use cinematographic techniques more often. Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2000), 58–59. 19. See, for example, Tracy Pintchman, The Rise of the Goddess in the Hindu Tradition (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994); Kathleen M. Erndl, Victory to the Mother: The Hindu Goddess of Northwest India in Myth, Ritual, and Symbol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); David Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986). 20. Diana L. Eck, Banaras: City of Light (New Delhi: Penguin, 1983), 110. 21. Christopher Pinney, “‘A Secret of Their Own Country’: Or, How Indian Nationalism Made Itself Irrefutable,” in Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India, ed. Sumathy Ramaswamy (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2003), 113–150.

Feminine India  139 22. Munshi, Prime Time Soap Operas. Munshi connects the powerful women characters to the notion of Shakti or divine cosmic energy in its female form. For more, see Cybelle Shattuck, Hinduism (London: Routledge, 1999) and Kinsley, Hindu Goddesses. 23. See Rajagopal, Politics after Nationalism and Mankekar, Screening Culture. 24. Jean R. Renshaw, Kimono in the Boardroom: The Invisible Evolution of Japanese Women Managers (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999). 25. As a Market Research Professional in an Indian company that was owned by women, I observed Indian women working in extremely important and powerful positions. Yet both the Indian advertising and market research industries are dominated by men. 26. Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong, and Tani E. Barlow, eds. The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 27. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Also see, Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. and trans. Colin Gordon (New York, NY: Pantheon, 2005), 109–33; Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, eds. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 208–226; Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993); Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). 28. Priti Ramamurthy, “All Consuming Nationalism: The Indian Modern Girl in the 1920s and 1930s,” in The Modern Girl around the World, eds. Alys Eve Weinbaum et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 147–173. A reverse trend occurred at the turn of the millennium, as song and dance sequences that were earlier performed by the so called vamp, a morally questionable female character, started being performed by the film’s heroine who could also be the model housewife in the same film. See Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema. 29. Timothy Burke, “The Modern Girl and Commodity Culture,” in The Modern Girl around the World, eds. Alys Eve Weinbaum et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 362–370; Burke, Lifebuoy Men. 30. Ganti, Producing Bollywood. 31. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. 32. See About.Com: Women’s History, available online, accessed 2 May 2012, from http://womenshistory.about.com/od/feminism/tp/feminist_ protests.htm; also relevant in this regard are the protests by feminist groups before the 1996 Miss World Contest held in Bangalore—see,

140  Understanding India for example, “Beauty Pageants in India Becomes a Contest of Wills,” reported in CNN World Online, 17 November 1996, accessed 2 May 2012, from http://articles.cnn.com/1996-11-17/world/9611_17_miss. world_1_contest-beauty-pageant-activists?_s=PM:WORLD; and Radhika Parameswaran, “Global Media Events in India: Contests over Beauty, Gender and Nation,” Journalism and Communication Monographs 3, No. 2 (2001). 33. Dewey, Making Miss India Miss World. 34. Shoma Munshi, “A Perfect 10: ‘Modern and Indian’: Representations of the body in beauty pageants and the visual media in contemporary India,” in Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Postcolonial India, eds. James H. Mills and Satadru Sen (London, UK: Anthem Press, 2004), 162–182. 35. Uberoi, Freedom and Destiny, 62.

6 Consuming India

“The pack shot or product shot is most important, I would say, and we also give importance to the good looking shots for the sake of the opulence of the commercial.” Assistant Director1

Introduction This book, while focusing on television commercial production, has shed light on how these commercials were used as tools of consumer socialization during a phase when the Indian economy was experiencing the impact of economic liberalization. The analysis of the production process has, thus, highlighted various cinematic techniques that are used to communicate the message that the television commercial intends to send out to the audience. Readers interested in visual communication will, perhaps, most appreciate this aspect of the book. Apart from visual communication, this book has also analysed Indian identity as seen through the lens of the television commercials discussed in this book. Being focused on the production of television commercials, moreover, the analysis attempted to link the director’s vision of Indian identity with key production decisions. One legitimate criticism that this study, thus, suffers from is the use of a non-representative sample to comment on

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phenomena about such a large country like India. Neither the directors and other respondents, in other words, nor the television commercials that were analysed were representative of either India or all the television commercials that are produced in the country. In my own defence, I would like to assert, however, that the objective of this study was to use my observations and interviews to comment on contemporary India, as I saw it. So the goal was to create a narrative that emerged from my journey through India and the exemplar television commercials, which I closely observed being produced. These television commercials and the associated ethnographic narrative bring up issues that are pertinent to India, which has recently experienced economic liberalization. Lack of representativeness may have omitted certain issues, but this does not take away from the insights that have been generated nevertheless. By sharing my story, I hope to have made my reader more aware of certain aspects of twenty first century India apart from communicating key details of how television commercials are produced in India.

Visual Representation and Culture The Indian national imaginary has been traditionally represented by cinema, which is perhaps the only medium, in a land of high illiteracy, to be simultaneously understood by the elite and rural consumers. “Cinema performs the ‘national’ and becomes the impersonation of Indian national identity,” writes film scholar Ranjani Mazumdar, drawing from the work of fellow film scholar Sumita Chakravarty.2 As the nation has changed, over the course of the sixty odd years of independence, so has Indian cinema. The representation of non-resident Indians has gradually increased, for example, as these Indians have grown into a sizeable community of consumers who purchase Indian cultural products and also contribute to the country’s economic power and global reputation.3

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Indian advertising has changed as well. Over the course of the fieldwork for this study, I learnt that it has become more mass oriented as the country’s purchasing power has increased and the mass consumption of products has become more prevalent. Cultural critic Theodore Adorno’s description of the mass audience in Europe seems to be an apt description of the Indian situation as well: Huge strata of the population formerly unacquainted with art have become cultural “consumers.” Modern audiences, although less capable of the artistic sublimation bred by tradition, have become shrewder in their demands for perfection of technique and for reliability of information, as well as in their desire for “services”; and they have become more convinced of the consumers’ potential power over the producer, no matter whether this power is actually wielded.4

Due to the heightened competitive spirit of the country, moreover, Indian advertisers can easily link their brands or products to a winning situation, happy outcome, and successful life through the narratives of advertisements. This is not surprising, since advertisements have been known to idealize consumerism and also create an appearance of harmony that hides the disenchantments of a capitalist society.5 Yet, as readers may be aware, advertisers are dependent on market research data that informs them about issues such as consumer’s attitudes and needs. They, thus, usually cannot randomly build narratives that capitalize on the existing pulse of the nation or promise the consumer happiness of a certain kind due to the consumption of a product or association with a brand. There is, in other words, a rationale behind many of the strategic decisions taken by advertisers, and the campaigns discussed in this book should have made this clear as well. These strategic decisions also shape the use of cinematic tools that are implemented for the production of television commercials, as also explained in this book. While the cinematic styles of television commercials may not exactly replicate established cinematic styles, such as the ones outlined in Chapter 1, techniques could be drawn from these established

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styles or from the works of specific filmmakers. In previous chapters, the television commercials discussed contain examples of such borrowing, and in most of these cases I have tried to connect the use of a cinematic style or technique to the larger message being communicated by the commercial. A television commercial’s visual language, as also discussed in this book, represents the message being communicated by the commercial. This study was planned with the intention of understanding how this process of visual representation is executed in terms of choosing a cinematic style, characters, and a location to film the television commercial. As I began my fieldwork, I soon realized that one of the dominant issues affecting this process of visual execution of a message is the changing cultural face of emerging markets such as India. This issue is particularly relevant, moreover, in case of multinational brands trying to enter a new nation. While multinational brands often choose the strategy of localization to get embedded within the national culture that they are entering,6 one of the challenges of localization, and particularly in formerly colonized countries like India, is to preserve the aura of the foreignness of the brand while also becoming Indian. This is because there is a tradition of foreignness being looked upon as a badge of prestige, as Cultural Anthropologist William Mazzarella explains. In India, this is often due to the scarcity of foreign goods during the four decades, before economic liberalization, when foreign investments were heavily restricted.7 I was first alerted to this issue while observing the filming of a Nigerian television commercial being produced in Mumbai. The Director* wanted to use traditional Nigerian attire during one section of the commercial, but the client† promptly alerted him that he should use jeans and t-shirt instead. The rationale behind the recommendation was that this attire would be more appealing to younger Nigerian consumers who were the target audience for this commercial. This was, thus, an example of localization strategy being rejected in favour of a more global *Name withheld on request. † Name withheld on request.

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look, while in this book I discussed other examples that used the opposite strategy. The difficulty of deciding on this strategy derives from the changing cultural face of India, which makes it difficult to get a grip on the pulse of the audience in terms of whether Indian or foreign culture would work better in the context of advertising a particular brand or product. Much of Indian visual culture, I would argue, reflects the combination of foreign and Indian influences because both are accepted. As the well-known saying goes, “any truism about India can be immediately contradicted by another truism about India.”8 Television commercial directors, fortunately, are wellpositioned to deal with the contradictions of contemporary India, because they work on a variety of films that are targeted towards a range of consumers.9 They can, thus, easily switch from depicting an urban upper income consumer to a rural lower income consumer and they have at their disposal, moreover, the resources required to depict these numerous types of consumers. Many of the television commercials discussed throughout this book have a vision of Indianness embedded within them. It is not a universal vision, however, since it is impacted by the nature of the product, the target audience, the specific marketing problem being tackled, and the influence of the advertising agency and television commercial director. It is not necessarily an explicit vision either, since one may need to decode it out of the narrative and visuals of the television commercial. The SBI Mutual Fund commercial, for example, discussed in Chapter 2, has a vision of a neoliberal, young, and upwardly mobile India embedded within it, although the viewer may have to view it multiple times and then analyse it carefully to decode this vision.

Mediation of Consumerism Advertisers have the liberty, moreover, of building stories that contribute to the construction of the national imaginary.

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Indian deodorant advertisements that depict sexual promiscuity, for example, have taken the liberty to use a risqué topic. To produce such television commercials, the specific narratives and visuals being used could well be constructing notions of sexual promiscuity rather than simply replaying the consumers’ desires and thoughts. As existing anthropological work on the production of advertisements suggests, analysis of advertisements and their production is both about understanding the nation where these advertisements will be shown as it is about understanding how the nation is constructed by advertisements. The Kama Sutra Condoms campaign was a watershed moment in the history of Indian advertising and the campaign may not have been released if the manufacturers believed that the nation would reject it as being too lewd. One could argue, moreover, that the campaign also altered and constructed perceptions of sexuality among an entire generation of Indians.10 Communication Theorist George Gerbner defines culture as being a network of texts that “mediate between existence and the consciousness of existence, and thereby contributes to both.”11 Advertisements as cultural texts, I would argue, associate consumerism with how we conceive of our existence as citizens of a particular community or country. By promoting consumerism, they also contribute to how we exist as citizens. While these are important functions of advertisements, and functions that are fairly obvious I would assume, what is more interesting is how advertisements mediate between existence and the consciousness of existence. The word mediation, in this context, refers to the function of being an intermediary that facilitates the communication between the person who exists and that person’s consciousness of existence. The relevant question in this context, thus, is that how does this mediation occur? One possible method, explained earlier, could be through the depiction of familiar situations and by showing the use of a brand or product within these situations so that we become aware of how we exist by seeing such a situation.

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More than mere depiction, however, television commercials can use numerous techniques, associated with tasks such as acting, camerawork, lighting, and editing, for this act of mediation. The use of classical Hollywood style camerawork, for example, could be aimed at making the mediation transparent and influencing the viewer’s consciousness by helping the viewer easily identify with the images by assuming the point of view of the camera.12 The use of montage style camerawork, in contrast, could be aimed at bringing together various aspects of the viewer’s existence and influencing their overall consciousness by showing these situations simultaneously.13 The average Indian’s existence has changed remarkably over the course of the last two decades since economic liberalization. Any attempt to write about contemporary India invariably brings in a discussion about this change, and Chapter 2 of this book is an example of such an attempt. Indian advertisements, as mediators of consumer culture, have spread the news of this change. They have, thus, mediated between the change in the consumer’s existence and their consciousness of this change. The objectives of television commercials vary, however, since some commercials—such as the Reebok commercial discussed in this book—might be primarily aimed at positioning a brand while others—such as the Tata Indicom commercial discussed in this book—could be announcing the features of a product or service. The emphasis on socializing consumers to a new product or service, furthermore, is usually not as strong as in case of the SBI Mutual Fund commercial. There is a commonality, nevertheless, in the sort of tools that the advertiser can use for the task of mediation. Metaphors such as cricket, discussed in an earlier chapter, are among the tools that can be used for mediation. Although the gender lines are increasingly getting blurred in the domain of Indian sports, cricket as a metaphor tends to be primarily utilized to advertise products for the male consumer. Iconic images such as the Tamil village scene are useful for mediation to demographic groups who would be able to relate to these images as icons.

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Mediation to women, similarly, often utilizes iconic relationships such as that between a mother and daughter. Cultural references are also tools that are useful for the task of mediation. References can be used to construct characters, as seen in the Parle Digestive Marie commercial discussed in Chapter 5. This character, based on the movie Lara Croft (2001), inserted a whole gamut of features that then strengthened the overall message of the commercial. Subtler references, such as the use of the movie Traffic (2000) to add colour temperatures, are useful as well and in this case the colour temperatures were meant to enhance the attention of the viewers.

Creating the Spectacle14 Among other benefits, these various tools of mediation also help to grab the attention of the viewers in an increasingly cluttered media environment, since each television commercial has to jostle for the viewers’ eyeballs. Cricket and famous cricket players, for example, are useful attention grabbers as are famous film stars who are often featured in Indian television commercials as celebrity endorsers. Filmmakers have numerous other attention grabbing tools at their disposal, as readers are perhaps aware and as may have been obvious from the commercials discussed in this book. The difficulty of television commercial making, however, is that these commercials have to communicate a pre-constructed message, a message that may be basic and mundane, while also grabbing the attention of the audience. How does one, for example, communicate the antiseptic qualities of a brand of soap and also make the commercial appealing enough to make the viewer stop and watch it? The viewer, one should note, has numerous other channels to choose from while this particular commercial is shown during a commercial break.15 Skilled commercial directors, as I understand, have the ability to take a seemingly trivial message and turn it into a spectacle because layers of communication are synchronized to create synergy. Not all commercials, however, are as

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exaggerated as the Tata Indicom commercial, for example, where the director almost went out of his way, so to speak, to use Indian miniature painting to communicate a message about free incoming calls being offered by a mobile service provider. Exaggeration, in other words, should not be taken as a synonym for the task of creating a spectacle even if it is a word whose natural meaning could connote a certain exaggeration to some readers. The spectacle could be understated, instead, and still grab attention due to the use of a particularly striking shot or unusual camerawork. Indian advertisements have often stood out, as I was told, because they have not shared the loud aesthetics of Indian commercial cinema that is such a dominant aspect of Indian visual culture. I watched numerous show reels, while visiting film production houses, which contained unusual television commercials that were spectacular for being creatively sophisticated rather than being exaggerated. Critics, though, have often been disparaging of such sophisticated advertising, because they are supposedly created to win international awards rather than sell products to the average Indian consumer. The spectacle also arises out of the ability to make the ordinary aspects of Indian life look extraordinary. Indian television commercial directors have nurtured this ability, because of the need to make commercials that are aspirational. It is interesting that Hindi cinema and Indian television commercials differ in this regard, although both attempt to create a spectacle out of the extraordinary. The extraordinariness of Hindi cinema is usually created through exotic locales and fancy costumes, while Indian television commercials usually create the extraordinary by finding it or creating it within everyday settings. A recent commercial, for example, for a brand of mints, Mentos, shows a young man on a motorbike stuck at a congested traffic signal that is such a familiar sight in contemporary India. He notices a policeman and realizes that he is not wearing a helmet. In the next shot, we see him wearing a scooped out watermelon shell as a helmet, and the voiceover tells us that this mint lights up the mind. Here a smartly

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written script brings out the extraordinary from within a very ordinary everyday setting, and the watermelon on the biker’s head becomes another iconic image for Indian street smartness that is an extremely popular virtue in contemporary India.

The Role of the Filmmaker The spectacular is created by many people who act together to turn the ordinary into that extraordinary television commercial that has been the focus of this book. A marketing problem is converted into a marketing communication plan that germinates at the advertising agency, where the account planner typically oversees this planning process. The plan is usually converted into a script and often a storyboard as well for the television commercial that will be produced. In some cases, however, the advertising agency’s contribution is much less significant as the television commercial director receives only a one-line description of the marketing communication plan that has to be converted into a film. The advertising agency’s contribution and the television commercial director’s contribution were earlier termed the first voice and the second voice, respectively. As evident from the discussed campaigns, the first and second voice should ideally work in tandem or sing the same song that sounds like the perfectly synchronised duet. The director’s attempt at synchronization is captured in the often used phrase that they want to “make the film” a certain way. This is, in other words, an effort to create a cinematic language that they feel will best express the advertising agency’s voice. At times, the first voice may have to be modified after the second voice has been created. During the production of the Tata Indicom commercial, for example, McCann Erickson’s Creative Head‡ visited the editing studio to look at the film and rewrite parts of the script that did not quite sound right according to the team working on the campaign. Name withheld on request.

‡

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The first voice can be poorly defined and this could be done on purpose, when the product manufacturer or advertising agency wants the filmmaker to be given creative license to ideate without getting too limited by a pre-written script. The second voice may be relatively restricted too if the advertising agency’s script is straightforward and they simply want a filmmaker to narrate the script without adding any cinematic frills. In a media environment that is dominated by satellite television offering fifty television channels or more, visual expertise is not only lucrative but it is also indispensable. The television commercial director, perhaps more than anyone else involved in the creation of advertising, has the ability to speak to the consumer visually and make the consumer like the product and desire to own the product. This is because, making a film is almost like playing an instrument and while many listeners can hum a tune, only the skilled musician can play the tune in front of an audience. In some cases, the advertising agency ceases to exist and the product manufacturer works directly with the film production house that makes the television commercials. Apart from the technical knowledge of filmmaking, moreover, the director also possesses the ability to visually represent the pulse of the consumer by realizing that a character needs to wear a jacket that looks a certain way or that one of the characters should smile more while delivering a dialogue. The director also has the ability to combine the acting, art direction, cinematography, and editing to make a coherent statement, which matches the campaign blueprint provided by the advertising agency, and to ensure that the visual quality of the commercial is at par or better than what the industry offers.

Consuming India Television commercial production is an intensely competitive industry where new entrants are constantly threatening

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the position of established directors while many others are struggling to get enough business to run a film production house successfully. It can take years to build a reputation in this industry, I was told, and the television commercial director’s reputation is particularly important because their work represents a brand or product in the marketplace. Those successful in securing their reputation are able to, subsequently, wield their influence in representing the brand or product in a certain way, and examples of such influence have been presented in earlier chapters of this book. I would extend this argument and assert that television commercial directors represent the nation to a nation of consumers as each commercial is a snapshot of the consuming nation. Like popular culture texts, such as Hindi cinema in India, which often strengthens the hegemonic sway of consumerist ideology, television commercials also support this hegemony16 as already suggested earlier in this book. Positive images of the nation, shown in concurrence with consumerism, strengthens this hegemony because they propagate the belief that consumerism is making the country a better place to live in.17 These images of the nation should be as inviting as the brand or product being advertised so that these images also turn into consumables and consumerism in contemporary India is as much about consuming the nation–state as it is about consuming the brands and products being advertised. The localization of brands, perhaps, also heightens the process of making India more consumable, because the localized brand is closely aligned with life within the nation–state. Being Indian is, thus, intertwined with the process of investing in SBI Mutual Fund and the act of using a Tata Indicom phone. The images of these commercials also contribute to the experience of consuming the brand or product and, thus, to the experience of being Indian as well. These images, moreover, as already explained, represent both pre-existing Indianness and construct notions of Indianness. So they can be said to belong to both the realms of the real and the hyper-real.18 In some cases, a television

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commercial is more firmly embedded in the realm of the hyper-real, as was the case with the Reebok commercial that comprises images of a group of Indian cricket players engaged in dance-like postures. These images can be said to belong to the hyper-real because they have no direct realworld counterparts, since cricket players are not known to engage in such postures while playing the game in the real world. The India that is consumed, consequently, is a country that exists in reality and in the imagination of the consuming masses. A television commercial’s visual language has the potential to influence the consumer’s imagination of the India that they inhabit. It is this influence that creates an India that exists on the television commercial screen, first, in the minds of the consumers, next, and it may or may not enter the realm of the real India, eventually. It is important to note in this context, moreover, that not every commercial announces explicitly that they are representing India, but by representing the Indian consumer’s world, as it was, the visuals implicitly refer to India nevertheless.

Conclusion As more products are sold in Indian shops, more television commercials are made to advertise these products, more foreign companies enter India to sell their products to the millions, and still more television commercials are made to advertise these products, consumerism spreads deeper into Indian veins although not equally deep into every vein due to huge income disparities across the country.19 During my fieldwork, I still remember how surprised I was to see a cinematographer decide to stop at a Mumbai grocery store to pick up a sandwich because he wanted a late afternoon snack. Till then, my vision of an afternoon snack in India was limited to greasy samosas or bhel puri20 rather than a sandwich, which does not innately belong to any Indian cuisine.

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Fifteen years ago, similarly, I remember how surprised I was to see a friend walk-up to an automatic teller machine (ATM) to withdraw money before joining me for cup of coffee at a newly opened Kolkata Café. Till then, evening strolls with friends had always been funded by loose change, and roadside chai or tea stalls, rather than an air-conditioned café, were the usual hangouts. In today’s India, ATMs and air-conditioned cafés are ubiquitous while I carry three credit cards, although I still remember the day when I struggled to swipe my card at a duty-free shop. Marketing communications expert Santosh Desai describes some of these details of contemporary India in his newspaper columns that have been compiled as a book.21 To what extent will Indianness change may be a question that crosses the minds of many Indians and those foreigners who follow developments in India due to work or personal reasons. Which way will it change could be another relevant question. One aspect of this change that has been highlighted in this book is the dialectic between an old Indian identity and new Indian identity. The new identity has evolved out of the event that is now commonly known as the liberalization of the Indian economy, while the old Indian identity existed prior to this event. The changing Indianness, thus, looks forward towards a more developed and wealthier India, while it does not give up on a more traditional India. The changing Indianness is eager to absorb the best of the rest of the world, to become more competitive, yet it also maintains a deep respect in local knowledge rooted in an Indian way of life. This version of Indianness is, thus, distinctly post-modern. First, it is self-reflexive and focused on Indian subjectivity, which implies that it subscribes to the philosophy of relativism.22 Second, it is based on a disbelief in meta-narratives of progress.23 Third, it is intimately tied to a late stage of capitalism when culture as signs, such as those representing Indianness in television commercials, is produced and consumed as a commodity.24

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Moving into the future, I expect this form of Indianness to mature and strengthen as India grows economically and due to the increasing presence of People of Indian Origin in countries around the world. Rather than feeling threatened by foreign culture or needing to change in order to fit into a preconceived global culture, this form of Indianness will confidently express itself on the global stage even if influenced by foreign culture, as it probably will. One example is the Reebok commercial where American ballet was used for the expression of Indianness, but it did not seem like Indian cricket players were trying to be American. Communication scholar Marwan Kraidy writes about a similar phenomenon when he describes contemporary cultural hybridity as “a symptom of resistance by the colonized, as the contamination of imperialist ideology, aesthetics, and identity by natives striking back at colonial domination.”25 Indian hybridity, in other words, is an outcome of Indians asserting their agency and reappropriating foreign culture to express their own, Indian, identity. These foreign influences can be potentially more powerful now due to the increase in the purchasing power of the average Indian and the proliferation of foreign brands in India. While earlier, only the privileged urban Indian got to buy a pair of American jeans or take a flight to London, now large numbers of Indians indulge in these activities.26 This hybrid Indianness will be global, moreover, rather than being tied to the landmass known as India, and I would assert that this form of Indianness already exists. As the Director of the Tata Indicom commercial explained, while discussing his use of Indian miniature painting, that he was thinking in the shoes of the British Asian promoting his own culture across the globe and not like the Indian village artist eager to stay rooted to his homeland. Finally, due to the foreign influences global Indianness cannot uphold Indian authenticity or a pre-defined Indian identity, which has been handed down the generations.27 Being post-modern, this Indianness will use foreign influences to push the boundaries of what it means to be Indian.

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Notes and References   1. Interview 134.   2. Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Sumita Chakravarty, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–1987 (Mumbai: Oxford University Press, 1996), 32.   3. For example, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Brave Hearted Will Take The Bride) (1995); Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (Never Say Goodbye) (2006); Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Sometimes There’s Happiness, Sometimes There’s Sadness) (2001).   4. Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. John M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 2001), 161.  5. Schudson, Advertising the Uneasy Persuasion; Williams, “Advertising the Magic System,” in Problems in Materialism.   6. Whether to standardize or localize has been a hotly debated issue among international marketing practitioners and theorists, and the localization strategy seems to have been utilized more often in India. As examples of articles and books written on this issue, see Theodore Levitt, “The Globalization of Markets,” Harvard Business Review 61, no. 5 (1983): 87–91; Robert D. Buzzell, “Can You Standardize Multinational Marketing,” Harvard Business Review 46 (1968): 102–113; T. Duncan and J. Ramaprasad, “Standardized Multinational Advertising: The Influencing Factors,” Journal of Advertising 24, no. 3 (1995): 55–68; Colin Hines, Localization: A Global Manifesto (London: Earthscan Publications, 2000); Don E. Schultz and Philip J. Kitchen, Communicating Globally: An Integrated Marketing Approach (New York, NY: NTC Business Books, 2000); Johny K. Johansson, Global Marketing: Foreign Entry, Local Marketing, and Global Management (New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill, 2006).  7. Mazzarella, Shovelling Smoke, 250–257.  8. Tharoor, The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cellphone, 11.   9. There are a number of reasons that cause this variety in television commercials. A few of these reasons are as follows. First, commercials can be made for different kinds of demographic profiles because one product is targeted at school children, while another product is targeted at married couples. Second, even within the same age group, commercials can choose a certain lifestyle segment to target. For more on lifestyle segments, see Ronald D. Michman, Lifestyle Market Segmentation (New York, NY: Praeger, 1991) and Dennis J. Cahill, Lifestyle Market Segmentation (New York, NY: Haworth Press, 2006). Third, different marketing problems could be addressed by a set of commercials and this difference might make their appearance vary. One commercial, for example, could have been made to publicize a specific offer during the annual festival season, while another commercial could have been made

Consuming India  157 to make the positioning of a brand more feminine. For more on brand positioning, see Al Ries and Jack Trout, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill, 2003). 10. See Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke, 59–100 for a discussion on how this campaign was created. 11. Cited in John Shanahan and Michael Morgan, Television and Its Viewers: Cultivation Theory and Research (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 15. 12. Bordwell et al., Classical Hollywood Cinema. 13. Eisenstein, Film Form. 14. This section title is inspired by Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1994). 15. Existing academic research on attention to media messages is too broad to be reviewed in its entirety here. A few exemplar articles, and particularly ones on viewer attention during commercial breaks, are as follows. Ruby P. W. Lee and Alan Ching Biu Tse, “Zapping Behaviour During Commercial Breaks,” Journal of Advertising Research 41, no. 3 (2001): 25–27; Lex van Meurs, “Zapp! A Study of Switching Behaviors during Commercial Breaks,” Journal of Advertising Research 38, no. 1 (1998): 43–53; Paul J. Danaher, “What Happens to Television Ratings during Commercial Breaks?” Journal of Advertising Research 35, no. 1 (1995): 37–47; Annie Lang, Shuhua Zhou, Nancy Schwartz, Paul D. Bolls, and Robert F. Potter, “The Effects of Edits on Arousal, Attention, and Memory for Television Messages: When an Edit Is an Edit Can an Edit Be Too Much?” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 44, no. 1 (2000): 94–109. For a comprehensive overview of psychological responses to advertisements, see Erik Du Plessis, The Advertised Mind: Ground Breaking Insights into How Our Brains Respond to Advertising (London: Millward Brown and Kogan Page, 2005). For an overview of academic research on media effects, see Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann eds., Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002). 16. In this context, see Leela Fernandes, “Hegemony and Inequality: Theoretical Reflections on India’s ‘New’ Middle Class,” in Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray eds., Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011), 58–82; Leela Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 17. Schudson, Advertising the Uneasy Persuasion; Williams, “Advertising the Magic System” in Problems in Materialism. 18. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. P. Foss, P. Patton and P. Beitchman (New York, NY: Semiotext, 1983). 19. See, for example, “India’s Income Inequality has Doubled in 20 Years,” reported in The Times of India Online, 7 December 2011, accessed 22 June 2012, from http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Indias-incomeinequality-has-doubled-in-20-years/articleshow/11012855.cms; Manasi

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20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

Singh, “India Still Suffers from Huge Income Gap,” posted on the web site One World South Asia, accessed 22 June 2012, from http://southasia. oneworld.net/Article/india-still-suffers-from-huge-income-gap; Vani K. Borooah, “Caste, Inequality, and Poverty in India” Review of Development Economics 9, no. 3 (2005): 399–414. A snack made of puffed rice and other ingredients such as chopped onion, nuts, and various sauces. Santosh Desai, Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2010). David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990). Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). Marwan Kraidy, Hybridity or the Cultural Logic of Globalization, (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2005). Also see in this context Homi Bhabha’s discussion of mimicry (“Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”) in Bhaba, Location of Culture, 317–325. Recent figures suggest that India’s purchasing power is now even higher than Japan. Devika Banerji and Rishi Shah, “India overtakes Japan to become third-largest economy in purchasing power parity,” reported in The Economic Times Online, 19 April 2012, accessed 22 June 2012, from http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-04-19/ news/31367838_1_ppp-terms-india-s-gdp-power-parity In this context, see Jackson, Real Black for a discussion on the notion of authentic black identity.

Glossary of Terms

Alpha Female: An especially strong and confident woman who is known for being assertive, dominant in her group, and for living an independent and successful life. Analytical Editing: An editing style that begins a scene using an establishing shot, which shows the entire setting of a scene, and then uses close ups or tighter shots of different sections of the setting to set up the scene. Anthropology: The study of human beings from a biological, cultural, demographic, evolutionary, historical, and social perspective; the field is accordingly divided into archaeology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. Brahmanical Hinduism: A form of Hinduism that believes in the authority of the ancient Sanskrit texts known as the Vedas (Rig, Sama, Yajur, and Atharva) and the supremacy of the Brahmans or religious priests who are interpreters of these texts. Brand: A sign or symbol used to differentiate one company’s product from another company’s product; a brand is usually loaded with both tangible and intangible properties to make it meaningful to a potential consumer. Cinematic Style: The grammar of filmmaking used to film and edit cinema; so certain camera movements and lighting techniques would be used if one was following the style of French Impressionism, for example.

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Cinematography: The style and techniques used to plan and execute motion–picture photography; it includes choice of camera, camera lens, camera movement, lighting, shot length, shot sequence, and editing style. Colonized Subject: An individual dominated by a more powerful entity who asserts its authority and subjugates this individual into thinking about him or herself as being less capable or inferior; this term is commonly used to describe non-European people who lived under the dominance of European colonial rule. Consumer Socialization: A process of encouraging and persuading people to purchase consumer goods and participate in a lifestyle that involves the active use of consumer goods. Consumerism: An ideology and lifestyle that celebrates the active use of consumer goods for the fulfilment of emotional and physiological needs. Continuity System: A method of editing that maintains spatial and temporal continuity between shots, such that the narrative or storyline is communicated coherently. Creative Director: A senior member of an advertising agency’s creative department; this person may be heading one or more creative teams of a large agency, while in a smaller agency he or she could be the leader of the entire creative department. Cultural Code: A quick guide or blueprint of a particular aspect of a culture or cultural group, and this can also be a broad overview of the same culture. Cultural Hybridity: A condition of existing amidst multiple cultural influences that creates a combination of cultural types within the same individual. Democratic Citizenship: A form of citizenship or membership to a national community where the individuals are able to

Glossary of Terms  161

exercise their democratic rights, such as the ability to vote in a national election. Desi: A common name for a South Asian individual who is living in a foreign country; this is a Hindi term primarily used by members of the South Asian community to refer to each other. Dharma: A complex term that can be understood as behaviour that is morally correct and required for the maintenance of personal and social health. Dialectic: An opposition that creates contradictions and argument to lead to a resolution of the opposing voices. Director: The person supervising the filming process, of a television commercial for example, by taking all the major decisions such as those related to casting, costume design, set design, and lighting style in collaboration with key members of his team, and most importantly closely monitoring the acting and camera work while the filming is taking place. Discourse: A formal and structured body of thought regarding a given topic; a discourse can be ideologically motivated and focused on controlling or changing the behaviour of a group of people. Dissertation: A document submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for obtaining a doctorate degree or Ph.D.; this document is usually the report of an independent research project conducted in the student’s area of study. Economic Liberalization: The process of reducing economic regulations so that private economic initiatives can thrive, private property can grow to strengthen the economy, and foreign investors are allowed to invest in economic projects being planned within the country. Editing: The process of cutting the footage of a film and joining it together in an often predetermined shot sequence and

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according to a certain pace and rhythm, as usually decided by the Director. Establishing Shot: The shot that establishes or introduces a scene by providing an overview of the setting at the beginning of the scene. Ethnography: The study of human culture by immersing oneself in the daily life of the group being studied. Executive Producer: The person managing a filmmaking project, such as a the production of a television commercial, by overseeing various tasks such as the finances, recruitment of team members, location hunting, and production logistics. Feminism: A political movement demanding equal political, economic, and social rights for women and the elimination of female exploitation that occurs through activities such as human trafficking for prostitution and sexual abuse. Film Production House: An organization that makes films such as documentaries, television commercials, and fictional films. Framing: The way a message is structured before being communicated to an audience. Full Frontal Address: A style of visual representation that shows or films a person directly from the front. Interpretive Anthropology: A school of anthropology that believes in the need for the anthropologist to understand the cultural context before interpreting a culture as a text that has a certain meaning in that context; this is usually contrasted with a method of detached observation that involves understanding a culture from a distance. Invisible Camera: The style of camerawork usually associated with the classical Hollywood style of filmmaking; the notion of invisibility derives from the effort to draw attention away

Glossary of Terms  163

from the camera movements; so the camerawork follows the storyline as well as character movements, and key changes in camera position and angle are merged with developments in the plot in order to keep the camera invisible. Karma: Deeds that lead to results, which are good or bad as per the nature of the initial actions; so a person’s good work creates good karma and leads to good fortune, and on a larger spiritual scale certain religious groups believe that good karma in one life leads to good fortune in the next life when the soul is reborn. Long Shot: A cinematic shot where the characters and setting are at a distance from the camera and it often involves the use of a wide angle that shows the entire expanse of a setting. Linear Perspective Painting: A style of painting developed in Renaissance era Europe; this style of painting is most wellknown for the use of the technique of parallel lines converging at a distance to depict depth and, thus, object size diminishing at a distance like it does when the human eye sees a real world setting. Media Anthropology: A branch of cultural anthropology that specializes in understanding media production and media reception using anthropological methods such as ethnography. Mediated Imagery: Images transmitted by media such as television, radio, and the Internet. Melodrama: A form of drama that is known for the use of an exaggerated storyline and intense characterization to appeal to the emotions of the audience. Montage: A technique of joining images to communicate a message through the symbolic connection between these images rather than spatial and temporal continuity as in the continuity system.

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Multiple Perspective: Showing the same scene or setting from the point of view of multiple actors or actresses present, each depicting a different perspective. National Imaginary: A national community’s mental image of themselves and the way they, thus, distinguish themselves from other communities. Pedagogical Citizenship: A model of citizenship that is top down; so the citizen follows certain predetermined or handed down notions of citizenship that are aimed at creating a model citizen who will maintain social order. Performative Citizenship: A model of citizenship that allows the citizen the freedom to practice their own model of citizenship and, thus, demonstrate their individuality. Postcolonial: A descriptor used to qualify something or someone associated with the time period after the end of colonial rule. Public Sphere: The part of society, typically the non-domestic space, which is shared by the public comprising mainly citizens but also non-citizens. Realist Illusion: The creation of a semblance of reality on the screen although the content being shown is entirely fictional; this style of filmmaking is known to have been initially developed in Hollywood and is also known as the classical Hollywood style or invisible style. Simulation: The creation or projection of a reality or an existence on the canvas or screen, not to copy the real world but to create a reality that has no real world counterpart. Subjective Shot: A shot taken from the perspective or point of view of the actor or actress in the scene; so the audience sees what this character is shown to be seeing.

Glossary of Terms  165

Symbolic Capital: Non-monetary recognition or status enjoyed by an individual within a certain culture due to factors such as superior education, possession of ancestral wealth, or duties fulfilled like serving in the military. Visual Grammar: The grammatical rules used to communicate visually such that the receiver and sender can easily understand each other.

Selected Bibliography

Abu-Lughod, Lila. Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Adorno, Theodor W. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Edited by John M. Bernstein. London: Routledge, 2001. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. New York, NY: Verso, 1991. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Translated by P. Foss, P. Patton, and P. Beitchman. New York, NY: Semiotext, 1983. Baviskar, Amita and R. Ray, eds. Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes. New Delhi: Routledge, 2011. Bhatia, Tej K. Advertising in Rural India: Language, Marketing Communication and Consumerism. Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2000. Bordwell, David, J. Staiger, and K. Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Cinematic Style & Mode of Production to 1960. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1985. Bordwell, David. On The History of Film Style. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Brosius, Christiane. India’s Middle Class: New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption and Prosperity. New Delhi: Routledge, 2010. ———. Empowering Visions: The Politics of Representation in Hindu Nationalism. London: Anthem Press, 2005. Brosius, Christiane and M. Butcher, eds. Image Journeys: Audio-visual Media and Cultural Change in India. New Delhi: SAGE, 1999. Burke, Timothy. Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Caldwell, John T. Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Cayla, Julien. “A Passage to India: An Ethnographic Study of the Advertising Agency’s Role in Mediating the Cultural Learning and Adaptation of Multinational Corporations.” Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Colorado, 2003. ProQuest Digital Dissertations, 64 (04). (UMI No. 3087527). Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Selected Bibliography  167 Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chakravarty, Sumita. National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–1987. Mumbai: Oxford University Press, 1996. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Davila, Arlene. Latinos Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2001. Denzin, Norman K. and Y.S. Lincoln, eds. Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2007. Desai, Santosh. Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India. New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2010. Dewey, Susan. Making Miss India Miss World: Constructing Gender, Power, and the Nation in Postliberalization India. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008. Eck, Diana L. Banaras: City of Light. New Delhi: Penguin, 1983. Ewen, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. Fernandes, Leela. India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Foster, Robert J. Materializing the Nation: Commodities, Consumption, and Media in Papua New Guinea. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002. Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Translated & Edited by Peter Strachey. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 1960. Ganti, Tejaswini. Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1973. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Ginsburg, Faye D., L. Abu-Lughod, and B. Larkin. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. Giridharadas, Anand. India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation’s Remaking. Noida: HarperCollins, 2011. Goldman, Robert, and S. Papson. Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising. New York, NY: Guilford, 1996. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990. Holt, Douglas B. How Brands Become Icons: Principles of Cultural Branding. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2004. Jackson Jr, John L. Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.

168  Understanding India Joshi, Sanjay. “The Spectre of Comparisons: Studying the Middle Class of Colonial India.” In Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes, edited by Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray, 83–107. New Delhi: Routledge, 2011. Kamdar, Mira. Planet India: How the Fastest Growing Democracy is Transforming the World. New York, NY: Scribner, 2007. Kemper, Stephen. Buying and Believing: Sri Lankan Advertising and Consumers in a Transnational World. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Kraidy, Marwan. Hybridity or the Cultural Logic of Globalization. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2005. Larkin, Brian. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Leeds-Hurwitz, Wendy. Semiotics and Communication: Signs, Codes, Cultures. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993. Luce, Edward. In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India. London: Abacus, 2006. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Majumdar, Boria. Cricket in Colonial India, 1780–1947. New Delhi: Routledge, 2008. Mankekar, Purnima. Screening Culture Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985. Mazumdar, Ranjani. Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Mazzarella, William. Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Messaris, Paul. Visual Persuasion: The Role of Images in Advertising. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1997. Miller, Daniel. Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach. New York, NY: Berg, 1997. Moeran, Brian. A Japanese Advertising Agency: An Anthropology of Media and Markets. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai Press. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. Munshi, Shoma. “Wife/Mother/Daughter-in-law: Multiple Avatars of the Homemaker in 1990s Indian Advertising.” Media Culture Society 20, no. 4 (1998): 573–591. Munshi, Shoma, ed. Images of the Modern Woman in Asia: Global Media, Local Meaning. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001.

Selected Bibliography  169 Munshi, Shoma. Prime Time Soap Operas on Indian Television. New Delhi: Routledge, 2010. Nandy, Ashish. “Introduction: Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum’s Eye View of Politics.” In The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema, edited by Ashish Nandy, 1–18. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. ———. The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and Destiny of Games. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. Peterson, Mark Allen. Anthropology and Mass Communication: Media and Myth in the New Millennium. New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2003. Puri, Jyoti. Woman, Body, Desire in Post-Colonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999. Rajagopal, Arvind. Politics after Nationalism: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Ramaswamy, Sumathy, ed. Beyond Appearances? Visual Practice and Ideologies in Modern India. New Delhi: SAGE, 2003. Rapaille, Clotaire. The Culture Code. New York, NY: Broadway Books, 2006. Renshaw, Jean R. Kimono in the Boardroom: The Invisible Evolution of Japanese Women Managers. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999. Schudson, Michael. Advertising the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1986. Shanahan, John and M. Morgan. Television and Its Viewers: Cultivation Theory and Research. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Sinha, Dheeraj. Consumer India: Inside the Indian Mind and Wallet. New Delhi: Wiley, 2011. Slater, Don. Consumer Culture and Modernity. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1997. Stallybrass, Peter and A. White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Taussig, Michael T. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Tharoor, Shashi. The Elephant, the Tiger, and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the Twenty-First Century. New Delhi: Penguin, 2007. Uberoi, Patricia. Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family, and Popular Culture in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. Varzi, Roxanne. Warring Souls: Youth, Media, and Martyrdom in PostRevolution Iran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Williams, Raymond. Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: Verso, 1980. Weinbaum Alys Eve, L.M. Thomas, P. Ramamurthy, U.G. Poiger, M.Y. Dong, and T.E. Barlow, eds. The Modern Girl around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Wright, Kimberly. “Advertising National Pride: The Unifying Power of Cricket Fever, Kashmir, and Politics.” Advertising & Society Review 4, no. 1 (2003). Accessed 27 May 2004, from http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:8223/ journals/advertising_and_society_review/v004/4.1wright.html

Index

Abu-Lughod, Lila, 4 actor’s perspective, 2 Adidas commercial, 114 Adorno, Theodore, 143 advertisements, 5, 18 production in early twentieth century, 29 advertisement’s imagery capitalist realism (see capitalist realism) politics of, 9 advertisers, 145–147 attempt to lessen Indian consumer’s anxiety, 16 benefits from iconicity of images, 7 Indian, 119, 143 advertising academic literature on, 17 agency, 46, 56, 121, 150 cinematic medium usefulness for, 10 strategy, 6 aesthetics, 8 alpha female, 121–127, 135 American advertisements, 30 American basketball players, 104 American cinematographers, 77 analytical editing, 10 anti-capitalist ideology, 3 anti-colonial nationalism, India’s, 121 anti-consumerist, 30 Appadurai, Arjun, 115

appointment process, 6 automatic action, 2 automatic teller machine (ATM), 154 Balasubramanian, Shyam, 99 barsaati, 28 batting, 100, 105, 107 behavior, cultural significance of, 2 Bhabha, Homi, 101, 111 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 31–32 Bharat Mata, 134 Bhatia, Tej K., 17 bleed blue campaign, 112 blockbuster Hollywood films, 124 Bond, James, 66 borders of nation state, 101–102 bowling, 105, 107 Brahmanical Hinduism, 102 brand endorsements, 100–101 branding, 59–60, 112–113 Brosius, Christiane, 16, 28–29 capitalist mode of production, 44 capitalist production, 29 capitalist realism, 10 Chak De! India (Come on India), 136n5 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 2–3, 87 Chakravarty, Sumita, 142 Chaplin, Charlie, 6–7, 129 character causality, 10–11

Index  171 Chatterjee, Partha, 121 Chopra, Anjum, 137n7 Cinema 1 and 2, 38 cinema, Indian, 10–13 characteristics of, 12 performs national and impersonation of Indian national identity, 142 cinematic aspects of television commercials, 13 cinematic language, 11–12 cinematic style, 6–7, 12, 41, 56–58, 63, 143–144 cinematography, 63, 67, 88, 130, 151 citizenship, notion of, 29, 87, 101 classical Hollywood cinema, 10–11 class, notion of, 30 climactic moments of international cricket match, 114 colonized subjects, 106 commercialization of cricket, 99–100, 103 Congress Party, 31 consumerism, 10, 16, 18–19, 27, 30, 99, 125, 131, 143 association of existing rituals, 33 mediation of (see mediation of consumerism) socializing Indians to, 32–33, 49 socializing women to, 116 consumer socialization, 18, 27, 29–33, 42–48, 124 consuming India, 151–153 contemporary female identity in India, 116 contemporary marketing myths, 112 corporate identity system (CIS), 91n9 creating spectacle, 148–150

Creative Director, 25, 34–35, 39, 41–43, 47, 58, 60, 64, 68, 71–72, 75, 88, 119 cricket, 90, 113–114 arena for expression of Indian masculinity, 98 as bodily expression on and off field, 110 changes seen in Indian society for, 115 devotion in, 104 extremes of contemporary Indianness, 115 forms in India, 98–101 Indianization of, 98 male-dominated sport, 115 as means of self-expression, 99 medium of expressing one’s affiliation to the nation, 98, 111 mythic potential of, 112 pedagogical role in formerly British colonies, 102 performative dimension connected to medium of expression, 102–103 played as a collective, 103 -themed commercial, 97–98 Cricket World Cup 2011, 101, 112 cultural behaviour, 1 cultural codes, 2, 43, 46, 48 cultural complexities, 3 cultural consumers, 143 cultural hybridity, 18, 155 cultural nationalism, 32 cultural self-expression, 97 culture, definition of, 146 dancing, 42, 84, 109 democratic citizenship, 19, 99 Desai, Santosh, 14 ‘desire for an alternative modernity’, 3 Devgan, Ajay, 85

172  Understanding India Dewey, Susan, 120, 138n11 dharma, 104 Director, selection of, 57–59 Discipline and Punish (Michel Foucault), 106 Doordarshan, 32 Dutt, Ashu, 125 Eisenstein, Sergei, 11 establishing shot, 10 ethnographer, goal of, 2 ethnography goal of, 4 of media production, 17–18 objective of, 2 European cinematographers, 77 Executive Producer, 16, 19, 36, 75, 127–130, 132 eye movement, 2 female assistant, 127–132 female model, 132–135 female presence in Indian workforce, 120 fielding, 105, 107 Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), 53n39 filmmakers, 12, 57, 144, 148 amateur, 28 Indian, 16 role of, 150–151 filmmaking, 7, 27, 33, 66, 73, 129, 151 European styles of, 11 Hollywood style of, 10 people associated with consume visual texts, 67 women joining in, 130 film production houses, Indian, 53n40 films mediation, 10 production house, 123, 135 styles, 12

techniques, 12 voices, 56–57 foreign companies in India, 31 framing, 12, 59–65 French impressionism style for television commercials, 11 full frontal address, 12 full frontal address technique, 12 game’s commercialization, 101 Gandhi, Indira, 51n23, 119 Gandhi, Mahatma, 30–31, 119 Gandhi, Rajiv, 31, 51n23 Ganti, Tejaswini, 4 Geertz, Clifford, 2–3, 13 Gerbner, George, 146 German expressionism style for television commercials, 11 Goddess Durga, 126 Goddess Kali, 126 Goddess Parvati, 126 Goregaon Film City, 40, 105 Great Tamasha, The (James Astill), 99 Griffith, D.W., 11 Guha, Ramchandra, 98, 115 heroines working in Mumbai based Hindi film industry, 131 Hindi film industry, 121 Hindi movies, 86, 119, 134 Hindu mythology, 126, 135 Hindu nation, 32 Hindu polytheism, 135 human behaviour, 3 cultural implications of, 4 IBM, 91n9 Idea of India, 15 images, role of, 7–10 independence movement, Indian, 119 Indian art, 12 Indian identity, 32

Index  173 Indianness, 32–33, 97, 154 Indian Premier League (IPL), 99 Industrial Revolution, 43 interpretive anthropology, 1–2 invisible camera, 58, 63, 68 Japanese women as managers, 130 jewellery commercial, 133–134 Jolie, Angelina, 123 Kajol, 85, 123 Kama Sutra Condoms campaign, 146 Kapferer, Jean-Noel, 9 karma, 104, 108 Kesavan, Mukul, 31 Khadi, Indian politician’s habit of wearing, 2–3 knowledge of cultural codes, 2 Kraidy, Marwan, 155 Krishnan, Janaki, 120 Lagaan (Land Tax) film, 98 Lara Croft, 123, 148 Larkin, Brian, 4 liberalization of Indian economy and public sphere, 27–29 recognized to influence discursive construction of female beauty, 133 linear perspective painting, Renaissance Europe’s, 12, 77, 88–89, 97 long shot, 41, 68 Madhvani, Ram, 36, 40, 58–59, 67, 69, 75, 77–78, 81, 85, 88, 104, 106, 108 magic system, 10 Mahmood, Saba, 131 Majumdar, Boria, 98, 106, 115 Mani, Bhaskar, 47, 89 Mankekar, Purnima, 4

market research professional in Indian company, 139n25 mass industry, 29 mass, notion of, 30 Matrix, 124 Mazumdar, Ranjani, 142 Mazzarella, William, 17, 144 McCann Erickson, 79, 81, 150 media anthropologists, 4, 28–29 media anthropology, 4–5 media audiences, 4 media industries, 4 mediated imagery, 5 media texts, 4 mediation, 10, 61, 70 of consumerism, 145–148 Mentos commercial, 149 miniature painting, Indian, 18, 77–79, 81, 88, 149, 155 minting coins process in Papua New Guinea, 44 Mirza, Sania, 119, 136n3 modern audiences, 143 modern industrial life, 29 montage filmmaking style, 11, 147 Mother India, 134 motherly female representations in India, importance of, 134 Mother Teresa, 79 movies, 37, 61, 66, 74 English movies in Indian advertisements, 71 Hindi (see Hindi movies) moving images, 5 multinational brands, 144 multiple perspectives, 12 Munshi, Shoma, 4, 120, 126, 133 Nandy, Ashish, 97, 115 national identity heterogeneity of, 4–5 performative dimension of, 111 national imaginary, 15, 142, 145–146

174  Understanding India National Institute of Design (NID), 53n39, 93n34, 128 nation building role of media institutions in postcolonial settings, 4 Nehru, Jawaharlal (Pandit), 30–31, 119 Nehwal, Saina, 119, 136n4 Nigerian television commercial, 144 non-voluntary action, 2 North Indian television commercial production, 25 Parle Digestive Marie commercial, 121–122, 125, 148 patriarchal power structures of Indian society, 120–121 peasant mode of production, 44 pedagogical citizenship, 101–105 Peirce, C.S., 7 performative citizenship, 101–105 Pinney, Christopher, 88–89, 126 political influence of mediated imagery, 5 Pond’s women talcum powder brand, 120 post-liberalization Indian economy, 18, 27 post-liberalization urban India, 41 post-war consumerism, 30 pre-appointed advertising, 5 Princess Diana, 79 print advertisements, 5 printing paper notes process in Papua New Guinea, 44 private sector, Indian, 29 Puri, Jyoti, 120 Rajagopal, Arvind, 4 Rapaille, Clotaire, 43 realist illusion, 10–11 rebranding, 60

Reebok commercial, 147, 153, 155. See also cricket body as in-between, 109–114 imagery of male body, 105–109 pedagogical and performative citizenship, 101–105 Ryle, Gilbert, 2 Santhanam, Vijay, 99 satellite television, 151 SBI Mutual Fund commercial, 45–46, 145, 147 appearance of role of referencing, 65–70 simulation and framing of, 59–65 visualizing India, 70–76 campaign, 37–41, 43, 47–48, 56, 88–89, 96, 132 creation of small investor town, 33–37 four scripts for campaigning, 41–42 Schudson, Michael, 9 simulation, 59–65 skilled commercial directors, 148 social contradiction resolution, 112 social melodramas, 12 Soviet Union, 10–11 stereotyping of Latin consumer in U.S., 90 street smartness, 107 subjective shot, 66, 68 Surf commercial add, 124 symbolic capital, 14 Tanishq Mia, 134 Tata Indicom commercial campaign appearance, 96–97, 147, 149–150, 155 Indian visuals, 76–80, 83 mass appeal as difference, 79–82

Index  175 script and animation, 82–85 visualizing India, 85–88 technical knowledge of filmmaking, 151 television, 5, 74 commercial producers, 5, 15, 131–132 commercials, 142 television commercial making, 148 television commercials, Indian, 125, 141 as cinema, 10–13 comprise of moving images, 5 cricket fresh representations within, 99 images, role of (see images, role of) production process, 5–7 techniques for investment products, 45 visual grammar, 5 voice from advertising agency, 56 television commercials production, Indian, 1, 4 televisionising process, 14 Tendulkar, Sachin, 101, 113 thick description, 2, 13 thin description, 2

Times of India, 100 Traffic, 148 Uberoi, Patricia, 121, 134–135 Usha, P.T., 119, 136n2 Victorian cricket, 98–99 visual branding, 59–60, 91n9 visual communication, 9, 13, 17, 85, 141 visual culture, 17, 145 visual grammar, 5, 12 visual identity (VI), 91n9 visual language of television commercials, 39, 57, 97, 100, 144, 153 visual representation and culture, 142–145 Waking Life (Richard Lintlaker), 109–111 Wang, Jing, 90 Who Wants to be a Millionaire, 40 Williams, Raymond, 10 women’s cricket team, Indian, 136n6 Zimbabwe, hegemonic discourses about bodily hygiene, manners and visual appearances, 30

About the Author

Rohitashya Chattopadhyay is currently pursuing a Postgraduate Certificate Program in Research and Analysis at Georgian College, Canada. He has an academic background in Marketing and Communication. He received a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania. He has worked at the World Bank Headquarters, Washington, D.C. as a Consultant. He has also worked as a Qualitative Research Analyst at Quantum Consumer Solutions Pvt. Ltd, one of Asia’s leading consumer insights firms. He has published academic articles in Advertising and Society Review and Contemporary South Asia. Rohitashya Chattopadhyay has a keen interest in film production, marketing communications, popular culture, and cultural/national identity. These interests have been the inspiration behind much of his writings. To nurture these interests, he currently maintains a marketing and popular culture blog at www.rohitchat.com