ABSTRACT
In January 2008, Tata Motors – a leading Indian automobile company – launched its new Tata Nano at the Auto Expo in Delhi. Promoted as an Indian ‘people’s car’, and priced at only 100,000 Indian Rupees (INR), the arrival of the Nano on the Indian scene generated widespread excitement with its promise of bringing car ownership within reach of even ordinary middle class families; and for demonstrating ‘New India’s unique capacity for innovation and engineering. Yet seven years after the launch, the Nano has, contrary to expectations, barely made an impact on the Indian car market, and is widely regarded as a failure. Drawing on social theories of consumption, this article offers a detailed study of the rise and fall of the Nano. The purpose of doing so is twofold. First, we seek to explain why a car that was widely predicted to revolutionise automobility in India failed to do so in practice. Second, we seek to demonstrate how cars, as a particular consumer good, feed into historically constituted linkages between objects and social status displays in India, and how these linkages are mediated in new ways in a context of accelerated global economic integration and trade, an increasingly globalised media, and refashioned consumer aspirations. By embedding the story of the Indian ‘people’s car’ from drawing room to showroom in a longer history of automobility and consumption in India, the article thus maps out the changing popular representations and symbolic imaginaries that attach to the car as a means to mobility and an object of identity and social status. To this end, we base our account primarily on public representations and discourse on the Nano, as found in the national and international media. Here, the voices of producers, dealers, prospective and actual consumers, marketing agencies, critics, and ‘the motor press’ have interfaced to provide a multifaceted picture of the Nano. Our narrative covers the period from around 2003, when Tata Motors first aired the idea of producing an inexpensive Indian ‘people’s car’ (Freiberg et al. 2011, 29), and up to early 2015 when rumours started circulating that the company may shut down the Nano project unless sales improve (Kartikey 2015). We also rely on promotional material, including pamphlets, blog entries and videos, produced or promoted by Tata Motors. We proceed to situate the story of the Nano with reference to the trajectory of the car in post-colonial India. We then turn to the narrative account of the
rise and fall of the Nano. We argue that the Nano failed neither because it was a mediocre car, nor because it remained economically out of reach for most Indians. Rather, we suggest that its insertion into the lower ranks of a powerful status hierarchy of identity-defining objects precluded it from adequately tapping into new and hegemonic forms of middle class aspiration in ‘New India’. The popular rejection of the Nano was thus not directed only at the object itself, but also at the image of ‘the Indian middle class consumer subject’ that the car conjures up. To substantiate this argument we engage with the growing literature (e.g. Fernandes 2006, 2009; Fernandes and Heller 2008; Brosius 2010; D’Costa 2010a; Saavala 2010; Donner 2011; Upadhya 2011; Kaur 2012, 2015; Kaur and Hansen 2015) on the link between consumption practices, social status, the formation of a so-called ‘new middle class’, and the public discourse of a ‘New India’ in which the nation is projected as rapidly entering into a new world of global possibilities.
