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By Arvind Rajagopal The urban vision invoked by the media is of a consumption utopia. What impact does this portrayal of a shining urban India have on city-dwellers who live in slums or on the streets? Surely, by stimulating desires that cannot be fulfilled, marketers are contributing to a revolution of rising expectations?
In India , political change has preceded social reform. India won independence from Britain in 1947, but society was hardly likely to change overnight. Part of the Congress Party’s winning formula in the freedom struggle, of course, was its avoidance of any talk of dramatic social change. To the contrary, Congress leaders wooed the wealthy and conservative classes to take part in the movement, albeit in khadi vestments. The party’s ability to undertake a serious programme of social change (such as caste reform) was hence limited, apart from well-intentioned legislation including reservations. Nearly 60 years later, India remains the largest single-country-contributor to the world’s poor, with significant measures of human well-being at the bottom of even the list of developing countries. The failure of the ruling NDA’s India Shining election campaign in 2004 confirmed that the majority of the people remain excluded from the prosperity that makes the well-to-do ‘shine’. Yet if you examine the messages issuing from the media, largely headquartered in Mumbai and New Delhi , India is still shining. Although the political parties have been obliged to undertake a course correction with pro-poor policies, the media have not deflected from their sponsorship of programmes aimed almost exclusively at the up-market segment, including soap operas which combine glamorous lifestyles and traditional Hindu conventions. The failure of the rural economy, which still directly affects over two-thirds of the population, was declared a credible subject only with the victory of the Congress-led opposition. But subsequent months have shown little attention to this problem, though newspapers, magazines and television channels continue to multiply. In India the communications revolution appears to occur in a hall of mirrors where the rich and beautiful (the first term implies the second; the rich are always beautiful) can never be sufficiently reflected. Nevertheless, the expansion of media and markets induces new habits of media and product consumption across Indian towns and cities. Mumbai, as a hub of this activity, both relays and exemplifies new global modes of consumption. What is the impact downstream from Mumbai? The media have often been considered instruments of socialisation, bringing the outside world to audiences, and thereby gently ridding viewers of their insularity and parochialism. But such a view assumes that the media are weightless and transparent, with no influence of their own. Not only does this ignore the technical specifics of each medium (print, TV and Internet, for example), it also overlooks the social predilections of media professionals as well as the economic constraints on their work. The technical characteristics of the media have crucial effects, but they require to be bracketed in this short essay. Here I will briefly discuss the social and economic constraints on the media, which in fact become clearer when taken together. The bulk of media and advertising expenditure is aimed at the top fifth of the consuming classes, whether in the metros or in the hinterland. Research by multinationals for the mass market focuses almost entirely on the socio-economic classes A2 and B1, which are the second and third tiers respectively of the class pyramid. Audience surveys on their part double the sample they draw from the topmost tier, A1, because marketers feel they need to understand the tastes of this segment better. The lower classes are technically Peeping Toms, from the industry’s viewpoint, since they are watching ads and programmes that were either not really meant for them, or were designed specifically to exclude them. To give an example of the latter, the film Dil Chahta Hai was hailed as a breakthrough event because of its success in excluding what advertisers called PLT, People Like Them. The story, set mainly in Mumbai, did not feature a single poor and/or dark-skinned/low-caste person, and revolved entirely around the cares of three rich, young male friends, who apparently lived without cooks, drivers, factotums or vagrants around them, to say nothing of friends or family poorer than themselves. The film thus focused on those whom advertisers prefer, namely PLUS, or People Like Us. The urban vision invoked here is a narcissistic fantasy in which any social elements external to the projected consumption utopia are forbidden. Yet the film, which was otherwise sober in its plot and treatment, was acclaimed by critics for its ‘slice of life’ portrayal. Interestingly, its rosy view of city life was as little subject to debate as the romantic bliss that most films idealise. Such a reception indicates that this fantasy of urban life is not limited to the film’s characters, but has a social currency today. That the fantasy of urban life cannot be realised without sustained and unremitting violence against the majority of the city’s inhabitants is perhaps taken for granted, since that is indeed the reality of the city, something that provokes little comment from People Like Us. What distinguishes urban living is the casual but unavoidable proximity of different social classes, and the toleration of the anonymous, the marginal and the stranger. In other words, there is an under-defined and open-ended character to modern city life. With its unending tumult of diverse sensations, the city de-sensitises its inhabitants to its environment, no doubt. But side by side, we glimpse the possibility of an urban ecology in which rich and poor co-exist in relative peace, sometimes even with a shared sense of community. Ecological diversity can benefit people as well as plants and animals! To make this observation is not to romanticise the poor, but to acknowledge that social juxtaposition allows each class to make demands of the other, and to assess their mutual distance every day. If nothing else it is a reminder that they share not only an environment but a common fate. Despite their fabled provinciality, no town in India lacks opportunities for classes to mingle, and even to approach something like intimacy with each other. In the city, such promiscuity tends to be confined to the basti, the mohalla or the neighbourhood, but it can be quite real even within these confines. But increasingly today, Indian cities have gated colonies and apartment complexes, while demolition drives keep the encroaching poor at bay. Taking this tendency further, advertisers and media managers seek what they believe to be communicational efficiency, and shape messages to reflect the desired consumption habits of target audiences. Hence the jubilant reception of a film like Dil Chahta Hai, which “broke through” with its bold exclusion of all but marketers’ aspirations. But what of those who are not portrayed but nevertheless watch, namely the down-market classes in the towns and cities across the country? It is not in the films, sitcoms or soap operas that these classes might find themselves best reflected. Rather, it is in advertisements. Let me explain by discussing an ad for tea. A Scene of Consumption: The cup that cheers. The ad is for Brooke Bond A-1 Kadak Chaap tea. Kadak chaap indicates that this is strong tea (literally, the stamp of strength; kadak means strong, vigorous), and in India , the kind of tea favoured by working and rural classes. Kadak Chaap is a play on sadak chaap, suggesting that the product is branded with the sign of the street, connoting therefore the vague disreputability associated with street life. Tea stalls operating on city sidewalks would vend it. Staged in a melodramatic and filmi style, the ad shows a bulldozer, flanked by sinister-looking figures, demolishing undefined shanty structures on the street. The soundtrack is suggestive of a war-zone, with helicopters and air-raid sirens loud in the background. A swarthy, bearded man wearing dark glasses sits in the shadowy interior of a white car, peering intermittently at his lawyer and his henchmen as they direct the demolition. Facing the bulldozer is a young woman in a white sari, drinking tea. Her costume suggests she is a social worker or an activist. The camera pauses a moment to focus on the glass of tea in the woman’s hand. On the street, tea is drunk in glasses, and at home, it is drunk in cups. A roadside tea stall is being demolished, and the woman has decided to resist it. Sitting in front of the bulldozer, the woman challenges the man at its wheel to run over her. A sharp exchange of words ensues in the bulldozer operator taking to his heels, while the crowd lies prone all around the machine. Brooke Bond A-1 Kadak Chaap works its magic, and an unarmed woman triumphs over a gang of toughs. The ad stages a typical scene in Mumbai and other cities in India , of the confrontation between the majority who dwell and make their livelihood on the street, and the minority, who view the streets as but the circuitry of the formal economy in which they themselves work. The ad offers symbolic redemption for the sidewalk residents and vendors who are invariably vanquished in such confrontations, but through the image of a consumer brand and the rhetoric of a young, female consumer. Now, everyday scenes of demolition are accompanied by police squads and city workers; as representatives of the only institution with usufruct in public space, namely the State. The ad boldly dramatises the popular belief that the State is ruled by a class fraction partial to itself, or that it is hand-in-glove with criminals. The conundrum of a State undertaking illegal action is answered, appropriately enough, by a charismatic figure, a pretty heroine matching the goons’ tough talk with her own fluent, idiomatic slang. Gendering the confrontation lowers the political threshold for its reception, we may note, bringing as it does aspects other than the class contradiction central to this conflict. For the ad to feature real pheriwalas (street vendors) might perhaps distract from its aesthetic. Indeed the life and work of pheriwalas themselves are nowhere to be seen here; their existence has to be inferred from the image of the bulldozer, the glass of tea, and Brooke Bond A-1 Kadak Chaap. Characteristically, the growing market for national and global consumer brands, which in part replaces the informal economy of roadside stalls, seeks to absorb the image of that which it replaces. But the audio track, shifting from a melodramatic announcement of the brand, to the soundscape of a battlefield, and the snappy repartee of street-talk, invokes the rhythms and lexical repertoire of popular cinema. The arcs of the visual and audio narratives both culminate in a global brand gone local, but in the ways they traverse the lexicon of popular culture, their moral economies overlap but do not coincide. Despite its limitations, the ad offers more vivid acknowledgment of the rights of street vendors and the depredations suffered by them in the terrorist regime of Mumbai city politics than is to be found in most news reports; the latter tend to regard street vendors as illegitimate or anachronistic, and serve mainly as vehicles for middle class and corporate campaigns against pheriwalas. The ad excludes the faces and voices of pheriwalas, but a crucial aspect of their contemporary experience is portrayed: demolition is implied to be a violation of their rights. Aimed at a lower income segment, but displaying high production values, the ad is a symptom of an expanding visual regime in which the viewing pleasures and consuming power of working class audiences have to be balanced against the interests of corporate sponsors. The ad acknowledges the violence involved in the control over urban space, and the spectacular forms through which it takes effect. The violence is not simply epiphenomenal to a project of political control: it is itself productive, linking its audience in a shared sense of fear and fascination. If in precapitalist society, sumptuary expenditure flowed to poorer classes, in capitalism, for the first time we have a ruling class that spends its income chiefly on itself. The demolitions are perhaps a sign of the devolution of sumptuary expenditure, its rendition into a spectacle for general enjoyment at the cost of the poor themselves. With economic liberalisation, more concerted attempts to entice foreign investment, and the growth of a consuming middle class whose mode of asserting their citizenship rights now typically occurs by refiguring their relationship to the poor, such forms of violence have gained emphasis, albeit with a rhetoric that denies their illiberal nature. What is interesting is that this ad was aired at the height of a fierce media campaign against urban encroachment. Although advertising is typically considered the advance guard of the most insidious elements of global capitalism, we can see here some of its more liberal aspects. Ironically, television programmers in India have used their advantage as latecomers to become more tightly geared to marketing needs than even in the US . Hence it is advertising, with its more indeterminate effectivity, that becomes a window of opportunity to portray some aspects of Indian social reality. The consequences are of course that new consumption patterns are found across the cities and small towns, involving awareness of global brands, and the assertion of personal wants as against community obligations. Indigenous producers fill much of the need for new products, for those with the money, since such producers tend to be cheaper, and are prepared to invest for the long haul, unlike most foreign companies. More importantly, new consumers are proving to be assertive, socially and politically, in ways that are not anticipated by corporations. By stimulating desires they cannot fulfill, marketers are certainly contributing to a revolution of rising expectations. Given that a social revolution is yet to occur to re-align society with the political revolution that occurred nearly six decades ago now, India is witnessing what one writer has called "a million mutinies now". Business confidence that popular expectations will invariably seek consumer gratification, or that corporations themselves can be bystanders in this radical process of change, is surely misplaced. As media managers try to stratify and isolate target audiences, the more messy nature of the media, with their constant spillover effects (on so-called Peeping Toms, for example), will assert itself. Advertising is but one example of such a spillover. What we see on the whole, however, is a failure of imagination on the part of elites to apprehend coming changes, and prepare for them in collectively beneficial ways. InfoChange News & Features, February 2005
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