Are Ads Moving Past the ‘Standard Indian Housewife’

Manish Swarup/Associated Press

If I won a rupee every time an Indian commercial stereotyped women, I could have a bought a Ford Figo to use as storage space.

The timing of the Figo ad, which showed buxom women tied up and stuffed in the car’s trunk to emphasize the “extra-large boot,” not only caused national outrage and international embarrassment, but also extinguished whatever lingering hope we Indians might have had from our advertisers. Indian advertising had been outrageous enough lately, with a series of brands reminding the Indian woman of the value of submission - whether through whitening their vagina for her prized husband (Clean and Dry), or by enduring his sharp rebuke without a single word (Mother Dairy).

But that’s just one side of the story. The other is the recent attempt by a handful of brands to be different. Sit before your television set for an entire day, and there are chances you will catch new ads that are creating alternative narratives around women. Most of them are doing so by transcending the basic building-block of Indian advertising: The Standard Housewife. No matter what else women do in commercials, whether it is selling cement in bikinis or waxing clearly hairless legs for a date, their ultimate aim seems to be to keep a great house - judged by the whiteness of her husband’s shirt and the height of her child.

And why should they show otherwise, advertisers have argued, for according to them, the majority of Indian women, particularly in what they call India 2 (Tier II and III cities), know of no greater validation than being appreciated for precisely these things. This is why the recent trickle of ads extending the idea of the woman consumer is worth noting.

Some of them have the single working woman spending her own money for her own sake.

“Kuch apne dil ke liye” (something for your own heart) goes the tagline for the new Vita Marie honey-oat biscuits by Britannia, a straight response to the standard trope of the housewife fussing over the cholesterol level of her overworked husband. In the ad, a young photographer spends a long, rough day on the streets, capturing charming images of homeless children at the order of her demanding editor. We see her next at her house, where she presumably â€" and happily â€" lives alone, starting her crazy day with a healthy snack, because as she stresses, “Dil pe bahut pressure hai yaar” (there is too much pressure on the heart).

In another example, an ad for the Mia range of jewelry for Tanishq, a young, stylish girl is getting ready for office, trying to make some space in her cluttered bedroom to approach the full-length mirror, when she spots a small box, takes out a pair of light earrings and puts them on, to feel a little positive about what is going to be the day on which she receives another unsatisfactory pay raise. Both these ads try to capture the everyday struggles of what is a fast-growing section of the Indian female workforce: the mid-level professional.

In an ad for MIOT Hospital, the pilot getting a joint replaced is a woman - because, the ad says, she can’t rely on anything less trustworthy for her own most-valued self. Since pain-relief brands have always used the image of the aching housewife, it is surprising that the MIOT ad makes not the slightest deal of her being a woman, that too in a traditionally male occupation.

Working women in Indian ads aren’t that new. But what is new is the treatment: the new ads neither feed the old stereotype of whip-cracking boardroom woman, nor project them as inspirational do-gooders. The girl on screen is no longer working to prove herself to a man or, worse, her own parents. It is almost as if nobody remembers the Fair and Lovely ad from just a few years ago, in which a girl’s first response to her father lamenting the lack of a son is to buy a tube of the fairness cream - a purchase which leads, naturally, to an unspecified great job and proud parents.

The other set of the new Indian woman ads present married women trying to balance work and family, and often - like many people we know - failing.

In the new Idea commercial, the wife is dealing with an absent maid, the bane of the Indian housewife, at the same time as she faces an urgent deadline for a freelance writing assignment, and she takes her frustrations out on the husband. In a new Ariel commercial, the husband proceeds to cook dinner after a text from the wife about being stuck at work, and then, for the first time in the storied history of the Indian Husband in Advertising, washes his stained shirt himself. In a third example, the ad for Google Chrome, a bored wife decides to do something with the recipes her mother sends her over e-mail and ends up blogging her way to nothing less than a book contract.

I am not suggesting that showing a woman as independent or concerned about her job is the best way to challenge stereotyping, or that this recent trend indicates a conscious decision or a coherent shift. My point is that the more we try out new themes, the less dominant the old fixations will become. Didn’t the terrorizing mother-in-law (remember the early Harpic ad, where she inspects the toilet bowl for stains as the daughter-in-law’s heart drums in her chest) disappear, as the advertisers discovered the more pressing challenges before Indian women

We are talking about a very small proportion of our advertising output - I can count the ads on my fingers - made even more insignificant by the mad flow of television; but together, they promise some minor relief from the dispiriting sameness of the most mass media content involving women. If advertisements do indeed create normalcy, then we might be headed somewhere less bizarre.

Snigdha Poonam is Arts Editor at The Caravan. She is on Twitter at@snigdhapoonam