Arvind Rajagopal EPW. 2001

Thinking through Emerging Markets: Brand Logics and Cultural Forms of Political Society inIndiaAuthor(s): Arvind RajagopalSource: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 36, No. 9 (Mar. 3-9, 2001), pp. 773+775-782Published by: Economic and Political WeeklyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4410350 .Accessed: 26/09/2011 02:36

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Thinking through Emerging Markets

Brand Logics and Cultural Forms

of Political Society in Indial

While political mobilisation involves the championing of narratives to unite groups and individuals in particular ways, markets too use modes of address and rhetoric that may complicate these larger narratives. In their attempts to reach the rural hinterland, businesses

seek not merely to establish a brand, but also its significance for consumers. They need then to ask questions like - What kind of political performatives might consumer goods make

possible What cultural identities are reinforced in the process of market extension? It is to meet this increasing competition that businesses have also resorted to

'Hindu' symbols as a way to reach new consumers.

ARVIND RAJAGOPAL

I think it is time we stopped shying away from words such as 'sell'. We must realise there has been a major

revolution in communication. If we maintain that a good ad campaign can't sell a bad product, conversely people will never purchase a good product if they don't know about it." (Hindu right leader Pramod Mahajan, quoted in The Times of India, September 17, 1993)

"I am tired of Ram - I want a new name." A 15-year-old schoolgirl in Pipariya, Madhya Pradesh, in June 1994, on the Hindu right's Ram temple campaign.

"You cannot make a political souffle rise twice from the same recipe." Hindu right leader Jaswant Singh quoted in India Today [Awasthi and Aiyar: 1991].

Politics in India has in recent times been characterised by the explicitness and force of a logic of marketing. That this is a recent development is suggested by Pramod Mahajan, in the quote above, who ties the importance of the approach to the 'revolution' in communication, which instantly translates market trends into political forces, without the intervening mediation of either collective participation or critical public discussion. Mahajan points to a new conjuncture where these categories telescope into each other, and market logics could interbraid with politics; at the same time, his advocacy of it suggests the extent to which his own party gained from the articulation and pro- pagation of political demands by occupying the infra-political realm of consu- smption, where these demands were harder to contest.

What the equation made by Mahajan signals is the stitching together of different fields, of culture, economy and politics, an event requiring to be located in its specific historical context. One way of understanding this is in terms of the institution of a visual regime right across social divides, due to the electronic media. Along with the expansion of markets, there is then a new level of connectivity, and a new social legibility as well. This is not to say that politics, economy and culture merge-and flow into each other; rather, it is the block- ages and constraints to a transparent movement between these spheres that highlight the particularity of the situation.

This paper is an inquiry into the mutually constitutive work of the languages of markets and politics, into the blocks and opacities that limit their translatability one into the other, illuminating the culturally specific forms of politics evolving in India. If political mobilisation involves the championing of narratives that would unite individuals and groups in particular ways, markets themselves use modes of address and rhetorical structures that may complicate those larger narratives, and vice versa. It might often appear that globalisation or market liberalisation (twin terms in India as in many other countries) offers up the truth of contemporary social change, but an examination of the ways in which markets actually become meaningful to consumers illuminates the contingent and the irreducibly cultural character of this process. As consumer goods markets expand into the rural hinterland, businesses struggle not only to establish brands against

pseudo-branded and unbranded goods, but also to establish what a brand is, and what it will signify. What kinds of political performatives might consumer goods make possible, and what cultural identities are shifted or reinforced in the extension of markets? The answers worked out to these questions are of course provisional and must continually be remade.

With increasing competition to establish new goods in a growing market, businesses may resort to Hindu symbols as a way of reaching new consumers. But this may be only a superficial sign of a deeper set of processes at work, whereby political authority is being reconstituted in more authoritarian ways while the economic and cultural spheres are apparently working through a model of consent, creating an apparently expanding middle class and at the same time, a wider acceptance of Hindu dominance, in some sense. By considering the practices through which brands are instituted and extended in the market place itself, I seek to understand the significance of brand affiliation, and examine the kinds of conclusions that might be drawn about the political sphere from such evidence.

Clearly, then, I am suggesting that politics does not simply reflect the economy, rather, it tends to delineate the limits of the economy, insofar as social action goes. In this respect, politics stands in relation to the economy not in conventional Marxist terms as akin to superstructure and base. Rather, each has a specific form of materi- ality, in Balibar's terms, arising from their mode of production and mode of subjec-

Economic and Political Weekly March 3, 2001 773

tion respectively. Each tells the story of the other, politics that of the economy, and the economy that of politics. The economy has effects in the political sphere just as in turn, the kinds of subject positions, the narratives of political action, the relationship of classes - one to the other and to authority that are found in the political sphere turn out to influence and impel events in the economy. Thus we may say that the economy works through the rhetoric of the image (as instanced in advertising), while the image itself works through the rhetoric of the economy [Balibar 1995: 160].

Recent Hindu nationalism in India arose within the nexus of market reforms and the expansion of communications, seeking to reshape the forms of public affiliation through a logic of commodification even while terrorising minorities with its supre- macist actions. Along with a mode of address where citizenship was equated with the right to consumption, there was a dis- aggregation of citizenship itself, according to the ability and willingness to con- sume in designated ways. There was a fortuitous convergence between economic liberalisation and Hindu nationalissn in India. State legitimacy has deteriorated with its failure to accomplish its develop- mental targets, and with growing critiques of the technocratic assumptions underwrit- ing its power. Both liberalisation and Hindu nationalism responded to this crisis by seeking to limit demands on the state by rejecting the promises of an earlier dispen- sation, of secular national growth, and redefining a more limited arena where consent was sought. The Hindu right's intent to render a narrow, authoritarian view of Hindu identity as politically dominant has been accompanied by a record of violence and campaigns of terror against Muslims, and now Christians and secular institutions.

But it is fair to say that popular support for the Ram temple campaign, critical in its rise to prominence, did not necessarily translate into popular endorsement of Hindu nationalist politics in general, and Hindutva strength was overestimated. With the decline of the Congress, what emerged was an era of more competitive politics, and more fluid alignments in electoral constituencies. We may say that the recent prominence of Hindu nationalism has been made possible by testing out new modes of power, that may outlast Hindu nationalism itself. Its relevance can thus be carried over even when the kind of dominance envisaged for it was no longer feasible.

Hindu nationalism's rise represented the unravelling of a prevailing consensus, about an insulation between realms of economy, culture and politics, suggesting instead a homology between exhortations to con- sume and to vote, between aspirations for cultural identification and requirements of electoral affiliation. In the process, the BJP sought to bypass the more slow and ardu- ous process of extending its traditional base, and of working through the contradictions between its own political positions and those of the different social groups it embraced. At the same time, a ceaseless emphasis on mobilisation as the mode of participation, bolstered by violence against 'outsiders' marks the limits of its forms of politics. In this way, the crisis of political consent was sought to be addressed by exorcising discontents in the person of the other. At the same time the zone of consent thereby achieved is a shrinking one, with the facade of Hindu unity split apart through lower caste assertion, aided by the very market-based forms of articulating interests that helped bring Hindutva to prominence. The crisis of consent does not get resolved, therefore, but is institutionalised, with an increasingly authoritarian political sphere, and a seemingly consensual cultural sphere where the form of consensus is increasingly violent and repressive. Against this domestic scenario is the public image sought by the BJP, however, which is that of a political party sympathetic to global economic integration, and attentive to the interests of foreign investors and financial institutions.

How then do we characterise the cultural forms of politics, and the political impli- cations of market changes, in the wake of what Partha Chatterjee has called the latest phase of the globalisation of capital? [Chat- terjee 1998: 57-69]. The question gains salience in the context of recent debates, with Arjun Appadurai arguing, for instance, that post-national forms of solidarities are emerging that reflect the more globalised character of society, that have yet to transcend the limits on the imagination imposed by the territorial nation-state. We seek a more genuinely internationalist language that has yet to emerge, he writes, to articulate the political possibilities and aspirations as yet only implicit in our social practices [Appadurai 1996: 158-77].

Questioning this view, Chatterjee has suggested that in a post-colonial country like India, the importance of negotiating national and subnational contradictions increases rather than diminishes with

globalisation [Chatterjee 1998]. He argues that these contradictions centre around the resiliency of community as a locus of affiliation and action, as a means of resis- tance to the homogenising impetus of capital, -a site of historic memory and a resource for alternative futures.2 The kinds of political rights asserted here are distinct from the chiefly individual character of the rights sought and contested in western society. Classical liberal theory is unable to recognise communities as political actors, however, rendering it incapable of coming to terms with the kinds of developments witnessed in the contemporary,world [Sandel 1984]. From electoral behaviour, where voting tends to occur along community lines, to urban environments, where neighbourhoods act as kin groups to prac- tise mutual aid, to the well-known example of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, where communities serve as collateral for loans, numerous examples can be cited that highlight this lacuna.

It is one thing to argue for the virtues of communities as political actors when they are marginal or minority communities, claiming a modicum of state protection as a compensation for the aberrations of colonial history in India (here the varieties of compensatory discrimination enacted in the realms of caste, religion and gender can be indexed). In the case of Hindu nationalism however, the community in question claims to represent the majority, and thus has the potential to subvert the state's neutral arbitration altogether.

Hindu nationalism made an indigenised political language available to a majority population largely excluded from the agenda of an elitist developmentalist regime. While drawing on a particularistic conception of community, the BJP and its allies at the same time appealed to a majoritarian conception of politics.3 We thus face an impasse in thinking of communities as actors in a situation where at this historical conjuncture, Hindu nationalism is both the globalising face of Indian politics, and the bearer of a violent and brutal form of religious chauvinism within the confines of the nation-state.

Political Economy of Hindu Nationalism

As the precise form of nationhood becomes contentious with the growth in politicisation, and the increasing challenges faced by the developmentalist welfare state, markets become prominent as promising


means to address and solve questions of politics, since in their ideal form they exemplify consensual exchange. They can thus come to be seen, in this context, as a means of breaking out of a political deadlock, or of arriving at a more adequate consensus.

But there is a problem in performing this analytical operation. The kind of pluralism that can be envisioned in markets presumes individual freedoms, which can clearly coexist with each other under a given rule of law. In politics, however, what is at stake is the future of the collective as a whole, and while there is room for negotiation and debate, it typically excludes discussion on the character of political system in place. A given political system espouses a particular kind of ethics or morality, state capitalist, market capitalist, or socialist, as opposed to markets, which are amoral, and undefined in terms of the larger project they lend themselves to. This then is one kind of blockage in the flow of circuits between fields. The political field tends to pose restrictions on the kinds of questions that might result from market flows. Questions of private or individual interest need to be couched in terms of or give way to questions of collective interest. Similarly, the cultural field, as a densely particularised network of signification, would transmit those kinds of expression that could be perceived within its historically given medium of understanding. These are clearly as much issues of language as of substance, so that the terms in which a given issue is articulated shift, become differently accented, or take on an altered meaning in their passage across circuits of communication. Thus for instance, the circulation of an aggressive Hindu nationalist ideology could be understood in the cultural field as a demand for upper caste Hindu assertiveness, in the political field as a move to consolidate the Hindu vote, upper and lower caste both, and in the economic field as a critique of the secularist Nehruvian ideology of the Congress.

Globalisation was initiated in India with debates about the path of development the country had taken since independence. 'Nehruvianism', the term retrospectively used to characterise the Congress Party's post-independence governance, quickly condensed into a taken-for-granted term that became a political weapon used according to the wielder. The term purports to describe the Congress Party's early vision of a planned economy, with import substi-

tution industrialisation and its goal of autarkic development. For all of the five- year plans made, and all the public sector enterprises built, Nehruvianism was very far from being a hegemonic force or a fait accompli, if by this we mean state-led socialist development. In fact, it was always a wished-for and a thwarted project, a potential goal rather than an achieved condition, gaining in these criticisms a retro- active unity it perhaps never possessed in practice.4 The private sector was in fact charged with husbanding the country's progress toward development, and allowed to profit for its participating in this development. If this was a sure recipe for cultivating inefficiency, it was as much business complacency as it was state laxity in permitting this.

When it seemed that liberalisation offered a means of quick expansion in a rapidly growing market, it was welcomed by businesses. When it began to be clear that foreign competition would enter as a necessary concomitant of any internal liberalisation, the mood rapidly became more ambivalent, and protests ensued from several sections, demanding a so-called level playing field (e g, demands made by the 'Bombay Club' formed by the top industrial houses). Visions of swadeshi, viz, demands for indigenising the economy, were suddenly resurrected, visions that had been prominent in theirabsence in the heyday of the Rajiv Gandhi-led liberalisation.

Liberalisation positioned itself as a conversation about the economy, qua economy, whereas in fact it sought at the same time to address the failures of politics and to bypass its impediments. Arguments advancing liberalisation appealed to cri- teria of productivity and market success as a way of compensating for the deterio- ration ofpolitical legitimacy and the waning of prevailing Nehruvian understandings of the collective good. The progression of Hindu nationalism itself illustrated this, swelling as popular responses to particular campaigns grew, and retreating when the feedback was more ambivalent.5 As voters became detached from traditional loyalties and new voters flooded into the electoral arena with a lowering of the voting age (from 21 to 18, in 1989), political campaigns became increasingly deliberate in their targeting of what L K Advani called 'the non-committed vote'.6 It was in this context that cultural identity became salient and began to be explicitly incorpo- rated in the appeals that political parties made to the electorate.

Three discrete but related sets of events converge to constitute the present conjuncture, then [Rajan 1999].7 Firstly, there is the onset of globalisation in India, indexed by the greater presence of multinationals in the Indian market through mergers, acquisitions and startups, and the availability, since 1993, of a host of sat- ellite television channels from the west, for the first time unmediated by government censorship. The commanding heights from which the Indian state governed economy and society have now reduced considerably with a new, independent set of forces present, forces that threaten to dwarf erstwhile authority altogether. Sec- ondly, since the mid-1980s, political developments in India have reshaped the visual space, so that image forms draw increasingly on indigenous traditions, specifically a brahminical Hindu culture, albeit modernised and adapted to sponsor- ship on television. Drawing on advertising and consumer culture to mobilise at the grass roots level, the Hindu right fought its way to the centre of the political stage, managing to appear simultaneously as the last resort of (Hindu) patriots, the party of liberalisation and the hope of big business. If the greater Hinduisation of the polity and the affinity of such politics with an ascen- dant market ideology point to the use of advertising-related strategies, markets themselves have come to regard the use of Hindu imagery as more acceptable, and have begun to explore the intimate meanings of religious tradition that are a far cry from their hitherto mainly westernised conceptualisations of the cultural bases of markets. If the BJP and its allies make claims for a kind of Hindu modernity, through media and markets, those institutions appear to absorb and gradually dif- fuse this wisdom, albeit in somewhat diluted form. The larger political conditions that enable and are reinforced by such expression thus need to be marked. Re- lated to these two events is a third, namely, the establishment of television broadcast- ing in the early eighties, and the resulting creation of a common platform that for the first time stretched across barriers of language and literacy. The broadcast of com- mercially sponsored Hindu epics serialised on state-owned national television, to enormous popular audiences, signalled the possibility of a kind of mass participation that had never before been witnessed in post-independence times; this was a potential that the BJP was the first to utilise in any effective way [Rajagopal 1996; Basu 1993].8

776 Economic and Political Weekly March 3, 2001

Commercial electronic media thus stands between the realms of politics and the economy, signalling and enabling the entry of the masses onto the stage of politics, while seeking to appropriate or channel these popular energies in terms of the logic of marketing. Thus if the media provide a kind of stage where the population can imagine and identify itself as a people united, the work of the economy and that of politics is to divide this population into market niches and electoral constituencies, the better to guard them from competing brands and political parties, and thereby acting as forces ofdisidentification at the same time. Clearly, looking to politics or of the economy alone does not illuminate either one or the other realm; a tacking between these realms is required.

Now, the change in the political environment from a welfare state-dominant to a neo-liberal market-dominant regime has been accompanied by a change in the marketing environment, from a manufacturer's market in the post-second world war era, to a more consumer-driven market since the 1980s. Whereas worldwide, this shift was accompanied by stagnation in the growth of markets, in the Indian situation there was a considerable market growth during the same period. Thus in fact domestic businesses fared well, lacking the level of competition their foreign counterparts faced abroad. It was in the wake of the. optimism generated by this period of growth that an alternative to the waning Congress Party came to be seen as possible, and that the BJP, perceiving this opportunity, refashioned itself as a possible successor to the ruling party.9 In this process, not only politics, but businesses too sought more individualised modes of address, shifting from the generic notion of the mass consumer, to a more disaggregated view of the individual consumer.

Market's Mode of Address

It may be said that the barriers to the interaction of global, national and local forces are lowest in consumer goods markets, and that it is here that their mutual influence can be most clearly seen. After a lengthy period of the protection of the domestic market, when indigenous businesses by and large contented themselves with servicing existing customers, the expansion of the market has been the focus of a great deal of effort and attracts fierce competition, between multinationals,

national and regional businesses. This is especially the case with fast moving consumer goods (FMCGs), relatively inex- pensive items where the efforts to entice consumers are most visible.

With the opening up of a protected domestic market, and the resulting increase in the presence of large foreign companies, however, indigenous brands came under attack, and Indian businesses began to pay the price for having utilised the developmentalist growth phase to luxuriate as rentiers enjoying a license-permit raj rather than to cultivate their capacities as internationally competitive entrepreneurs. An enormous amount of effort came to be directed at gaining entry to this 'emerging market', with businesses seeking to establish themselves early when media costs were relatively low, and markets relatively underdeveloped, so that strong loyalties could be built.10

Advertisers had been addressing a market that represented the balance of political and cultural forces as it prevailed at the time. If they conceived the urban, upwardly mobile middle class, the most desirable segment of the market, to be 'people like us' (or PLUs), this reflected not only a prevailing political balance of forces, but a tacit acceptance of this balance, or an inability to think beyond it. With the expansion of markets, advertisers and marketers faced a difficult problem, namely, how to conceive of the new consumers, whom they had never addressed before, and with whom they were culturally unfamiliar. It was one thing to perform market research studies, and to construct profiles of their target consumers' anxi- eties and aspirations. But what if consumers did not behave as they were supposed to, and if their psychographics seemed to make them refractory to the most skilful advertising rhetoric? Available, politically salient forms of appeal provide an attractive option, I suggest, lending the access routes to a globalised economy an irreducibly specific cultural character. The particularistic forms of identity that political rhetoric utilises are seen to have a proven market value, furthermore. The opening up of the cultural-political field by the decline of a strong centrist state, and the advances made by new coalitions following this decline, render the use of cultural appeals such as of religion and caste an effective strategy, I suggest, and the prevailing political context endows the strategy with a distinctly contemporary meaning.11

Advertisers working in a protected domestic market had their job cut out for them; industry old-timers spoke of it as a gentleman's club, with little pressure on them to compete. Copy was mostly writ- ten in English and translated, and appeals that were frequently adapted from inter- national campaigns had little cultural specificity, for the most part. The market they addressed can be divided, broadly, into two. For upmarket audiences, advertisers sought to aestheticise the appeal of goods, using a blend of borrowed and indigenous imagery. Campaigns with the Air India Maharaja figure, and cartoons in Indianised themes for the Amul company, a proud symbol of national cooperative dairy industry, are some examples, both catering to well-to-do customers. For down- market and rural customers, appealing to the goods' utility was believed to be sufficient, or at any rate, a sign of what marketers were willing to spend on this segment. The Nehruvian era was, then, marked by the absence of a popular aesthetic in advertising for the working and the rural classes.12 The power of Hindu nationalism's appeal was in many ways, I suggest, a symptom of this absence.

Following the opening up of the visual field and with the increase in economic competition, this split structure of the consumer market has begun to change, with campaigns being crafted for the lower segment of the market as well. Broadly, two styles of address can be seen in recent advertising for nationally promoted goods, although there is variation within each of them.13 The first style is characterised by abstracted and self-conscious uses of indigenous culture, wherein the meanings of the practices and themes used become a fetishised referent whose particular meanings are extraneous to the ad's narrative. Here there is an aestheticised consumption of a repertoire of things marked as 'culture', unconnected to daily life; we can see this as a high cultural appropriation of indigenous symbols.14 In the second category, the use of indigenous symbolism is invoked as part of a more situated cultural language, and marks the entry of such symbolism into national circulation. Cul- ture here is more like a set of practices in use, rather than a set of fetishised objects used for their iconic value.15 Simply by virtue of their positioning on a national stage, however, often with the intermixing of English and/or Hindi with a regional language for instance, such advertising speaks to and evokes an


increasingly screen-literate and culturally self-conscious audience.

This still corresponds only to a relatively tiny section of the market, occupied by national brands. With a medium like television, however, a virtual marketplace is established that transcends any given market segment, generating some level of brand awareness across an entire population. For each national brand that attains any significant market share, there invari- ably arises a host of regional imitators, often changing from one district to the next, offering consumers versions of the good in question with varying degrees of success. These 'pseudo-brands' are like a penumbra around the brand, indicating the existence of consumers who have either failed to identify the brand correctly, a common phenomenon in 'emerging markets', or else, despite being brand-literate, have chosen the. imitation for its more affordable value. In addition, there are goods that are only weakly branded, pos-- sessing a name, but with no value added to it in terms of publicity and brand personality. Against both of these stands the infinitely larger world of unbranded goods, composed not only of bulk commodities, but also of finished goods that are too modest to merit their anointment with a brand, existing in the itinerant, often fu- gitive world of travelling markets and street- comer sales, of textiles and ready-made clothes, aluminiumware, plasticware, glassware, jewellery, and so on. These phenomena are signs of the never-finished work of branding. In the marketplace, the real advertisers and the free riders, the branded and the counterfeit or pseudo- branded goods fight it out, alongside unbranded commodities, like so many parallel universes struggling to establish their hegemony, each of them placing a different value on consumption practices, real and metaphorical. 'Expanding markets' then refers first and foremost to this struggle to extend the provenance of the brand over the arena of consumption, persuading consumers of the significance of consuming branded goods, where brands are sought to be defined in very specific ways. Against the exhortation to a generic consumer on the part of those selling commodities, we can observe the need to develop more particularistic modes of address, the better to secure the addressees' attention, and the attempt to gradually extend these particularistic modes of address across the market as a whole.

Political Overtones of a Changing Market

The question of the establishment of brands often takes the form, in business publications, of inquiring how rural markets are being extended. Rural markets were largely seen to be occupied by local, small-scale producers, selling bulk goods and unbranded commodities. What is the significance of this shift towards branding? First and foremost, it is a means to 'adding value' to the product, perhaps in terms of quality, packaging and 'customer satisfaction,' but above all in terms of price. It is also a particular way of recoding the relationship between person and thing, between a thing's utility and its aesthetic properties, between the individual appre- ciation of the aesthetic qualities of day-today objects and the endowment of these forms of recognition with an explicitly social significance. The expansion of markets proceeds through a rhetoric of personal self-definition and improvement, and of thereby achieving social member- ship, imputing that entry and acceptance are open to all. Whereas in fact the sphere of consumption is an infinitely graded hierarchical realm, so that a given repertoire of consumption practices permits one form of inequality, coded in locally recog- nisable ways, to be traded for another, more nationally or internationally legible form. It should be noted that while the translation of regional practices to a more public arena permits new modes of identity formation, the extensive internal dif- ferentiation in any individual repertoire renders consumption patterns an unlikely basis for collective action other than on themes of consumption itself.

My discussion of the market will focus on the fabric wash market, which has been the site of the most intense competition between multinationals, regional and local companies.16 The spread of audio-visual media, literacy and increased publicity about cleanliness and personal care have transformed the soaps and synthetic detergents market in India into a battlefield for multinationals and domestic players.17 Despite the relatively low per capita consumption in India of soap and detergent, the aggregate market is growing only at the rate of population growth, and market share is achieved mainly at the expense of the competition. The choice in laundry soaps and detergents tends to be one that consumers identify with closely, and so is relatively hard to dislodge; consumers

typically maintain that the product they happen to use is the best, no matter which one it is. Thus the comparative benefits of different laundry wash products are clearly entirely intangible.18 The phenomenon of branding can thus be seen more clearly as a battle over modes of signifying consumption.

Market development in fabric wash has involved the attempt to convert users of edible oil-based laundry soaps, who have historically comprised the largest part of the market, to users of phosphate-based synthetic detergents. The laundry soaps segment have been reserved for the small scale, or 'unorganised' sector, which turns out about 90 per cent of the production, while the medium and large-scale, or organised sector, which cannot operate without a licence, produces the remain- der.19 The small-scale sector gains the benefit of more lenient industrial laws and bank financing, as well as market restrictions that prevent larger companies from eliminating them through direct competition. What the organised sector seeks to do instead is to convert laundry soap users to users of detergent powders and bars, presenting the latter as superior products that any enlightened consumer would use. Over time, laundry soaps have reduced from occupying over 90 per cent of the market to holding barely one-third of it, growing at a rate much smaller than that of the detergents market, with most of the growth in laundry wash going to detergents.20

Brand Wars

There is a pyramid of offerings in the organised sector of the laundry market, consisting of premium non-soap detergent (NSD) bars, mid-priced NSDs, low priced NSDs, and laundry soaps. Laundry soaps tend to be dominated by regional brands that have anything but a well-developed profile of their target consumers; the big- gest brands, including Doctor soap in the north, BB soap in Mumbai, and Urvashi in Tamil Nadu, are unknown elsewhere. The premium products are understood to offer more evolved emotional benefits, and reflect a more developed psychographic portrait of their audience. Following the pattern established in the west, women are targeted as the chief decision-makers for domestic consumer goods.21 Brand man- agers present themselves as segmenting the market between women consumers who are mere homemakers and those who go


beyond just taking care of their family. Women who buy premium detergents are thought to be more evolved than those buying low-priced NSDs, for instance, and consumers in the unorganised laundry soap market are understood to be much more traditional, with their world being con- fined to their husbands and families. 'The more you move consumers up the triangle', one brand manager concluded, 'the more you get value for your business. The idea is not volumes but value.'22 He was re- ferring to Abraham Maslow's model of human motivation, which presumes a hierarchy of needs; those at the bottom chiefly meet their subsistence needs, in this understanding, whereas those at the top have realised their inner potential [Maslow 1954: 35-46]. This is mapped onto thepyramid of consumer demograph- ics, with consumers able and willing to spend more money understood to be the most self-realised. This is a self-fulfilling scheme as far as marketers are concerned: low income consumers are believed to be less evolved, and premium brand consumers more so. The challenge before businesses is of course to make manifest the advantages of such evolution to low income consumers.

Interestingly, the first notable sign of brand wars, in the wake of the establishment of national television and consequent attempts to expand the consumer market, in the early 'eighties, came not from a national or multinational company but from a small-scale entrepreneur in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, Karsanbhai Patel, and the low- cost detergent empire he created. Hindustan Lever, a subsidiary of the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate Unilever, has dominated the detergent market for many years. Until the early 'eighties, detergents were believed to have only a premium market, and Lever held the leading brand, Surf, priced considerably higher than other brands. Patel essentially demonstrated that the limits of the domestic market were not simply resource-based, but were a result of the limits of marketers' imagination. He challenged the identification of detergents with relatively affluent consumers by opening up a market previously not believed to exist, with his product Nirma. The reasons for his success included perceiving the new possibilities of low-cost outreach to consumers, maintaining low overheads, keep- ing the price almost equal to that of laundry soap, and ensuring adequate distribution with high wholesaler and retailer margins.23 Beyond its price, the brand appeal itself

rested on little more than a catchy jingle, and offered no psychological value, unlike its competition. What was bewildering to large companies like Lever was that despite the crudity of his methods, Patel was able to repeat his success in one product category after another, first in detergent powders, stealing substantial volumes from Surf, and then in the detergent bars category, from Lever's Rin. Thereafter Nirma proceeded to threaten Lever as well in premium toilet soaps (e g, Lux), and popular bathing soaps (e g, Lifebuoy), all with one brand name, Nirma, and relatively mini- mal advertising outlay. Lever's executives spoke of this with all the horror of watch- ing an enemy general inexorably advance his army to their capital city, in this case, some of the company's core brands, un- affected by all their counter-attacks.

New Strategies

What was at work was a different phi- losophy of market expansion. Nirma, followed a method of developing markets strikingly different from that of multinationals, allowing a product to circulate in the hinterland markets for a period of two or more years and allowing it to build its base, observing consumer responses to it, and incorporating this information in the decision whether to finally promote it or not. Generous margins for wholesalers and retailers ensured that the company would not suffer for lack ofa field force such as that employed by the large companies. Multinationals, on the contrary, perform market trials over a short period of time, and then proceed with a major publicity blitz, attempting to create a coercive demand for their products that would oblige distributors and retailers to content themselves with the small margins the company allow them. Their large overheads, and their need to satisfy investors and achieve high margins forbids them from adopting the more bottom-up approach such as that demonstrated by Nirma.24

After ignoring Nirma for some years, Lever eventually adopted a three-pronged strategy in its battle to erode its market share. It developed an ad campaign for Surf with a 'value for money' story, arguing consumers should pay more because it cleaned better; it used an established laundry soap brand name in its portfolio, Sunlight, to market a detergent powder, and finally, it implemented what was called Operation STING, Strategy to Inhibit the Growth of Nirma, aimed as well at future low cost

competition. The last of these strategies was the development of a separate low cost operation under the rubric of Stepan Chemicals, a small company taken overby Lever, to avoid its typically huge overheads.

Wheel detergent powder began to be marketed in intensive campaigns, but with limited results. Because new users of detergents were assumed to require education, the advertising campaigns designed for Wheel adopted a pedagogical approach, with a salesman advising a housewife on the product's merits. After indifferent results with the ad, the campaign became more experimental, using a melodramatic, Hindi film style, and drawing more heavily on market research. The narratives became richer, more full of incident, involving deeper family dynamics and emotional drama and thus more assured of engaging with viewers in terms of the narrative content and enactment. Corresponding to the novelty of the product for the target market (a detergent rather than a laundry soap) a deeper penetration of the social structure was required to weave it in with existing family relationships. The burden of responsibility fell on the woman: her failure to whiten her man's clothes was endangering his chances of success, and thus their survival. Based on focus group discussions, the number of lemons shown was increased, so that scores of lemons fell like rain into the detergent. Meanwhile the wheel in the graphic became a more fast- spinning three-dimensional device. Both of these were exterior to the apparent plot of the ad, functioning as religious fetishes that signified purity and strength respectively.25 Their use said much about Lever's perception of this market segment, as being responsive to quasi-subliminal religious imagery, and Lever's own eagerness to win consumers. The use of such symbolism clarified the company's own perception of the otherwise opaque motivations of this relatively new set of consumers. At the same time it confirmed this opacity by relegating consumer motives to the mystery bin of superstition, and reproduced the company' s own uncertainty in addressing this market. Through a combination of strategies, the sales of Wheel finally began to rise suf- ficiently to challenge Nirma's growth, but Lever's executives asserted the importance of lemons and wheels in this process.26

What the foregoing suggests is the uncertain battle between attempts to aestheticise consumption and more price

* and utility based strategies of extending markets. Large companies try to shift the


ground of competition, from pricing and value as perceived by customers (whether in the trade or at the consumer level) to a different level of psychological value, where their weapons of publicity will make their victory more likely. However, this dependence on the mechanisms of publicity and brand imagery renders businesses vulnerable to competition making more functional appeals to consumers.

With a host of new products coming in, customers may turn to the retailer for advice on what to use, on the presumption that he receives feedback from a variety of shoppers. Businesses are competing with each other to exploit this trust, and create top of the mind awareness, essentially bribing retailers with various forms of 'trade loads', or schemes to ensure that retailers have an interest in pushing their products. 'Kya scheme hai'? is the question retailers ask of every salesperson who visits them - i e, what is the promotional scheme that would persuade me to favour your goods over someone else's? Eight rupees forevery liter of coconut oil, they might be told, or, 5 per cent on every case of bathing soap. At the same time, businesses with sufficient resources seek to generate demand through advertising, and once demand has been created as even retailers agreed, a brand is impossible to dislodge. By creating a massive and unswerving demand, the power that a company gains over the rest of the production chain is enormous: they can hold up payments to suppliers of raw materials, and receive goods on credit, and they can reduce retail margins to negligible proportions while ensuring that, to retain customers, retailers are forced to stock their products.27

With the opening up of a protected domestic market, not only do large firms attempt to take control over or extend their hold over the growing consumer base. Small firms and entrepreneurs seek to cater to low-income segments of the market ignored or found unprofitable by large companies. This creates a problem of discipline for large companies, which need to ensure that forms of appeal are not institutionalised that threaten or under- mine their own long-term interests.28 In this sense, the change in market conditions accompanying the shift from Nehruvian developmentalism to the era of liberalisation has created a problem for businesses reflecting in the political sphere proper. The relation of different market segments one to the other, and the condition of the market as a whole, reflects a given balance

of political forces. The unsettling of this balance creates a problem of knowledge that cannot be solved with reference to the market itself, since it is from the political field that marketers have hitherto drawn their cues, e g, about how to respond to affiliations across class segments. The detergents market is especially interesting in this regard, in having an astute market leader, Hindustan Lever, that seeks to address and if possible to preempt competition in any segment of the market, especially after its humbling by Nirma. HLL tends to set the example for market cultivation that other businesses seek to emulate, and thus the foregoing case has lessons that extend beyond the detergents market, I would argue.

If previously, marketers could work with relatively fixed, homogeneous conceptions of a middle class market by targeting premium price segments, consumer behaviour now prohibits such complacency for a variety of reasons. Low income segments are exposed to a range of new appeals, not only for generic products such as Nirma, but as well for products tradi- tionally advertised for higher income groups. Now, consumers may cut across price barriers in the purchase of products, making consumer segmentation no longer as useful a way of understanding.the market as it used to be. That is, with the expansion of the market and of communications, the market is more difficult to map. Accom- modations may be made to the smaller purchasing power of lower class urban and of rural markets by playing 'the volume game', offering a range of product sizes 'without cheapening the communications strategy'.29 This is a new phenomenon, one that expands the middle class aspirationally while not challenging its income stratification.30 The obverse of inflating the aspirations of consumers, however, is that their behaviour becomes less predictable, and harder to control. Commenting on a demographic aspect of this problem, viz, that 70 per cent of the Indian population is under 35 years of age, one vice-president of marketing expressed how 'frightened' he was by a consumer base that lacked the historical knowledge that would ensure brand loyalty.31 This is, truly, a regime in transition.

With the expansion of the market, large companies seek to create and reinforce brands as their preferred means of maximising control over communication with consumers. Cultivating brand value is a way of reducing if not bypassing the

power that the trade can exert downstream from the brand manufacturer, helping to cut through the clutter of a messy retail environment and an inefficient sales per- sonnel. This helps to gain 'top of the mind' share in the market, and use it to increase 'value, not volumes,' in the words of the Lever's executive, that is, to increase the percentage in profits rather than merely serve larger groups of people. With new communications extending beyond the physical limits of any given marketplace, however, this logic is always liable to .subversion, as new volumes are found by competitors, diminishing what can be accumulated from the old sources of value. Similarly, if Hindutva appears as a possible solution to the crisis of political authority, and religious symbols and fetishes are seen to extend the narket's grasp over a population only partially literate in the logic of branding, these means of aggregation are themselves open to challenge.

Conclusion

When we ask what are the cultural forms of political society, and assert that these are not restricted within political society, but belong to circuits across society, we are saying that these are influential across society. That is the point we are making about Hindutva, is that it travelled on the back of expanding markets, as it were, inserting itself into spaces party politics had not developed systematically, thus bringing itself closer to people, and advancing its cause. It continues to do this in the growth of markets, since it offers a powerful repository of symbols marketers can draw upon in their quest to address consumers whose culture they have only a very poor grasp of. By virtue of the lack of concerted political opposition to the religious themes the Hindu right propa- gated, the circulation of Hindutva took on a political significance regardless of precisely what people thought of it.

The very forces that helped promote Hindutva at first led subsequently to its dilution. We may recall that in fact, no sooner did Hindutva go public than it happened that its bluff was called, with the implementation of the Mandal Commis- sion recommendations to award reserva- tions in government jobs and college admissions to OBCs, in 1989. The consequent political split in the caste coalition that composed its ranks put paid to any dreams of sole dominance the BJP may


have had; thereafter, only coalitional rule would be possible, at least in the foresee- able future. The ideology and the appeal of Hindutva's rhetoric have outlasted this moment, however, as a reminder that politics is something more than the sum of its parts. This excess, over and beyond the aggregation of. interests, is precisely the political, i e, that collective vision or narrative whose refashioning and contes- tation constitutes the arena of politics. Similarly, the excess of meaning, beyond the stated copy of any given advertisement and beyond any use a product has for its buyer, contains the distinctness of a given brand, or what is crucial in retaining consumer loyalty, in delivering the value that businesses seek and ensuring that their goods retain the capacity to make a profit. In an era of a 'revolution' in communication, the interaction between these spheres is more intimate than before. There is an irreducible difference between these spheres, however; there are political issues proper that cannot be displaced onto markets, but require addressing in themselves. At the same time, the means of answering these questions become more contested and subject to challenge, as political decisions require working through a process of consensus formation rendered more complex and precarious by the new means of communication. l

Notes 1 This is a slightly altered version of an essay

that appeared in Social Text No 60, Fall 1999. 2 During the period of colonial rule, nationalist

politics defined a cultural preserve that would be exempt from the disciplinary practices of the colonial state, in order to preserve the potential for anti-colonial mobilisation. This realm of politics entails forms of mobilisation often inconsistent with the principles of association in civil society. The cultural models conceived for this realm, to mediate between the population and the nation state of the future remain consequential for postcolonial politics. See Partha Chatterjee, "A Response to Taylor's 'Modes of Civil Society'," Public Culture 3, 1, Fall 1990, 119-132, rpt in The Nation and Its Fragments, Chapter 11. See also Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-colonial Histories. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1994.

3 Thus the Ram temple campaign based its demand for the Babri masjid in Ayodhya not only on the claim of being original owner, for which no definitive proof existed, but also on the ground that a'Muslim minority should bow to the majority culture.

4 I owe this important point to a conversation with Lee Schlesinger, in Ann Arbor, MI, March 12, 1997.

5 The organisational force of the grass roots cadre of the Hindu cadre was of course crucial in giving shape to the Hindu right campaign, it should be noted. See Rajagopal, 1999, forthcoming.

6 Interview with L K Advani, Economic Times, August 8, 1994. There were about 40 million new voters between the age of 18 and 21 who were eligible to vote in the November 1989 general elections, for instance. See Richard Sisson, 'India in 1989: A Year of Elections in a Culture of Change', Asian Survey, Vol XXX, No 1, January 1990, 120.

7 In this essay I seek to develop an argument first formulated in my 'Thinking about the new Indian middle class: gender, advertising and politics in an age of globalisation' in Rajeswari Sunder Rajan ed Signposts: Ma(r)king the Present, Kali for Women Press, New Delhi, 1999.

8 In 'Communalism and the Consuming Subject', Economic and Political Weekly, February 10, 1996, I have discussed the centrality of the media in the rise of the Hindu right. See also Tapan Basu et al, Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags: A Critique ofthe Hindu Right, Orient Longman, New Delhi, 1993.

9 In the process, it was overlooked that in fact the party had always been a dependent political formation incapable of leading a government on its own, both in terms of the smallness of its core constituency and in terms of its political inability to transcend the limitations this imposed on the party's room for maneuver. For an argument that examines the historically limited character of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, subsequently the Bharatiya Janata Party, (see Bruce Graham, Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics: The Origins and Development of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990). Graham's examination, which concludes before 1980, is useful in explaining why the Hindu right did not achieve the extent of influence it sought to. It should be noted however that this explanation nonetheless does not illuminate why the party did achieve such prominence it did during the 1980s and subsequently. What is missing, I suggest, is a properly political explanation of the power of a given ideology to extend its influence beyond a given 'core constituency'.

10 Thus in the US for instance, brands like Kellogg's, Pepsi and Marlboro still gain from large advertising spend they received during the 1950s and 1960s. Brands enable manu- facturers to communicate directly with consumers regardless of the actions of the middle- man. For some useful business literature on brands, see, e g, Paul Stobart, ed, Brand Power, New York University Press, New York, 1994, passim.

11 Thus while Hindu imagery has been present in some measure in Indian advertising for decades, its use since the late 'eighties is difficult to separate from the loud and aggressive claims for public dominance by Hindu nationalists; the intention of advertisers is obviously immaterial to the resonances such texts may provoke. I do not discuss caste in this paper, because although it has achieved independent political expression, as a form of cultural expression, lower caste identity is still as easily liable to be folded into Hindu

nationalist themes as lower caste parties are to strike political alliances with the Hindu right in the elctoral arena; with Hindu right imagery still retaining a protean and widely present force. See, in this context, my 'Thinking about the new Indian middle class' in Sunder Rajan ed, 1999.

12 This paralleled a strategy of development that gave priority to economic issues and understood cultural issues to be secondary or epipheno- menal, in what at the time appeared an entirely reasonable categorisation of tasks before the government. What this signalled however was the absence of a cultural policy, and the reliance of a mostly English-language trained techno- cracy to bypass cultural particularisms in their task of national development. The assumption that culture was simply residual was obviously a deeply problematic one, however, and has returned to roost.

13 Goods with a strictly regional market may have their advertising copy composed in the regional language, unlike most goods promoted nationally, and thus are open to more particular forms of appeal. I am only considering goods with a national market here.

14 For instance, in the ad for Kama Sutra.premium condoms, the name is presumably chosen for its evocation of an indigenous sexuality. This however cannot be depicted per the conventions of nationalist iconography, which presumes chaste rather than sexually active women. The ad depicts a strange encounter that simulates eroticism without touching, with a narrative coded as ethnically unmarked, viz, with upper caste characters in a spare, westernised setting, devoid of any local or regional signs. A variation within this category includes ads where particular practices are shown, e g, brahmins chant- ing the Vedas, or a classical Indian dancer in performance, to index the age and therefore implicitly the excellence of the culture, and then ties the product in with these qualities, either by plain juxtaposition, or more often by humorous and ironic contrast (Philips for the first, Pepsi the second).

15 Here we can list ads for Asian Paints, Cadbury's Perk, Maggi sauce and Ganga soap, for instance, as examples. For more discussion, see my 'Thinking About the New Indian Middle Class' in Sunder Rajan ed, 1999.

16 This discussion is based on interviews with executives with market research organisations, during interviews conducted in Mumbai between January and March of 1997. The names of the executives have been withheld at their request.

17 The annual per capita consumption of bathing soap in India is 0.3 kg (1990 figures), while for other LDCs it is 1 kg. For washing soap the corresponding figures are 1.6 kg and 4.5 kg. (See I Satya Sundaram, 'Bright Future for Soaps and Detergents', Facts for You, New Delhi, March 1990, pp 39-41).

18 In fact, due to the unusually high particulate content of Indian dirt, three to four times higher than elsewhere, dirt cannot be dislodged from clothes beyond a point, and after 20 washes or so, the 'loss of reflectance' in clothes, a measure used to indicate their cleanliness, is unchanged no matter what soap or detergent is used. Interview, market research consultant (name withheld.), Mumbai, February 1 14,1997.


19 On the dangers to consumers arising from the liberties taken with industry standards by the organised sector, see N GC Wagle, 'Consumer Rights and Responsibilities', Soaps, Deter- gents and Toiletries Review Annual and Handbook 94, p 195. Also see "No toilet soap measures up to lowest BIS [Bureau of Indian Standards] quality levels," Press Trust of India dispatch, Business and Political Observer, April 3, 1993; and Indrani Bagchi, "Rs 6 soaps cleanse just as well as Rs 30 ones: CERC [Consumer Education and Research Centre, Ahmedabad]," Economic Times, February 22, 1996.

20 The Indian soap and detergent industry's estimated annual turnover is about 100 billion rupees. This figure is an estimate combining organised and unorganised sector production. (See Samata Dhawade and Kishor Kadam, 'Untapped vast rural market (sic) - soap and detergent industry sitting on a gold mine,' Business Standard, September 20, 1996.

21 See my "Thinking about the new Indian middle class" in Sunder Rajan, op cit.

22 Interview with market research executive (name withheld).

23 A high percentage of soda ash helped to make Nirma a strong washing powder, at the cost however of inducing a burning sensation in the hands of those doing the washing. This became a major theme of Lever's ad campaigns, presenting its own products as gentle to the hands.

24 In an industry where Hindustan Lever is the leader (around 70 per cent share in volume), the upward march of Nirma's share is striking. Nirma's share in the 0.5 million tonne low- cost detergents market has, however, recently reduced to around 38 per cent in 1996 from over 44 per cent in 1994, per independent estimates. The loss in share for Nirma is not the gain of its traditional competitor, HLL, however. The slight decline in Nirma's share appears to be mainly on account of mush- rooming regional brands like Hippolin, JVG, Shuddh, etc, in the low cost detergents market. Toilet soap volumes of Nirma, however, have increased to 63,000 tonne in 1996-97 from 53,000 tonne a year back. On the back of this, the company has almost doubled its market share in popular soaps segment from 7 per cent last year. The domestic toilet soaps industry, according to the Indian Soap and Toiletries Makers' Association, has been growing at 5 per cent over the last few years, with the product penetration saturating at 95 per cent. Mumbai, Namrata Singh, "Nirma picks up 14 per cent share in toilet soaps market", Financial Express, July 31, 1997. See also Vinod Mathew, "Nirma turnover up 85 per cent", Business Line, Chennai, June 11, 1997, p 1.

25 The addition of the lemon is at a 'claim level', and the product does not actually contain any lemon ingredients, although the addition of perfume helps to conceal this fact. This was confirmed recently in the press. India Journal (Los Angeles), January 1, 1999, p B4, I thank Karen Leonard for the reference.

26 I am summarising a complex battle that began in the mid-eighties and is still continuing, although Lever appears confident that it is now able to address the challenge, and that new growth in the detergents market will accrue

to itself rather than to Nirma. In addition to the strategies mentioned, both companies tinkered with the formulation of their product while fighting price wars, increasing the amount of inert filler and reducing the active ingredients in the detergent. Nirma for its part also played the Hindu card, and in a more overt fashion, hiring the actress Deepika Chikhlia to act as herself in one ad campign, ordering Nirma from a storekeeper, to his visible surprise. Chikhlia played the goddess Sita in the popular tele-epic, the Ramayan, and went on to become a member of parliament for the BJP.

27 This allows the goal of negative working capital, which means that without actually investing any money, the cycle of production and accumulation can begin, since with the clout of thecompany's brands, they can get suppliers to invest money simply in order to survive.

28 One index of the challenge faced by marketers in comprehending the new scenario is the shift to 'quali', i e, qualitative research, which has been considerable in the last 4-5 years. If the 'quali-quanti' ratio used to be 10 to 90, it is now 20 to 80 or 25 to 75 and in ORG-MARG it is 30 to 70. There is extensive use of attitude studies, habits and practice studies, often sponsored by multinationals. What was taboo earlier may not be so today, eg pre-marital sex, divorce, and love marriage. People are suspending disbelief in areas where previously to depart from the norm would have been shocking. Srinivas Raman, GM, ORG-MARG, personal interview, Mumbai, January 29,1997.

29 Navin Chopra, RK Swamy Advertising Co, New Delhi. Personal interview, April 21,1994.

30 The development of the 'flex pack', which was introduced in the late eighties, was crucial here, providing attractive illustrations on reflective plastic sheets. Velvette shampoo 'pioneered' the technique involved here, of selling sachets costing one or two rupees, rather than a whole bottle. Thus if a picture of the actress Madhuri Dixit was on the bottle,

it was used for the sachet as well. In the upmarket retail stores, a multi-level aesthetic environment is designed for the product, and the consumer is allowed to 'see, feel, touch and select' it. Priyanka Singh and Nanda Majumdar, 'Going flexible on packaging', Brand Equity, Economic Times, August 10, 1994, p 1.

31 Harish Manwani, Divisional Vice President, Marketing, Hindustan Lever, cited in Marion Arathoon, 'When Heritage is Not Enough', Brand Equity, Economic Times, April 5-11, 1995, p 1. The age profile of the Indian population is clearly not new. What Manwani leaves unspoken is that this threat is a recent one.

References Appadurai, Arjun (1996): Modernity at Large:

Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996, pp 158-77.

Awasthi, Dilip and S A Aiyar (1991): 'Hindu Divided Family', India Today, November 30.

Balibar, Etienne (1995): 'The Infinite Con- tradiction', Yale French Studies 88, p 160.

Basu, Tapan et al (1993): Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right, Orient Longman, New Delhi.

Chatterjee, Partha (1998): 'Beyond the Nation? Or Within'? Social Text 56, Vol 16, No 3, pp 57-60.

Maslow, Abraham (1954, 1970): Motivation and Personality, Harper and Row, New York and Evanston, pp 35-46.

Rajagopal, Arvind (1996): 'Communalism and the Consuming Subject', Economic and Political Weekly, February 10-17.

Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder (1999): Signposts: Ma[r]king the Present, Kali for Women Press,. New Delhi.

Sandel, Michaet(1984): Liberalism andIts Critics, New York University Press, New York.

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Arvind Rajagopal EPW. 2001