Doing Style

Youth and Mass Mediation in South India

Constantine V. Nakassis

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226327990
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

In Doing Style, Constantine V. Nakassis explores the world of youth and mass media in South India, where what Tamil youth call " style " anchors their day-to-day lives and media worlds. Through intimate ethnographic descriptions of college life in Tamil Nadu, Nakassis explores the complex ways that acts and objects of style such as brand fashion, English slang, and film representations express the multiple desires and anxieties of this generation, who live in the shadow of the promise of global modernity.
           
As Nakassis shows, while signs of the global, modern world are everywhere in post-liberalization India, for most of these young people this world is still very distant—a paradox that results in youth's profound sense of being in between. This in-betweenness manifests itself in the ambivalent quality of style, the ways in which stylish objects are necessarily marked as counterfeit, mixed, or ironical. In order to show how this in-betweenness materializes in particular media, Nakassis explores the entanglements between youth peer groups and the sites where such stylish media objects are produced, arguing that these entanglements deeply condition the production and circulation of the media objects themselves. The result is an important and timely look at the tremendous forces of youth culture, globalization, and mass media as they interact in the vibrancy of a rapidly changing India. 

PART I

Brand

TWO

Brand and Brandedness

Fresher’s Day

On a midsummer evening in 2007, the Madurai college hostel that I had moved into the week before was bustling with activity. For this and the coming weeks, in fact, the campus was abuzz: every department and hostel was having a function to officially welcome the “freshers” (first-year students). It was our hostel’s “welcome function,” or “fresher’s day.” In addition to celebrating hostel solidarity and “welcoming” the incoming students, this function signaled the end of “ragging,” a colonial inheritance from British educational and military institutions (akin to US college hazing rituals) during which second- and third-year “seniors” force freshers (who most often, but not exclusively, belong to their departments or hostels) to perform exaggerated and often absurd acts of subservience and deference to them.1

The previous two weeks had been punctuated with quotidian events of ragging that had led up to this function. Seniors would call freshers to where they were sitting, make them stand in front of them with submissive bodily demeanor, bombard them with personal questions in intimidating and demeaning language, and force them to engage in embarrassing acts—for example, singing love songs to unknown persons of the opposite sex or performing the “college salute” (grabbing one’s crotch, gyrating one’s hips, then stamping one’s foot and saluting copresent seniors). During this ragging period, various proscriptions might be levied on freshers. For men, using cell phones; going to the movies, parks, or malls; talking to young women; smoking cigarettes; drinking alcohol; and generally being loud and visible were all likely to be policed. Those who engaged in such activities risked censure, and more ragging, from their seniors. Generally, any act or sign of youth status, anything that broke the rules and asserted independence, anything that called positive attention to oneself—in short, anything these young men called “style”—was off-limits. Loud mouths, show offs, the fashion conscious, and generally richer freshers were all more likely to be made examples of, made to be equal to their same-year peers, something reminiscent of the rites of passage classically discussed by Victor Turner (1967:103).

Sartorially, freshers were often made to forsake their fashionable clothing, including their branded garments, and instead were forced to dress “decent” by wearing shabby “formals”: button-down dress shirts and slacks. Nathan, a middle-class friend who had completed his bachelor of arts at the Madurai college where I was living, for example, relayed to me how the seniors in his master of business administration program in Coimbatore ordered him to stop wearing his preferred hip-hop-inspired clothing (baggy jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts) and physically forced him to remove his prized Livestrong bracelet. Instead, he was told to wear dowdy formals. When I asked why, Nathan said that his seniors found his stylish dress arrogant, his name-brand apparel uppity and presumptuous. They thought he was trying to stand out too much. Similarly, at a Chennai college that an acquaintance, Kumar, attended, freshers were made to wear cheap, tailored button-down shirts left untucked, plain polyester slacks, and ratty bathroom slippers. By forcing freshers to wear shabby formals and forsake their brand gear, seniors attempted to deny incoming students like Nathan and Kumar access to style. Such students were forced to dress like those who they were not and desired not to be: low class (hence shabby), adult, and working (hence formals). By being figuratively put in another’s sartorial place, such students were put in their place, at least for a while.

The ragging practices at my Madurai college were occasional, generally playful, and considered very mild by all involved. They were a far cry from the more extreme and sadistic forms of ragging that have received much press in recent (and past) years and that have resulted in the criminalization of ragging in Indian colleges (Saqaf 2009). While officially there was an active attempt by college administrators to stamp ragging out, the kinds of ragging that I describe here continued on, often with the implicit consent of the administration. As one hostel warden confided, “I’m not supposed to say this, but ragging is necessary in the college.” Indeed, the officially sanctioned welcome function was a public part of the ragging ritual, its end point and its culmination. Even if its relation to ragging was officially disavowed, the welcome function itself was a form of ragging that required incoming freshers to perform onstage—to sing, dance, or show some other talent—while their seniors hooted, hollered, booed, interrupted, and otherwise gave them a hard time.

Like the warden, students also saw ragging as a necessary practice. Freshers anticipated it with a mix of fear and delight. It was exciting. It was what college was supposed to be about. Without it, college life would be boring (bore aṭikkutu), one incoming fresher told me. Older students took a more functionalist perspective on things. Sebastian, one of my Madurai roommates in his third and final year, observed that without ragging, year cohorts would lack solidarity and intimacy, leading to “groupism” (i.e., cliques and factions) among hostel students of the same year.2 To avoid such groupism and promote year, and ultimately hostel, unity (for ragging also forced a form of hierarchical intimacy with seniors), students had to be ragged.3 And indeed, it was the common experience of ragging that formed the boundaries of the year-equal cohort, a space wherein social difference was putatively flattened and within which forms of intimacy and egalitarian norms of sociality could be instated and experienced (chapter 1). This required bracketing and transforming those social hierarchies from outside the college, which otherwise located these youth.

Ragging negates age difference and converts it into year difference. It reinscribes that hierarchy by which youth are subordinated to adults—namely, age and generation—within the student population as a hierarchy of year, as the relative relation of “juniors” and “seniors.” Hence a junior who is older than a senior would still be ragged by him and would still be required, during and after ragging (and even after college), to give him deference, to address him with honorific address forms (second-person plural verb endings and pronouns, the kinterm for older brother [see note 3 in this chapter]), to do what he asks, and the like.4 Ragging allowed seniors to usurp the college administration’s authority, figuratively acting like ‘big men’ who lorded their gettu (‘dominance,’ ‘prestige’) over freshers—who were thereby figurated as ‘little boys’—by enforcing the otherwise relatively lax college and hostel rules (such as dress codes, bans on cell phone usage, and hostel curfews) and then some. Suspended in the college, hierarchically ranked lifecycle categories reappear as relative terms of status and value to construe and typify differences among students, not as younger and older, but as juniors and seniors.

On the day of the welcome function, there was excitement in my hallway. Bright and gaudy garments passed hands as my hostelmates tried on each other’s clothes, hoping to strike the right combination. Sneakers were unpacked from dressers, sunglasses were shined, baseball hats, bracelets, and rings were mixed and matched. The welcome function was the first day in their college lives that these freshers were, within the strictures of ragging at least, officially allowed to ostentatiously ‘do style’ (style paṇṟatu), to put on their duds and strut their stuff. Today, their liminal status in the lifecycle as youth was replicated through this minor rite, which now inducted them as individuals capable of throwing off, or at least performing throwing off, the stifling rules of ragging and the larger institutional order of age (and class) hierarchy that ragging bracketed and figuratively reinscribed. They were now, in a sense, fully college youth.

Among all the signs of style, conspicuous on welcome day were the brand names and logos that adorned these young men’s bodies. The end of ragging was an opportunity to loudly display brands on their bodies, or at least things like brands. Indeed, the garments that adorned these young men’s bodies on this day and the days that followed were by and large not “originals.” They were “dummy pieces,” locally made, low-quality counterfeits, defect and surplus garments, brand pastiches, and other brand-inspired apparel, or what I call in this chapter “brand surfeits”: damaged Reebok polos, fake Diesel watches, misspelled “Pumaa” backpacks, and T-shirts with fictive brand names, nonsensical slogans (e.g., “Disquerd, Everinhu Canglong asiohdngy”), and seemingly unrelated designs (figure 3; also see figures 5–8 in chapter 3). While these young men were keen that such clothes have the trappings of brand apparel, they were outwardly indifferent to the particular brand identities displayed on their garments, as they were to their authenticity.

Figure 3. Two brand surfeits: left—a “Pumaa” bag (Chennai 2011); right—“Force” fictive brand shirt, with “Style Without Control” slogan (Madurai 2007)

What are we to make of the uncanny brand surfeits adorning these young men’s bodies? Or of young men’s simultaneous desire for and indifference to the brands that embellished such garments? Or of their nonchalance about their authenticity? What made such fashion, stamped by mimicked marks of the global, objects to be policed during ragging and displayed with zeal after it? What made them style?

In this chapter, I explore the style of the brand and its relation to youth forms of status and sociality, focusing in particular on young men’s clothing fashion.5 Young men draw on branded forms to diagram and negotiate their relationships with adult respectability and masculinity, to manage their expectations and anxieties about future participation in the workforce, and most centrally, to do style in their peer groups. As I show, there is an ambivalence that underwrites and underplays young men’s engagements with brand fashion, an ambivalence about the potential of the brand not simply to do style but to do too much style. This ambivalence manifests itself in acts of indifference to and outright disavowal of brand authenticity and value. It materializes as the very surfeits that adorn these young men’s bodies. This ambivalence takes a positive form as what I call “an aesthetics of brandedness.” This sartorial aesthetic revolves around the “look” of brand apparel, even as it problematizes the very question of what and when a brand is—a question I turn to at the end of chapter 3. The chapter then addresses the gendered nature of this aesthetic, discussing young men who draw on alternate masculinities that eschew branded forms, and style more generally, and college-going women, whose bodies are almost never visibly marked by branded forms. In concluding, I ask what kind of subject is presupposed and entailed by young men’s fashion. I argue that it is a liminal, flirtatious subject, one that emerges out of a close distance with those other subjectivities that he invokes but keeps in quotes, reanimates but disavows, embraces but defers through his ambivalent reanimations of the brand. But first, I turn to a brief history of clothing in modern India to contextualize the terrain upon which college students encountered brand garments.

From Khadi to (Khadi) Brand

The dhoti-kurta clad politician travelling in third class railway compartments is an image of the past. Today’s rulers sport Gucci shoes, Cartier sunglasses and live five-star lifestyles. . . . The distance between Gandhi (Mahatma) and Gandhi (Rajiv) is a vast traverse in political ethic.

—“THE NEW MAHARAJAHS,” SUNDAY, APRIL 17–23, 1988, PP. 22, 26 (CITED IN FERNANDES 2006:36, CITING RUDOLPH 1989:2, NOTE 1)

The New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1991 is conventionally taken to mark a transition in Indian history. The NEP crystallized earlier gestures toward economic liberalization in the 1980s by Indira Gandhi and later by her son Rajiv Gandhi, inscribing a clear, if contested, break with the state-planned economic policies and “socialistic” vision associated with India’s first prime minister, Indira Gandhi’s father, Jawaharlal Nehru. The NEP responded to the fiscal crisis of 1991, instituting a number of structural reforms at the behest of the International Monetary Fund: liberalized industrial licensing, relaxed import quotas, reduced import tariffs, and increased allowances on foreign investment, among other changes (Jenkins 1999:12–41). In doing so, the Indian economy was opened to new commodities, labor relations, and global capital. Liberalization was, of course, not simply an issue of market economics but a shift in the political dispensation and ideological orientation of the nation-state (Mankekar 1999; Mazzarella 2003; Fernandes 2006; Srivastava 2007; Lukose 2009), a shift that has been felt in multiple domains, from higher education (chapter 1), language politics (chapter 4), and media entertainment (chapters 5–7) to, as I discuss in this chapter and the next, young men’s fashion, among many others still.

To see this, one might track the modern history of cloth, clothing, and fashion in the subcontinent. As Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy (2013[2009]b:6) put it, until the eighteenth century, “India clothed the world.” It was this vibrant textile trade that in the seventeenth century attracted the East India Company, which bought low-cost, high-quality Indian cotton textiles for the consumer fashion market in England or for further trade in Southeast Asia. By the nineteenth century, English manufacturers had succeeded in mechanizing textile production. In the second half of the century, they were exporting their cheaper, industrially produced fabrics to the subcontinent, reversing earlier trade patterns and thus, as it came to be seen, decimating the Indian handicraft industry (Parthasarathi 2013[2009]; 2010).6 In this same period, increasing colonial trade, governance, and Western education saw European dress styles of various sorts gain popularity among elite, educated Indian men (Cohn 1989:333ff.; Tarlo 1996:24, 320). By the end of the nineteenth century, Western cloth and clothing had come to represent the exploitative nature of colonialism to an emerging anticolonial sensibility. The response of the nascent nationalist movement, and that of the Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi in particular, took the form of traditionally hand-spun, hand-woven Indian cotton. It took the form of khadi.

Mahatma Gandhi—one of those dapper, Western-dressed and Western-educated colonial subjects in his youth (Bean 1989; Tarlo 1996:64–69)—did the most to position and champion khadi dress as the answer to the political and economic subjugation of India under British colonialism (Trivedi 2007). For the nationalist movement, khadi emblematized swadeshi (literally, ‘home country’): the boycott of foreign goods and the promotion of indigenous goods.7 Gandhi advocated that every Indian exclusively wear khadi and, moreover, hand-spin their own yarn—a sacrifice of labor to uplift and free the to-be nation.8 As Gandhi put it, “Swadeshi is the soul of Swaraj (‘self-rule’), Khadi is the essence of Swadeshi” (quoted in Bean 1989:370). Locally produced, handmade, and worn in modest “traditional” “Indian” styles (Tarlo 1996), khadi dress—often all white and without any embellishment (the “dhoti-kurta” referred to above)—became a national symbol, or the “fabric of Indian independence,” as Nehru put it (cited in Chakrabarthy 2001:28).

In the postindependence period, khadi came to stand in for the austere dispensation and aesthetic of Nehru’s brand of nationalism, with its developmentalist emphasis on constrained consumption and import substitution production.9 It is the breakdown of this nationalist dispensation and aesthetic that found political-economic expression in the policy shifts of the 1980s and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration, Quotation, and Pseudonyms
• List of Symbols and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I Brand
• PART II Language
• PART III Film
• Conclusions
• Notes
• References
• Index