Ephemeral mass-produced advertisements had not been treated as serious historical archives until the publication of the pioneering books by Robert Jay (1987) on American trade cards, Ann McClintock (1995) on British advertisements, and Timothy Burke (1996) on Zimbabwean advertisements, which these scholars tied with the broader projects of nationalism and imperialism.1 No comparable book existed for advertisements in Indian history, until Douglas Haynes’ recent study of brand-name capitalism in late-colonial Western India.
In his meticulously researched book, Haynes analyzes professional advertisements printed in newspapers in the Bombay Presidency in the inter-war period, by European and American companies that tried to enter the South Asian market. As Haynes shows, advertisers were acutely aware of the need to target middle-class Indians differently than the techniques used to target wealthy Westernized Indians and Europeans in Bombay, Poona, and Ahmedabad. International brands were eager to learn from vernacular firms, and sometimes even adopted codes from vernacular advertising. Haynes argues that advertisers of commodities as diverse as soaps, tonics, beverages, and domestic gadgets, all converged on the common theme of conjugality and the modern family to develop middle-class Indian customership. Advertisers appealed to the health of the family, particularly of children, emphasized the virtues of domestic hygiene, and promised to enhance masculine virility and feminine beauty, to ensure familial bliss. In the process, advertising transformed everyday habits and bodily practices of Indian consumers, such as “taking baths with soap” rather than ash, “relying on laundry soap” rather than the dhobi (washerman), “using a toothbrush and toothpaste” instead of neem twigs (p. 14), shaving, drinking hot beverages etc.
The book has seven chapters. Chapter 1 traces the entry of professional advertising in Western India, a region with a long history of vernacular capitalism, trade-fairs, bazaars, and manufacturing sector. Haynes shows how international advertisers shifted from “race” to “culture” to understand differences between the West and India and resorted to commercial ethnological knowledge accumulation through claims of scientific market research. Accordingly, international brands, despite subscribing to a capitalist universalism, altered their global messages to suit local cultural values. Chapter 2 shows that in the inter-war period, multinational companies in India cultivated a two-pronged advertising approach. For European consumers, ads promised the re-creation of metropolitan lifestyle in the tropical empire, while for middle-class urban Indians, ads focused on modern conjugality. Advertisers recognized the difficulties of appealing to rural and non-literate consumers.
Chapter 3 explores ads of tonics targeting male customers, that promised to restore masculine vigor and virility, but ultimately catered to notions of the family, and men’s duties as husbands and fathers. Haynes situates the immense popularity of these tonics in British colonial emasculation of Indian men. Chapter 4 analyzes ads targeting women, especially after surveys revealed that women controlled domestic consumption decisions. While Horlicks capitalized on male anxieties about unemployment and inability to provide for the family, its competitor Ovaltine targeted women consumers, using tropes of scientific motherhood and family health. A popular counterpart to male tonics was the South African product Feluna, which advertised the virtues of women’s fertility, motherhood, and wifehood. While ads targeting European women deployed the “modern girl” trope of women smoking, playing tennis, wearing short dresses, or in scenes of courtship, ads by the same companies depicted Indian women in traditional attire and in the familial roles of mother and wife.
The book provides a detailed study of soap advertisements, beginning in Chapter 4. Haynes shows how a market for beauty soaps (Lux, Pears, Palmolive etc.) emerged in 1930s India, promising to enhance femininity, youthfulness, and lighten skin-complexion of middle-class privileged-caste housewives, by using images and testimonials of Bollywood actresses (Sulochana, Devika Rani etc.). Chapter 5 continues the discussion of soap ads by focusing on Sunlight Soap for washing clothes, and Lifebuoy soap, which altered its global campaign around “body odour” to suit the Indian market, where this did not translate, and focused instead on the soap protecting the health of children, by eliminating germs. This medicalized invocation of family health was also seen in ads promoting new cooking oils, Cocogem and Dalda, which attempted to replace ghee and other traditional cooking substances, as shown in Chapter 6. Soap and cooking-oil companies altered their global ads in India by emphasizing their products’ vegetarian purity, and the lack of beef/pork fat, to appeal to Hindus, Jains, and Muslims. But packaged-food companies made very limited inroad into the Indian middle-class market, as people purchased food from local bazaars.
A theme that emerges in many ads is the middle-class family’s dispensability of servants by using brand-name products, or servants using the new commodities to enhance the middle-class family’s status. This is explored in Chapter 2 (Cornflour ad and the cook, Philips bulb and the Indian “boy”), Chapter 6 (Sunlight soap and the dhobi), and particularly in Chapter 7, which explores how electricity and new electric technology (lightbulbs, fans, stoves) were advertised as a more convenient alternative to servants. In reality, as Haynes shows, paid domestic labor in the colonial economy was cheaper than domestic gadgets (vacuum cleaners, refrigerators etc.).
By studying the entry of global brands into the Indian middle-class market in the 1920s–30s, the book shatters the popular perception that the globalization of consumer culture and modern marketing in India is a post-1991 neoliberalization phenomenon. I really appreciated the author’s inclusion of the various ads (mostly English-language ads, but some Gujarati and Marathi ads too) in the book, his occasional juxtaposition of ads of the same brand in India and other parts of the world (e.g. South Africa [pp. 111–112]), and comparison of ads of the same brand over time. Seeing the ads while reading Haynes’ excellent analysis and historical contextualization creates a stimulating learning experience that is sure to make readers look at late-colonial South Asia through a very different lens.
I wish Western/foreign brands’ contention with Boycott and Swadeshi (Indian-made) was explored more centrally in the book, given its focus on the inter-war period, when Gandhian mass-movements (Non-Cooperation movement in 1920, anti-Simon Commission protests in 1928, and Civil Disobedience movement in 1930) were in full swing. While briefly discussed in Chapter 5 in the context of soap ads, I wanted to know more about what it meant to advertise foreign brands at the height of anti-colonial nationalism that urged Indians to boycott foreign goods and buy Swadeshi. In the same vein, the contrast between Gandhian simplicity and the consumerism that brand-name capitalism advocated would be interesting to explore.
Translations of certain vernacular words/brands, such as Amritdhara (p. 17), Sundarisathi (p. 108), Garbharasak (p. 108), Prajabandhu (p. 149) would have helped non-South Asian readers.2 While tea advertisements have been studied extensively by scholars, a chapter (or at least a few pages) on tea companies’ (Lipton, Brook Bond) ubiquitous presence in Western India, I felt, would enhance the book’s broader discussion of brand-name capitalism. Finally, I wondered why the book cover used the image of Vishnu riding Garuda, an interesting deployment of Hindu mythology (which Haynes admits was rare [p. 125]) by Sunlight Soap company, but detracting readers from the book’s argument about advertisements promoting the modern conjugal family ideal in late-colonial India, for which the book had innumerable fascinating images to showcase.
Overall, this brilliant book adds fresh perspectives on South Asian history by foregrounding visual culture, modernity, conjugality, and consumerism. The book is an important contribution to business history, and the history of capitalism in a colonial context. The book will not only appeal to scholars and students, but also non-academic readers interested in histories of consumption culture, marketing and advertising, health, sexuality and the modern family.
Notes:
1 Robert Jay, The Trade Card in Nineteenth-Century America, Columbia 1987; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, London 1995; Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women. Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe, Durham 1996.
2 Amritdhara (cascade of nectar), Sundarisathi (beauty companion), Garbharasak (womb protector), Prajabandhu (friend of the people). Translations mine.