The Woman in the Advertisement: Historical Explorations Through a Type

How the advertisement woman’s body satisfies the hunger of the upper-caste, patriarchal, capitalist establishment.

The advertisement woman’s body satisfies the hunger of the upper-caste, patriarchal, capitalist establishment.

by R. Srivatsan

IN ADVERTISING, ONE of the techniques used to speak effectively to the viewer is that of providing a stable and recognizable type from which the voice will emanate. The type anchors different advertising messages and ensures that familiarity and pleasure, relayed through repeated and subtly varied contact, hold the attention of the viewer. A privileged one, in that it appears often, and in different cultural contexts of advertising, is that of a woman. How and in what manner, against what background, evoking what world does the woman in the advertisement speak to the viewer? Not so much with the message of the advertisement as with her attitude, apparel, and personal style in the phan­tasy narrative within which she is deployed? What is the mode of engagement of this type with the world in which the viewer lives? In this essay, I try to address these questions with respect to a specific period: the mid-sixties, with the hope of bringing out some of the preliminary considerations that would have to be addressed satisfactorily if history writing using photographic images as archival records were to be made possible.’

The woman in the sixties

In matters of dress, the woman in the advertisement of the sixties
 seems surprisingly bold, even to eyes which have witnessed the
 sexual revolution’ in the nineties. The most common variants of clothing are suggestively draped sarees, sleeveless blouses, churidars, tenniswear and the occasional swimsuit. The hairdo is most often a ‘bun’, or a bob, with straight combed hair framing the forehead tightly in many cases. Out of an average of 110 images in a month during the periods sampled, about 40 per cent seem to be erotic in a way that directly addresses a masculine viewer (I generalize based on my response to them as I see them today), but a sexual undertone is present in nearly all of them. The camera focusses on the body most of the time. Though there is a clear voyeuristic intent in the newspaper advertisement image, I would like to argue that the male gaze was not the direct determi­nant for the contours of this woman in any simple sense. Granted that the newspaper would mark a masculine domain, the products these advertisements sold were, quite often, cosmetics and other commodities directed at women. Therefore, if the advertisement had to be effective, it had to address a woman who had access to a newspaper, broadly in terms of different desires that she acknowledged, however surreptitiously, as her own. This kind of ‘fashionable image was deployed within and against a particular convention and practice of ‘being feminine’, which was prevalent in urban India of the sixties. The significance of the woman in the advertisement would therefore also have to be understood in terms of its effects upon, and interplay with, that his­torical convention and norm of femininity.’ It is this interplay that I would like to evoke for the reader here.

In a large number of the advertisements the woman is por­trayed as being concerned with her appearance (such a concern is visible in advertisements for vanishing creams, soaps, shampoos); in cases where this is not the explicit copy, there are stereotypical features to suggest such a preoccupation. Hers was as readily a troubled body, which suffered from minor ailments like rash, headaches and colds, as it was simultaneously a joyous one that was free from troubles of any kind (as may be seen from ads selling talcum powders, headache pills, cough mixtures, fans, holiday trips). In these images (as in any such to this day) desirable femininity is characterised by the primary criterion of visible beauty. This norm of beauty is central to most of the advertisements, and not just to those that sell beauty products. Obviously, the advertisement discourse played a role in refining the equivalence between the concept of visible beauty and imagined femininity, deploying suitable signifiers in the advertising image and shaping them, with a sensitivity to social consensus and with an element of chance.

This attractive woman often adopted the role of caregiver, home manager or hostess. A little less often, she was in search of a man to romance, marry and get away with from the clutches of ‘tradition’. In most instances, however, in spite of a clearly signalled role, the woman in the advertisement had nothing to do, except exist as a being of pleasure and freedom, sometimes in temporary discomfort, but almost always smiling at the viewer. Less than 2 percent of the women in advertising images seemed to work in a profession outside the house, and those who did were secretaries. Only one advertisement directly foregrounded the ubiquitous, yet invisible, profession of the model who posed for these hundreds of images in the newspaper. The phantasy life of the advertising woman can be better understood when set in the schema of the viewer’s imagination which is implicit in the advertisement’s narrative. In this schema, the space of the world is divided into the opposites of the inside (home, comfort, con­sumption, femininity) and the outside (world, risk, production, masculinity); and the time of life is divided into the time of work/pain and that of leisure/pleasure. In this space and time, the woman viewer would clearly be designated as occupying the quadrant categorised by the congruence of ‘inside’ and ‘work’, whereas the male viewer would be made to fit into the quadrant ‘outside’ and ‘work’.

In order to appeal to viewers of both sexes, the woman in the advertisement is imaged in the time of leisure, and occupies both the home, and outside spaces that are marked, clearly, as domains of pleasure. Thus it would seem that the advertisement viewer is encouraged to develop a characteristic (and from a different perspective, definitely peculiar) sensibility which opposes work and pleasure, and aligns with these opposites, the imagined characteristics of masculinity and femininity respectively: femininity equals pleasure in the advertising images and this automatically supports the male dominant position by the equation of masculinity with work. The disparity between what the image constructed as a woman’s lifestyle and living experience for women would result in their responding with a problematised and ambivalent relationship to the femininity that was imaged in a manner that perpetually swung between description of a state of affairs and prescription for utopia.

Description: ‘Women are beings of pleasure/leisure’, to which women would almost certainly respond with anger. Prescription: ‘The most beautiful and desirable aspects of femininity show themselves in the domain of leisure’, to which there would be a less negative response. But in either case, there is a fitment or normalisation of femininity which occurs.

The profile of the woman in the advertisement was a composite of mother, playmate and free body, all paradoxically held together. Her femininity was traditional and did not permit her to support herself, and her prime goal was to attract a man who could support her in a life of pleasure and dependence. At the same time in her characteristic ‘weakness’ as a woman, she was also a staunchly modern and thoroughly Indian being who sought to embrace the world of commodities with a new-found freedom. Obviously, once the reader asks questions about the kind of modernity and the model of freedom imaged, the contour of this stereotypical figure begins to outline, on the ground, the politics of a consumer culture in India.

In keeping with my general thesis that advertisement discourse designates and proposes fictional solutions to contain anxieties, problems and crises at different levels, I would suggest to the reader that the advertising woman signified to and claimed on behalf of the feminine viewer, an imaginary liberation from what were experienced in contrast, as the ‘minor’ oppressions of everyday life in that period.’ This raises the question of what such oppressions were and what life was like for women in the sixties. In my attempt to address this question, I evade, on the one hand, the choice of trying to approach feminine experience in the sixties through memories of women who lived then. Remembering the truth about a past experience is not a simple task because the memory that remains of an event is a result of an experience; it is a recountable and accessible aspect of subjectivity that remains in response to the experience of an event; it is not a simple record. The problem becomes even more complex when a whole past mode of experiencing femininity is to be recalled, because what remained invisible and what was forgotten become as crucial as what was remembered. Therefore, recalling a past mode of experiencing life is an exercise which, rather than telling you what it was like then, alters how you relate to that past today — it changes subjectivity in the present. This does not invalidate the recollection of experience for analysis, but places it in the position of a powerful instrument that is to be used with care: a recounting of experience can only be a critical task, with its own agendas, structures and political fora. While such an approach would require a book of a different kind than this one, it also cannot be denied that in some sense this essay too tries to change some of the ways in which we relate to our past and present lives.

On the other hand, I also avoid the option of trying to describe women’s lives in the sixties through a comparison with self-representations of that period. This is because no archival record of a given period can function as an ‘objective’ representation of the consciousness of that period in a simple way. Thus, as with an advertisement image, so with any other genre like a health column in a women’s magazine; the experience described in a health column cannot be understood in a historical sense unless some attempt were made to account for the way in which the discourse was constructed, used, imagined and directed in its flow by its operators and addressees. This too demands skills well beyond my competence in areas other than those related to the visual image. Instead of these two options, therefore, I essay a guess here, about the power play between the femininity that is imaged in the advertisement, and femininity as it emerged in the lived world of the sixties; a guess that is educated by a logic that is ‘internal’ to the advertising discourse on the one hand and to the mode of visibility that this discourse is forced to encounter in the sixties on the other.

I would like to introduce here, a la Dada, and with a lack of ceremony that is symptomatic of the difficulty that I am trying to address, the notion that caste is a condition of visibility in India. It functions as a screen that without itself being seen makes the world visible in a specific way. Let me suggest in a rather desperate shorthand that caste as a condition of visibility is overdetermined by the history of political institutions, cultural practices and memory, if by this last term we mean the residue of experience that determines both the form of subjectivity and the content of memory. This way of thinking about caste results in some useful effects. Firstly, the term ‘caste’ ceases to be a descriptive category and begins to function as an epistemological condition that must be accounted for reflexively in the description itself. Secondly, it permits me to shift the problematic so that the issue is no longer one of introducing caste as a visible characteristic of the image that may be described, but rather one of describing caste as something that inheres in the process of imaging. My task changes from being one of introducing an invisible caste in a disciplined and seemly manner, to being one of introducing the omnipresent caste of manners, seemliness and discipline that seem to be universal and qualifying characteristics of ‘civilised’ discourses such as advertising. This shift in perspective will at a deeper level, question a theorisation which impedes rather than facilitates a description of the experience of caste oppression. I believe that such an interrogation will, in the longer run, result in an effective genealogy of caste/power/knowledge that does its work against the history of our ‘civilisation’ at the fulcrum of its legitimisation in new territories.

Let us turn to look at the sixties’ images of women in advertisements using this notion of caste as a primary condition of visibility, a condition that is itself invisible. By so interrogating these images I hope to approach the mode in which caste and photographic imaging work together. The invisibility of caste in the advertisement in the advertising world, which I have described with respect to the advertisements of the nineties, is characteristic of the sixties’ images too. It is likely, however, that in the sixties’ case, an aesthetic that eliminated visual signs of lower-caste life in society (to take the most obvious example, the near complete absence of any domestic help in the advertisements for home products, detergents and soap powders had a trajectory and valency that were different from that of advertising today. I would like to suggest that this erasure of caste in the sixties advertisements permitted the phantasy world of the advertisement to address the anxieties of an upper‑caste viewer in a manner that was unique to the circumstances of
 its deployment. When seen from this point of view, it becomes possible to think that the woman in the advertisement of the sixties engaged in a dialogue with aspects of upper-caste practices that became visible as archaic rituals and traditions connected with femininity, ritual pollution and purdah. Thus, the intense visibil­ity, the overt sexual attractiveness, the reassurance that the aches and pains of femininity would be eliminated by modern analgesics, the reference to detergents and scouring powders that would keep the household clean and healthy, could all be seen as narrative devices, that at a level above the sales pitch, addressed anxieties about femininity which were associated with a transition to a modern upper-caste consumer culture. Therefore, it could be said that this masculine visualisation of the feminine body did, in an ambivalent way, make positive sense to women (and, as importantly, to men) who read newspapers — that is, it accommodated a world-view in which a path could be broached for upper-caste cul­ture, allowing it to reorganize and align itself with what was emerging as a modern society dependent on a consumer economy. In my elaboration of this hypothesis of caste as a condition, more, an architecture of visibility, I would like to provide the reader with a focus on the functions this recognizable type of the advertising woman performed and the modes in which she did by proposing three facets of her function, that is, modern­isation, the forging of a cultural consensus, and a redefinition of family space.

Modernisation

The advertising woman operated as an instrument of ‘modern­isation,’ as may be gauged from her different roles in four or five scenes in a day’s newspaper. She gestured towards a shared hori­zon of fantasy against which the new objects of desire could be located, providing in the imaginary world of the viewer, a support which held up and gave meaning to these objects. It is through the visual pleasure she provided that something which may be called life-style was sought to be nurtured in the imagination of the viewer, opening it out onto the world of consumer products.

Simultaneously, ‘life-style’ as imaged in the figure of the advertising woman drew on and elaborated a modern norm of ‘Indian­ness’ in that viewer. This norm of Indianness expressed itself in stereotypical features, such as the clothing, the cosmetics used the activities engaged in, and in the stance of the model in the images concerned. Thus a considerable part of the sense of being , modern Indian man or woman coalesced in dialogue with the woman in the advertisement, within the coordinates of the space depicted in the daily rhythm of the newspaper.

Forging a cultural consensus

The persona of the advertising woman provided a model with reference to which specific practices of ‘living in a family’ could be shaped. The woman in the advertisement who acted the role of a wife (either already one, or a prospect), who took on the responsibility for hygiene in the modern family; who had the need to retain personal attractiveness; who exercised control as the wife in the choice of decorating the home and assumed the responsibility to keep this home attractive, acted as a behavioural model. The leisure time available to the woman in the advertisement was one that resulted from her successfully discharging these responsibilities without labour, either her own or that of servants — that was the phantasy solution to women’s work proposed by the advertisement! However, it would be inadequate if we assume that the model only induced mimetic responses on the part of the feminine viewer; a whole range of positions and relationships could operate between viewer and type. The woman in the advertisement would also have provided a gauge with which the husband, the man of the world, could measure and evaluate the behaviour of the women around hint. In a culture in transition, such a gauge would be necessary to reassure the man that the transformation in his life and within his domain of control is in step with that occurring in society at large. It would measure and permit the adjustment of the mix of anonymity and recognition which functions as a palliative against the stress of change.

The reader would find a hypothetical example of the range of dialogical positions between men, women and images of women in advertisements useful. While a man living in that period would be appreciative of a sexually attractive woman in the advertisement, he would try to enforce a more ‘decorous’ and ‘respectable’ appearance on the part of his wife in public, but at the same time hope for and encourage a more ‘open’ demeanour inside the house. On the other hand, he would in a contradictory fashion, give the glad eye to a woman who carried herself like the advertising woman in public if she were not his wife. In addition he may well expect that the attitude of the advertising woman with respect to the product advertised be wholeheartedly adopted by the wife without her emulating the former’s free and attractive style; these responses were likely to get even more tangled and contradictory in the case of the advertisement for beauty products which make fashionable and desirable precisely free and attractive styles in themselves. For each of these possible responses of the man to the advertisement, there could be correspondingly complex ripostes from the women concerned (which could have been entirely different from, but entwined with, her responses to the advertisement itself), leading to an open range of situations mediated by the advertising type. We may guess that the stereotype of the advertising woman provided a focus with respect to which many dimensions of the relationship between men and women were mapped. The woman in the advertisement of the sixties could therefore be seen as an object of dynamic consensus regarding gender relationships. She was not simply a ‘model’ to be emulated, but was also a political model subjected to and moulded by the full and unrestrained force of the contradictions that played themselves out in the struggles that were undergone in order to arrive at this consensus.

The sixties’ advertisement could be seen as helping to evolve a consensus of viewership regarding the micro-political structure of the community, which was clearly not one between equal, ra­tional and free ‘men’. The inequality between men and women viewers, obviously part of a more general gender oppression, would intensify as an effect of the way in which the apparatus of the advertising business, and the force of masculinity converged on the body of the woman of the sixties. The handicap women faced, then, would play a crucial role in determining the kind of political ‘treaty’ that was continuously being forged with respect to gender relations. At the same time, such a consensus would also have been a working of the diverse and subtle modes of oppression of women against oppressions in other politico-cultural dimensions such as caste. Thus, the kinds of images of the home, the models of domesticity, the depiction of attitudes, the physical features and behaviour of men in the advertisement, and the aesthetic criteria that evolved through the discourse, would work against the cultural practices of lower-caste society, the more public life of the women of that stratum, and (what would seem in contrast like) the lack of decorum and discipline of the men, all of which were cast in unpleasant counterpoint to the beauty and seemliness of the world depicted in the advertisement. The double pleasure the stereotype offered to the viewer, of being sexually attractive in an unprecedented way on the one hand, and of being modern and free of the veils of ‘tradition’ on the other, incorporated the pain of oppression. The imaginary conditions of that double pleasure: the landscape, the narratives and the uto­pian dimensions it invoked, provided no space for that other oppressed: the Dalit.

Redefinition of the family space

The moment of modernisation that the woman in the advertisement provided was linked to a redefinition of family space. The advertisement suggested that the space of the family was a hermetic and private home. While the home did not connect in any functional way with the public world, this domestic family space was always invoked through, and represented in, the medium of public opinion, the newspaper. The advertisement problematised and reinforced the ‘real’ home, as an indirect referent of the visible image it employed. The torsion between the represented space and the real one that was being designated and referred to, set in position shared and contested notions of the space of privacy, consumption, rest and femininity. This ‘contest’ marked out a community of viewers with definite ideas about the existent characteristics of domestic space, and in opposition to these, the desirable ones. The advertisement thus slowly altered the outlines of this ‘real’ domestic space, in order to match the new requirements being placed on a family by the emerging consumerist economy, and these requirements were signalled by the presence of the advertisement itself. In this remodelling, the woman was a crucial instrument that permitted the public sphere to delineate the family space, with a pretext of a limited discourse concerning the use of the objects advertised. The centrality of the woman in the advertisement obviously depended on the consensus regarding the place of the woman in the family. This place was being reiterated in the sixties’ advertisement by a series of conceptual collapses: (a) that the woman is a wife; (b) that a wife belongs in, and defines, a family; © that a family is a domestic unit that has an enclosed space; (d) that the domestic space is defined by its privacy and its congeniality to sexual pleasure, both of which do not have a legitimate space in the public world and (e) this in turn collapsed onto the woman as wife, the function of providing sexual pleasure to the man.

The role of the woman in the new domestic order is evident in the occasional portrayals of the advertisement home, in which, in addition to scenes of overt intimacy, the way in which the background and the attitudes were depicted, covertly or clearly, pointed to and celebrated, a privacy and freedom that provided opportunities for sexual pleasures of a less furtive kind than that available in what was designated as reality. Two observations may be made at this point: firstly, these conflated and hegemonic assumptions regarding femininity, the family and domesticity were certainly not new; they could well have had a long enough history to permit their being read as universal features of most cultures. However, for them to have organic currency and sustainability in a culture, that history alone is not enough; what is required is a continued reiteration of these ‘truths’ in a manner that engages with and productively transforms the dominant force in that culture and this is the leverage the advertisement provides. Thus, and secondly, what were being designated as the wife and the real home by the images in the advertisement were clearly untramelled universalisation of upper-caste desire. The attributes of a world that would be hospitable to capitalism in India were clearly envisioned in terms that established a new upper-caste aesthetic as the dominant one.

It would be worth listing the multiple benefits of such a transformation of ‘wife and home’ to the economy: firstly, the space of the family would become a locus for a decision to purchase. A distribution of such loci is essential because the possibility of expanding business within capitalism has depended on the proliferation of consumer goods that incited the desires and fancies of this decision-making unit: the family. The photographic advertisement brings into being something called the viewer-consumer, without whom consumer goods would be meaningless. Secondly, the bonus of uninhibited sexual pleasure in the ideal family would promote the concept of a limited family size which would increase the wealth available for purchase of consumer goods by reducing the number of members that need survival expenditure. Thus, the power process of the photographic advertisement would seek to work through a modulation of the sexual body and achieve its effects on the demographic pattern. Thirdly, the sexual privacy of the new family space, the concomitant of a reduced family size, and the kind of unequal consensus between man and wife that the advertisement generated within the family, were extremely important to the logic of consumer culture as well. A family of reduced size ruled by a benign patriarchal despot was naturally imbued with a sense of identity that arose out of the hegemonised vision of a desirable life. Such a family would decrease the uncertainty surrounding the purchase of a product, thus making it more feasible to predict how much of what commodity can be sold. This is because there would be reduced scope for extraneous opinions and perspectives that would have arisen with larger, and/or more open, family structures. Fourthly, a wide dispersion of purchasing units of a limited size reduces the political power of the buyer with respect to the corporations and businesses which sold the goods. Thus at a point when capitalist development is most vulnerable, it would become almost impossible to forge something like a consumer’s union which can have a say on what may or may not be a consumable or its attributes.

The decision of what is sexually attractive in an advertisement image can never be attributed to an ‘author, but emerges in a delicately balanced aesthetic consensus of a community-in-forma­tion: between copywriter, photographer, creative director, the manufacturer of the product being advertised, his employees, and imagined/actual representatives of the target viewer. The community of target viewers is not a homogeneous one that represents the whole populace, but is one that is marked by a process of self-selection, a ‘raising-in-relief’ of a contour within the population which is able to leverage its hegemony by means of its monopolistic access to different engines of such hegemony, like the stock market, the wireless media, the print media, the fashion industry, the advertising business, cinema, and so on. The difference between the self-developmental process driven by the advertising engine on the one hand, and the modernisation and development programmes of the state in the five year plans on the other, both of which seek to have their effect on demography, emerge primarily in the mode in which the subject of development is articulated. In the first, the viewer is seduced by the new pleasures of a free sexuality and unlimited consumption. In the second, the subject of institutionalised development is one whose body, life, family size and sexuality (especially in the aspect of birth control and the release of her body for unlimited pleasure) must be altered in a planned way for her own good, either with or often without her consent.

In sum, photography in the sixties advertisement engages with a condition of visibility that is upper caste in form with the following effects: (a) it establishes the advertising woman’s body as a site of desire; (b) it privileges a femininity that is dependent and domesticated; © it provides an aesthetic foundation for a hegem­ony of upper-caste masculinity; (d) it naturalises and makes transparent to our gaze, a transformation of domestic space that serves as a sliding hinge between changing forms of caste and class hegemony.

NOTES

1. A sample study of images of the advertising woman was carried out in The Hindu. The month chosen at random was March, in three consecutive years in each decade: 1966, 1967, 1968; 1976, 1977, 1978; 1986, 1987 and 1988. The same month ensured that seasonal variations in products advertised were avoided. The three years in each decade permitted some generalisability about the characteristics being studied in an arbitrarily chosen time period. The gap of a decade between each group of three years ensured that any changes in the type and its function became more clearly visible than if the advertisements were studied in sequential years.

The parameters of the study were: the product sold, its brand, the number of times the advertisement appeared, the page number and the news text surrounding it, whether black and white or colour, the size of the advertisement, the size of woman’s image in the advertisement, the clothing and drape, the props, perspective, posture, expression, direction of the gaze, hairstyle, body colour, bindi, the advertisement text, the narrative and the simplest allusions it seemed to make.

This chapter has drawn on the archival newspaper material made available to me by the ICSSR, Southern Regional Centre (Osmania University). I am grateful to the director and the staff for their gen­erous cooperation.

2. Betty Friedan’s chapter on ‘The Happy Housewife Heroine’ in The Feminine Mystique (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963) is a seminal study of the emergence of the housewife stereotype in the American women’s magazine story in the post-World War II political context. A landmark in the powerful feminist polemic against the visibility of the sexualised body of the woman would be Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ in Screen 16, 3 (Autumn 1975): 17­18. However, in Mulvey’s critique, the body in the gaze is treated as a general characteristic of the film frame. The dialectic between the psychoanalytic concepts of scopophilia and sadism which she uses does not easily accommodate political effects that could possibly de­rive from sources that may not be reducible to Oedipal schemata.

3. See ‘Notes for a Theory of Advertising’, this volume, seventh essay especially the last section, ‘Illusion and Reality’ for an elaboration of this oscillation between description and prescription in the speech of the advertisement.

4. lbid, for an elaboration of the argument that the advertisement states a crisis in a language, and from a perspective, that make sense to the addressee, and proposes solutions to it in the fantasy world.

5. See the illuminating discussions of differences in logic, epistemology and historical effects, between experience used as a method, and experience used as a mode of constructing the truth about a past, in Stree Shakti Sanghatana, We Were Making History: Life Stories of Women in the Telangana Struggk (New Delhi: Kak 1989) pp 30.31, and in Susie Tharu and K Lalita, Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century, Vol. 1 (New York: Feminist Press, 1991), 28.33. see also Johannes Fabian and Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) for an approach to the genre of historical painting, which is reflexive and cautious about the use of experience.

6. When I wrote this essay, I was also not aware of any work dune from a perspective that is compatible with mine, on the lives and experiences of women who lived in the sixties. However, see Susie Tharu, ‘Citizenship and Its Discontents’ paper presented in ‘Rethinking Indian Modernity: The Political Economy of Sexuality, 26th Inter-disciplinary Research Methodology Workshop’ MIDS for a description of the weave of the short story and advice column genres in the work of Saroj Pathak. Tharu problematises the meaning of associated genres by interrogating that association regarding its effect and expression in the subjectivity, the hie and the historical function of the writer.

7. For an experience based critical study of the life practices of upper_ caste women and the differences in the relationship between men and women of upper-caste and Dalit society, see Kancha Ilaiah, I Am Not a Hindu (Calcutta: Samya, 1996). His book also makes it clear why the opposition between inside-feminine, outside-mascu­line is most likely to be strictly specific to the upper-caste sensibility in modern India.

8. Why I Am Not a Hindu has served me as an invaluable reference for critical insights into upper-caste social structure and its negation of Dalit values.

This essay — part of Modernity on a Shoestring: Dimensions of Globalisation, Consumption and Development in Africa and Beyond — has been republished with permission from the author.