Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia edited by Douetas E. Haynes, ABIGAIL MCGowAN, TIRTHANKAR Roy, AND HARUKA YANAGISAWA OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESSOXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. 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No part of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without Permission in writing from Oxford University Press. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN-13: 978-0-19-806364-3 ISBN-10: 0-19-806364-4 ‘Typeset in MinionPro 10/13, by Digital Domain IT Services Pvt, Ltd., Kolkata, Printed in India at Bengal Binding, New Delhi 110 020 Published by Oxford University Press... YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, NewDelhi 110 001 4 CONTENTS List of Figures and Tables Acknowledgements Introduction Dovetas E. HAYNES AND ABIGAIL McGowAN . The Consumption of British Manufactured Goods in India: A Prologue, 1765-1813 HV. Bowen . Growth of Small-scale Industries and Changes in Consumption Patterns in South India, 1910s-50s HARUKA YANAGISAWA N » Consumption History of the Estado da India, 1850-1950 Remy Dias 4. Consumption, Domestic Economy, and the Idea of the ‘Middle Class’ in Late Colonial Bombay PRASHANT KIDAMBI 5. At Home in the World: Cinema and Cultures of the Young in Bombay in the 1920s Kausuix BHAUMIK vii 26 51 76 108 136vi Contents 6. Consuming Families: Negotiating Women’s Shopping in Early Twentieth Century Western India ABIGAIL McGowAN 7. Creating the Consumer? Advertising, Capitalism, and the Middle Class in Urban Western India, 1914-40 Doucetas E, Haynes 8. Honour, Desire, and Fashion: Textile Consumption in Northwest India and Pakistan MICHELLE MASKIELL 9. OfSoaps and Scents: Corporeal Cleanliness in Urban Colonial India HARMINDER Kaur 10, Consumption and Craftsmanship in India, 1870-1940 TIRTHANKAR Roy Notes on Contributors 155 185 224 246 268 299Creating the Consumer?* Advertising, Capitalism, and the Middle Class in Urban Western India, 1914-40 Douatas E. HAYNES D uring the period between the two World Wars, new forms of advanced capitalism, focused on the aggressive marketing of consumer goods to urban South Asians, began to develop on the subcontinent. A central expectation of these new kinds of business was that brand name products might oust a range of locally produced and marketed goods from regional bazaars, and that demand for these products could be stabilized or expanded on a national level by developing sustained consumer loyalties among a South Asian public through advertising. Businessmen increasingly geared their advertising efforts to a set of urban Indians who were defining themselves as members of the middle class. The inroads of brand name capitalism into South Asian markets were slow and uneven, but by 1940, a small number of Indian industries that catered to urban consumers—the producers of medicines, light bulbs, fans, soaps and other toiletries, vegetable oils, packaged foods, and some kinds of ready made clothes—had firmly established themselves. In this essay, I explore the ways capitalist actors—manufacturers, mer- chants, and advertising agencies—sought to create markets for their products among the urban ‘middle class’ of the Bombay Presidency by advertising. I analyse advertisements in the Bombay Chronicle, an English-language daily * My thanks to Jeremy Schneider who helped to collect advertisements for this project while working as a Dartmouth College Presidential Scholar. 1 want to thank members of the conference ‘Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia’, and especially Abigail McGowan and Tirthankar Roy, for comments on an earlier version of this essay. Talking with Vikram Doctor and reading his work on advertising has helped to clarify my thinking and correct factual errors.186 Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia in western India, during the period between 1914 and 1940, I have chosen the Bombay Chronicle for two reasons. On one hand, the effort to develop brand loyalties was more pronounced in English newspapers than in ver- nacular papers.’ On the other hand, The Times of India, the other major English-language newspaper of western India, remained oriented toward an audience composed of Europeans and perhaps of those seeking to emulate Europeans more closely. In some cases, advertisements in the The Times of India and in the Bombay Chronicle for the same products could be quite different from one another, reflecting these differences in audience. My main sources for this essay are the advertisements themselves. Only limited evidence exists on the decision making that informed particular advertising campaigns. By contrast, advertisements are a source that exist in great abundance, and their value to historians of South Asia has been almost totally neglected. Here I try to capture capitalist imaginings of the Indian consumer by looking at the content of advertisements and the evolution of advertising pitches over time. I pay particular attention to the discourse of these advertisements, and discuss the values and ideals they evoked. I also seek to look closely at the visual content of these images. In each of the two cases I examine—tonics and soap—I focus on concepts of thé body that informed the advertisements.? As many scholars have recognized, modern consumer-oriented capital- ism involves efforts to shape new needs and reorient old ones. But at the same time, as Timothy Burke has argued, advertisers cannot be seen simply as figures capable of creating out of thin air a ‘false consciousness’ or of in- venting ‘false needs’. Instead, advertisers must draw in some part upon exist- ing understandings and values to be successful. As Judith Williamson argues, ‘the subject who is drawn into advertising is one who knows.... Advertisers clearly produce knowledge ... but this knowledge is always produced from something already known, that acts as a guarantee, in its anteriority, for the “truth” in the ad itself’. My examination of advertisements is predicated upon uncovering these ‘prior meanings’—again I use Burke’s phrase—that businessmen sought to evoke in their advertisements.* Put another way, I try to establish some presence of the consumer back into an understanding of advertising. Businessmen sought to create markets for their goods, but they could not do so without consideration of what they felt to be their consumers’ understandings and values. The work of adver- tising was in some cases to direct those understandings toward particular products, in other cases to reshape understandings so that buyers would see the value of their goods. I suggest we can appreciate how advertisers accom- modated themselves to, and refashioned, existing commodity environments Creating the Consumer? 187 by looking at (a) the way advertising campaigns for different products tended to coalesce around shared themes in their sales pitches and (b) how advertisers chose to alter the ‘commodity image’ of their products over time.’ Every advertisement might be seen as a part of long-term processes of experimentation, in which sellers tested consumer responses and then adjusted their approach to what they believed was successful and what was not. In effect, advertising both shaped, and was shaped by, larger discourses of what it meant to be middle class during this time. We cannot say from this kind of study how advertising influenced actual practices of material consumption. But it is equally problematic to assume that advertisers were simply alien figures who received little input from the society around them. Advertisers in effect had their antennae up in order to gather any informa- tion they could about consumer values and about the response of buyers to specific sales pitches. Existing academic studies of advertisements in South Asia to a great extent have focused on the 1980s and afterwards. This, it has often been suggested, has been a period of ‘mass consumption’ or ‘consumerism’, stimulated by rapidly expanding incomes among the Indian middle classes and by the dissemination of the new media (see Kidambi’s critique of this view in this volume). The literature on advertising has highlighted the ways in which advertisers have played upon ideas of autonomy, independence, pleasure, desire, and the erotic in the creation of ‘commodity images.” But this literature tells us very little about earlier forms of advertising.” As we attempt to reconstruct the cultural and ideological factors shaping historical consumption, we need to be careful about reading back in time the ethos that we assume to be characteristic of the present. During the climate of the interwar period, advertising could not create out of thin air any straightforward culture of ‘consumerism’ that might have led to unrestrained indulgence in spending. Certainly, members of the middle class sought to differentiate themselves from other classes in society by defining themselves as ‘modern’, scientific in outlook, and ‘progressive’ in social views, and this self-conception affected their consumption prac- tices, But ‘modernity’ was itself a contradictory conception. It brought with it new anxieties about self, health, sexuality, family, work, and social order; it was fractured by ‘traditional’ values and by economic realities.* Members of the middle class certainly adopted new kinds of consumer norms, and they certainly sought to differentiate their lifestyles from those of other so- cial strata. At the same time, they were inhibited from embracing a larger consumerist ethos by their own family resources and priorities and by po- litically-constructed cultural constraints on the nature of spending. Before188 Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia 1940, concepts of desire, pleasure, fashion, and comfort played a subordinate rather than primary role in advertising; instead businesses promoted their products by attempting to invoke what they identified as the core anxieties of their targeted audience. I particularly stress that advertisers sought to evoke imperatives of the body, that is, notions held by members of the middle class that their physical well-being was subject to serious threats that needed to be met by immediate counter-measures. Middle-class anxieties about the body were shaped by a variety of forces—colonialist and nationalist conceptions of masculinity and femininity, medical discourses about health, high caste ideas of purity and pollution, and new notions of middle-class domesticity — that established a universe of ‘prior meanings’ influencing how messages about commodities would be received. ADVERTISING AND THE MIDDLE CLASS Changes in the Character of Advertising The period between 1914 and 1940 was one in which advertising in print media underwent a significant transformation. Advertising had long been important to the financial well-being of newspapers. But advertising early in the period was clearly quite different from advertising at the end of it. In 1914, many of the advertisements in the Bombay Chronicle were submitted by particular stores, and they often did little more than inform the reader of the availability of certain items or announce the arrival of consignments of goods.’ In some instances, the reader might be exposed to a lengthy description of particular goods and their virtues. Often stores inyited readers to purchase items through correspondence; the customer was not expected to visit the store physically.'° In other cases, sellers of bazaar goods made by local artisans and other small producers and distributed by peddlers in the regional markets depicted the qualities of their products in occasional public notices. Brand name advertising before World War I was primarily intended to entice European buyers (and perhaps Indians who most closely emulated Europeans) to purchase particular items. Advertisements during this time often possessed little visual material other than the manipulation of the size of the type font for emphasis. There were exceptions to this pattern. For instance, many items of modern technology—safes, cars, watches, etc.—were represented visually. Some images of people were present, but usually those represented were Europeans." By 1940, larger businesses—both importing corporations and Indian firms—had become increasingly assertive in their efforts to develop con- sumer bases. Markets in some goods, such as medicines and soaps, became highly competitive during the period between the two World Wars. This Creating the Consumer? 189 was also a time of considerable volatility in demand, especially during the Great Depression, Advertising promised to be a means of stabilizing sales, so that production could be geared more predictably to purchases. Advertising was also a way in which brand name capitalists could extend their markets at the expense of bazaar goods. Increasingly businesses devoted more of their resources to developing sophisticated publicity for their products. Profes- sional advertising emerged in India as one response to this development. Sometimes companies hired specialist firms—such as J. Walter Thompson (an American firm) and L.A. Stronach—whose employees had extensive experience in framing advertisements for consumer items. In other cases, European manufacturers expected the agencies handling the distribution of their goods to provide advertising services. In a few instances, companies even hired in-house professionals to do this work. Finally, if their budget was smaller, they could sometimes draw upon expertise provided by news- papers themselves to popularize their products. By 1940, advertising had altered the physical appearance of the Bombay Chronicle. News stories now occupied the first page of the paper, where advertising was more limited. But advertisements inside often drew the at- tention of readers to products through increasingly sophisticated means of employing type and visual matter. While stores continued to inform readers of their goods, a larger proportion of the advertisements highlighted par- ticular brand names. Copywriters able to formulate compelling captions and artists trained at the J.J. School of Art in commercial design were increasingly employed in Bombay to help to develop sophisticated advertisements.” The human form appeared much more frequently in advertisements, and im- ages of European men and women were gradually replaced by renderings of persons clearly marked by hairstyles and clothing as Indian (in the case of female images, by long black hair, a marriage mark on the forehead, or by a sari pulled over the top of the head).'? Increasingly, advertisers replaced lengthy descriptions of their products with short, catchy, phrasing designed to evoke a strong reaction from the potential buyers; this kind of copy often enhanced the eye-catching quality of an advertisements appearance. The development of professional advertising also involved gathering knowledge about urban society and attitudes. Advertising firms increasingly did research on the local economy and culture, their managers travelled widely to get a sense of prevailing market trends in different parts of India, and, by the late 1930s, they began to conduct more formal yet still rudimen- tary market surveys. In many cases, the heads of advertising offices (gener- ally European) prided themselves to be men who understood Indians and their markets. But advertising firms also hired educated Indians—persons190 Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia from the same social strata as the potential clientele for consumer goods—as translators, line drawers, and ultimately copywriters, These individuals in effect came to constitute informal channels of information about potential buyers. Though their sources of knowledge were far from perfect, profes- sional advertisers should not be seen as figures completely cnt off from their customer base, intent on projecting alien consumer values onto their pro- spective buyers." The days when advertisements were simply imported into India from Europe and printed in their original form were over. The Middle Class and its Consumption Patterns The new efforts to sell brand name products were geared primarily to the urban middle class, a category of people whom—in contrast to the peasantry—advertisers hoped to entice into participating in a new consumer culture, To some extent, one might say, these advertisements involved an attempt to fashion this ‘middle class’. The images of Indian consumers pictured in advertisements were of high caste Hindus (or sometimes Parsees) who lived in homes or comfortable flats. Muslims were excluded as were peasants and members of the working class.'° Regional differences—between Gujaratis, Maharashtrians, and south Indians—were often obliterated in advertisements. The families represented were nuclear families, thus excluding the full variety of family forms present in Bombay, which ranged from single men to joint families. Advertisements created an image of consumers as people who had money to spend even if they needed to be frugal about how they spent it, But advertisers could not just conjure up this class out of thin air, Families whose male heads held jobs in the literate professions—whether in govern- ment or in new forms of modern business—were starting to see themselves as members of a middle class, even as they retained or sharpened other iden- tities.'° This development was associated with new patterns of spending. As Kaushik Bhaumik has argued, the period between 1910 and 1930 saw ‘the emergence of the middle classes in Bombay no longer defined exclusively by ties of community, region and religion but also by the lifestyles they as- sumed. The logic of consumption set the horizons of expectation’. Urban people engaged in an expanded range of leisure activities, including the the- atre, films, eating out in restaurants, and purchasing and reading magazines, newspapers, and novels.'* Bhaumik recognizes diversity in consumption patterns within the middle classes, but stresses the desire for similar catego- ries of goods that cut across regional communities. Clearly, the interwar period witnessed a variety of developments that promoted new patterns of consumption. In urban areas changes in taste Creating the Consumer? 191 were causing shifts in demand away from products manufactured by small producers in the western Indian countryside, sometimes toward goods that were made in cities or that were imported from Europe, Japan or the United States.” Urban women, for instance, were reducing their use of ornate bordered silk saris with gold thread. There was new demand for printed saris. And saris made of ‘art silk’, that is, synthetic fibres that could assume asilk-like appearance, began to make their entry into the market during the late 1920s, Some women shifted their use patterns from nine-yard saris to six-yard saris. If evidence from south India is any guide, middle class women increasingly developed wardrobes of larger numbers of cheaper saris, caus- ing demand for more expensive varieties to contract.” These changes in consumption practices seemingly stemmed from the need to present oneself as ‘modern’, an identity which itself was influenced by a range of cultural developments, from education to movements of social reform and changes in the occupational structure of Indian cities. Shifts in attitudes among and about women were a critical part of these processes. Abigail McGowan has argued that changes in the family, begin- ning in the late nineteenth century, allocated to wives new management roles over household budgets, presumably with greater control over ex- penditure.”” Women increasingly entered into public life in western Indian cities, especially after 1920, with significant consequences for consumption behaviour. Theatre and cinema drew women into new civic spaces outside the home, at least in Bombay, providing new models for emulation. For in- stance, Bal Gandharva, a male actor who played female roles in the Marathi theatre, enjoyed a major role in setting clothing standards. Movies—both European and Indian—no doubt came to exercise a similar influence. Gandhian politics gave women new roles in forms of public protest in the Non-Cooperation movement of 1920-2 and especially the Civil Disobedi- ence movement of 1930-2. Small numbers of women began to make their way into the work world, perhaps setting trends for those who never sought employment themselves. Perhaps most significantly, women came to exer- cise a greater role in shopping. Until the 1920s, middle class females had of- ten not come directly to shops to make purchases; instead men and perhaps senior women in joint households chose saris for the younger housewives, or the family purchased clothes by mail order or from itinerant merchants who brought goods to the home.” But by the 1920s and 1930s, women were frequenting shops themselves in increasing numbers.” But any account we might make of expanding consumption before 1940 must be tempered by recognition of countervailing tendencies, as the essays by Kidambi and McGowan in this volume make clear. First, the purchasing192 Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia power of many families that considered themselves middle class placed severe constraints on material practices. Perhaps 40 per cent of these families lived at levels of income little better than those earned by the upper end of the work- ing class. They still spent the majority of their income on food and housing According to family budgets collected by the Bombay Labour Office during the early 1920s, while working class families used about 28 per cent of their income on items other than food, fuel, bedding, and house rent, families de- fined as middle class devoted only slightly more, on average about 35 per cent, to such goods. Those earning less than Rs 125 a month, about two-fifths of the. survey sample, committed on average only 29 per cent of family expenditures outside these four categories.” The high cost of living space was one reason that middle class households were unable to free up greater resources for com- modity purchases. Even so housing was often of poor quality.” In addition, middle class households often gave preference in their expen- ditures to items that contributed to the reproduction of the family—and their family’s middle-class character—into the next generation, Education of chil- dren wasa significant expense largely absent among workers. Spending on life insurance, which sought to guarantee that the nuclear family would survive if the male head died, had a high priority. Some income earners devoted a significant part of earnings to remittances for dependants who remained in native places.” Such expenditures might be seen less as an attempt to perpetu- ate families that already met some domestic ideal than as an effort to realize that ideal in the future. So most of these families hardly fit an image ofa middle class with sizable incomes, oriented toward leisure and pleasure. There were also strong cultural factors inhibiting conspicuous consump- tion among those who had money to spend. Certainly some Hindu and Jain traditions discouraged displays of wealth.” Gujarati Banias for instance. had historically maintained spartan households, with little furniture or decoration. During the twentieth century, Indian nationalists increasingly expressed serious reservations about many visible forms of consumption. Gandhi and his followers specifically urged members of the middle class to refrain from forms of spending that would mark their lifestyles off from those of the poor. Writing in Young India, for instance, Gandhi reserved special criticism for urban consumers: There is not in the cities at least that real change of taste that the people will not touch foreign cloth whether it comes from England, Japan, France, or elsewhere. Though the intellect admits the desirability of abjuring from foreign cloth, the heart yearns after the fineries which come only from foreign countries, Love of self predominates over love of the country or rather love of the semi-starved millions.” : Creating the Consumer? 193 This quote of course is evidence of the inability of Gandhians to compel urban people to abstain from all conspicuous expenditures. But it also il- lustrates the pressures members of the middle class were under to conform to nationalist prerogatives. Congress leaders discouraged emulation of ‘aris- tocratic’ styles of cloth and furniture, not just foreign ones. Often urbanites tried to steer some kind of middle course between using their resources to distinguish themselves from lower social strata and adhering to nationalist codes stressing asceticism and uniformity.” ‘An emphasis on financial restraint and modesty in consumption was di- rected particularly toward women. As Partha Chatterjee has argued, nation- alist discourse often drew a line between the acceptance of western models in the ‘material’ and political world, which was to be controlled by men, and the ‘spiritual’ world, which was embodied by women. ‘Women’, Abigail McGowan has noted, ‘were expected to compensate for the Westernization of male, public life by adhering to Indian cultural traditions, food habits and religious observances’.* Open breaches of ‘tradition’ by women, particularly the public emulation of western females in consumption practices, were of- ten regarded as behaviours that could lead to social breakdown. Periodical literature repeatedly denounced women who sought to imitate foreign styles or to engage in the ostentatious use of material things. In addition, nation- alism reinforced restraints against overt expressions of sexuality. In short then, urban middle class dwellers were affected by contradictory impulses. While values favouring consumption were certainly developing in western India, new forms of constraint were also being constructed. In this environment, businesses often steered clear of sales pitches that stressed the pleasure that could be derived from the use of a product; such approaches could be perceived as alien and offensive, and might prove ineffective in the social and political climate of the 1920s and 1930s. The character of textile advertising in part reflected the limitations of these circumstances. Clothing was the largest item of consumption in urban spending outside of food and housing, and the potential for expanding de- mand for particular products was great. But clothing was also a particularly key symbolic battleground in the nationalist struggle; Congress organizers of the 1930s not only advocated the boycott of foreign cloth, but they often urged upon the middle class the use of simple, modest homespun textiles woven by the rural poor. Textile producers who chose to encourage expen- diture on clothing beyond basic necessities could run afoul of the Gandhians and those urban dwellers influenced by Gandhian ideals. In this context, Indian mills committed limited resources to advertising in newspapers. Most of the clothing advertisements that did appear in the Bombay Chronicle were194 Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia geared to the European population; these stressed wear for formal occasions, for participation in sports, for rainy or cold weather, and for servants’ uni- forms. Frequently in such cases visual images of the male or female body—in proper attire for the occasion—were central to the marketing pitch. But the smaller number of clothing advertisements directed to Indian consumers were more modest; they possessed few human images and often simply listed products available in a store or the fact that these goods were swadeshi (made in India). Such advertisements could have been easily designed with- out the involvement of advertising professionals. Notions of fashion and a sense of the erotic were rarely present. In this context, textile producers seem to have been content with satisfying narrow and specialized markets associ- ated with particular regions and communities; they refrained from engaging in aggressive campaigns to build a national demand for specific products.° After 1935, there were some partial exceptions to this pattern—for instance, Arvind Mills of Ahmedabad in women’s clothing and Buckingham and Carnatic Mills in men’s wear. The vast majority of mills, however, abstained from running extensive advertisements in the Bombay Chronicle. WESTERN MEDICINES AND TONICS By contrast, medical commodities were heavily advertised between. 1914 and 1940. Such advertisements were often steeped in notions of bodily anxiety that had been developing in the colonial context. Ina sample of nine random issues of the Bombay Chronicle from 1937-9, I found 66 medical advertisements, compared to only five for clothing in the same issues, Many of these medical advertisements were quite small, but others were quite large. Some of these advertisements were clearly for products associated with ‘western’ medicine; a smaller number were for medicines with healing claims grounded in Ayurvedic and other Indian medical traditions. One of the main kinds of brand name products was a class of items re- ferred to as tonics. In the sample set of newspapers mentioned above, 16 of the medical advertisements could be classified in this category. Tonics came in a variety of forms: they could be tablets, liquids (including wines), laxatives or foods (some of which were dissolved in milk). The definition of what constituted a tonic was somewhat ambiguous since the products were so varied; some possessed ‘secret formulae’ whose qualities had never been subjected to any serious scrutiny by the medical profession.“ Many of the tonics were made in Europe, but Indian counterparts had entered the market by the 1920s. In what follows, I will focus particularly on the ways tonic advertisements evoked meanings of special salience to members of the middle class in the making. Creating the Consumer? 195 The frequency and size of tonic advertisements suggests two things: First, there was money to be made in tonics. According to the Report of the Drugs Enquiry Committee, (1930-31) a ‘craze’ for medicinal products had developed in India, and demand was considerable.” The financial commitment that sellers of tonics made to advertising in English could not have been sustained without a significant customer base willing to spend money on these products, Profit margins in these drugs were often high, so there was the promise of handsome returns to investment if one could induce customers to purchase one’s product. Second, the market in tonics was very competitive. At any given time, there were a large number of products available that claimed to possess tonic properties. Entering the market seemingly required little capital, and new medical goods appeared and sometimes disappeared frequently. In the absence of significant regulation of drugs, no producer needed to establish evidence of the effectiveness of a medicine or of the standard- ization of its ingredients in order to begin to sell a tonic publicly. Accord- ing to some horrified professional observers at the time, the market was ‘flooded’ with a wide variety of medicines, and consumers had little way of assessing such goods.** Advertising was a way of attracting customers to one’s own brand and of establishing its reputation in this kind of cut- throat atmosphere, Tonics, moreover, did not compete merely among themselves. They were also participants in an implicit battle between ‘western’ medicine and ‘Indian’ medicine (that is, products with commodity images rooted in Ayurvedic, Unani, and other ‘indigenous’ traditions of healing). Many of the providers of indig- enous medicines in western India during this period are no doubt invisible to us now. They worked out of small shops and homes, creating products through experimentation and establishing clienteles through word of mouth and by ped- dling their goods in local bazaars. But by 1914, there was also a class of more major manufacturers who were themselves advertising their goods aggressively. The claims of their advertisements were varied. Often, they sought to establish and reinforce through advertising the capacity to cure disease through com- prehensive methods,” suggesting their products went beyond disease-specific remedies and addressed the overall health of the body. An advertisement for one such product, ‘Amritdhara’, asserted that the medicine was ‘INDIA’s infallible cure for all diseases’, and that it cured ‘miraculously all aches from head to foot’ as well as a host of other illnesses including indigestion, constipation, plague, cholera, and pneumonia. A phial of Rs 2-8, it stated, ‘saves money, time, trouble, danger and anxiety’. (See Fig. 7.1 for a similar advertisement.)" In purchasing Amritdhara or some similar product, advertisers suggested, the consumer could avoid the need to buy a wide range of medicines for different ailments. As one196 Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia advertisement put it, ‘Hundreds of heavy medicine chests are nothing as com- pared with a small phial of this medicine’. The advertisements also suggested that by using such products one might avoid the costs of visiting doctors to get more specific diagnoses. In the case of sexual problems, they seemed to offer a way to avoid the need to broach sensitive and embarrassing subjects openly with a medical professional.” Arguing their products were steeped in ‘ancient wisdom’, these advertisements participated in a wider nationalist reinvention of Ayurveda as a specifically Indian tradition. At the same time, they sometimes insisted, the qualities of such medicines had been confirmed by modern science. The attractiveness of such goods, with truth-claims rooted in multiple traditions, and with the promise of serious cost savings, may have been considerable to members of a middle class struggling to get by. THE TRUE ELIXIR OF LIFE, VITALITY & HEALTH. Pe ee MRITDHARA’ True &Trino Rane oy POR THE CURE, or DISEASE, SEDGE VdOETTS TESTES SESOTSOIS. oi A pica oy Ro 2-8, ple om 8. 1 itv ne Ing ted hay aan nS Write towtny 2 Manager, . AMRITDHARA PHARMACY, Amdtdhara Buildings, Amnitdhara Rosd, Amritdhace Post Offer, LAHORE, Dy pal Marg lis derow | MINN OREO OSNE MELEE DD LOLEDIIET AEN Fig. 7.1. ‘The true elixir of life, vitality and health’, Advertisement for Amritdhara Pharmacy, Bombay Chronicle, 16 October 1919, p. 11 Creating the Consumer? 197 In order to establish a customer base, tonic producers and distributors sought to wean buyers away from a reliance on these rival classes of medi- cal goods. Over time, judged by the changing frequency of advertisements, tonics may have gained the advantage in this competition. But they never achieved a total victory, as is evident in the continued advertisement of in- digenous medicines into the 1940s and later. In their efforts to counter the appeal of Ayurvedic medicines, advertisers of tonics drew upon a range of powerful messages that they hoped would resonate with potential buyers. ‘Their claims for their products were in part similar to those employed by advertisements for Ayurvedic goods. In effect, the tonics connected themselves with comprehensive conceptions of healing and physical well-being.** Many advertisements for tonics included a long list of ailments that they addressed. Phosferine—‘the greatest of all tonics’—listed as problems it counteracted as including influenza, lassitude, brain fag, gastric pains, debility, indigestion, sleeplessness, exhaustion, nerve shock, rheumatism, headache, sciatica, neuralgia, maternity weakness, and anaemia. Other notices for tonics mentioned such illnesses as tuberculosis, malaria, and fever-producing diseases within a single advertisement. The notion of building or rebuilding the strength of the body, an idea strongly present in Ayurvedic medical traditions, found a central place in tonic advertisements. Tonics also promised many of the same cost savings as the Ayurvedic products, since the consumer might hope to avoid going to the doctor or buying different medicines for different ailments by using these products. One Bombay physician lamented that consumers saw such advertised medicines as an alternative to consulting professionals: Reading of advertisements of cures brought about by such preparations produces great effect on patients who have tried medical men without result. Such people come to the conclusion that doctor’s treatment is useless and seek to find some other remedy for their complaints. When a person belonging to this class reads such advertisements he feels happy and thinks that it is possible to get rid of his disease. ‘The assurance of cure and the force of arguments advanced to guarantee the same coupled with certificates of the men cured, make such a powerful impression on his mind that he is easily duped.*® Discourses of Science At the same time, advertisements of tonics asserted a ‘scientific’ basis for their healing power in a way that was more insistent than that found in the advertisements for indigenous medicines. ‘Nature alone’, advertisements198 Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia for a product named Vitophenes insisted (in an advertisement that seems _ to be specifically directed against Ayurvedic claims) ‘cannot guarantee health and happiness all through life. Nature needs the support of Science, the help that Vitophenes give. Whatever your age, Vitophenes will banish Headaches, Depression, Debility, “Nerves,” Sleeplessness, and Poor Health.” Advertisements for Okasa, perhaps the tonic most frequently publicized in the Bombay Chronicle, carried medical diagrams of the human digestive tract and nervous system, providing an aura of medical authenticity to the commodity image. They went on to assert, for example, that ‘OKASA revitalizes the Nerves, activates the Glands, strengthens the Brain, the Heart, the Digestive tract and all other vital organs of the body.’* The professional backing of physicians was frequently invoked. Advertisements for Sanatogen, a ‘tonic food’,.carried pictures of doctors attending a patient, and insisted that ‘25,000 physicians all over the world’ recommended the product.” The notion that tonics repaired the nervous system, ‘cleansed the blood’, ‘stimulated the liver’, and ‘corrected blood pressure’ were found in a wide range of advertisements. Numerical data reinforced the atmosphere of science surrounding tonics. ‘ADD OVER 24% TO YOUR VITALITY’ proclaimed one ad for Sanatogen (Fig. 7.2), ‘there is unshakable scientific proof that Sanatogen will do that for you’ (bold in the advertisement).** The advertisement went on to cite tests that had been published in the journal Medical Echo to back this point.® The use of names that carried the aura of serious chemistry—Leciferrin, Vitophenes, Magnolax, Phosperine, etc.—furthered the sense that these products were scientifically sound. The medical language of these advertisements sought.to appeal to the sensibilities of members of the middle class as persons who saw themselves as ‘modern’ with a view of the world steeped in western science. While the ‘indigenous’ commodities themselves were making claims in modern scientific terms as well as in principles of traditional Indian medicine, they could not match the tonic advertisements’ grounding in this language. Discourses of Weakness The most dominant—and most interesting—theme in tonic advertisement, however, was that of ‘weakness’, physical debility, and mental disintegration. In resorting to this theme so widely, the advertisements evoked directly the self-perceptions and anxieties of the educated middle class, perceptions and anxieties that focused on ideas about the body. In effect, tonic advertisements drew upon three sets of interlocking discourses about weakness that were prevalent at the time. First of all they Strengthen your verves, rejuvenate your blood, improve your vitality by 24% with ilsover tae difercace betteea “hate and real heath! It ds normal people like you, pegple who sre not Mhat all but neither enjoy radiant health, who should Sanacouen mow and then fot a fey weeks. Sanatogehwillenableyou to enjoy life againg ‘SANATOGEN wil aga dhe diirege bore “tatbbealch” sad veal ch, Fig. 7.2. ‘Add over 24% to your vitality’, Advertisement for Sanatogen, Bombay Chronicle, 8 March 1938, p. 4200 Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia grounded themselves in colonial conceptions about the effeminacy of the high caste, educated Indian and nationalist counter-conceptions that em- phasized the importance of physical culture and martial might in overcom- ing the dangers of weakness and degenerations. As numerous scholars have pointed out, British rulers conceived of high caste groups such as the Bengali bhadralok, Maharashtrian Brahmins and Gujarati Banias as ‘weak’, ‘femi- nine’ peoples with little capacity for physical exertion who contrasted both with Europeans and with the so-called ‘martial races’ of northern India. As Thomas Macaulay insisted in his famous comment about Bengalis: The physical organization of the Bengali is feeble even to effeminacy. He lives in a constant vapor bath. His pursuits are sedentary, his limbs delicate, his movernents languid. During many ages he has been trampled upon by men of bolder and more hardy breeds. ... His mind bears a singular analogy to his body. It is weak even to helplessness for purposes of manly resistance..." The quote illustrates that weakness and effeminacy were conceived of in both physical and mental terms. In colonial discourse, the educated Hindu was imagined to be a frail person, ‘degenerate in mind and body’, ‘lacking in enterprise’ and ‘physically weak and effeminate’. Such supposed char- acteristics called into question the ability of middle class persons not just to engage in military service, sports, and other forms of activity that would demand bodily exertion, but also their very capacity to provide moral and political leadership. The influence of these colonial stereotypes on the self-conception of the middle class was apparently profound. Gandhi’s own writings frequently reflect the concern that Indians overcome physical and mental frailty and establish their masculinity. In one case, for example, he wrote, ‘I have trav- eled all over the country and one of the most deplorable things I have noted is the rickety bodies of young men’® and he stressed the need to rebuild the Indian physique. Other scholars have pointed to the centrality of physical culture—for instance, gymnastics, wrestling, and paramilitary training and displays—in a great variety of forms of nationalist expression (especially in Bengal and Maharashtra).** Lloyd Rudolph and Susane Rudolph have sug- gested that part of Gandhi’s success stemmed from his ability to develop new models of assertion, courage, and potency that would negate the self- image of weakness and effeminacy—and the psychic damage associated with it—but in ways that fit into well-established practices of vegetarianism, self-control, and non-violence.” Second, advertisements drew upon popular theories of tropical medicine that saw ‘weakness’ of thenerves—‘neurasthenia’—as the source ofillnessand Creating the Consumer? 201 bodily breakdowns. While this set of notions needs to be more fully analysed, it attributed problems of the nerves to a variety of causes that drained male bodies: the hot climate, overwork, the strains of urban life, and problematic moral behaviours, Such ideas were located entirely outside the germ theory of disease causation, suggesting that poor health and physical degeneration were to be found in the general physical condition of the person. In effect, they were a major part of the comprehensive conceptions of bodily health that I have previously mentioned. Yet at the same time, they still carried the aura of western science with its connotations of modernity. Third, notions of weakness were rooted in concepts of what might be called the ‘sexual health’ of men. During this period, a general notion seem- ingly prevailed that sexual excess—in one’s youth or in mature adulthood— could lead to male impotence. Masturbation, wet dreams, the visiting of prostitutes, and homosexuality wasted semen, which in turn could cause the body to become run down and lead to sexual incapacity. These kinds of anxieties may have been strongest among the large number of middle class male migrants living apart from their wives and among the ranks of the young single men for whom a period of adolescence between childhood and adulthood was beginning to open up as a result of the increasing age of marriage. Advertisements in vernacular papers openly drew upon these notions as they addressed buyers of impotency medicines and aphrodisiacs. My own research in vernacular advertisements of western India has found that these kinds of appeals were widespread, and that they must have been a major source of revenue for the papers.” Middle class men, the readers of these papers, were no doubt significant consumers of these products. While I have described these notions of weakness as separate discourses, in practice they came together in colonial as well as counter-colonial dis- cussions. As Ishita Pande has demonstrated, moral excesses associated with masturbation, wet dreams, and early marriage were often viewed as a major root cause of the weakness of the high caste urban male in India. The general condition of the nerves was regarded as a source of impotency; conversely impotency could be seen as producing wider problems of psychic and physical health. Racial discourses suggested that Indians might be espe- cially prone to nervous conditions and sexual excess. The emphasis on moral failings and bad habits—the consumption of alcohol, the use of drugs, and sexual indulgence—as sources of weakness resonated widely at the time. The novel Devdas, which was read all over India and was made into a popular film in 1936, drew out a connection between a life of dissipation and a lack of bodily vigour with a special sharpness.” Gandhi himself suggested in some of his writings that physical ailments