In contemporary India, visual culture serves as a stage where national identity is rehearsed and reasserted. Advertising, which saturates our visual world, offers a carefully composed image of who belongs to the aspirational citizenry. It presents a cheerful nation, dressed in festive hues, speaking in softened accents, consuming with quiet confidence. But this ideal India is often conspicuously homogeneous. The billboarded nation largely excludes religious and caste minorities, and increasingly confines representations of diversity to the safe terrains of region, accent, or culinary difference.

This absence is not simply a failure of representation. It reflects a deeper anxiety about who belongs in the imagined middle-class consumer-citizenry. In a country where Muslim presence in everyday public life has become increasingly precarious, and caste continues to structure access to dignity and visibility, the world of advertising acts as both a filter and a fantasy of homogeneity. In an age of emboldened majoritarianism, this aesthetic curation is not accidental – it is ideological.

Yet, paradoxically, when minority figures do appear in advertisements – when a woman coded as a Muslim by her dupatta or hijab smiles from a billboard, or when a Dalit-coded figure is portrayed not as suffering but as stylish – the moment can carry powerful resonance. This is the paradox of commodified recognition. Even when mediated through the market, representation can matter.

Recognition without redistribution

The concept of recognition, as developed in political and philosophical thought – especially by thinkers like Axel Honneth and Charles Taylor – highlights how human dignity is tied not only to rights or redistribution, but to being seen and affirmed as a full subject. In the domain of advertising, recognition often comes stripped of its political teeth. It is tied instead to consumer subjectivity: one is recognised as a potential buyer, a lifestyle, a demographic.

In her work Authentic™, Sarah Banet-Weiser outlines how brands have begun to deploy “authenticity” and “diversity” as marketable traits, aligning themselves with progressive social causes without committing to structural change. This is what she calls the rise of brand culture, where inclusion is repackaged as affect and sentiment, not politics. In another collaborative work titled Commodity Activism Banet-Weiser and other contributors show that progressive representation in advertisements can offer moments of symbolic validation, even as it participates in neoliberal narratives of individual empowerment.

But these frameworks, developed in the context of American race and gender politics, require careful translation when applied to the Indian context – where caste is not a “diversity” category in the corporate imagination, and where Muslimness is often treated as a liability in public discourse.

Absence as strategic

Writing on the Urdu newspaper industry, Robin Jeffrey pointed out a telling contradiction: despite decent circulation, Urdu newspapers have attracted little advertising revenue, especially from consumer brands. This, the publishers and editors said, was because their largely Muslim readership was perceived to lack purchasing power. But by the 1990s, a distinct segment of the Muslim middle class had emerged, aspirational and consumer-oriented like others in their class. Still, leading Urdu dailies continued to be bypassed by major advertisers.

This reveals a critical asymmetry in Indian media: the growing numbers of Muslim and Scheduled Caste individuals in the middle class did not get translated into their recognition as paying publics in mainstream advertising, even as the Muslim and Dalit masses are recognised in digital attention economies as audience.

The issue, then, is not merely one of who appears in advertisements, but of who is seen as worth addressing. Addressing a community does not always require showing its members. To be seen can also mean having one's culture acknowledged through naming festivals and anticipating buying rhythms.

Eid, for instance, rarely figures in national ad campaigns as a meaningful economic or emotional moment. Unlike Diwali, which is saturated with consumer messaging, Eid passes with minimal commercial acknowledgment even when Muslim consumers are significant participants in the markets for clothing and food. Christmas has been absorbed into the visual grammar of aspirational urban India not as minority culture but more as global consumer aesthetics. Its acceptance reveals the global political economy of desirability and phobias.

There is no vocabulary within mainstream advertising to depict caste, unless it is entirely sublimated into euphemisms like “rural consumers” or “aspirational India”. Dalit presence is at best symbolic, as in rare campaigns that foreground ‘change-makers’ from marginalised communities – most often as part of a corporate social responsibility narrative rather than commercial branding.

Why visibility still matters

Given the wider conditions of exclusion and violence, it is easy to dismiss such representational politics as hollow. And yet, affect resists easy dismissal. To deny the emotional weight of being seen, to write off recognition as mere ideological bait, is to misunderstand the lived experience of erasure. Advertising may not be the site of justice, but it remains a terrain of imagination. A working-class Muslim child who sees a character like herself in a school uniform on a digital platform might not read it as a political act but it can shape her sense of possibility.

Elizabeth Chin’s ethnographic work on Black children in the US (Purchasing Power, 2001) illustrates how advertising and consumer culture shape affective worlds. While it promotes materialism, consumers can see advertisements as offering scripts for self-worth and social imagination. When someone long pushed to the edges of visibility in Indian society sees their likeness in aspirational media or is addressed without being reduced to suffering or charity, it can offer a quiet moment of affective affirmation.

Holding the tension

It is true that mere noble imagery cannot undo dispossession and violence. An advertisement that showcases interfaith harmony, for instance, may soothe some viewers, but it does not interrogate the ongoing criminalisation of Muslim presence in the polity. It risks becoming, as one trenchant critic put it, a form of “passive-aggressive majoritarianism” – a sentimental mask over structures of exclusion. Lauren Berlant characterised the promise of belonging that depends on the denial of structural violence, “cruel optimism”.

Yet, it is precisely this tension that requires attention. Public representation today is not just about ideology; it is also about affective economies – about how people feel, dream, and imagine belonging. In a country where to be seen with dignity is a rare achievement for many communities, visual representation and being addressed as consumers does not feel superficial to those who are ghosted by market forces. It can be humiliating to spend your money in a marketplace that takes your business but refuses to acknowledge your presence, your festivals, or your dignity. It is not just an economic exclusion, but a failure of the moral economy.

The task, then, is to hold this tension without collapsing it. To be seen is not a substitute for justice. To be addressed is not liberation. But it is not nothing.

Ghazala Jamil is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University.