India’s consumption story has been making news not only within India but internationally too. For more than 10 years on the trot, there has been a universally amazing fascination with Indian consumption, Indian consumers, and Indian retail. Indeed, the consistently increasing size of private retail consumption, estimated at almost $475 billion (over Rs 20 lakh crores) in 2010 and projected to double by 2015, has caught the fancy of the biggest of the biggest businesses, including groups such as Tata, Birla, Ambani, and Mittal, and global giants including Wal-Mart, Tesco, Carrefour, and Metro, just to list a few.
In this backdrop, there is little on record on what India consumed and how the Indian consumption story panned out in the British India period. Yes, there are many books on how Indian royalty lived and consumed, especially in the 20th century, but there is very limited well-researched, methodically documented material on the fascinating theme of India’s consumption in the last few centuries.
Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia, essentially a compilation of essays contributed by no less than 10 scholars, is a delectable treat. Each essay is an outcome of diligent research and covers a very interesting array of themes — ranging from imports of British manufactured goods into India in the early years of the East India Company’s presence in India, the growth of small-scale industry in the early 20th century, middle-class India in colonial Bombay, and cinema and culture of the young (in Bombay) in the 1920s, to Indian women’s shopping behaviour and advertising in the early part of the 20th century, among others.
Each provides interesting insights into the India of that period, such as the influence of imported merchandise on the Indian elite in the 19th century. For instance, the Indian elite was selective even then and did not show any great proclivity for all things ‘imported’. Things are not very different at the beginning of the 21st century, with purveyor after purveyor of global luxury and premium brands having realised that Indians will buy their handbags but not jewelry, eyewear and wrist-wear but not clothing, barring a few exceptions. Another chapter traces the growth of small-scale industry in India in the early 20th century by way of establishment of mills for cotton ginning, oilseed extraction, and hosiery, with a stimulus happening — surprisingly — because of a decline in exports and a simultaneous increase in domestic demand.
History seems to be repeating itself in the 21st century, when India’s strong and steadily rising domestic consumer demand is stimulating high levels of investment in creation of new manufacturing (and services) capacities. There is a delightful chapter that traces the emergence of a ‘middle class’ in urban India through the creation of many salaried jobs, including clerical (which were considered respectable professions), and their values and way of life.
Yet another interesting chapters describes the gradual lowering of the age profile of Bombay in the early 1920s, with an increase in the 20-40 age group and a simultaneous decline of the 40-60 age group, and the culture and the cinema of this young Bombay. An excerpt reads, “On the ground most spheres of public life were beginning to be led by young people. Many of the writers, artists, businessmen, and political artists were young — businessmen like J R D Tata, G D Birla, and Jamnalal Bajaj, among others, and politicians like Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Sarojini Naidu, and Vallabhbhai Patel. As the Congress assumed the character of mass national movement in the 1920s, it drew in substantial support from a new generation of students, businessmen, professionals, and women”.
Do we see a similar change taking place in this decade and the 2020s? There is a chapter on consuming families of the early 20th century, and a profile of the woman shopper. In the 2020s too, the profile of the Indian consuming family and the profile of the woman shopper will undergo dramatic changes and it makes very interesting reading to compare this with what was happening in India a hundred years ago!
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The content is rich, and the style quite appropriate to the overall theme of the compilation. The illustrations, though scarce, are delightful. For those having an even more serious interest in the subject, the authors have liberally shared at the end of each essay the different references and resources they have used and this should be invaluable to those who may wish to do deeper research in any particular sub-theme.
Of course, it would have been even more helpful if the authors (or any one of them) had added a more quantitative chapter giving the size and scale of India’s / South Asia’s economy in the 18th, the 19th, and the pre-independence part of the 20th century, and its composition in terms of public and private spending, and the size of specific categories of private spending and changes over the decades and centuries. Hopefully, one or more of the contributors to this volume will take it up in a future compilation.
Indeed, the book is a very interesting read not only for those directly involved in India’s consumer product businesses, but for others too who have some interest in India’s non-political history in the last two centuries.
TOWARDS A HISTORY OF CONSUMPTION IN SOUTH ASIA
Douglas E. Haynes,
et al (Eds)
Oxford University Press
300 pp, Rs 750