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Nationalizing the Consumption of Tea for the Hindi Reader: The Indian Tea Market Expansion Board's advertisement campaign*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 July 2017

SHOBNA NIJHAWAN
SHOBNA NIJHAWAN*
Affiliation:
Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics, York University, Toronto, Canada Email: shobna@yorku.ca
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Abstract

In analysing a campaign launched by the Indian Tea Market Expansion Board in a Hindi literary periodical, this article seeks to read tea advertisements within the cultural history of gendered lives and nationalism in the decade leading up to Indian Independence. More specifically, it explores how multiple versions of feminized Indian modernity came to feature in the construction of black tea as a healthy, social, and national beverage. As the habit and custom of tea drinking was not common amongst the Indian population of the first half of the twentieth century, the advertisements focused on the creation of a culture of ‘proper’ tea preparation and ‘correct’ consumption. Not only did the middle-class woman and her family feature centrally in these advertisements; aristocratic and working women as well as movie actresses were all associated with the beverage drunk to reenergize and savour. While the advertisements addressed middle-class society and consciousness, this article argues that they did so by also drawing on, and not distancing from, diverse class, caste, and professional contexts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 5 , September 2017 , pp. 1229 - 1252
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

My sincere thanks to Philip Lutgendorf for commenting on an earlier version of this article, the anonymous readers for Modern Asian Studies for their constructive comments and encouragement in expanding on this article, as well as to my doctoral students, Balraj Persaud and Khyati Nagar, for reading through the final version of this article.

References

1 Anand, Mulk Raj, Two Leaves and a Bud, Kutub-Popular, Bombay, 1966 [1937].Google Scholar

2 The Hindi literary monthly Sudha was edited by the writer, poet, and publisher, Dularelal Bhargava (1895–1975), and his co-editor of long, Rupnarayan Pandey (1884–1958). It was published by Ganga Pustak Mala Press in Lucknow in a print run of 7,200 issues in its early years and around 2,000 issues in later years.

3 The ITMEB was formed 1935 out of the Tea Cess Committee. Its unprecedented budget allowed for one of the largest marketing campaigns in colonial India ( Lutgendorf, P., ‘Making tea in India: Chai, capitalism, culture’, Thesis Eleven, vol. 113, no. 1, 2012, p. 15 CrossRefGoogle Scholar). A survey commissioned by the ITMEB in 1939 on the tea-drinking habits of Hindu and Muslim middle-class families in Calcutta is discussed by Mahalanobis, P. C., ‘Enquiry into the prevalence of drinking tea among middle-class Indian families in Calcutta: 1939’, Sankhyā: The Indian Journal of Statistics (1933–1960), vol. 6, no. 3 Google Scholar, Proceedings of the Indian Statistical Conference 1942 (1943), pp. 283–312.

4 While I focus on the advertisements placed in Sudha, this vernacular periodical was one of many that placed tea advertisements. Lutgendorf, ‘Making tea’, has outlined the early developments of marketing and consuming Indian tea in a diversity of public spheres as well as in proximity to the production places of the crop, first to the British residing in India in the early twentieth century, then to Indian middle-class populations, and, in post-Independence India, as a national drink ‘of unity’.

5 See Haynes, D., McGowan, A., Roy, T., and Yanagisawa, H. (eds), Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2010 Google Scholar; and Venkatachalapathy, A. R., ‘“In those days there was no coffee”: coffee-drinking and middle-class culture in colonial Tamilnadu’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 39, no. 2–3, 2002, pp. 301–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 For the Bombay context, Abigail McGowan has noted that a leading aspect of the discourse on consumerism was precisely this question surrounding women's responsibilities as consumers. See her ‘Consuming families: negotiating women's shopping in early twentieth century Western India’, in Haynes et al., Towards a History of Consumption, pp. 155–84.

7 The phrase is from Lutgendorf, ‘Making tea’, p. 11.

8 Partha Chatterjee first developed this argument in ‘ The nationalist resolution of the women's question’ in Recasting Women, Sangari, K. and Vaid, S. (eds), Kali for Women, Delhi, 1989, pp. 233–53Google Scholar. McGowan has applied it to the context of consumer items for women in Bombay in ‘An all-consuming subject? Women and consumption in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Western India’, Journal of Women's History, vol. 18, no. 4, 2006, pp. 31–54.

9 Haynes et al., Towards a History of Consumption.

10 Bhadra, G., From an Imperial Product to a National Drink: The Culture of Tea Consumption in Modern India, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, 2005, p. 5Google Scholar.

11 See Venkatachalapathy, ‘In those days’, for an assessment of the status of tea in South India.

12 Lutgendorf, ‘Making tea’, p. 13.

13 Bhadra, From an Imperial Product, pp. 14–15.

14 All translations from Hindi into English are mine. Boldfaces are those of the original advertisements.

15 See Lutgendorf, ‘Making tea’, p. 4; P. Lutgendorf, ‘Chai why? The triumph of tea in India as documented in the Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art (New Delhi)’, 30 December 2009, Figures 2 and 7, http://www.tasveerghar.net/cmsdesk/essay/89/index_2.html, [accessed 17 May 2017]; Bhadra, From an Imperial Product, p. 5, Figure 4. Anandi Ramamurthy has investigated the representation of plantation workers in tea advertisements from the colonial period up to present-day fair-trade tea advertisements. See A. Ramamurthy, ‘Absences and silences: the representation of the tea picker in colonial and fair trade advertising’, Visual Culture in Britain, 368–81, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2012.717457, [accessed 17 May 2017].

16 It is precisely such a pose that is being referred to in nationalist publications, such as the women's periodical Stri Dharma criticizing women who fed their toddlers coffee, another beverage considered harmful and addictive (Venkatachalapathy, ‘In those days’, p. 306).

17 Male consumers of tea generally wore dhotis in the advertisements.

18 Bhadra, From an Imperial Product, p. 8.

19 This advertisement came with the initiative of sending the advertisement to the ITMEB in Calcutta in order to receive one of several ITMEB publications, i.e. an illustrated English-language booklet entitled ‘When women say yes’. This booklet was free of cost and laid out the benefits of tea.

20 Ibid., p. 5.

21 Ibid., p. 18.

22 Scholars who have framed such advertisements of toiletry and other hygiene products for the body and the household within the colonial discourse of cleanliness are McGowan, ‘Consuming families’; and H. Kaur, ‘Of soaps and scents: corporeal cleanliness in urban colonial India’, in Haynes et al., Towards a History of Consumption, pp. 246–67. Medicine and health care products for women in Hindi periodicals with a focus on scientific education about the female body, sexuality, and reproduction are discussed by Sharma, M., ‘Debating women's health: reflections in popular Hindi print-culture’, Indian Historical Review, vol. 35, no. 2, July 2008, pp. 178–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23 As described in the advertisement featuring Mira Sanyal (Sudha, November 1939).

24 See figures in Bhadra, From an Imperial Product, p. 36; and J. Masood, ‘Catering to Indian and British tastes: gender in early Indian print advertisements’, Tasveer Ghar: A Digital Archive of South Asian Popular Visual Culture, p. 4, http://www.tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/essay/74/index_3.html, [accessed 17 May 2017].

25 As viewed in Sudha, November 1939 and March 1940.

26 S. Gadihoke, ‘Selling soap and stardom: the story of Lux’, Tasveer Ghar: A Digital Archive of South Asian Popular Visual Culture, http://www.tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/essay/104/index.html, [accessed 17 May 2017].

27 Ibid.

28 For a detailed elaboration on this argument regarding the emergence of the professional woman in the visual Hindi public sphere, see S. Nijhawan, ‘Women and the nationalization of literature: text and image as parallel narratives with multiplied meaning in a Hindi periodical (1927–1941)’, Gender and History, vol. 29, no. 1, April 2017, pp. 48–66.

29 This advertisement can be found in Lutgendorf, ‘Making tea’, p. 15, Figure 3.

30 In contrast, Indian advertising of the 1990s focuses on diverse roles of women exclusively within the middle-class context, as argued by Munshi, S., ‘Wife/mother/daughter-in-law: multiple avatars of homemaker in 1990s Indian advertising’, Media, Culture and Society, vol. 20, 1998, pp. 573–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Venkatachalapathy, ‘In those days’, p. 303.

32 Ibid., p. 314.

33 Ibid., pp. 314–15.

34 Mahalanobis, ‘Enquiry’. A comparative study of tea advertisements in different vernacular periodicals and newspapers has yet to be conducted.