ABSTRACT
Traveling to the outskirts of New Delhi on a hot summer afternoon in 1996, I noticed a series of Coca-Cola and Pepsi advertisements along the highway. Painted on the sides of shops and tea stalls, they blended together into a blur of white and red. The giant soft drink manufacturers had only recently gained entrée into the Indian market, and their logos already peppered the landscape. Painted on walls, on building facades, and on corrugated store shutters, the logos formed an endless stream on surfaces once filled with a collage of other advertisements, ripped movie posters, and political graffiti from the last election. We stopped a little while later and stepped out into the blistering heat at one of the roadside tea stalls. As we sat in the shade and waited for our tea, I noticed another Coca-Cola logo painted on a nearby wall. Leaching faintly through the white background that surrounded the logo was an old advertisement for washing soap, marketed predominantly to middle and lower middle income households. The juxtaposition appeared as a palimpsest where a new “multinational” advertisement was grafted onto an old “Indian” one. This image stayed with me over the next few years as I researched globalization in India, becoming emblematic of the tensions I witnessed.
