an emerging consumer society and political culture will not be immediately apparent. This is why this chapter begins with a longer introductory section than the others, providing the reader with a suggestive glimpse of what the overall argument is getting at.
Consumption and politics: outlines of a connection
Finding the right terminology for countries, nations, movements and political functionaries was one of the self-expressionists’ great preoccupations. In many cases names mattered more than the things they were actually meant to designate.
The authors of the Khilafat-e-Pakistan Scheme, for instance, spent most of their creative energy on finding appropriate Islamic-sounding terms for state institutions but paid little attention to how these institutions were supposed to operate.
Amongst other things, they insisted that their country needed a ‘bait ul-mal’
(lit. ‘House of Property’) instead of a ‘State Bank’ even though they openly acknowledged that there was no substantive difference between the two.2This was not simply a matter of translation. Both terms were equally ‘foreign’ to the linguistic context of North India, but the Arabic term conjured up a link with the time of the Prophet of Islam that suggested a sense of justice and common wel- fare, while the English equivalent smacked of an illegitimate European presence.
Names were believed to encapsulate an inner authenticity that was in accord with the larger national soul. Something similar was at play when Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were renamed Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai over the last decade, or when the regime of Pervez Musharraf claimed that calling the ‘District Commissioner’ a ‘DistrictNazim’ would make a real difference to how this figure related to the people.
The most explicit and philosophically grounded approach to the politics of naming was to be found in the oeuvre of V.D. Savarkar. His famous pamphlet Hindutva: Who is a Hindu?actually started off with a meditation on the ontolo- gical status of names. This was necessary because the recasting of Hindu identity as ‘Hindutva’ was directly grounded in the belief that the abolition of the European term ‘Hinduism’ would lead to substantive changes in the nature of the Hindu community itself. Savarkar’s reasoning went as follows:
The very fact that a thing is indicated by a dozen names in a dozen human tongues disarms the concomitance between sound and the meaning it conveys. Yet, as the association of the word with the thing grows stronger and lasts long, so does the channel which connects the two states of consciousness tend to allow an easy flow of thoughts from one to another, till at last it seems almost impossible to separate them. And when in addition to this, a number of secondary thoughts or feelings that are generally roused by the thing get mystically entwined with the word that signifies it, the name seems to matter as much as the thing itself.
(. . .) . . . there are words which imply an idea in itself extremely complex
or an ideal or a vast and abstract generalization which seem to take, as it were, a being unto themselves or live and grow as an organism would do.
(. . .) Inscribe at the foot of one of those beautiful paintings of ‘Madona’
[sic] the name ‘Fatima’ and a Spaniard would keep gazing at it as curiously as at any other piece of art; but just restore the name of
‘Madona’ instead, and behold his knees would lose their stiffness and bend, his eyes their inquisitiveness and turn inwards in adoring recognition, and his whole being get suffused with a consciousness of the presence of Divine Motherhood and Love!3
Savarkar’s ruminations describe nothing less than a reification of names.
Although he said earlier in the pamphlet that things matter more than names, he ends up with the very opposite – that a name makes all the difference for how people interact with things. In fact, as the case of the Spanish Madonna demon- strates, things may no longer matter at all. The example assumes that there is nothing meaningful about the depicted figure as such; meaning is entirely produced by the label. A tentative step towards some form of Sassurian linguistics – that there is really no inherent connection between name and thing, the signifier and the signified – is taken in order to make names appear as if they were the only things that really existed. This manoeuvre was necessary for Savarkar’s entire political enterprise. He had to detach names from things in order to be free to create a new name – ‘Hindutva’ – that was independent of social structures on the ground; having done this, Savarkar then had to start to assume that there was some ‘organic’ substance to his neologism in order to give it relevance and solidity.
A somewhat similar process of symbolic investment of names was at play in the Pakistan movement. Following the work of Ayesha Jalal, it has now become part of the scholarly consensus that the demand for ‘Pakistan’ could be politically effec- tive, precisely because the exact meaning of the term was never really spelt out.4 Chaudhri Rehmat Ali’s original coinage was based on an acronym involving letters from the names of each of ‘Pakistan’s’ prospective provinces – ‘P’ for Punjab, ‘A’
for Afghania, ‘K’ for Kashmir and so on, but this was nothing more than an exercise in name fetishism that few Muslim nationalists at the time took very seriously.5The alternative reading of Pakistan as ‘Land of the Pure’ was hardly more precise. A UP Muslim League leader could tell a crowd of supporters that
‘Pak’-istan had no territorial basis, but was simply everywhere that Muslims practiced their faith properly.6 Ismat Chughtai, the socialist and feminist writer growing up under the shadow of the movement, captured the combination of emotional expectations and the power of signs as follows:
They were to have Pakistan. Along with the Taj Mahal, Moti Masjid and Laal Qila, the entire hallowed world, under the silvery moon’s shadow, happily engulfed in fasting and prayer, would slowly slide towards paradise. Their allotted portion was to be handed to them. A copper ‘P’ was already selling at every betel-leaf shop.7
Apart from recognizing the geographical indeterminacy of ‘Pakistan’ – all the places mentioned eventually ended up in ‘India’ – this description also points to something immediately relevant for this chapter. Like the ‘P’ in Pakistan, names and even letters could be quite literally turned into fetishes or talismans. The magic of Pakistan as a political ideal lay in the fact that people could project their own hopes and aspirations – for states of empowerment and rausch, justice and social equality, religious purity and historical greatness – on to a cipher that became all the more evocative the more people interacted with it.
It is easy to place the preoccupation with naming in the context of late colonial middle-class politics. The creation of terminologies for states and institutions, communities and imaginary armies could propose something radically new without having to deal with the complexities of political action on the ground. The most prolific of neologists were typically those excluded from politics – Savarkar in prison, Rehmat Ali in Cambridge – or members of erstwhile political sects who suddenly found themselves at the core of nationalist movements – such as Mashriqi or the authors of the Scheme. The desire to take possession of something by literally ‘branding’ it with a name was paramount; the actual qualities of the thing in question – its use value so to speak – secondary. No doubt, there was a sense of joyful creativity in conjuring up names. The drafting of new terminolo- gies generated a state of temporary elation that fed upon the self-expressionist longing for power, beauty and states of de-societalization. Naming was a natural component of the desire to communicate essential being to ‘the eyes of the world’
and of an aestheticism that revelled in the beauty of political language or the reg- ularity of paramilitary displays. The ultimate roots of the politics of naming were the same that sustained the politics of self-expression more generally: a middle- class existence that bred both frustration and ambition, but did not provide much room for constructive radical politics. But there appears to be a more direct and specific link between middle-class culture and the politics of naming – consumption as a new form of social communication.
Let us approach this subject matter by suggesting a striking homology. The aforementioned examples of name politics bring to mind a certain passage in Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects – a late 1960s exploration of modern consumer society. Under the enigmatic heading ‘GARAP’, he described the following mind experiment:
Picture for a moment our modern cities stripped of all signs, their walls blank as an empty consciousness. And imagine that all of a sudden the single word GARAP appears everywhere, written on every wall. A pure signifier, having no referent, signifying only itself, it is read, discussed, interpreted in a vacuum, signified despite itself – in short, consumed qua sign. What indeed can it signify except for the society itself that it is capable of generating such a sign? By virtue of its very lack of signifi- cation it mobilizes an entire imaginary collectivity. (. . .) In a way, people end up ‘believing’ in GARAP. They consider it the mark of advertising’s
omnipotence, and judge that if only GARAP would assume the specificity of a product, then that product would meet with an immediate and sweeping success. (. . .) Were a specific referent to be made explicit, individual resistance would certainly come back into play. But consent (even ironic consent) thus founded on faith in a pure sign is self- creating. Advertising’s true referent is here apparent in its purest form: like GARAP, advertising is mass society itself, using systematic arbitrary signs to arouse emotions and mobilize consciousness, and reconstituting its collective nature in this very process.8
This vignette would not lose its suggestive power if the meaningless phrase
‘GARAP’ was replaced by some of the not exactly meaningless, but meaning- poor creations of the political self-expressionism in North India. ‘Pakistan’,
‘Hindutva’ and many other contemporary political names made their appearance in the way described by Baudrillard, by suddenly invading both print space and – in the form of flags, poems, posters and graffiti – also public space. Both neolo- gisms began to define imaginary but strongly believed-in collectivities precisely because no specific referent was ever made explicit. This was the same miracle experienced by consumers seeing ‘GARAP’. An enigmatic but self-referential cipher that attracted meaning from nowhere and without much discursive prepa- ration. The resulting condensate of meaning was then described with nebulous terms suggesting mystical depth, such as national ‘essence’ or ‘soul’. The result were communities of people held together by the fact that they related to an enigmatic, but evocative name in similar ways.
Baudrillard understood the magic solidification of empty ciphers as characteristic of a new kind of social communication that emerged in the period of mass consumption. This raises an interesting question about the socio-genesis of self- expressionism. The politics of naming coincided precisely with the appearance of branded commodities, the use of advertising in print and film, and the proliferation of metropolitan consumer goods in the Urdu middle-class milieu. There is nothing outlandish about the connection between political culture and consump- tion; it has been documented and explored, with varying degrees of theoretical depth, in several studies of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe, North America and more recently China.9The absence of similar attempts in the South Asian context seems to be related to a sense of political unease. The early and mid-twentieth century was the age of nationalism, and the language of national- ism is deadly serious; it speaks of sacrifice, fighting to the death, of self-respect and grand projects of change. The language of advertising in contrast is frivolous;
it focuses on the little things of daily life and represents them in gaudy colours.
In an ideological universe where overcoming the everyday world for the sake of something greater was a primary objective, an insistence on the importance of such mundane trivia must appear as an unfathomable denigration. In a certain sense it is, and deliberately so; there is no denying that the basic stance of this book regards the harbouring after the ‘great’ as a pathological self-indulgence,
and valourises concern for the small and the immediate as truly critical and political.
But other readings of the argument need to be rejected right from the start.
The emphasis on material culture in an exploration of political culture is not a replication of the colonialist manoeuvre of imputing material self-interest to nationalist activists. To argue that certain forms of nationalist ideology were guided by the logic of consumption is not the same as to suggest that nationalists were insincere and only after the good things in life. Consumption was never a question of personal morality in this sense, but a structural force that refashioned the fundamental logic of social communication. The point is not that middle-class nationalists were insincere, rather that there was something deeply problematic about the very cult of sincerity most of them subscribed to.
The universal need of post-colonial societies to protect the memory of the nationalist struggle has been compounded in the South Asian context by the widespread espousal of a culture of frugality. Nobody exemplifies this better than the figure of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi – the Mahatma who rejected most of the amenities of normal life and insisted on wearing little more than a loincloth.
Indian nationalism, and to an extent also Pakistani nationalism, were in the eyes of their followers not only too sincere and important to be involved in consumerism, they also appear to have taken a direct stance against it. The body- politics of self-expressionism as described in Chapter 2, and the constant need to defend the middle-class body against the ill effects of modern life mentioned in Chapter 3, are testimony to what appears to be a highly critical attitude to middle- class comforts. But again, this would be missing the point. Anti-consumerism of this kind was not opposed to a political culture ruled by consumption, but in fact one of its most striking manifestations. The false assumption is the conflation of consumption with affluence or comfort. Nothing could be further from the truth; as this chapter will demonstrate, the demonstrative expression of austerity is under certain circumstances no less consumerist than the demonstrative expression of affluence.
Consumption and social identities: why Baudrillard?
Having thus established the wider problematic of this chapter and its implications, it is necessary to construct a theoretical roadmap that will guide us on our trek through the evidence and help us to unlock its significance. My main reference remains Jean Baudrillard – more precisely his first three books, The System of Objects(1968),The Consumer Society(1970) and For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign(1972).10This choice requires some justification. Baudrillard is mainly known for his later works that develop a very radical argument about the effective unreality of the ‘hyper-reality’ produced by the ‘simulacra and simulations’ of the post-modern media universe.11At some point, he famously claimed that, for all matters and purposes, the (first) US–Iraq war ‘did not take place’.12Whatever one makes of the point itself, this is clearly something that only applies to a social context dominated by 24-hour news channels. It is little
wonder that the South Asian social science literature – let alone history – have not seen any need to engage much with Baudrillard.
Baudrillard’s earlier explorations of a société de consommationare situated in the period of mass affluence that existed in the post-War industrialized world. The Consumer Societybegins with a survey of ‘profusion’ and attests the existence of a ‘kind of fantastic conspicuousness of consumption and abundance, constituted by the multiplication of objects, services and material goods’.13This is followed by a reading of shopping malls and drugstores as ‘total environments’ of consumption.14Once again, all this is miles away from the social reality of 1930s and 1940s North India, even as far as the relatively well-off middle-class milieu is concerned. But this should not prevent us from thinking with Baudrillard’s arguments. After all, the invocation of affluence in The Consumer Societywas more rhetorical than substantial; Baudrillard’s main thrust was to debunkauthors such as J.K. Galbraith who believed that affluence alone could change society.
The conspicuous proliferation of material wealth was stressed by Baudrillard in order to give his real point greater force – that it was all a diabolical sham. As he asserted in a key passage, ‘instead of prodigality, we have “consumption”, forced consumption in perpetuity, twin sister to scarcity. (. . .) It is our social logic which condemns us to luxurious and spectacular penury.’15
The route to this conclusion took Baudrillard through the anthropology of
‘primitive societies’. All his early works drew strongly on the classic authors in the field – Malinowski, Mauss, Levi-Strauss, Sahlins – and commented on social phenomena such as potlatch, cargo-cult, prodigal feasts and gift exchange.16To run the apparentaffluence of modern consumer society up against such primordial practices was precisely what enabled Baudrillard to make his main point – that the political economy of production, governed by use value and exchange value, had to be supplemented by a political economy of the sign, based on ‘symbolic exchange value’.17This entailed the realization that the realm of production – the very site where material affluence was constituted – was an ideological cover for something else more ancient and profound – the need of society to continually reproduce hierarchy and difference in social communication. The main point about the consumer society was not so much that it had driven capitalist commodity production to unprecedented heights, but the way in which this com- modity production collided with an autonomous grid of socio-political power.
InThe Consumer Society, Baudrillard identified two angles of analysis from which the process of consumption should be seen:
1 As a process of signification and communication, based on a code into which consumption practices fit and from which they derive their meaning.
Consumption is here a system of exchange, and the equivalent of a language. (. . .)
2 As a process of classification and social differentiationin which sign/
objects are ordered not now merely as significant differences in a code but as status values in a hierarchy.18
This followed on from his earlier observation that modern consumer goods are sign objects constituting a comprehensive system of communication. For Baudrillard, this was particularly apparent in ‘models’ and ‘series’ of products, in which items with a very similar use value are distinguished by added identity features – a gradation of products by the appearance of exclusivity, naturalness, antiquity, scientific innovation and so on. This ‘personalization’ of products meant that products ranging from cars and washing powder to pieces of furniture could be used to demarcate specific lifestyles.19The magic of consumer society rests in the fact that it presents individual consumers with ‘freedom’, ‘aspiration’
and ‘choice’ but really ties them down in a cast-iron grid of social hierarchy:
‘Each individual experiences his differential social gains as absolute gains; he does not experience the cultural constraint which means that positions change, but the order of differences remains.’20
A substantive advantage of Baudrillard’s early work is that – remaining within the orbit of Marxism – he still thought in terms of contradiction– between sign and use value, for instance, or between the promise of individual betterment and the cementation of hierarchy. This opens up his work to a ‘Leninist’ reading.
If contradiction is a major theoretical point, it is not only entirely legitimate, but particularly relevant to use it in a context where contradiction is most pronounced.
This means that consumer culture in the North Indian context does not have to be treated as an imperfect or inconsequential replica of what existed in the indus- trialized world, but rather as a case in which the true nature of consumer society reveals itself even more clearly than in its more developed forms. The field of advertising and the proliferation of branded commodities of everyday use may not have been as widespread or developed in the Urdu middle-class milieu as they were to become later on, but the other side of Baudrillard’s argument – the continuing existence of a strong socio-political power grid expressed as a system of sign-objects – was particularly visible and well-established. This is well known to anthropologists or sociologists dealing with the question of caste, for instance.
They have observed, that a mere increase in affluence or cultural sophistication often does very little to change caste hierarchies, it simply shifts or displaces them.
When lower caste people begin to use Sanskritic norms in their religious obser- vance – the erstwhile prerogative of the high castes – the latter switch to a secular identity and English to maintain an essential difference.21What really matters is how socio-political power influences the relative position of sign-objects within a total system of sign-objects, not the nature of individual objects or cultural goods itself. Baudrillard can help us to think further by pointing out that the emergence of consumer culture simultaneously fortified and undermined pre-existing sys- tems of symbolic communication. Its emergence did represent a change in the material culture of middle-class Indians, even though its impact was much more complex and contradictory than the ideology of consumption itself would permit.
Baudrillard’s key insight, then, is that a consumer society represents a system of communication. Its hallmark is not so much the proliferation of goods, but the