NOSTALGIA CAN BE A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD, PARTICULARLY in the world of advertising or brand building. Wielded the right way, as a lyrical exhortation to the past, it could be used by brands to peddle something in the present. It exerts such a gravitational pull that when brands resort to marketing based on nostalgia, it is highly effective (see the success the juice brand Paper Boat, automotive major Bajaj and dairy brand Amul as well as Parle-G biscuits and Rooh Afza juices have had with their marketing campaigns). Paper Boat, for instance, famously recreated your childhood drinks of aam panna or kala khatta in their launch ad campaigns. These ads featured a narrative that played up the natural goodness of the drinks your mother made for you, now offered in updated, modern packaging. Amul with its topical hoardings has often created their own version of 'Throwback Thursdays' by referencing an event in history through their satirical and humorous lens, featuring their adorable moppet. Bajaj Auto is best known for its Hamara Bajaj ad, which first appeared more than 30 years ago. It is still brought up in their modern advertising via the jingle or more overtly as a then vs. now.
However, nostalgia can also seem like a shamelessly exploitative marketing tool, and that's not the intent of this book. The idea is not merely to look back at brands of yore to admire their twee quaintness or retro design or feel a pang of longing for simpler times when branding and marketing had not yet begun to decisively control which brands, we use.
While a little nostalgia certainly doesn't hurt, my intention is to help us understand a time when branding was being attempted in an environment of marketing resource scarcity. When distribution was nascent and we didn't have malls or hypermarkets, only kirana (provision) shops and British department stores. These stores were offshoots of famous department stores from Great Britain, which sent customers their annual brochure, allowing them to order goods from them. The products offered were a mix of Continental European brands and British ones. This was a time when advertising did not mean a blitz, as there was no digital or 360-degree marketing; instead, there were pamphlets, billboards, word-of-mouth marketing and, at best, ads in the local newspaper or radio channel (notice the use of the singular). This was a time when production was impacted strongly by colonial whims and fancies, especially with respect to availability of raw material or capital, and price was regulated or determined by import duties, taxes and British laws.
This book looks largely at pre-Independence India, the colonial period bookended by the Sepoy Mutiny or Revolt of 1857 and freedom from British rule in 1947. Fun fact: we gained Sampurna Swaraj from the British only in 1950, so on 15 August 1947, according to the Mountbatten Plan, India and Pakistan became self-governing dominions under the British Crown. India became truly independent only in 1950.
One could argue that our largely federal consortium of royal kingdoms, presidencies and states began to assume a national identity in the course of these hundred years. Further, this is when the local market began to emerge in a real sense with various legal and practical frameworks set in place to enable commerce within India by Indians. As Dr Ritu Birla writes in Stages of Capital: Law, Culture and Market Governance in Late Colonial India, 'In the latter half of the eighteenth century, perhaps the most prominent ancestor of the modern joint-stock corporation, the East India Company, launched a political government in the subcontinent. Equipped with a mercenary army, its officers reaped profits like today's pirate hedge-fund managers. We know that by the early nineteenth century this joint-stock-corporation-turned-sovereign-power sought to legitimize itself through projects of civilizing improvement, putting missionary convictions and utilitarian visions of good government to work. But it was only after the rebellions of 1857, when the company was dissolved and the Crown assumed authority over India that the colonial sovereignty sought aggressively to standardize market practice and organization. In order to facilitate this, the rules of the marketplace were also set in place: 'A barrage of novel and foundational legal measures spanning company law, negotiable instruments, income tax, charitable giving, pension funds and procedures distinguishing gambling from speculation and futures trading, among many finer matters was implemented in the period from about 1870 to 1930.
Dwijendra Tripathi and Jyothi Jumani write in the Concise Oxford History of Indian Business, 'One particular legal measure must have been of special interest to the business community. This was the first company law ever adopted in India. Modelled broadly on the prevailing English law, Act XLIII of 1850 merely sought to legitimize most of the existing business practices rather than place any meaningful restrictions on the working of the firms. But it marked the beginning of a process that would have important bearing on the future directions of Indian business.'3
The other reason for limiting the scope to this period is that it coincides with the rise of the Indian middle class as consumers and also sees the emergence of a new breed of entrepreneurs who wanted to make India self-sufficient. Remember, it was a time of resistance to British rule and there was widespread opposition to foreign goods. Therefore, 'Made in India' became a symbol of nationalist pride and the freedom struggle. Some of these enterprises and entrepreneurs would go on to become giants of industry and nation builders in their own right.
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