Crisis is the best time for the growth of capitalism. In turbulent times, the capitalist class finds a glorious opportunity to pursue their interests. They know how to take advantage of current trends and then manipulate the demographics and the popular mindset.
Their bourgeoisie sentiments are often garbed in a rhetoric that is sometimes in-your-face. However, at other times, it is so subtle that you miss the exact point of these exercises – to make you root for their rhetoric, and simultaneously, their products. In recent times, this rhetoric has centred around two major axes – the army and ayurveda.
Today, many products in India are using this rhetoric to make a case for their product. This concern is not just economic – the rhetoric also takes its roots from the prevalent political conditions and their subsequent appropriation and legitimisation in popular culture. When something attains enough importance to be the rallying point of a community, culture or the nation as a whole, it also becomes a commodity.
In a capitalist world, sentiments can be fetishised to serve the purpose of the bourgeoisie. If you take a cursory glance at the television commercials of the day, many things – motorbikes, cement, cooking oil, building tiles, etc. – are often sold in the name of and by using the face of the army.
Sometimes, the desperation to use the imagery is so strong that the product-makers try to forge connections where none exist. Motorbike companies use a masculine imagery to equate the army with virility. Thus, the keywords of chivalry, strength, honour, etc. become the keywords of the bike as well. But, for a product like cooking oil or cement, the analogical rhetoric doesn’t work – and so, the supposedly selfless, sacrificing image of an army personnel is emphasised. Then, a plea is made in a subtle manner to reciprocate that selfless service by love and respect – the material manifestation of which is the product being advertised.
Actually, the army and ayurveda have emerged as the central points of myriad discourses, while legitimising and validating them at the same time. The purpose of this exercise is not just nationalism or service. The army has also become a legitimising agency for a lot of things in our popular culture, and these ads are reinforcing just that.
Similarly, the newfound obsession with ayurveda is not as much an appreciation of the richness of India’s past as a rhetoric for that growing crop of population who seem to have a myopic sense of their self and the identity of others. These people tend to view certain people as ‘others’, and the material world of these ‘others’ are gravely suspected. Here, ‘assimilation’ is sacrificed for a nostalgic assertion of a mythical and anachronistic golden past.
Today, ayurveda has nearly become the parameter to judge not only the purity of a product, but also the purity of sentiments of its producers. Certain brands seem to have become so vocal in this new-found meaning that they are equating their products with national sentiments. A call for buying their products has become a call of duty for ‘patriotic’ and ‘zealous’ citizens. These ‘swadeshi’ brands seem to be pitting themselves against the multi-national corporations (MNCs), foreign manufacturers and even Indian companies (with their seemingly ‘western products’).
This rhetoric has had a two-fold impact on the advertisement strategy of brands.
1. Little-known ayurveda-based firms have started asserting their position very firmly in the advertising world, with this rhetoric playing a vital role in their upward surge.
2. Curiously enough, those brands which were in the firing line of these ayurvedic brands, have also tried to remodel their products based on this new rhetoric.
So, a lot of brands have now started asserting themselves as a part of the ‘ayurveda brigade’. They are doing this by bringing in ayurvedic variants of their products. After all, they are trying to recoup the space they lost due to paradigm shifts in marketing.
Thus, ayurveda has become a space for negotiation for competitive brands, and their success depends on:
1. How successfully the rhetoric is employed.
2. Whether these brands are able to shrug off their image of ‘others’, or are able to reinforce an image of ‘swadeshi-ness’, which will, in turn, validate their use of the rhetoric of ‘ayurveda’.
It’s not only the employment of rhetoric that is important here, but the validity of the agency to use that rhetoric. This, in turn, depends on both the image of the brand as perceived by the consumers, and the image of the brand ‘constructed’ for the consumers’ sake.
This image is further enhanced by the brand ambassadors, who are often celebrities who, through their huge following, have the potential to sway the audience to their side. But there is another point in this process. These ambassadors are not playing a character or taking a character’s garb. Instead, they are using their own persona and public image to make a case in their favor.
Out of the many brand ambassadors, there are a few particular figures who figure prominently in these endorsements. An Indian actor, widely known for taking up patriotic roles and who is visibly vocal about the army, nationalism and the current government, is likely to feature in more of these advertisements. Similarly, a veteran actor, who has achieved a legendary status in the film industry, still commands a considerable following, and is known for their involvement in government endeavors, is also likely to endorse such brands.
But, a new emerging giant of ayurveda-based fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) is using the face of its current founder – a spiritual guru known for revolutionising yoga in India. These figures use their personalities as an ideological statement. Their images give particular meanings to the words they speak and produce particular discourses.
In a nutshell, the people consuming these ads can be classified into different categories.
1. Those who support the discourse of nationalism/swadeshi/nostalgia of the past.
2. Those who support the actors or their off-screen views.
3. Those who support the brand.
In many cases, these domains overlap, and often, we find multiple layers of engagement co-existing with each other.
When the nation becomes a medium to sell a product, then the whole idea of the nation – everything it constitutes and everyone who adheres to it – becomes subservient to the vicious circle of capitalism. This creates a facade of wants by creating an illusion of incompleteness, scarcity and need, by utilising the rhetoric mentioned above. It also reinforces the material basis of emotions like nationalism by defining them in their exteriority and their tangible manifestation. Lastly, it also turns nationalism into a product to be sold in the market.
In such a case, capitalism not only acquires benevolence, it also gets legitimacy and credibility which garb the ulterior motive of the rhetoric and makes us consumers of the fetishism. We are obliged to feel that serving capitalism is equal to serving the nation. We satiate our egoistic desire of serving the nation – not by active participation in the process of nation-building, but by the passive process of consuming the products, whose manufacturers make us realize that we are rendering our services to the nation.
Consumers get a sense of self-fulfillment by supporting the most ‘visible’ form of nationalism, that is the army or indigenous products. We can afford to ignore wrong, because we believe we are doing our bit for the nation. This self-fulfillment is as much a facade as that ‘perceived scarcity’ which we internalise so that we have to fulfill it through capitalism.
Capitalism doesn’t fulfill the tenets of nationalism – it just satiates our false egos and makes us feel better about ourselves. At the same time, it adds two different categories – ‘capitalism of the self’ and ‘capitalism of the other’.
As Slavoj Zizek puts it, “The underlying ideological message is something like: ‘Don’t think, don’t politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!’. ”
A version of this post was first published here.
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