Bindi hits the spot

It is now left to be seen if the bindi gets a global sheen, thanks to Nasa's Swati Mohan

Nasa’s Swati Mohan created a stir around a little black bindi when she decided to sport it while announcing, “Touchdown confirmed! Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars, ready to begin seeking signs of past life.” With that little bindi touch, she injected new life into an ancient Indian adornment. Social media, at least in India, went abuzz over the little black bindi. Comments included “Big Love for Swati Mohan, rocking that bindi in the control room”; “Thanks to Dr Swati Mohan, Nasa! Who knew a bindi could make me so happy”.

Not only was bindi trending in India, even the South China Morning Post (March 3, 2021) decided to carry an article titled, “A Potent Symbol of Style”: how bindi is on its way to becoming a global fashion accessory. Or not? The article spoke of how “the bindi has over time been appropriated by other cultures”. International pop and rock stars have used the bindi and faced opposition. At the 2013 MTV awards, US pop star Selena Gomez flaunted a bindi and was criticised. The article says that other international stars like Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Madonna have faced backlash for their “inappropriate” use of the bindi. Even South Korean singer Jennie Kim from K-pop band Blackpink ruffled feathers when she wore a bindi at a 2018 show.

When I started my career in advertising in the late 1970s, all TV and print ads featuring “married women” showed them in a sari, wearing a bindi and a mangalsutra. We were trained to make sure these three “boxes” were ticked whenever we made ads aimed at the middle-income Indian consumer. This started changing in the ’90s. In a Santoor ad shot in 1995, I agonised over the missing bindi only to discover that the so-called error went largely unnoticed (for more on that story, dig into my book For God’s Sake or read an excerpt from it here: https://tinyurl.com/sbzhnt9t).

That episode over the missing bindi drove me to do a deeper dive into the topic of the sari-mangalsutra-bindi triad 10 years ago. My research revealed that more and more consumer product advertising on television was showing women in a dress (not a sari) and the ubiquitous mangalsutra and bindi were no longer the “markers” of a married woman. At least in consumer product ads. The use of the sari declined from 88 per cent of the ads studied in 1997 to less than 65 per cent by the time we got to 2007; the mangalsutra moved down from 73 per cent to 57 per cent; and the bindi fell from 92 per cent to 53 per cent. This prompted me to title an article I presented at the Association for Consumer Research Conference as “Mystery of the Missing Bindi”.

Nasa’s Swati Mohan

The latest noise around the bindi and Mohan’s proud display of her black bindi got me thinking. Are FMCG brand ads still showing a woman in a sari, with a mangalsutra and a bidi? Or has the fall that I had spotted accelerated further. To do this, 100 ads from popular Hindi entertainment channels were analysed; these were mostly ads for consumer products. The assumption was that consumer products like soap, shampoo, toothpaste, milk etc show typical (or aspirational) middle-income women in their ads.

The results were a little surprising. The sari seems to have declined rapidly to just 10 per cent. That is, of the 100 ads we analysed, only 10 showed a woman in a sari. The bindi has done better with 17 per cent of the women shown sporting it. The mangalsutra has had the steepest fall of them all; only three ads showed women wearing a mangalsutra (mind you, 15 years ago the numbers were sari 65 per cent, bindi 55 per cent and mangalsutra 57 per cent).

Why are Indian brands abandoning the sari-mangalsutra-bindi triad?

My hypothesis is that brands do know that middle-income women are often dressed in a sari, wear a mangalsutra and a bindi. But in their own eyes, they want to be seen as modern, wearing a smart shirt or a kurti. Semiotically speaking, it is possible that a woman shown wearing a sari, sporting a mangalsutra and a bindi could signal a stay-at-home lower socio-economic income woman. Hence brands, even those appealing to the lower middle-income, show women in a kurta/kurta and trousers, without the adornments of mangalsutra/bindi.

It is now left to be seen if the bindi gets a global sheen, thanks to Swati Mohan. Who knows, maybe the Nasa aerospace engineer will fuel afresh the growth of the bindi as a global fashion accessory. And instead of protesting, global Indians should be ready to welcome the trend.

The writer is an independent brand coach, author and founder brand-building.com, a brand advisory. He can be reached at ambimgp@brand-building.com