Consuming Students: Advertisements and the Indian Youth Market, 1935–65

Abstract

Advertisements for commodities offer a unique keyhole into the shifting consumption practices and media constructions of the youthful consumer. An analysis of five student and youth magazines foregrounds the gendered and materialistic idealisations of leisure invoked to promote branded goods in the Indian youth market. Analysing advertisements in these magazines allows us to trace the increasingly sophisticated way in which capitalist actors stratified the domain of advertising by life stages during the late colonial and early post-colonial periods in India. This finding runs contrary to the grain of historiography that contends that the Indian ‘market’ failed to respond to the interests of consumers prior to the media liberalisation of the 1980s and 1990s.