WEB MAGAZINE SECTIONS INTERACTIVE FEATURES REGULARS RESOURCES RSS

TweetTweet 17 COMMENTS PRINT

Society MAGAZINE | MAR 11, 2013

Fanning the flames? Vikas Verma and Shanti Pandit in the ad

OPINION

The ManuscriptersThe varnacular of our societys brand managers merits reading-into

VIJAY NAMBISAN

TEXT SIZE

Watching the Chennai Test against Australia, I chanced upon a new commercial for a brand offan. A couple enter a registrars office, obviously for a civil wedding, and give their names asVikas Verma and Shanti Pandit. The registrar notes these and says, So, after the wedding,

you will be Mrs Shanti Verma. The groom, a JNU type, quickly interjects, No, madam. Shewill stay Shanti Pandit and Ill change my name to hers. The couple exchange a glance ofunderstanding, and along comes the fans image and slogan, roughly The winds of change.Not bad, I thought, spuriously liberal and hypocritically feelgood as it isas, indeed, all suchadvertisements are. Then, I found a deeper, and more dangerous, subtext. Please to note thesurnames. Verma is a Kshatriya name; Pandit a Brahmin. The groom, by adopting the bridesname, is actually being upwardly mobile. (Aryan law forbids a woman to marry beneath her,but well let that pass.)

People who work for advertising agencies like to think of themselves as creative, even thesales executives and (euphemism) research types. In truth, they are the most reactionary andhidebound set of drones on earth. What are the most common surnames you find inmainstream advertising and commercial Hindi cinema? Sharmaji is, I think, the most used,though the Brahmin population of India is less than five per cent of the total. There are plenty ofDubeys and Thakurs, and Singhs and Chaudhurys, among the well-to-do. The last two are notreally caste-specific, but in the context you find them in, its easy to make out where theybelong.

I have yet to see a hero or protagonist in these genres of communication with a Paswan orAhluwalia surname. A Yadav is usually risible. As for south Indian names in Bombay cinema,they havent progressed beyond Mehmoods portrayal of an Iyer in Padosan. Confront anyadvertising person with this fact, and she (see, I can be politically correct too) will say they areonly reflecting reality.

If you are only reflecting reality, what is your creativity worth? Creativity is the ability to createsomething new, something which can change things as they are. Mainstream Hindi cinema isnot creative in this sense, because while it has changed in terms of technical sophisticationand its depiction of urban mores, it has stubbornly refused to present a different, and moreequitable, social prospect since probably Mother India and Garam Hawa. Which are not, ofcourse, mainstream films in todays context.

And where are the Dalits? I should think it would be easy enough to begin simply, by using thesurname Kumar or Gupta, which may belong to any of a number of castes. In the 1970s weonly had Ravi and Vijay, which could strike a chord in anyone. They and their ladies were fair-skinned, or at least not black. The hero who found himself making a perilous living in the slumsturned out to be Nirupa Roys sona savarna by birth to say the least.

To all these people reflecting reality, I say phooey. Take for your next hero, or at leastpatriarch, a member of the Dalit Chamber of Commerce who didnt inherit his money but made

Like 117 Send

TweetTweet 17 COMMENTS PRINT

TRANSLATE INTO:

patriarch, a member of the Dalit Chamber of Commerce who didnt inherit his money but madeit against the odds. And why is the incomparable Nana Patekar always the anti-hero? Whyhas Sadashiv Amrapurkar, since his unforgettable debut in Ardh Satya, been cast as abuffoon? Has there been a dark-skinned heroine in mainstream Hindi cinema besides SmitaPatil?

These are vexatious questions, and worse than vexatious, like mosquitoes which annoy butcan also kill. There are so many apologists for the new Bollywood (a word I loathe, though inits commercial motivations, and its reflection of realities, the comparison with Hollywood iswell-founded). Sure, our advertising and our cinema arein terms of sophisticationamongthe best in the world. That does not mean they are any good.

Going back to names: There is a verse in (I think) a commentary on Manu-Smrti, which detailswhat names are proper to what castes: Sharma and Deva belong to Brahmins; Varma andTraatru to the warriors; Bhuti and Datta denote Vaisyas; and Dasa the Sudras.

We have not come a long way in 2,000 years, have we?

TEXT SIZE

FILED IN:

AUTHORS: VIJAY NAMBISAN

TAGS: ADVERTISING, ADS | CASTE | DALITS | MOVIES | SKIN COLOUR

SECTION: SOCIETY

Follow us on Twitter for all updates, like us on Facebook for important and fun stuff

Post a CommentYou are not logged in, please log in or register

If you w ish your letter to be considered for publication in the print magazine, w e request you to use a proper

name, w ith full postal address - you could still maintain your anonymity, but please desist from using unpublishable

sobriquets and handles

PUBLISHED DAILY MAIL

HAVE YOUR SAY

1MAR 25, 2013

Scripsi Not

This refers to Vijay Nambisans column The Manuscripters (Mar 11),where he takes off from a popular ad for Havells fans and launchesinto a tirade of urban Indias myopia towards the realities of caste.The article proves that Outlook doesnt give its columnists enoughtime to write their pieces. Poor Mr Nambisan was so engrossed infollowing the India-Australia match that he ended up submitting third-rate tripe based on imaginary subtexts.

KRISHNAMURTHI KUMAR, BARODA

The very fact that there still exists a concept in India called the 'inter-caste' marriage itself demonstrates that we haven't changed. Suchmarriages also come under the category of 'Special Marriage Act',further proof of their 'peculiarity' and deviation from norm.

GARIMA SINGH YADAV, FARIDABAD

PERMALINK

Comments Policy

ABOUT US | CONTACT US | SUBSCRIBE

Or just type in a few initial letters of a topic: go

Like 117 Send

View 1 more

Facebook social plugin

3 comments

Comment

Add a comment...

Ravan Raj

the author is absolutely right. most of these upper caste copy writers are casteist and sexist

Reply Like March 13 at 1:47am

Nidhi Bansal Institute of Rural Management (IRMA)

i guess author is unnecessarily trying to extrapolate the facts. something could be analysed in simple

manner..

Reply Like March 7 at 6:26am1

OUTLOOK TOPICS: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9