GS F242 Cultural Studies

BITS Pilani Dr. Muhammed Afzal P

Pilani Campus
 BITS Pilani
Pilani Campus

Visual Culture: Advertisements

BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus
• Tea as a foreign drink
• Gandhi: “the blood of the peasants of Assam”
• largely aimed at resident Britishers and the Anglophone
elite who aspired to their lifestyle.
• It celebrated tea as a natural product of a colonized and
tamed ‘jungle’, raised in geometrically arrayed and
manicured ‘gardens’ and picked by dark-skinned, subaltern
women, who offered it at a gleaming white table to equally
white consumers; a tidy ‘factory’ building in the background,
lit by the rising sun of colonial-era progress, merely hinted
at the complex and increasingly mechanized intermediary
process involved in actual tea manufacture

BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus
• Enamel placards posted in railway stations and markets
detailed the process of infusing tea by the ‘correct’ British
method, and this technique was endlessly iterated by
‘demonstration teams’ dispatched to festivals and bazaars,
and even (via all-female units) to the inner quarters of
conservative, purdah-observing households

BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

the publicity adopted the nationalist rhetoric of the
independence movement to champion tea as India’s
‘national beverage’ that (like a ‘national language’, ‘national
costume’, ‘national song’, etc.) could potentially unify the
subcontinent’s diverse religious, linguistic, and caste
groups. This trope of ‘national integration’ (a government
slogan of the post-Independence period) was likewise
taken up by indigenous firms such as the Bengali blender
A. Tosh & Sons, whose c. 1930s newspaper ad declares
‘Diverse castes, diverse creeds – but about Tosh tea, all
are of one mind!’

BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus
Another approach of the ITMEB was to urge factory owners
and office managers to set up free or subsidized canteens
on their premises and to offer an afternoon ‘tea break’ to
workers. Illustrated brochures proposed that such ‘lost’ shift
time would actually be cost-effective since it would result in
a happier, more alert, and more productive workforce. Artist
Annada Munshi’s Soviet-style poster for ITMEB shows a
textile mill worker – coded as a subaltern woman in a
blouseless sari, yet with a chic necklace and matching
earrings – glowing with sensual vitality as she partakes of
the daily ‘cup that cheers’.

BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus
BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus