Fair’s Unfair
Anisha Datta Against the backdrop of a globalized capitalist economy and postcolonial modernity, contemporary Indian metropolises are sites of prolific production and consumption. Since the mid-1980s an intensified and highly visible consumer culture has emerged in urban spaces and there has been an unprecedented proliferation of media and mediated images in everyday life. Advertisements are the symbols of India’s globalized and deregulated economy and its main consumers are the upwardly mobile middle class. India has a huge middle-class population of approximately 250–350 million with growing purchasing power, reflected by the remarkable increase in purchase of consumer durables in the last decade. Recently, the global real-estate consulting group Knight Frank ranked India fifth in the list of 30 emerging retail markets. In this essay, I will undertake a feminist and postcolonial deconstruction of one of the ‘Fair & Lovely’ face cream advertisements in order to unpack how this particular advertisement appeals to a set of dominant gender and aesthetic prejudices by seducing the careerist and consumerist desires of educated young Indian women. [2] (For a video version of the ad–please visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yET6dTSYsSA ) Baudrillardian Moments At the outset, I would like to point out two classic Baudrillardian moments that I experienced while I was surfing the website (www.agencyfaqs.com) from where I accessed this advertisement. The ‘agencyfaqs’ website aptly reflects how production and consumption intersect with and reconstitute each other in the new media of the World Wide Web, and that too on a global scale. It is a website where the advertising agencies are advertising their products, primarily targeting potential client corporations; and at the same time it is a site for pure entertainment and leisure for a casual Internet surfer. And in the role of a casual surfer I chanced upon this website and this particular advertisement. Secondly, this website represents the extreme ephemeral and episodic nature of form that characterizes the postmodern world. The site uploads any new ad’s audio/visual form, which they call the streaming version, as well as the still image-frames which are termed the storyboard. But the streaming version can be accessed only in the first few days, when the new ad is being beamed over the television channels and hence still ‘live’. After which it is withdrawn from the website, and then one can only find the storyboard version of the same advertisement – which by now has been reduced to the status of ‘file picture’. This reflects the transient existence of any mass-circulated sign today, be it fashion, news item or advertisement. Its only recently that one discovers the adverstisement on sites like youtube for another kind of consumption. The Narrative Unpacked The narrative of the advertisement revolves around an educated young woman with a passion for cricket, the most popular sport in India, who aspires to be a TV cricket commentator. The advertisement also depicts the hyperreal journey of an ‘ordinary’ young woman from an unknown city neighbourhood to the globalized information highways of satellite television and ‘live’ cricket matches. The story of Indian cricket, which begins with the first mention of a cricket match played by British sailors in Cambay in 1721, is a story of its gradual indigenization. Since India’s victory in the World Cup Cricket tournament in England in 1983, cricket has emerged as a huge corporate business in India in terms of match sponsorship, product endorsement by cricket players and the revenue generated through telecast rights and advertisements shown during telecast cricket matches. [3] As we know, cricket in India is popularly portrayed in chaste terms, as being a social unifier cutting across class and regional boundaries, a civilizing agent and a national cultural bond striving to overcome religious, caste and language divisions. Since the mid-1980s, there was a significant change in the nature of cricket consumption with the spread of viewership through television, which has taken cricket out of its urban confines to the villages and small towns. During the last World Cup Cricket tournament in February 2003, 79.9 million Indians tuned into live cricket telecasts, of which 36.5 million – that is close to 50 per cent – were female viewers. [4] In the words of cricket historian Ramachandra Guha, cricket has become a vehicle for the playing out of nationalist feeling. [5] India’s success in the game can also be viewed as the reappropriation of cricket by a former British colony, a typical phenomenon of the ‘Empire striking back’. The indigenous adoption of cricket also reflects certain ideas of self-cultivation, manliness and self-worth. The game became a mirror through which a (middle class) [6] Indian identity assessed itself. However, it is to be noted that even today, cricket commentary in India is overwhelmingly a male domain, as is the case with all other televised sports. Therefore, the aspiration of the girl in the advertisement indicates a definite breaking of new ground, a detraditionalizing move, as she wants to make a foray into a traditionally male occupation. Commentators have always been men and often these days one finds images of former (male) cricketers wielding the microphone on TV instead of the willow and the ball. Thus the advertisement projects a hyperreal world in which gendered occupational barriers have apparently withered away, courtesy of commodity consumption. Let us now look into the initial images in some detail: the woman is walking into an expansive cricket field dressed in a three-piece suit, salwar kurta, which is a typical dress of young working women in urban India. The shot of the woman walking into the huge field in the image is quite significant, as it can be read as the allegorical representation of the woman’s entry into the juggernaut world of a high-profile career and conspicuous consumption. Moving on to a later images in frame five, she is seen to be practising mock commentary while watching a cricket match on the TV. Keeping in mind the present status of cricket in India, the advertisement simulates the fusion of commerce and leisure/entertainment by representing the woman watching cricket on TV, commentating and