ABSTRACT
This essay looks at how a recent television commercial simulates and plays on the dominant aesthetic, careerist, consumerist, nationalist and entertainment/leisure desires of consuming female subjects in India. The product advertised here is a fairness (bleaching) face cream, ‘Fair & Lovely’. The advertisement appeals to a set of prevalent gender and colour prejudices by ‘seducing’ the careerist and consumerist desires of educated young Indian women. Depicting the life of an ‘ordinary’ consuming subject from an unknown city neighbourhood to the globalized information highways of satellite television, the advertisement projects a hyperreal world in which gendered occupational barriers have apparently withered away, courtesy of commodity consumption. The advertisement is critically analysed as a pastiche of seductive simulacra concerning the desire for ‘fairness’ in the midst of ‘unfair’ cultural prejudices, social contradictions and apolitical commercial ideologies.
