Introduction

Abstract

In a 1949 memorandum prepared for the advertising firm J. Walter Thompson, social scientist Vergil Reed likened the task of modernizing India to shovelling smoke or putting ‘a rubber band around a gaseous mass’. Due to their cultural ‘introspection’ and aversion to ‘the practical’, Indians, reported Reed, were obsessed with eternity rather than the here-and-now priorities of modern consumption. Faced with this apparent obstinacy and in response to corporations seeking new markets, Reed prescribed a kind of cultural retraining programme. ‘The medicine of modernization,’ he reported, ‘may taste strange and bitter at first, but it can’t help the patient until taken.’¹ Indeed, it would be decades before an elixir of commodified social relations and consumerist practices would turn the patient (India) around, supplanting Gandhian austerity with immediate-gratification priorities.

Consumption is the motor force of capitalism and the motivation of consumer demand is indispensable to capitalism’s continuing development. There are significant cultural variations … but, on the world scale, aspiration towards the American and west European model has been the dynamic behind market liberalization in the Third World, China and the ex-Soviet empire, and the driving force of economic globalization.

—Robert W. Cox