Link to video trailer can be found here.

Introduction

The significance of a message could be symbolic or economic. Still, media platforms in general and digital media platforms, in particular, have been central bearers of circulating ‘new canons’ of aspirations and consumption in India, particularly since the 1990s (Uberoi 2008; Chaudhuri 2017). The democratised circuit and application settings mark digital media platforms apart and ‘distinct’ from the print and electronic media and its circulation of ‘cultural content’.

The questions, however, remain. Do these ‘new’ and emerging material aspirations, facilitated by global economic and cultural flows, allow one to discount the explanatory potential of hierarchies and distinctions based on gender, caste, class etc.? How can one trace the processes through which new categories of identity and identification are getting legitimised?

This essay considers ornamentation through a reading of specific Instagram Text Posts by jewellery stores in India. It seeks to look at how administrative, regional, spatial, and specific emergent classifications are naturalised as possible identity markers. While such prescriptions on jewellery are tethered to consumption, there are new ideas of going beyond caste, race and caste that are latched on. Indeed ideas of women’s empowerment are forged overtly. (Chaudhuri 2017) Even though the essay sees Instagram as a tool for analysis, the specific features will also be touched here.

The Garhwali Bride and Gold

Fig.1 (Source: Instagram)

The gender prescriptions, as conveyed through this post, conform with the norms of patrilocality, the gift of a virgin and jewelled daughter, marriage as a state endowing auspiciousness to a woman (Mehrotra 2004). At the same time, regional or linguistic identity is invoked and linked to the ornament.  The Garhwali Mangalsutra’ containing the metal gold is naturalised, a fixed given of what is presented as Garhwali identity.

 The metal gold and its cultural meanings attached to it was historically contingent on one’s caste identity, as were prescriptions and proscriptions associated with the use of the ornament. Such social specificities and hierarchies related to ornamentation are invisibilised here. Here, the gold mangalsutra is linked to the linguistic or ethnic identity as one homogenous entity. Identifying an ethnolinguistic group (i.e. the ‘Garhwali’ in this case) with the metal gold, mangalsutra etc., fulfils the commercial desirability of   ‘maximum consumership’ in this case.

Any reference to caste distinctions, metals and ways of ornamentation etc., are unmentioned here. But the practices, ritual and cultural significance essentially followed by the Caste Hindu groups are identified and articulated here as coterminous with the ethnolinguistic identity of ‘Garhwali. One can also observe that while abiding by a moral imperative not to make overt references on caste or race through the use of the term ‘Garhwali’, there is a corresponding invisibilising of practices associated with non-caste Hindus such as polygamy (Berreman 1962), matrilineality (Pande 2019) etc., followed by certain groups in this region. They appear to be no longer part of the desirable imaginaries associated with ‘Garhwali’.

The Case of Sustainable Fashion: The Newness Value

Fig.2 ( Source: Instagram)

If a homogenised ‘tradition’ is invoked above, we also witness evidence of new corporate ethics. While the idea of ‘sustainably crafted luxury jewellery’ adheres to a ‘bio-ethics’, the ‘Thank you for making a child smile’ acknowledges the demands of social responsibility. The consumption scene is not only a ‘theatre of virtue’ (Rajak,2016) here but also a site for performing one’s class identity. Here, it’s not the commemorative value or historical value (Risberg & Much 2015)  of the piece that becomes a critical parameter in realising one’s aspired identity. The ‘newness’ value created through an interaction of moral and class imperatives makes the jewellery and the buyer ‘distinct’.

Kirsi Niinimäki’s (2015) observations on sustainable fashion practices are that a ‘consumer-based eco-efficiency’ creates a value efficiency for a particular brand or firm. The ideas of ‘simplicity’, ‘sustainability’ etc., as highlighted in the text, are supplemented through a colour symbolism in the backdrop. The cultural meaning of ‘pink’ and its association with sentimentality and effeminate qualities, and that of white with integrity (Koller,2008), don’t bear similar meanings in South Asia. In this case, it’s implied that the urban, English-educated consumer who is the expected buyer possess or aspires to a ‘cosmopolitan’ identity calls for a suspension of one’s religious or regional identity in certain contexts.

Bridehood and the Brand

Along with addressing a person’s identity through regional or spatial location, the brand becomes significant, particularly when the digital media facilitates the documentation and circulation of specificities related to a product. The particular brand mentioned here sells gold-plated jewellery or provide them on rent, along with Swarovski crystals. The substitution of gold jewellery with imitation or precious stones with glass jewellery ascertains the importance of documenting, circulating and keeping the images for a relatively long period in the social memory.

Here, one can notice how the meaning of bride’s jewellery as streedhan as it was practised among certain upper caste groups in India (Dalmia & Lawrence 2005) is changing into an object for ‘digital aesthetics’. It is not the metal used in the ornaments that mark the bride ‘distinct’. The designs and the ‘aesthetics’ allow for the identification and categorisation of the bride through the brand, which is the case with other jewellery or costume brands. While the hashtagging and descriptions provided refers to ‘High Jewellery’, ‘Polki Chandbali’ etc., which can be sites for queries linking caste/ class with that of bridal jewellery prescriptions, the content posted in the year 2019 gives the ‘big news’ to the ‘Millenial Brides’, conform to the new norms on marriage and gender.

 Fig.3 ( Source: Instagram)

Rather than a complete dismissal of traditional categories of distinctions, what one can notice in the cases mentioned above, is the emergence of context-specific new markers for the traditional categories of social distinction, which are digitally mediated and circulated through the images and texts (Bourdieu 1979). Digital media images, in my opinion, does ask one to invoke one’s caste, class or religious identities. Still, simultaneously they call for an overt suspension of these markers for specific contexts. But what one can notice would be the significance of consumption as a marker of identity aspiration and a solution for all flaws that may come in the way of the new aspired identity/identities.

(The author thanks Ruchika Rai, research scholar, CSSS, JNU, for her observations on Garhwali identity)

References

Berreman, G. D. (1962). Pahari polyandry: a comparison. American Anthropologist, 60.

Bourdieu, Pierre. (1979). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press.

Chaudhuri M. (2017). Refashioning India: Gender, Media, and a Transformed Public Discourse. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan.

Dalmia, S., & Lawrence, P. G. (2005). The institution of dowry in India: Why it continues to prevail. The Journal of Developing Areas, 71-93.

Jaffrelot, C., & van der Veer, P. (Eds.). (2008). Patterns of middle-class consumption in India and China. SAGE Publications India.

Koller, V. (2008). Not just a colour’: pink as a gender and sexuality marker in visual communication. Visual communication, 7(4), 395-423.

Mehrotra, N. (2004). Gold and gender in India: Some observations from South Orissa. indián Anthropologist, 34(1), 27-39.

Niinimäki, K. (2015). Ethical foundations in sustainable fashion. Textiles and Clothing Sustainability, 1(1), 1-11.

Pande, V. (2019). Changing Imaginaries of Geographies and Journeys in Kumaun & Tibet.

Rajak, D. (2016). Theatres of Virtue. The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility, 18, 29.

Riisberg, V., & Munch, A. V. (2014). Decoration and Durability: Ornaments and their “appropriateness” from fashion and design to architecture. Artifact: Journal of Design Practice, 3(3), 5-1.

Uberoi, P. (2008). Aspirational weddings: the bridal magazine and the canons of ‘decent marriage’. Patterns of Middle-Class Consumption in India and China, 230-62.

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Athira. B.K. is a Research Scholar at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.