Finding a little alcove among the crammed-up two-wheelers in the Phoenix Marketcity parking lot, I locked my cycle and entered the mall lobby, donned with modern art masterpieces of Jeff Koons, James Turrell and Damien Hirst, which struck me as odd to begin with. No one walking with me seemed to pay them any attention. “Modern art”, in its colloquial usage, has the notoriety of being inaccessible to the “masses” in how it deals with abstractions, So, it intrigued me that the very entrance of the mall had the haughty frames of “inaccessible” artworks acting as fillers. 20th-century modern and contemporary art largely operated within a field driven by a competitive, commercial field of economic and cultural capital (Upton-Hansen et. al., 2021). Modern art also often dealt with its commodified place within what Theodor Adorno identified as “culture industry”. Bourdieu (1985, 1996) emphasises that the field of art is operated by its principles of exclusion, which were co-constitutive of wider social power relations. Art seemed to act like a hollow, yet loud brand that displayed the prestige of “taste” and drew the first filter between the mall and the “streets”, almost like metal detecting security gates.
I entered the shopping mall to the smell of expensive perfumes and the enticing smell of coffee from the shops right beside me. The spewing Indian Sunday mall crowd shuffled along. I had come along with a friend for a movie, adopting the “go-along” anthropological method employed by Margarethe Kusenbach in her study on Street Phenomenology, where she becomes one with the many urban dwellers, observing their behavioural patterns (Aceska and Heer, 2019). I did not directly engage with the people. My position as a male in an urban crowd allowed me a great degree of anonymity. The most immediate observations I made about the environment and its engagement with the people within were majorly in terms of the architecture, colour schemes, demographics, semiology of instructive symbols, the nature of social representation in advertisements, and the socio-political and economic interplay involved.
Shopping malls have evolved in Europe and the US from the 19th-century European ‘passage’ markets (Watson, 2009), but were different in the sense that modern shopping malls tend to be “highly regulated spaces with elaborated mechanisms of security and control”, with “very clear spatial boundaries” (Wehrheim, 2007). The mall’s grand, high-ceiling architecture, flooded with advertisements, diminishes individuals into micro-spaces under regulation. The use of colours in advertising and product placement demonstrates how colour psychology has blended with marketing, unlike local establishments like dhabas and ironing shops that prioritize convenience and price. Red-yellow combinations for food chains, black-white combinations for perfume stores, and pop colours for family-friendly establishments show how economic capital brings along with it an ability to research product placement and garner more attention within a market environment.
Washrooms at Phoenix interestingly featured three signs (a man symbolized by a tie, a woman by a skirt and a disabled person by a wheelchair). No one mistook any of the signs, revealing our conditioned connection to gender binaries by the coded meanings imposed by signs in public spaces, that also excluded non-binary gender identities. Photographs of artists like Satyajit Ray filled walls in wash cabins, once again making art a filler commodity and display of “taste”, where curation acts as an exercise of exclusion. On Sunday evenings, malls serve as a safe social blending place for young people, couples, families, and friends. Malls also serve as short-trip destinations, with markers of social, economic, and cultural identity playing out through clothing and public behaviour (including PDA). An omniscient security system is imposed both by surveillance and sociocultural exclusion that creates a sense of security for people to behave more freely than outside the mall.
Advertisements often represent a blended interplay of Western neoliberalism and Indianization, with diverse representations but also selective representation. This selective representation creates exclusion and makes advertisements a political instrument. The choice between liberal Western and traditional Indian images has cultural and political implications, as what is commonly seen in media can easily become the norm. Marginalized minorities along lines of caste, religion, language, and gender, are unrepresented, normalizing an exclusionary portrayal of a polished, privileged Indian society, inaccessible and unrelatable to most. The star power of celebrities is used to legitimize brands, even when they have little to do with the products. The Indian context emulsifies a very pungent conflict of tradition and modernity into representation by brands, by strongly dividing the two under the same roof of marketing. Many “traditional” or “ethnic” brands have a fair-skinned heterosexual couple, whose attire represents privileged sections of Indians, remote to the majority of the country’s population. International fashion brands are free to have non-binary gender expression, and in a way, that also creates an exclusion of the more conservative Indians, who would then prefer the “traditional”, Indian brands. These advertisements also generate very problematic beauty standards and codes. Fashion and cosmetic brands religiously display slim models, who are either fair or dark-complexioned. Fair people are represented without special labels, but on a poster shared by a fair-skinned and a dark-skinned model, I was intrigued to find the caption, “Au Naturale”, French for nude or original, which becomes a prerequisite template for advertising dark-complexioned models. The fittings of “uniqueness” and “boldness” are attached to non-white models, while white models are spared of them. These “colour-blind” and “inclusive” brands also seemed to attract more well-off, “liberal” (in a capitalist assumption) people.
The ingrained misconception of Indian culture as Hindu culture is also reflected strongly in advertisements, more visibly in representing the Indian urban middle class. Retail stores represent their customers with a typical male figure with an ironed shirt, a woman who would be his wife wearing a sari or churidar and donning vermillion on her forehead and two fair-skinned children. I’d even seen a vermillion-clad woman as the face of a cement company, where the counterfeit fidelity of a model becomes the mark of legitimacy for the company itself (Fatma, 2016). Family-friendly advertisements often display the trope of dominant husbands, faithful wives, and happy kids, but these heteronormative, patriarchal stereotypes exclude most Indian communities, including religious minorities, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and LGBTQIA++. Many “indigenous” brands use Sanskrit terms without scientific backing to promote their products, citing often Ayurveda as their sources, making their products “indigenously scientific.” I saw an Ayurveda store named ‘Kama’, which baffled me.
Malls also act as an isolating space that provides a sense of security and exclusion from the “outside world”. With its closed, air-conditioned structure, and use of mild colours and warm lighting, it creates a comfortable bubble for everyone who enters to distinguish this overly crowded space from the similar crowd outside the mall, and in the process, a great section of society is filtered out, creating fortress-like, exclusionary, elitist, spaces “sanitized of poverty and decay” (Dirsuweit and Schattauer, 2004, p.247). Mall security systems serve as latent guards to the “fortress”. Exiting the mall, I saw its borders strewn with water pipes, thin mesh, and barbed wire, across which I heard sounds of old TVs and creaking fans from the nearby colony. Outside, food delivery partners were parked, waiting for pickups, the Chennai sewers boiling under them. The mall I left stood out entirely from the world around it, resting in ghastly respiration, like Mervyn Peake’s living fort, Gormenghast.
Fieldnotes
References:
Aceska, Ana, and Barbara Heer. (2019). “Everyday Encounters in the Shopping Mall: (Un)Making Boundaries in the Divided Cities of Johannesburg and Mostar”. Anthropological Forum. 29(1):47–61.
Bourdieu, P. (1985). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1996). Rules of Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Dirsuweit, T., and F. Schattauer. 2004. “Fortresses of Desire: Melrose Arch and the Emergence of Urban Tourist Spectacles”. GeoJournal.60(3): pp. 239–247.
Fatma, S. (2016). “Changing Face of Women in Indian Advertising”. International Journal of Science Technology and Management. 5(10): 133-140.
Kusenbach, M. 2003. “Street Phenomenology: The Go-Along as Ethnographic Research Tool.” Ethnography. 4 (3): 449–479.
Upton-Hansen, C., Kolbe, K., & Savage, M. (2021). “An Institutional Politics of Place: Rethinking the Critical Function of Art in Times of Growing Inequality”. Cultural Sociology, 15(2):171-190.
Watson, S. 2009. “The Magic of the Marketplace: Sociality in a Neglected Public Space”. Urban Studies. 46 (8):1577–1591.
Wehrheim, J. 2007. “Shopping Malls, Eine Hinführung” In Shopping Malls. Interdisziplinäre Betrachtungen Eines Neuen Raumtyps, edited by J. Wehrheim. Pp. 7–12.Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
***
Akhil Faizal is a second year student of the Integrated MA Program in English Studies at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.