Book review: Sreedeep Bhattacharya. 2020. Consumerist Encounters: Flirting with Things and Images

Sreedeep Bhattacharya’s book is an important contribution to the sociological study of consumerist culture in India, particularly in the post- liberalisation era. The principal objective of this book is to highlight the changes in the consumerist landscape historically and its impact on bodies, images, and spaces. In doing so, Bhattacharya has analysed popular visual registers, such as advertisements in print media, to interpret the representation of consumerist aspirations in an India of post-liberalisation. The book anatomises digital remediation and addresses its implication on interaction, transaction, identity, and representation. Arguing that consumption has become an all-encompassing phenomenon, the book sheds light on the active participation and agency of the consumer in the 21^st century. Simultaneously, it raises concerns around the frivolous consumption that pervades our lives and the presence of discarded items that undergoes a movement from being a waste to trash––the former holding the possibilities of reuse or repair, while latter becoming a non-valuable entity (p. 211). The book is a collection of nine essays, tethered by interconnected themes.

The first theme explores the historically intimate-constructive relationship between consumerism and the middle class. Bhattacharya argues that the Indian middle-class attitude towards consumption in the colonial and post-colonial era was marked by thriftiness and restrain over material indulgence. This was a strategy to establish their exclusiveness from other classes. He demonstrates that advertisements in the print media until the 1990s were text heavy and emphasised the functionality of the commodity. In this representation, the family was the most important unit of consumption (p. 38).

The liberalisation of the Indian market in the 1990s offered a range of commodities and choices, enabling mass consumption across the demography. The author emphasises that liberalisation released repressed desires, making the middle class consume unapologetically (p. 39). The visual aspect of the commodity became an exterior bearer of difference among consumers. By examining advertisements, particularly of apparels, the author establishes that middle-class exclusivity in the post-liberalised era is visually mediated. This marked a shift in the consumerist landscape.

The second theme explores the relationship between commodity and image as well as body and image. Liberalisation ushered in the predominance of the commodity’s image, marginalising its use value. Bhattacharya asserts that in the shifted landscape the commodity has become a hollow entity whose meaning is revealed through an image that resides in the popular and digital domain. Advertisements today are increasingly designed for the individual identified as the consumer (p. 77). The commodity, now an image experienced vicariously entices the consumer through the promise of a ‘new’ encounter. The newness allows consumers to flirt with commodities and their images like never before. Commodity and image are now inseparable. The author uses illustrations from advertisements in print media to describe the new encounter.

The commodification of the body and sexuality is another trope used to understand the consumerist landscape. The author observes that sexualised bodies and their images are no longer stigmatised in the post- liberalisation era (p. 80). This has resulted in a new fetish with the beauty index. The consumer in this landscape consumes the image of an ideal body type and is influenced to become one. This is achieved through emulative practices of body care and workout. Bhattacharya remarks that the image and the body, too, have now become inseparable.

The next theme explores the ephemerality of commodities. Taking the example of a T-shirt (chapter 4), the author argues that this garment marks the advent of a ‘casual’ (p. 114) relationship with the commodity. According to Bhattacharya, the T-shirt resides in the ordinariness of everyday life; it is devoid of any symbolic meaning, and therefore can accommodate any graphic, patterns, and text. However, an important question that remains unanswered is whether the T-shirt can be a commodity that mitigates the class/caste distinction that exists in our society?

One of the interesting aspects of this book is its engagement with the visual-digital turn in communication in the 20^th century (chapter 6). Bhattacharya observes that digital remediation has allowed our lives to become screen-mediated, highlighting the embeddedness of networked devices in our social lives. The socio-technological condition engenders easy production, circulation, storage and dissemination of information and images. Since the digital space allows instant replication of data without any compromise in quality what we are witnessing now is an excess of images and incessant access to them (p. 150).

The author explores the disconnect between social embeddedness and isolation caused by digital remediation (p. 155). This argument needs to be reassessed in the post-pandemic world that encouraged collaborative engagement with a rise in the ‘content economy’ (Saffo 2020). It is well established that the new media technology and digital space has altered our relationship with bodies and space(s). The author points out the urge of an individual to visibilise the self through sharing, liking, and inviting comments as a means of seeking validation and instant gratification. However, the author ignores the direct monetisation facilitated by the viewership of the visual content. For instance, one can hardly say that the content creators of today are merely seeking validation. Viewership is directly associated with generating one’s income.

The final theme offers a fresh take on the afterlife of a commodity. Waste becomes a leitmotif of global capitalism that builds obsolescence into a commodity. In this section the author offers a language that aptly captures the impact of consumption which is simultaneously compulsory and disposable. In the post-liberalisation era, a space has been created for ‘packaged tourism’ (p. 196) that is marked by toxic waste resting against the scenic beauty of the destination. The author terms this ‘visual pollution’ (p. 197) that has become an unavoidable component of contemporary tourism.

The book is topical because consumption is our lived reality. While the five themes capture various aspects of the consumerist landscape, in his analysis of the visceral desire to mark exclusivity through consumption, Bhattacharya equates consumer mobility with caste mobility (p. 52) without making the distinction between the two. In India, caste mobility has been explained through Sanskritisation, Westernisation and affirmative action granted by the Constitution. Caste continues to be an operative principle that structures hierarchical social relations to reproduce distinction. Therefore, the role of caste in consumer aspiration must be studied to understand India’s diverse consumerist landscape (Jain 2014).

The strength of the book lies in its multi-disciplinary approach that allows for a wide readership. Students of sociology, history, visual culture, and environmental studies will benefit from this book.