No society in history can match the output of a capitalist society. Once produced, goods have to be distributed and consumed. Then the problem of a capitalist society is not production but consumption. It thus introduced advertising which saw the full development of an organized system of commercial information and persuasion, as part of the modern distributive system. Advertising is the most visible expression of willed coexistence of very new technology and very old social forms. It may seem very candid and transparent at the superficial level but in reality they are never innocent. Advertising images have clear intentionality at their core – they are constructed to convey specific meanings and specific messages. They are a medium and form of marketing communication used for encouraging, persuading, manipulating an audience and driving the consumer behavior towards a commercial, political or ideological offering in a capitalist society by targeting their cultural affiliations

The central concern of this assignment is a critique of advertising which rivets more on culture than on the merchandise. Advertisements communicate different messages in diverse dimensions. Images convey "truth" of the advertisement and promises the pleasure of the product will bring. A study of the photographic images would try to grasp the politics of photography at the level of interactions with discourse, its collusion with the state and its institutions and its determinations by investment and apparatus¹. They also appeal to the 'conscious' and 'unconscious' which are not necessarily separated in the picture.

Advertising is rather a “system of magic” which relates to, according to Raymond Williams, “the attitudes and social thinking of a ‘consumer’ society”[1]. To achieve this end and to reinforce our claims, we will here analyze two public advertisements. The first, a moving advertisement of Fair and Lovely Ayurvedic fairness cream[2] and the second a print advertisement of Union Bank of India, reproduced here, promising reduced home and car loans.

Fair and Lovely Ayurvedic:

(To watch the advertisement click here )

The moving advertisement of the fairness cream begins with the image of a young 'typical Indian' girl who is dark complexioned and is wearing a 'saree', accompanied by her 'pandit' father mistakenly enter a 'modern beauty company' for doing 'puja'. The receptionist identifies the girl as 'pre-modern' and challenges the 'power' of Ayurveda which inspires the 'pandit' father to 'beautify' his daughter. The image of the 'new fair beautiful face' sets the icon of 'real beauty' and we, the viewers, immediately, consciously or unconsciously set that image as the 'standard of beauty' that one should adopt. The concept of beauty arises then and there - fairness, shape of the body, dressing style etc. contributes to the understanding of 'beauty'. Nearly in all such advertisements it is this beauty that enables the girl to achieve her goals, gain confidence, empower herself other social benefits like wedding, job etc and most importantly, all of this with a patriarchal support. It is noticeable that in such advertisements the girl belongs to an upper class or upper middle class who 'happened to born' with a dark complexion and the product is invariably suggested to her either by father or boyfriend. The main implication is towards 'fairness' and other benefits only that particular product can provide. It insinuates the idea that white is beautiful and black is inferior.

The images of the ayurvedic products in the advertisement try to convince the audience about the authenticity of the product and to show the 'real magic' of Ayurveda, especially Indians who have strong beliefs in the heritage and years old 'sacred tradition'. Through images of sandal, tulsi,saffron etc.  they communicate with the audience the message that they are using 'pure', authentic ayurvedic ingredients and the product is in a way connected to the 'Indian culture'.  'Indian culture' which includes Vedas, Sanskrit mantras etc has always been associated with upper caste Brahmins. It has always been a Brahmin who studied Vedas and learned the 'secret' of fairness which is '5000 years old' as shown in the advertisement and revealed it to the world who 'cannot' step into the premises of Sanskrit learning and Vedas.  Not only Sanskrit but Ayurveda itself is casteist and also sexist. 'Knowledge hidden in the esoteric inner sanctum' has been forbidden to the lower caste population and women for a long time and in the case of a lower caste woman the discrimination is two-fold, on the grounds of caste and gender[3].  All the non-Brahmins are under the 'generosity' of the Brahmins who share the 'Vedic secrets' with them. Since years, the Indian traditional culture and literature are the monopoly of Brahmins. The presence of a Brahmin pandit and Sanskrit vocals in the advertisement reinforce this idea of casteist monopoly.

The frontal image of the model in the advertisement creates the icon which we can only identify with an upper caste or an upper-class depiction and not even a trace of lower class or a Dalit can be identified. The image which represents the women in the entire society, in this advertisement, invariably has the 'physicality' of an upper caste woman. The mainstream representation in advertisements always focuses on the privileged ones as its icons and an independent representation of a Dalit or a lower caste identity is not yet completely visible in the public sphere. It is always under the agency of an upper caste representation and the disadvantaged and marginalized are ignored here. It should not be understood as the presence of a Dalit figure is a must in every advertisement but what matters to us is the understanding of such representations as icons in an unconscious level of the individual who watches it.

Union Bank of India

The ‘home’ in the image is a bungalow which is usually a prototype of a ‘dream home’.  The car appears to be a mid-range saloon with a registration code of a metropolitan city, Mumbai in this case. Both the bungalow and the car are symbolic of the material goodness that something as abstract as a loan can bring about. The models are a middle-aged male and a comparatively younger and shorter female, reinforcing a culturally and socially accepted norm. They are fair skinned and well groomed. The relationship that is portrayed is probably of a couple with beaming smiles on their faces which symbolize a happy family. Both the models form the frontal image of the advertisement and are typified as a happy family which is complete after owning a house and a car. The posers appear to be belonging to upper-class or middle-upper class under a decent income group which also constitutes the main target audience. The male has his left-hand spread and pointing to the background suggesting possible possession or ownership which was possible only because of the loan and implies the same future for the viewer.

The second half of the advertisement is overtly textual .The interest rate is highlighted with an asterisk which is barely visible and the footnote further smaller in size to be rendered invisible which says “For loans up to Rs 75 lakh”, which is a limitation and hence disguised. The subheading of increased maximum tenure and no prepayment penalty puts forth the idea of a more accessible and flexible loan agreement.  The ones about an early sanction of loan try to clear the air about the loan and its procedures which are conceived to be very tiring, monotonous and prolonged. The “Top up loan facility” is for giving a sense of security to the borrower for a future loan in case of a financial crunch. The “Online Loan Application Facility” which is centrally placed and highlighted gives a technologically advanced image of the bank and has the connotation of its target audience which is competent enough to avail such facilities. The “app” feature at the bottom which takes a considerable space in the small advertisement also just strengthens the banks’ ‘with-the-times’ image rather than assisting the advertisement and again implicates its target audience which possesses smartphones.

The logo of the bank symbolizes a ‘union’ between the bankers and their clients. The bank taps the opportunity to portray itself as something more than just a commercial bank but as an organization concerned with upholding the clients’ interest, fostering social relationships and comradeship over its business goals. This view is reinforced with the bank’s tagline which also focuses on ‘people’ inside the bank and their benevolence. The bank exhibits itself as something which prefers people over profit. The name of the bank appears both in Hindi and English depicting the synchronization of an upheld tradition and nationality with a faithful loyalty to neoliberal attitudes. Altogether the terms laid in the advertisement are supposed to be true and honest. If anything fails to be in agreement and aims at conflict, then “Conditions apply”, written perpendicular to the axial orientation of the advertisement in an almost invisible font is there at their disposal. 

The banks juxtapose the needs and wants by creating a demand. By showing iconized images they stir up demands among consumers. They target them backhandedly by giving them an image of a perfect lifestyle which they could not afford, but will be able to now, with their home and car loan schemes.  Thus, when buying a house or a car, they assure that you do not only buy an object you buy social respect, discrimination, health, beauty, success, and power to control the environment.

Conclusion

Advertisements are catered by people who belong to all classes including non-middle class. It is often said that our society is materialist and advertising reflects this. If we were sensibly materialist, in that part of our living in which we use things, we should find most advertisements to be of insane irrelevance. But advertising with its emphasis on 'bringing the good things of life' takes a crucial cultural quality of its modern form. The material object being sold is never enough. Many people who watch these advertisements, especially the middle-class, consume these advertisements and prefer discrimination as an attempt to replicate its world and ideology which is representative of the upper-caste or class 'norms'. The understanding of the politics of the situation should inform our activism to make it better able to resist the power of the visual and fight the subjection it engenders, as it insidiously shapes us and the structure of our perceptions of society³. Advertisements have long been used to influence the consumers towards the companies’ interests availing benefits. Advertisers take a hostile stance towards their target – psychology and sociology are used against the system. The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them[4].

-Parth Sharma and Emy Joy

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Introduction

Benedict Anderson is a historian who is noted for his radical writings on nationalism. Using a historical materialist approach, he describes the major factors contributing to the emergence of nationalism in the world during the past three centuries in his seminal work Imagined Communities (1983). Not only has this work been sold more than a quarter of a million copies since its first publication, it has also been translated into dozens of languages. It has contributed to a new field of study and has been highly influential in many interdisciplinary studies. For students of English literature, when it comes to addressing questions regarding print capitalism, novel and new literary forms, definitions of literature as nationalist literature etc, this work is unavoidable.

In this paper we will summarize Anderson’s ideas regarding the conceptualization of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, of ‘homogenous, empty time’ and print-capitalism. Anderson viewed the Western ‘modular’ form of the nationalism as being universal which is a problem in his conception. It would seem that a country like India is only a perpetual consumer of Western modernity which is conflicting with the reality. Therefore, we will also trace some of the problems of his theory by a reading of Partha Chatterjee, Eric J. Hobsbawm and John Breuilly. Chatterjee is one of the leading members of the well-known subaltern studies collective of scholars whereas a representation of the traditional Marxist school of thought is made by Hobsbawm. Breuilly was a Marxist historian who worked extensively on areas such as nationalism and ethnicity, urban cultural history in 19^th century Europe and modern liberalism.

An Outline of Imagined Communities

In his book Anderson defines the nation as a politically imagined community, which is imagined as both limited and sovereign. Anderson proposes that nationalism is a cultural artefact which acquires concrete shape through the institution of print capitalism in the structural forms of the novel and the newspaper. It is “modular, capable of being transplanted with varying degrees of self consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to be merged and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations.” (2006:4). The modular influences of modern European languages and literatures were considered as standards by which different territories define themselves as nation. This form, which is a product of post-Enlightenment thought, was the most universalist resource that the West had.

He then takes up three cultural conceptions - namely the idea of sacred language, a society ruled by monarchs and the messianic time. Transition in these to vernaculars, sovereign states and homogenous, empty time, respectively, “made it possible to ‘think’ nation”. In messianic time, community was imagined regardless of language as vernacular. A nation, that corresponds with a particular vernacular language became imagined only when this notion of time gave way to a homogenous, empty time which is the ‘new’ concept of simultaneity. So, the germinal of nation as an idea is very new and modern. This is opposed to what was originally believed of a nation.

Print capitalism produces the new form of simultaneity. In the case of newspaper there is a simultaneous consumption of it by people who are unaware of one another’s identity. In novel the author fills the empty time with characters and events. The events are performed at a specific clocked, calendrical time by actors who do not know each other. Both the forms, hence, create an imagined world in the reader’s mind. Also, Anderson viewed that print capitalism laid the basis for national consciousness by creating a unified field of communication, languages-of-power and fixity of language.

Critiquing Anderson: Some alternative ideas on nationalism

Partha Chatterjee, attempts a critique of Imagined Communities in the first chapter of his book The Nation and Its Fragments (1993) which he titles as ‘Whose Imagined Community?’. Here he challenges the idea of nation as being imagined from certain modular forms. He argues that nationalism is not rooted “on an identity but rather on a difference of the modular forms of the nationalist society propagated by the modern west.” (1993:5). There was the creation of another form which is indigenous and ‘original’ to every nation. This ‘original’ form is what Chatterjee terms as a sovereign nation in the post-colonial world. Therefore, the meaning of the term ‘imagined community’ is not a universal one. If at all a nation is imagined, it is imagined differently by different nations.

An explanation of this is given by stating the existence of two sovereign domains-the material domain (the State and formal elements) which is an imitation of the West and the spiritual domain (consisting of the ‘national culture’), the sovereign territory from which the colonial society emerged well before the beginning of its political battle with the coloniser. It is in this sovereign spiritual domain that nationalism is said to have begun.  The spiritual domain consists of the national language created by the native elites who tried to make the native language fit into the ‘modern’ culture keeping the State out of its periphery. Similarly, the cultural forms of drama and novel were also ‘modernized’. Instead of aping the West, they constructed their own modernized artistic space. Other institutions like the secondary schools were also created. A space was provided for the new elites to generalize and normalize a new language and literature outside the domain of the State. In the domain of the family, the nationalists asserted the right to the reformation of the tradition where the intervention of the colonialists was not allowed. Therefore, one can see that in this spiritual domain the nationalist elite did not allow either the European missionaries or the colonial State to mould  it as an identical form of the ‘modular’ and instead made a clear distinction from it.  

In another book The Politics of the Governed (2004), Chatterjee critiques Anderson’s concept of ‘empty, homogenous time’ and politics of universalism. Anderson elaborates on the conception of politics of universalism as something belonging to the new concept of temporality (in The Spectre of Comparisons). In this, the world is viewed as one i.e. politics as an occurrence is uniform everywhere. Politics, in this sense, inhabits the empty homogenous time space of modernity. Chatterjee discards the idea of ‘empty, homogenous time’ by stating it to be the ‘utopian time of Capital’.  It is something not related in real space which he says consists of heterotopia. He asserts the idea that time is ‘heterogenous, unevenly dense.’ Since it is heterogeneous, the politics is also not the same for all the people, thereby discarding the idea of universality. This shows the short-circuit in thought which Anderson represents.

Unlike Chatterjee’s critique, the differences that Eric J. Hobsbawm holds from Anderson are not directly stated. A symptomatic reading of the two can help one construct a critique of Anderson. In Nations and Nationalisms Since 1780 (1990) Hobsbawm traces the various phases and forms of nationalism since the Enlightenment. Endorsing Anderson, he too argues that nation is not natural or inherent but rather of a historically recent origin. However, when distinguishing between nation and nationalism he says that ‘nationalism comes before nations. Nations do not make states and nationalisms but the other way round.’ (1990:10). Hobsbawm is also of the view that “nation” cannot be considered as something outlined and disseminated by newspaper columns and editorials. So, unlike Anderson, he says that we must look at “the sub-literary” level in order to know the concept of nation. And, in that sense, print capitalism alone will not be enough.

Anderson’s theory that a national identification directly comes into existence by means of the time of capital is held inadequate by Hobsbawm who argues that for the ordinary people, “nation” is not a singular kind of identification solely made by capital/time. It is “combined with identifications of another kind”. For example: for many people, India as a standard also means being Hindu, or partly a Bengali, a Hindi speaker. For many people being Hindu is a super condition to have the national identification of being Indian, over and above the national/state condition. Hobsbawm also believes that nationalist movements make use of pre-existing cultures. He then says that one cannot distinguish “nation” from previous societies unlike Anderson who had distinguished them from the modern nation.

Anderson thought that nation emerged out of a need for some inevitable localization or imagination of some group as a local one that differentiates itself from other nations/societies. The modern nation then should have first originated as a result of a tension somewhere in a colonized place, but not certainly in Europe, where print capitalism originated. Here Hobsbawm demonstrates that nation is not simply a result of a need to imagine oneself as a new kind of society in the modern times in this way. Anderson also believes that national imagination grows evenly through novel and newspaper, across all regions, or that at least it would be universal to all regions alike sooner or later. However, Hobsbawm differs by saying that it instead grows unevenly through social groupings or classes at different stages. Ranajit Guha,a subaltern historiographer, noted that in the Indian context  there existed the bourgeois nationalist historiography and the colonialist historiography, both of which were predominantly elite achievements. The subaltern historiography emerged much later. This reflects the unevenness mentioned before.

Another theorist, John Breuilly, in Nationalism and the State (1982), claims that nationalist political consciousness originates from oppositional activity within modern states. Nationalism, he says, is a parasitic movement and an ideology which is shaped by what it opposes. The general condition for the development of anti-colonial nationalism is the existence of a distinct power under foreign control. The very statement echoes Chatterjee’s assumption of the difference between the anti-colonial nationalism from the modular forms of the West. He refers to nationalism as political movements seeking or exercising power and justifying such actions with nationalist arguments.

Conclusion

Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities has provided the impetus for other scholars on nationalism and area specialists to formulate different ideas on nationalism. Although a foundational work, it has been criticized on the levels of the validation of its various concepts. While Anderson’s view of nation is normative and universal, Chatterjee offers a counter-narrative. Hobsbawm registers the problem of print-capitalism and the historical class problematic to the discussion while Breuilly argues the necessity of political sovereignty for nationalism. These criticisms result in enriching our understanding of the concept better. Nationalism as an ‘imagined’ concept is not universal; it is rather something that varies across space and time.

References:

Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 2006.

Anderson, Benedict, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World, London: Verso, 1998.

Breuilly, John, Nationalism and the State, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982.

Chatterjee, Partha, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Chatterjee, Partha, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004.

Guha, Ranajit, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’ in Ranajit Guha (ed.) Subaltern Studies, Vol. 1. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. 1-8.

Hobsbawm, Eric J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Success stories from the UPSC civil services examination (CSE), coveted as the most difficult exam in the world with a success rate of about 0.01%, often makes news. But why? What is it that makes these stories so special? Why are they so important? What is to gain from someone else’s success?

Before we answer that, let’s get a little uncomfortable.

Sandeep Kumar, son of a rickshaw puller and a resident of a transit camp for a slum, cleared CSE 2015. After the death of his father—he quit his job as an accountant to exclusively prepare for the exam. Studying in a makeshift cabin of 10×12 ft, without coaching or guidance, studying for 10-12 hours every day for two years, he achieved this stupendous feat.

Then again there is the twenty-seven-year-old, visually impaired, Bala Nagendran of Chennai, who also raised eyebrows by securing rank 926 in 2015 CSE with meagre resources and unavailability of good quality study material in Braille. Even then he said, “I would never accept whenever someone refers to me being blind as a challenge. Personally, I consider it a powerful tool. It has made me realise the importance of having inner-vision. My visual impairment has helped me get to know people better”

The 2014 CSE topper Ira Singhal, with 62% locomotor disability, placed her disability aside to clear the exam four times straight, acing it in her last attempt. She had the most novel reply when asked about her physical disability saying, “some problems are visible, some are not… we’re all fragmented beings, everybody has problems—what matters is how we deal with them.” And boy did she show us how.

The interesting thing about these stories, of Sandeep or Nagendran or Ira or anyone else, is that they do not just happen and die in isolation. They are infectious; they prove it’s not the means but the end that is more important. They don’t teach us how to clear just an exam, but how to not complain and crib. As heroes they stand right in our face, serving as living examples of how to stand tall in the face of adversity.

Such stories make news because they give us hope with a realisation of how lucky and better off we are, even with our share of problems. In the instant comparison with these overachievers, we face ourselves—we face the reality of how it could have been much worse—which is what makes us uncomfortable. Realising how difficult it must have been for them to break those binding shackles and overcome hindrances to achieve the unexpected shakes us up. But the resolve, the grit and determination shown by them to overcome insurmountable problems and yet emerging victorious, is what makes us happy.

We feel the adrenaline rise almost instantly; we feel everything is suddenly in reach with just the right amount of determination. There’s something in them that never ceases to amaze us whenever we remember them; something that stirs us, wakes us, and stiffens our resolve.

Even in the whirlpool of existential crisis they bring us a purpose. In the vagaries of life, they give us a hand to hold on to. This is why they’re so special, so important.