Setting Gender Roles in Early Indian Print Advertisements (Discovery‪)‬

When it comes to attracting potential buyers towards a product, the female body has remained a staple feature in advertising right from the time commercial printed images started appearing in the 19th century. The female figure not only solicited the attention of the male viewer, it also assuaged masculine anxiety in reproducing and reaffirming traditional roles for women. This regressive tendency of the media towards women is somewhat paradoxical given the advertising industry's self projection as the face of "modernity" and "progress". This brief essay explores a few examples of early Indian print advertising to highlight the gender roles and stereotypes circulated through them. This study is limited only to a few English-language periodicals (such as The Hindu and The Times of India) and some calendar advertisements and product labels published between the 1920s and 1950s, and does not throw much light on what was being published in the vernacular press. What it does reveal however is interesting, as it portrays attitudes and perceptions regarding gender roles in early-20th-century Indian popular culture. Although the printing press had been around in India since 1577 (used by the Dutch evangelists in Goa), a vibrant print culture emerged only in the 19th century. Along with print technology from Europe, came European commercial products and their advertising images. One of the earliest Indian advertisements appeared in 1780, in what was called Hickey's Bengal Gazette, published in Calcutta (Kolkata). But the major portion of modern Indian advertising emerged only between the late 1920s and early 1930s, when two English companies, J. Walter Thompson (JWT) and D.J. Keymer's, started publishing professional advertisements in India. Since most of the products advertised in the 1930s were still imported from England or other places in Europe, their print campaigns tended to be almost replicas of their advertisements in London or elsewhere. The main readership of the English-language advertisements were the British administrators and the Indian elite educated class, who were offered sumptuous goods, voyages, and other luxury services.