ÿþ<html><head><link href="../../Styles/global.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet"> <link href="../../Images/favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon"><meta name="Keywords" content="Soap advertisements from the collections of Priya Paul and Sabeena Gadihoke." /><title>Selling Soap and Stardom: The Story of Lux</title></head><body style="background-color:#BC5558" topMargin=0 ><div align="Center"> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="6" width="100%" style="background-color:#ffffff"><tr><td style="background-color:#BC5558;font-size:12px;font-family:Verdana;" align="center"> <a href="http://www.tasveergharindia.net" style="text-decoration:none;color:#ffffff;">Tasveer Ghar: A Digital Archive of South Asian Popular Visual Culture</a></td></tr><tr><td align="center" ><p><span style="color: rgb(188, 85, 88);"><strong><span style="font-size: 20px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Selling Soap and Stardom: The Story of Lux</span></span></strong></span></p></td></tr><tr><td align="center" > </td></tr><tr><td> <table width="850" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" align="center"> <tbody> <tr> <td><strong><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"> <table width="163" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" border="0" align="right"> <tbody> <tr> <td><strong><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><table valign="middle"><tr><td> <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=6><img width="148" height="190" border="0" align="right" src="/cmsdesk/userfiles/image/soap-Gadi/06n.jpg" alt="" style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-bottom-style: none"/></a></td></tr><tr><td align="Center" > <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=6> Fig.06</a></td></tr></table></span></span></strong></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> Celestial Models, the Politics of Race, and Modernity</span></span></strong> <p><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">The <a href="http://www.tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/essay/85/">Priya Paul collection</a> has several calendar images from the 1920s in which soap companies from Britain target vernacular markets. Like other products, these advertisements invoked devotional and mythological imagery to sell soap. Gods and goddesses were their first models.<span style="font-size: 9px;"><sup>9</sup></span> We see Lord Krishna for instance in a 1932 calendar (<a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&amp;EId=104&amp;ImageId=6">fig. 06</a>) endorsing Sunlight, the first Levers soap in India. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">In contrast to the utilitarian Sunlight, Vinolia, an expensive luxury soap, had the distinction of being supplied on the ill fated Titanic. A series of Vinolia calendars in the Collection use images of goddess Lakshmi (<a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&amp;EId=104&amp;ImageId=7">fig. 07</a>) and Saraswati (<a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&amp;EId=104&amp;ImageId=8">fig. 08</a>). These were based on well-known Raja Ravi Varma paintings. Scholars have point outed that many &quot;pirate&quot; versions of his images would circulate repetitively in calendars over time.<span style="font-size: 9px;"><sup>10</sup></span> In </span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&amp;EId=104&amp;ImageId=9">figure 09</a></span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">, we see another calendar using an identical image of the goddess Lakshmi for the locally manufactured Kerala Sandalwood Soap. While the Vinolia Calendar is dated 1926, this one is dated 1940. </span></span></p> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" border="0" align="center" style="width: 582px; height: 217px;"> <tbody> <tr> <td><table valign="middle"><tr><td> <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=7><img width="144" height="210" border="0" src="/cmsdesk/userfiles/image/soap-Gadi/07n.jpg" alt="" style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-bottom-style: none"/></a></td></tr><tr><td align="Center" > <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=7> Fig.07</a></td></tr></table></td> <td><table valign="middle"><tr><td> <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=8><img border="0" style="width: 162px; height: 211px;" src="/cmsdesk/userfiles/image/soap-Gadi/08n.jpg" alt="" style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-bottom-style: none"/></a></td></tr><tr><td align="Center" > <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=8> Fig.08</a></td></tr></table></td> <td><table valign="middle"><tr><td> <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=9><img width="156" height="210" border="0" src="/cmsdesk/userfiles/image/soap-Gadi/09n.jpg" alt="" style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-bottom-style: none"/></a></td></tr><tr><td align="Center" > <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=9> Fig.09</a></td></tr></table></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" border="0" align="left" style="width: 215px; height: 387px;"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <p style="text-align: center;"><br /> <table valign="middle"><tr><td> <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=10><img width="148" height="207" border="0" src="/cmsdesk/userfiles/image/soap-Gadi/10n.jpg" alt="" style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-bottom-style: none"/></a></td></tr><tr><td align="Center" > <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=10> Fig.10</a></td></tr></table></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><table valign="middle"><tr><td> <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=11><img border="0" style="width: 199px; height: 147px;" src="/cmsdesk/userfiles/image/soap-Gadi/11n.jpg" alt="" style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-bottom-style: none"/></a></td></tr><tr><td align="Center" > <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=11> Fig.11</a></td></tr></table></p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Of course transnational companies used more secular kinds of iconography as well, often drawn from their international markets. McClintock indicates how advertising became a vehicle to carry a certain visual imaginary of the empire to the colony and vice versa. If advertisements for soap featured white people and their bathtubs, it also liberally used images of an imagined Orient and its mystique. The transnational flow of images makes it difficult at times to tell whether these advertisements were meant for domestic consumers or for those in the colonies or both. The following two advertisements play on some of this ambiguity of intended and unintended consumers by projecting exotic orientalist fantasies. <a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&amp;EId=104&amp;ImageId=10">Figure 10</a> features a 1930-calendar with a &quot;Persian touch&quot; that plays upon the erotic possibilities of scented soap. More striking than the romanticized Orient evoked in this calendar selling Erasmic soap and perfumes (which begs the question about whom this was actually meant for!<span style="font-size: 9px;"><sup>11</sup></span>) is the allusion to diverse transnational constituencies. With text describing its high quality product in Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, Burmese and Sinhala, the calendar was clearly meant to travel to other British colonies in the subcontinent. The use of all these texts acquires greater significance if we look at the histories and journeys of languages through trans-border migrations and indentured labour. With imagery drawn from an imagined Turkish <em>hamaam</em> (communal bath), the Orientalist bath soap advertisement in <a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&amp;EId=104&amp;ImageId=11">figure 11</a> simultaneously perpetuates racial caricatures. The Black woman in this image is probably a slave and clearly on display. </span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">However the advertisement also hints at the erotic possibilities of collective bathing through multiple sexual gazes: of all the women admiring the body of the half clothed white woman; of the black woman watching the white woman; and of the consumers of the advertisement who could gaze upon all of them collectively.</span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"> </span></span></p> <table width="170" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" border="0" align="right"> <tbody> <tr> <td><table valign="middle"><tr><td> <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=12><img border="0" src="/cmsdesk/userfiles/image/soap-Gadi/12n.jpg" style="width: 160px; height: 213px;" alt="" style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-bottom-style: none"/></a></td></tr><tr><td align="Center" > <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=12> Fig.12</a></td></tr></table><br /> <table valign="middle"><tr><td> <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=13><img border="0" src="/cmsdesk/userfiles/image/soap-Gadi/13n.jpg" alt="" style="width: 158px; height: 218px;" style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-bottom-style: none"/></a></td></tr><tr><td align="Center" > <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=13> Fig.13</a></td></tr></table></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Given the obsession with lighter skin in India, it might seem like a coincidence that a number of luxury soaps were white in color. It is important to remember that soap was predicated on a notion of superiority. Over time whiteness came to be associated with cleanliness, and cleanliness in turn was linked to civilization and class. The Ivy (Ivory) soap advertisement normally featured little white children playing with soap (see, for example, </span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&amp;EId=104&amp;ImageId=12">fig. 12</a>)</span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">. An accident in the late nineteenth century by a plant worker in Cincinnati who left a batch of mixture in a stirring machine for longer than needed is said to have created this soap (with a hollowed inside) &ldquo;that floats!&rdquo; However, long before it was named Ivory after a biblical reference, the soap was somewhat unimaginatively called &ldquo;white soap.&rdquo; In the advertisement featured in </span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&amp;EId=104&amp;ImageId=12">fig. 12</a>, </span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">the text proclaims &ldquo;Ivy soap for washing everybody and everything.&rdquo; Implicit in the words and the image of the little white child bathing her dolls is an assumption of white superiority. Indeed many soap companies including Pears, Monkey Brand Soap, Lux, and Ivy would actually use images of marginalized groups of people (working class, native or people of color, for instance) purified by soap suggesting, as McClintock notes, that it could &ldquo;regenerate the Family of Man by washing from the skin the very stigma of racial and class degeneration.&rdquo;<span style="font-size: 9px;"><sup>12</sup></span> Children were also useful for advertising because of the association suggested by their skin (&quot;like babies&quot;). This association could later be transposed onto the figure of grown women as was the case with Pears that marketed a gentle transparent soap made of glycerin. The company ran beauty contests for little children and many &quot;Miss Pears&quot; would later become actresses or models. The Pears advertisement that we see in <a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&amp;EId=104&amp;ImageId=13">figure 13</a> features this possibility, not just of beauty but glamour and wealth judging from her expensive fur coat, jewelry and fashionable hairstyle. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Like Pears we see the promise of beauty and modernity for women in the next three advertisements that target the Indian housewife. A Wright's Coal Tar Soap advert brings together beauty as well as the hygiene and upward mobility associated with industrial modernity </span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">(<a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&amp;EId=104&amp;ImageId=14">fig. 14</a>)</span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">. We see the figure of a traditional Indian housewife in a modern bathroom. The use of the western style bathtub is significant: soaps after all needed to be accompanied by &quot;shrines of cleanliness.&quot;<span style="font-size: 9px;"><sup>13</sup></span> When we looking closely at the advertisement, however, we see a tension: the woman&rsquo;s figure is not complete and she seems superimposed against another, perhaps even alien space. One wonders if the sketch of the bathroom was used by the artist as a base to superimpose different kinds of women. In this reading of the image then, the Indian housewife becomes an uneasy consumer of modernity transposed as she is against this new landscape. Products of trans-national flows, it is not surprising that many early advertisements reflect this kind of a hybrid iconography. The Urdu text in the advertisement for Vinolia Soap featured in <a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&amp;EId=104&amp;ImageId=15">fig. 15</a> loosely translates as &ldquo;Vinolia White Rose soap brings the freshness of an Indian rose.&rdquo;<span style="font-size: 9px;"><sup>14</sup></span> While the woman wears a stylish blouse and sari, she seems Caucasian and holds an unmistakably English basket of roses! </span></span></p> <table width="400" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" border="0" align="center"> <tbody> <tr> <td><table valign="middle"><tr><td> <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=14><img width="177" height="232" border="0" src="/cmsdesk/userfiles/image/soap-Gadi/14n.jpg" alt="" style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-bottom-style: none"/></a></td></tr><tr><td align="Center" > <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=14> Fig.14</a></td></tr></table></td> <td><table valign="middle"><tr><td> <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=15><img border="0" src="/cmsdesk/userfiles/image/soap-Gadi/15n.jpg" style="width: 157px; height: 231px;" alt="" style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-bottom-style: none"/></a></td></tr><tr><td align="Center" > <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=15> Fig.15</a></td></tr></table></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <table width="169" height="253" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="1" border="0" align="right"> <tbody> <tr> <td><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><table valign="middle"><tr><td> <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=16><img width="167" height="251" border="0" src="/cmsdesk/userfiles/image/soap-Gadi/16n.jpg" style="" alt="" style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-bottom-style: none"/></a></td></tr><tr><td align="Center" > <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=16> Fig.16</a></td></tr></table></span></span></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Though Godrej is often projected as the first indigenous company to manufacture soap, there were smaller local companies making soap by the mid 1930s. A 1935 calendar from Mahaluxmi Soap Works depicts an upper class modern Indian woman </span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">(<a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&amp;EId=104&amp;ImageId=16">fig. 16</a>)</span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">. Clearly influenced by conventions of studio portraiture, the artist paints the woman posing self reflexively. Invisible in this image, the advert speaks about the symbolic value of soap in transforming her appearance that is highlighted through a &quot;double&quot; image. The use of mirrors and reflective surfaces in soap advertising has been noted by McClintock: &ldquo;Mirrors glint and gleam in soap advertising&hellip;The mirror became the epitome of commodity fetishism: erasing both the signs of domestic labor and the industrial origins of domestic commodities. In the domestic world of mirrors, objects multiply without apparent human intervention in a promiscuous economy of self- generation.&rdquo;<span style="font-size: 9px;"><sup>15</sup></span> If the woman in the advertisement is indeed a housewife, then this image erases all signs of work focusing instead on the associations of soap with modernity: with being fashionable (note her hair and stylish broach), living in a clean home and having time for leisure.<span style="font-size: 9px;"><sup>16</sup></span><br /> </span></span></p> <hr /> <p><sup><span style="font-size: 10px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">9 </span></span></sup><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">See the work of scholars such as Kajri Jain, Patricia Uberoi and Christopher Pinney.<br /> <sup><span style="font-size: 10px;">10 </span></sup>See Jain, Kajri. <em>Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art</em>. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2007, p. 35. Invoking Foucauldian notions of genealogy, she points out the impossibility of tracing originary moments in this repetitive genre. For another discussions around similar images from the Priya Paul Collection, see <a href="http://www.tasveerghar.net/cmsdesk/essay/97/">Tasveerghar essay by Richard H. Davis, &quot;Temple in a Frame</a>.&quot;<br /> <sup><span style="font-size: 10px;">11 </span></sup>It might be useful to remember that there was a large constituency of white people who also resided in the colonies.</span><br /> <sup><span style="font-size: 10px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">12 </span></span></sup><span style="font-family: Verdana;"> McClintock, p. 214<br /> <sup><span style="font-size: 10px;">13 </span></sup>Sivulka, p. 163<br /> <sup><span style="font-size: 10px;">14</span></sup> I am indebted to Yousuf Saeed, Sohail Akbar, Ponni Arasu, Ein Lal, Ma Thida, Uma Chakravarty and Geeta Patel for helping with the translations of some of these advertisements.<br /> <sup><span style="font-size: 10px;">15 </span></sup>McClintock, p. 218<br /> <sup><span style="font-size: 10px;">16 </span></sup>Also see Tasveerghar essay by <a href="http://www.tasveerghar.net/cmsdesk/essay/95/">Abigail McGowan, &ldquo;Modernity at Home: Leisure, Autonomy and the New Woman in India&rdquo;</a></span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><br /> </span></span></p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </td></tr></table><table style="width:850px"><tr><td></td><td align="right"><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:12px;color:#ffffff;">Select Page</span><select id="cmbPages" class="text-box" onchange="javascript:openPage();"> <option value="1">1</option><option value="2">2</option><option value="3">3</option><option value="4">4</option><option value="5">5</option></select> <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">function openPage(){ var i = document.getElementById('cmbPages').value; var path =window.location.pathname.substring(0,window.location.pathname.lastIndexOf('/')); if(i== 1) window.location.href = path + "/index.html"; else window.location.href = path + "/index_" + (i-1) +".html"; } var path =window.location.pathname.substring(window.location.pathname.lastIndexOf('/')+1); if (path.indexOf('_') == -1) document.getElementById('cmbPages').value=1; else {path = path.substring(path.lastIndexOf('_')+1); document.getElementById('cmbPages').value=parseInt(path)+1;} </script><a class="navigation-a" href="index.html" style="color:#ffffff;">Previous</a> <a class="navigation-a" href="index_2.html" style="color:#ffffff;">Next</a></td></tr></table><table style="width:100%;"><tr><td></td></tr><tr><td align="center" colspan="2"><a class="gallery-a" style="color:#ffffff;" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=86&EId=104&ImageId=1>Visit The Gallery</a> </td></tr><tr><td align="center" colspan="2"><a href="http://www.tasveergharindia.net" class="footer-a" style="color:#ffffff;"> Tasveer Ghar Home </a>-<a href="http://www.tasveergharindia.net/frmessaylisting.aspx" class="footer-a" style="color:#ffffff;"> Gallery </a>-<a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/pages/copyright.html" class="footer-a" style="color:#ffffff;"> Disclaimer on images </a>-<a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/pages/Contact_Us.html" class="footer-a" style="color:#ffffff;"> Contact us </a>-<a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/Unsubscriber.aspx" class="footer-a" style="color:#ffffff;"> UnSubscriber </a></td></tr></table></div><script type="text/javascript">try {var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-8020078-1");pageTracker._trackPageview();} catch(err) {}</script> </body></html>