Ever since advertisements were called the “cave paintings of our times,” as theatre maestro and adman Alyque Padamsee described them, their claim to be taken seriously has gone up, we must grant. But how seriously? In 2020, jewellery brand Tanishq caved to a loud boycott call and pulled an ad for the flaky offence of a wedding portrayal that protestors saw as insufficiently Hindu. On the eve of Holi this year in Delhi, food delivery service Swiggy took down a billboard asking for no pelting of eggs during the festival of colour after this request was accused of being Hinduphobic.
On 8 March, online match-maker Bharat Matrimony faced the same charge on social media for a Women’s Day commercial asking for a safe Holi. It showed a woman washing play colours off her face to reveal cuts and bruises. “Some colours don’t wash away easy,” went the ad’s message, “Harassment during Holi leads to immense trauma. Today, a third of women who’ve faced this trauma have stopped playing Holi.” It asked for a choice to be made in favour of women’s safety. While it’s no triumph of creativity, it was an earnest reminder of a real problem—one real enough to render protests vacuous. That the festival happens to be Hindu is irrelevant here, just as the faith markers of Tanishq’s ad were. Indian brands must not yield to custodians of Hindu sensibility kicking up a fringe fuss over how they address their markets.
Not all commercials will serve a great future purpose as cave records of this age, given how forgettable they mostly are, but some ads do deserve critiques for what they say, pitch, reflect or obscure. Placed under such scrutiny, matrimony services resemble skin lighteners in how they are advertised. Campaigns in both these markets tend to mask what’s actually going on, much of which should make us squirm. Just as complexion sensitivity persists as a major social failure 75 years after freedom, so does caste endogamy—by popular demand—as evident in the selection criteria listed on the plainly successful website of Bharat Matrimony. While it may make tactical sense for a business whose success is so patently reflective of social stagnancy to take a progressive public stance, Holi advice by a match-maker that glosses over what goes into matches would fail to qualify as cave art just for that. For not revealing anything of its own market, that is, although the company probably has loads of data on caste to analyse, study and help soften as a barrier.
Caste is tricky territory for businesses, however, and so most talk of it is discreetly kept on mute. It has grown fraught with tension, too. Whether or not identity lines have blurred, the political consolidation of groups has been afoot. In an analysis of social divisions, rightist economist Ashok Lahiri recently contended that two-thirds of the population rallied as one group would end religious polarization, though it could sharpen till that level is reached. Convincing or not, such contentions assign caste a central role in Indian politics, led as this arena has been lately by the Hindu-unity project of the ruling BJP. With rival parties working out their own identity calculus for electoral forays, the salience of caste in the public sphere is only expected to go up as we go along. In all this, it may be unrealistic to hope it will loosen its grip on which way elections turn and who marries whom in India. It’s not a recommended field for advertisements to venture into. It’s riddled with risks, granted. But then, a hush of silence over a subject is often where art emerges from.