Arvind Rajagopal

Middle-class Culture in an Emerging Market: Commodity Images from India

Tuesday, March 27, 2007 
Room  MC 5-100 - Time: 12:30 - 2:00 pm

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Speaker: Arvind Rajagopal
He is currently a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC (2006-07) and is an associate professor in the Departments of Culture and Communication, Sociology and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.  He is the author of Politics After Television; Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge, 2001).  This book won the Ananda Coomaraswamy Prize from the Association of Asian Studies in 2003 and the Daniel Griffiths Award from NYU. 

Discussant:  Masud Mozammel
He is Senior Communications Officer in the Development Communication of the External Affairs Vice Presidency of the World Bank.  Masud specializes in applying communication tools and techniques to empower information environments in the context of economic and democratic growth to fight poverty.
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This paper offers a survey of changes of consumer culture in India from the 1980s to the present, focusing on marketing strategies for Fast Moving Consumer Goods and the political environment against which these were shaped. 

During the 1950s Indian businesses evolved a set of codes to translate "developmentalism" into marketing terms. What this meant in practice was a division between the mass market and the premium market, the latter constituted of 'people like us', capable of realizing their aspirations, while the former were constrained to live a life of relative austerity.

With market liberalization the entry of multinationals and the growth of nationwide television and the fusion of segments that marketers had grown accustomed to thinking about separately, businesses faced a crisis in their understanding.  How were they going to address a greatly expanded mass market that was clearly demonstrating its capacity for aspiration?

Among other things, marketers had to learn to imagine what lower castes wanted and to overcome their own ritually sanctioned apprehension of any contact with these groups.  The paper examines how markets and "publics" were shaped as a result of this engagement.

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