ABSTRACT
The proliferation of individualized consumption coincides with the perceived expansion of the Indian middle class to such an extent that its representations have become the beacon of consumerist imaginaries. This idea of the middle class also serves as a consumer market for the United States, China, and other global empires. Advertisements for skin-lightening products, with their conflation of lightness with modernity, exemplify what Gyanendra Pandey describes as the perpetuation of “vernacular” prejudice through the values of the “universal” prejudice of the modern. In the field of advertising and marketing, both national and multinational corporations sell commodities by cultivating consumer desires to participate on the global plane, while simultaneously capitalizing on the desire to preserve an imagined national identity. As a result, there exist ads for skin-lightening products that incorporate specifically Hindu cultural themes while embedding these themes in discourses of modernity and empowerment.
