By Santosh Desai
Remember the old Harpic ad when mother-in-law comes a-visiting and checks out the toilet bowl while the housewife’s heart thuds loudly in our ears? On that occasion, she passes muster thanks to her saviour, the toilet cleaner, but in many ways, the pre-liberalisation housewife’s life was a series of such anxieties. Advertising works by quickening the pulse of desire and making ‘a better world’ seem a visit to the market away. However, in the world of the housewife then, desire was a noticeable absentee.
The housewife’s role was one more in the woman’s unending list of roles — each with a job description and a rigid set of rules.
Being a housewife meant catering to the diverse needs, desires, expectations and whims of her family without thinking about her own self. The housewife woke up first and ate last, slaved through the day, and described herself as ‘not working’. The home was hostile terrain full of pitfalls, economic, cultural and political. She managed with grit — and sly manoeuvre — to prise open small gaps between tight circumstances, using subterfuge, manipulation and subtle gesture.
The role of products was to help her in this battle against the world. Advertising offered to assist her in her struggles while slyly reinforcing the roles, pushing her to do more and more in the name of being ‘a good housewife’. The detergent was the archetypal product, representing the battle to erase the griminess the world imposed on her family, day by sweaty day. She laboured under Harpic fear, lived in Rin drudgery, escaped poignantly into the un-attainability of Liril fantasy. Her victories were hard-fought, as evidenced by the persona of Lalitaji, arguably Indian advertising’s most memorable character. Lalitaji lived in a world where men asked all the questions and every action by a woman needed explaining. Her preferred mode of response was aggressive; she gave as good as she got, but in doing so, she became a charm-less automaton.
Things changed with liberalisation, affluence easing the tightness constricting middle-class India. Aided by women’s improved education, the role of the housewife began changing discernibly. The martinet of Surf became playful manager of household circumstances as she teasingly challenged us with ‘Dhoondte Reh Jaaoge’ to find any dirt on her family’s clothing. Through the early 1990s, the housewife gradually found greater self-confidence, the motif of fear slowly receding from most advertising depictions. In the case of a cooking masala, which earlier showed a young housewife terrified about making a mistake while cooking, a new version depicted a young Mandira Bedi pretending to listen to her mother-in-law tell her about spices while actually listening to a Walkman. ‘Modernity’ was now a wink exchanged between the woman and the brand, with the audience eavesdropping.
Today, the housewife is rarely shown with a frown on her face. In fact, she is rarely shown at all. What we see instead is a highly confident homemaker who hovers above her roles. She is an enthusiastic cheerleader for her family, one who says ‘yes’ much more often than ‘no’, one who grants wishes while showering attention on her kin. Her children are her key projects, her husband, just one more child to be managed rather than obeyed. The mother-in-law is rarely present; when she does appear, it is as a distant, benign installation. It is almost as if the home is no longer the primary arena for the woman. The new frontier is the outside world and the new battlefield is the woman’s body. Her confidence at home stands in stark contrast to her anxieties outside, where her body is seen as a traitor intent on giving her away. Many products, particularly those involving grooming, have moved away from showing the home as a context anymore. The housewife has been exteriorised; her internal sense of self is now located in the outside world and found wanting. In that sense, in the last 30 years, everything has changed, yet nothing has. The anxieties have changed labels, but the woman’s heart still thuds in our ears.
Remember the old Harpic ad when mother-in-law comes a-visiting and checks out the toilet bowl while the housewife’s heart thuds loudly in our ears? On that occasion, she passes muster thanks to her saviour, the toilet cleaner, but in many ways, the pre-liberalisation housewife’s life was a series of such anxieties. Advertising works by quickening the pulse of desire and making ‘a better world’ seem a visit to the market away. However, in the world of the housewife then, desire was a noticeable absentee.
The housewife’s role was one more in the woman’s unending list of roles — each with a job description and a rigid set of rules.
Being a housewife meant catering to the diverse needs, desires, expectations and whims of her family without thinking about her own self. The housewife woke up first and ate last, slaved through the day, and described herself as ‘not working’. The home was hostile terrain full of pitfalls, economic, cultural and political. She managed with grit — and sly manoeuvre — to prise open small gaps between tight circumstances, using subterfuge, manipulation and subtle gesture.
The role of products was to help her in this battle against the world. Advertising offered to assist her in her struggles while slyly reinforcing the roles, pushing her to do more and more in the name of being ‘a good housewife’. The detergent was the archetypal product, representing the battle to erase the griminess the world imposed on her family, day by sweaty day. She laboured under Harpic fear, lived in Rin drudgery, escaped poignantly into the un-attainability of Liril fantasy. Her victories were hard-fought, as evidenced by the persona of Lalitaji, arguably Indian advertising’s most memorable character. Lalitaji lived in a world where men asked all the questions and every action by a woman needed explaining. Her preferred mode of response was aggressive; she gave as good as she got, but in doing so, she became a charm-less automaton.
Things changed with liberalisation, affluence easing the tightness constricting middle-class India. Aided by women’s improved education, the role of the housewife began changing discernibly. The martinet of Surf became playful manager of household circumstances as she teasingly challenged us with ‘Dhoondte Reh Jaaoge’ to find any dirt on her family’s clothing. Through the early 1990s, the housewife gradually found greater self-confidence, the motif of fear slowly receding from most advertising depictions. In the case of a cooking masala, which earlier showed a young housewife terrified about making a mistake while cooking, a new version depicted a young Mandira Bedi pretending to listen to her mother-in-law tell her about spices while actually listening to a Walkman. ‘Modernity’ was now a wink exchanged between the woman and the brand, with the audience eavesdropping.
Today, the housewife is rarely shown with a frown on her face. In fact, she is rarely shown at all. What we see instead is a highly confident homemaker who hovers above her roles. She is an enthusiastic cheerleader for her family, one who says ‘yes’ much more often than ‘no’, one who grants wishes while showering attention on her kin. Her children are her key projects, her husband, just one more child to be managed rather than obeyed. The mother-in-law is rarely present; when she does appear, it is as a distant, benign installation. It is almost as if the home is no longer the primary arena for the woman. The new frontier is the outside world and the new battlefield is the woman’s body. Her confidence at home stands in stark contrast to her anxieties outside, where her body is seen as a traitor intent on giving her away. Many products, particularly those involving grooming, have moved away from showing the home as a context anymore. The housewife has been exteriorised; her internal sense of self is now located in the outside world and found wanting. In that sense, in the last 30 years, everything has changed, yet nothing has. The anxieties have changed labels, but the woman’s heart still thuds in our ears.
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