Over the centuries, the idea of India has inspired multiple visions and manifold actions. Venerated as sacred geography, fought for as Bharat Mata, codified in the Constitution as a democratic republic—each way of seeing has influenced our being and becoming, cultural identities and political movements.
Brand New Nation focuses on a much more recent idea of India—‘India Rising’, ‘India Shining’. Unlike older ideas that are deep-dyed into popular imagination, this new vision rose rapidly during the first 15 years of the new millennium. It then deflated just as swiftly. However, Ravinder Kaur argues that, in its short life, this image revealed how the idea of nationhood has been transformed in the context of a globalised economy. Old formulae about India’s distinctive moral place in the world—non-alignment, non-violence, unity in diversity—no longer apply. Today, being a global player means parading one’s assets to investors and tourists. The assets are also newly minted. India is now depicted as buzzing with entrepreneurial energy, educated youth, and booming markets—all presided over by a government that’s ‘open for business.’ This is the New India, conjured up by India Inc.
Kaur tracks this image-making from posters at the World Economic Forum at Davos to the pages of print media. She analyses advertisements and interviews the bureaucrats and ad-makers behind them. She places these marketing campaigns within the larger story of globalised financial speculation and production, where competing nation-states strive to become magnets for mobile capital. Brand New Nation shows how hope is converted into hype, how numbers like GDP growth rates acquire magical powers, and how this fetish of growth intoxicates its worshippers with animal spirits. It also connects the quest to attract capital to the desire of nationalists to get a makeover, ditching the dowdiness of being ‘Third World’ for the more upbeat image of the ‘emerging market’. This account of optimism and anxiety, blind faith and folly, must be read by all those who believe the economy runs on rational principles.
From the iconography of India Inc, Kaur moves to ‘Incredible India’, a tourism promotion campaign that tried to update standard yogi-yoga-tiger-Taj visual representations. Although her close reading of advertisements is insightful, it doesn’t fit as well into the larger argument about how, in the 21st century, success for a nation-state is defined by its ability to attract foreign capital. Other chapters deal with ‘India Shining’, the BJP’s disastrous media campaign of 2004, and ‘Lead India’, the Times Group’s marketing blitz to gain credibility by adding ‘activism’ to the pap it serves readers. These chapters reveal a more complex—even contradictory—set of claims being made. Global capital is not at stake here. Instead, the discourse travels the familiar terrain of nation-building and national belonging. Thus ‘India Shining’ addressed a proud, prosperous populace (only to be repudiated by those excluded and disappointed). The subtitle, ‘Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Desires’, suggests such a conjugation of old and new ideas. But these cannot be neatly packaged into the globalisation story. The book also argues that “it is no coincidence” that globalisation led to the emergence of Modi, since India Inc craves a strong leader. This does not explain the illiberal roots of the Modi phenomenon, which draw upon a substrate of social prejudices around religion, caste and gender. Political economy alone cannot account for the rise of social conservatism and authoritarian leaders in India, Turkey, Brazil and the US. The cultural politics at work are more complex. PM Modi’s strongman image routinely invokes threats to national security. The idea of India as territory to be defended from foreign enemies, which probably won the BJP the 2019 elections, may be absent in advertisements but is one of the oldest and most influential nationalist stances.
Brand New Nation evocatively captures the zeitgeist of the glory days of globalisation. From the perspective of the present, where demonetisation, GST and the lockdown have destroyed people’s livelihoods, India is neither rising nor shining. Crony capitalism reigns. Perhaps that was the subliminal text in the messaging: the idea that India is For Sale.
(The author is a sociologist at Ashoka University)
