Thinking through Emerging Markets: Brand Logics and the Cultural Forms of Political Society in India

I think it is time we stopped shying away from words such as “sell.” We must realize 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, 17 September 1993

I am tired of Ram—I want a new name.

—A fifteen-year-old schoolgirl in June 1994, on the Hindu Right’s Ram temple campaign

You cannot make a political soufflé rise twice from the same recipe.

—Hindu Right leader Jaswant Singh quoted in India Today, 30 November 1991

How can we characterize the cultural forms of politics and the political implications of market changes in the wake of what Partha Chatterjee has called the latest phase of the globalization of capital? ¹ The question gains salience in the context of recent debates, with Arjun Appadurai arguing, for instance, that postnational forms of solidarities are emerging that reflect the more globalized character of society, and 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, Appadurai writes, to articulate the political possibilities and aspirations now only implicit in our social practices. ²

Questioning this view, Chatterjee has suggested that in a country like India, the importance of negotiating national and subnational contradictions increases rather than diminishes with globalization. ³ He argues that these contradictions center around the resiliency of community as a locus of affiliation and action, as a means of resistance to the homogenizing impetus of capital, as a site of historic memory, and as a resource for alternative futures. ⁴ 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 recognize communities as political actors, however, rendering it incapable of coming to terms with the kinds of developments witnessed in the contemporary world. ⁵ Numerous examples can be cited to highlight this lacuna: from electoral behavior, where voting tends to occur along community lines, to urban environments, where neighborhoods act as kin groups to practice mutual aid, to the well-known example of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, where communities serve as collateral for loans.

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 noted). In the current political climate, however, the prevalence of Hindu nationalism, characterized by aggression and violence on the part of the majority community, has the potential to subvert the state’s neutral arbitration altogether. While drawing on a particularistic conception of community, the Hindu Right at the same time appeals to a majoritarian conception of politics. ⁶ Hindu nationalism is both the globalizing face of Indian politics and the bearer of a violent and brutal form of religious chauvinism within the confines of the nation-state. Without a more historical account of how political formations actually take shape, we face an impasse in thinking of communities as actors and in accounting for the repressive as well as enabling developments evidenced in a country like India.

The work of markets and media is crucial in understanding the specific forms in which community takes shape, since increasingly they represent the discursive contexts within which communities are formed and reproduced. Relying as it did on both commodity and information circuits to expand its support base, many of Hindu nationalism’s exhortations were in fact inaudible; understanding it in conventional political terms is therefore inadequate. ⁷ It is possible, instead, to point to the ways in which the cultural space of the commodity is itself being redefined, to accomodate changes in the political realm...