Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India
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Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India
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Overview
An examination of the complex cultural politics of mass consumerism in a globalized marketplace, Shoveling Smoke is a pathbreaking and detailed ethnography of the contemporary Indian advertising industry. It is also a critical and innovative intervention into current theoretical debates on the intersection of consumerist globalization, aesthetic politics, and visual culture. William Mazzarella traces the rise in India during the 1980s of mass consumption as a self-consciously sensuous challenge to the austerities of state-led developmentalism. He shows how the decisive opening of Indian markets to foreign brands in the 1990s refigured established models of the relationship between the local and the global and, ironically, turned advertising professionals into custodians of cultural integrity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822385196 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/05/2003 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
William Mazzarella is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.
Read an Excerpt
Shoveling smoke
Advertising and globalization in contemporary IndiaBy William Mazzarella
Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-3145-4
Chapter One
Locations: Advertising and the New Swadeshi
This book is an ethnographic study of globalizing consumerism. It is set in the world of the Indian advertising business, and the arguments that I develop emerge out of that specific context. At the same time, this is also a book about processes and institutions that are today quite general, if not ubiquitous. Indeed, my initial intuition, as I started my research, was that the advertising business is a particularly compelling point of mediation between the local and the global, between culture and capital. This turned out to be true, but its mediations were far more complex and unpredictable than I had anticipated.
In the chapters that follow I develop detailed analyses of the shapes taken by some of these mediations: the rise of mass consumerism in India in the 1980s as an explicit challenge to the developmentalist dispensation of the post-Independence years; the articulation of a concomitant social ontology around what I call "the commodity image"; the crises of value brought on by the decisive opening of Indian consumer markets to foreign brands after 1991; and the associated retooling of Indian marketing professionals as cultural consultants.
In part, this book is an account of how national consumer goods advertising is produced inmetropolitan India, and the anxieties, commitments, and contradictions that animate that practice. By the same token, this is also an inquiry into some of the broader transformations in Indian public culture with which the rise of mass consumerism came to be identified. In some ways, the Indian advertising business's discourse is self-consciously modeled upon a global paradigm: consumerism as an inclusive formal system that strives to appropriate-and thereby also produce-local cultural difference as content. At the same time, the density of the cultural material that advertising is made of necessarily troubles such neat divisions. As an aesthetic interface of postcolonial capitalism, the everyday practice of advertising constantly calls into question the conceptual alignments that ground business discourse: local and global, culture and capital, particular and universal, content and form.
This is a book about the people who make advertising. I theorize the practice of advertising as a kind of public cultural production, centered on a distinctive form of commodity production, the production of commodity images. I certainly do not deny the importance of consumption as social practice, but I would prefer to situate it within a range of practices-commercial, political, subversive, disciplinary-that shape contested, and often internally contradictory, public fields of representation and discourse. And while we have a large and growing ethnographic literature on the cultural politics of consumption, a critical anthropology of the culture industries is only beginning to emerge.
The New Swadeshi
Speaking to a journalist in 1995, George Fernandes, leader of the Samata Party, recalled a watershed moment in his public career:
The idea of getting Coke out struck me [in 1977] when I was the Minister of Communications, prior to being Minister of Industry. I was visiting a village in my constituency. It was summer and hot, and the first thing I did when I reached that particular village was to ask for a glass of water. Someone brought me a glass of water, but the District Magistrate, who is the highest district government official, came and prevented me from taking the glass of water. He said "No sir, this is not for you, you can't drink this water. We have Coke for you." I was very upset and angry. I said "Thirty years of freedom and planning and we have Coke that has reached the villages, but we do not have drinking water that the villagers can consume." That is when my mind said something is wrong. (Coke Returns from India Exile 1995)
Within months, Fernandes, having assumed the Ministership of Industry in the newly elected Janata Party coalition, effectively forced the Coca-Cola Company out of India. Fernandes's subsequent recollection of the episode located his action squarely within the developmentalist discourse of national self-sufficiency that had informed official policy in India from Independence through to the early 1980s. The historical conjuncture from which he spoke, the mid-1990s, was, in contrast, marked by what appeared to be a complete reversal of this position.
Starting in the mid-1980s, a series of economic reforms, implemented under the banners of "liberalization" and, subsequently, "globalization," had brought a movement toward a new, externally oriented, consumption-led path to national prosperity. Coca-Cola, along with many other multinational companies (MNCS), was back. And yet by the time I arrived in Bombay to start my fieldwork, a backlash of sorts had already set in. It was a period of political turbulence: the national Congress government of P. V. Narasimha Rao, which had implemented the most radical wave of reforms starting in 1991, had been banished from office in 1996. It was succeeded by a coalition that lasted for approximately a fortnight, led by the "Hindu nationalist" Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). By late 1997 the second in the series of equally fragile coalitions that had replaced the BJP was in its turn crumbling, and the BJP was once again about to grasp power at the center in the national elections that were held in the spring of 1998. It was then that a word that had not been used seriously in national public debate since well before the economic reforms gained a new prominence: swadeshi.
Harking back to an older nationalist idiom, this new swadeshi represented an attempt to come to terms, in political discourse, with a predicament with which my informants in the advertising and marketing world were grappling every day. In brief, the challenge that faced them was to capitalize upon a world in which globalization was, in unpredictable ways, heightening rather than effacing the importance of locality and local identity.
Ostensibly, swadeshi (which literally means "of one's own country") and globalization were radically opposed. M. K. Gandhi had, starting in 1919, appropriated the term for a series of nationwide nationalist agitations against British industry, most notably the mill-woven cloth of Manchester. Encapsulated by Gandhi's most potent symbol, the charkha or hand-operated spinning wheel, swadeshi came to denote the desire for self-sufficiency and self-reliance. But it was also from the very beginning connected to Gandhi's adaptation of the concept of swaraj (self-rule), which drew a philosophical and political analogy between mastery of individual bodily appetites and desires on the one hand and national independence on the other. On the basis of this analogy, the desires of Indian consumers were understood as one of the deep foundations of foreign domination. Therefore, sublimating these desires for the greater good of the nation became, for Gandhi, every Indian's first duty. In his own words: "How can Manchester be blamed? We wore Manchester cloth, and that is why Manchester wove it" (Gandhi 1997, 107).
The term swadeshi re-entered national political discourse in 1997-98 primarily through the influence on the BJP's policy of an organization known as the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (SJM, or "Forum for Swadeshi Awakening"), which itself was part of a diverse coalition of BJP-affiliated groups collectively known as the Sangh Parivar (or "Family of Coalitions"). Swadeshi once again became a lightning rod for ongoing public debates around the meaning and desirability of consumerist globalization. The discursive field of these debates was extremely complicated, and I can only provide the briefest of outlines here.
At one pole, there was the key ideologue of the SJM, S. Gurumurthy, who took an uncompromisingly anti-globalization position. Gurumurthy argued that both Nehruvian state planning and the consumerist dispensation that had replaced it represented the imposition, by a Westernized Indian elite, of foreign models that were unsuited to Indian cultural conditions and deleterious to native entrepreneurial energies. Indeed, for Gurumurthy, imported social arrangements were a priori not compatible with the realization of Indian needs: "Each country's situation being different, there is no universal model of development available off the shelf" (Swadeshi Jagaran Manch, n.d.b). India's challenge was to articulate a path that arose organically out of "traditional" Indian life-worlds. Globalization, according to Gurumurthy, meant Americanization: "The new model of capitalism is the American variety-fabricated in USA, a State which is devoid of wholesome traditions and community life and has opted for atomized individualism" (ibid.). Indian "tradition," in contrast-and here the Gandhian critique blended with the Hindu nationalism of the ascendant cultural right wing-rendered "true" needs as a function of the community rather than the individual:
The lowest socio-economic unit of society in the swadeshi view is not the individual but the family.... The unbridled and unbalanced individualism of the West is destructive of community living. The market has to be an instrument and not the master of the people. The smaller the size of the market, the better it is as an instrument.... [Swadeshi] commands needs-based life, and rules out unlimited consumption as an end.... It is not autarky; but a global alternative which accepts only need-based transnationalism. (Swadeshi Jagaran Manch, n.d.a)
From such a standpoint, Indian advocates of economic deregulation and globalized consumerism were simply victims of a postcolonial inferiority complex and therefore unable to recognize the superior value of their own heritage: "The nation needs psychotherapy," commented Gurumurthy (1998a). In line with mainstream BJP thought, the SJM advocated a movement away from the "pseudo-secularism" of previous administrations, which, in its alienation from Hindu/Indian "tradition," had brought about "a dual life: a formal modern life as the veneer and the age-old beliefs at the core" (Gurumurthy 1998c).
At the other end of the discursive field, free-market apologists may have acknowledged Gurumurthy's dualism but preferred to give it a progressivist twist: Indians were not so much internally divided as torn between advocates of progress and the reactionary forces of tradition. Amit Jatia, the managing director of the company that held the Indian franchise for McDonald's hamburgers, exasperatedly portrayed the swadeshi-ites as a fanatical group of Hindu renouncers: "For every explanation we give, there's a new objection. Tell me how do I convince a sadhu that we're okay?" (Jetley and Shastri 1998). For another commentator, an investment analyst, bringing Indian policy into line with the requirements of foreign investors was simply the pragmatic thing to do. From this perspective, swadeshi represented an obsolete throwback to the days when George Fernandes, who was now back in power as a key member of the BJP-led coalition, had thrown out Coca-Cola: "His statements reflect an outdated mind-set which wants to take India backward. They have no foundation in or touch with [sic] economic reality and would send the wrong signals to foreign investors" (Xenophobic Investor Statements 1998). Privileging the "economic" in this way also enabled figures like Columbia University economist (and prominent pro-globalization theorist) Jagdish Bhagwati to dismiss swadeshi as merely "a cultural artefact" (Keshavan 1998).
Far from a cringing desire to please foreigners, many on the pro-globalization side saw a willingness to leap into global markets as the distinguishing mark of a self-confident nation. "Only a nation that lacks dignity and self-respect preaches swadeshi," wrote Pritish Nandy, Bombay publicist, marketing man, and political representative of the Hindu-nationalist Shiv Sena. "Because swadeshi means acknowledging one's inability to compete with the world. It means hobbling around on crutches and expecting others to pity you" (P. Nandy 1998). For Gurumurthy, legitimate Indian leadership meant an orientation toward "Indian" needs, defined as arising out of a "traditional" and indigenous sociocultural formation. For Nandy, conversely, the moral responsibility of the state was to ensure its citizenry access to a global marketplace: "Actually, the government owes it to the consumer to assist him in buying the best products in the world at the best possible price. In India. Irrespective of where they are made and who makes them" (ibid.).
In between these extremes, the debate about the merits of globalization offered several alternative positions. On the one hand, there were the economic pragmatists, who tended to suggest that the swadeshi position was both unrealistic and, in the words of Cornell University economist Kaushik Basu, "based on a bloated sense of national pride" (Basu 1999). The realistic option, then, was "to ask ourselves that given that the bias [of Western domination] is there, what is in our best interest? The answer that we would reach is that in today's world we have to attract foreign capital" (ibid.). The former head of Procter and Gamble India, Gurcharan Das, similarly tried to emphasize that India was in no position to pick and choose between luxuries and necessities: "They [the BJP and the SJM] talk about potato chips versus computer chips. The global investment community is a linked one. You try to discourage Coca-Cola, you will see that your hi-tech industries will also get affected. Because India will get a bad name as a place to do business" ("I Won't Say That We Need a Strong Government" 1998).
On the other hand, several leading industrialists-known collectively as "the Bombay Club"-aligned themselves with the economic dimension of the new swadeshi. Their central contention was that the post-1991 reforms had favored foreign companies and investors but had done little to liberalize business conditions for Indian companies. The "level playing field" that they called for included a limited extension of domestic protectionism to compensate for the inefficiencies that had accumulated under the planned economy (inefficiencies that someone like Das would argue were precisely the result of domestic protectionism). S. Gurumurthy put it succinctly: "International business is not like swimming which you learn by first getting into the pool. It's like flying where you have to learn to operate the aircraft in simulated conditions before taking to the skies" (Jishnu et al. 1998).
Despite the fact that the reforms clearly had biased the field toward foreign investors in several ways, and despite the preference shown by many commentators for seemingly objective economic data, the debate also involved many less quantifiable considerations. For the BJP and the SJM, swadeshi was never meant to be a purely economic concept; indeed, as we have seen, a Hindu-nationalist vision of Indian culture and identity underwrote it. But as we will see in the following chapters, appeals to cultural specificity could be mobilized in manifold ways. In fact, some of the staunchest critics of the new swadeshi used Hindunationalist and Orientalist-derived stereotypes of eternal India against its proponents. Gurcharan Das, for instance, admonished: "We should have confidence. Has our culture not survived the Moghuls, the British? Don't you think it will survive Coca-Cola?" ("I Won't Say ..." 1998).
In practice, the statements made by key BJP figures both before and immediately after the 1998 general elections expressed a position that seemed far more ambivalent-not to say confusing-than Gurumurthy's line. Already in October 1997, BJP General Secretary N. Govindacharya proclaimed, with little apparent interest in converting the undecided: "Swadeshi movement is our electoral compulsion. Liberalization, foreign investments etc. are our necessities. Unless you understand this difference between compulsion and necessity, you will not understand the BJP strategy" ("Atalji Is Just a Public Face" 1997).
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Illustrations viiAcknowledgments ix
Introduction
1. Locations: Advertising and the New Swadeshi 3
2. Elaborations: The Commodity Image 37
Part One
3. Citizens Have Sex, Consumers Make Love: KamaSutra I 59
4. The Aesthetic Politics of Aspiration: KamaSutra II 99
Part Two
5. Bombay Global: Mobility and Locality I 149
6. Bombay Local: Mobility and Locality II 185
Part Three
7. Indian Fun: Constructing "the Indian Consumer" I 215
8. Close Distance: Constructing "the Indian Consumer" II 250
Notes 289
Works Cited 331
Index 351