Brand-Name Capitalism, Soap Advertising, and the Making of the Middle-Class Family in Western India, 1918–40

After World War I, a consumer-based capitalism expanded significantly in urban South Asia, often by displacing goods that were made by small producers and that were sold in local bazaars. A central aspect of this development was the role of advertising, which often projected to the middle class the critical importance of consuming mass-manufactured items to the attainment of modernity. By exploring the role of advertising in western Indian newspapers between 1918 and 1940, this paper examines how Indian and global capitalisms on the one hand, and the process of making the middle class family on the other, were intertwined. It demonstrates how soap manufacturers fashioned commodity images of their goods around the healthy conjugal family as they competed with each other and with local products in the marketplace. It discusses a series of advertising campaigns for three different kinds of soap: 1) bar soaps meant for ordinary household consumption; 2) beauty soaps; and 3) laundry soaps. These products all replaced indigenous goods and practices that had served similar functions. The paper will show that with each type of commodity, advertisers advanced certain “pedagogical projects,” instructing consumers on how the use of brand-name soaps was necessary to family hygiene, social respectability and happy marriages. But in order to be successful, advertisers also needed to be responsive to conceptions of modernity that were developing through broader processes in urban society and that were connected to nationalist concerns; advertising could fail when it did not tap into powerful “prior meanings” associated with modern conjugality. The paper will involve analysis of visual imagery as well as the texts of advertisements.