Culture as Commodity: Visual Rhetoric of Tea Advertisement in Colonial India

This paper examines the popular rhetoric in printed tea advertisements in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century colonial India. The ethos of politeness, refinement and urban sociability of England was mapped onto the Indian culture through advertising campaigns. In the early nineteenth century, tea brands like Brook Bond and Lipton featured images of white European women drinking tea promoting it as a luxury item. However, a decisive shift is noticed in the visual iconography of the early twentieth-century advertisements where urban elite Indian women replaced white women. The visual imagery of the Indian ‘subaltern’ women plucking tea leaves with their nimble fingers in the tea plantation constructed a narrative of feminine care and oriental delicacy crafted for male fantasy. Thus the promotional campaigns for Indian-grown British-branded tea have to be studied within a complex discursive narrative where the woman simultaneously positioned as both the consumer and the producer of the exotic drink remains a signifier within the economy of male desire.