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Consumerist Encounters (Available on Amazon)

Oxford University Press

Economic liberalization and globalization in India in the early 1990s resulted in a whirlwind of consumerist activities. New material and visual temptations swamped the markets. Expanding field of commodification infiltrated consumer minds through media imageries. New objects of desire aroused inhibited cravings. This engendered an accelerated and intensified relationship with things and images that permeate our everyday lives.   

Consumerist Encounters elucidates how our all-consuming relationship with objects and their representations have transformed rapidly over the last few decades in contemporary urban India. It argues that ephemerality, frivolousness, and multiplicity of choice regulate our flirtatious encounters with commodities and their images as we restlessly use, exhaust, dispose, and move on. Such a trend is illustrated by examining a plethora of commodity-centric phenomena such as exclusion through apparel, eroticization of body images, population of the T-shirt surface with graphics and text, rise of business process outsourcing, instantaneous seeing and sharing of images, and rejection of material goods in junkyards and ruins. These explorations collectively shed light on the constant negotiation of our identities, statuses, and mobilities in the image-saturated commodity landscape.      

Dipankar Gupta (Eminent Sociologist)

"The subject matter of this book was crying out for attention, and this has been attended to in this book with finesse, vigor and style. It teases out many aspects of contemporary society, which had earlier gone unnoticed. "

Sanjay Srivastava (British Academy Global Professor, University College London )

"Bhattacharya’s book raises some questions that are fundamental to the ways in which contemporary selves are fashioned. Bhattacharya deals with these questions through a series of striking explorations of relationships between commodities, visual culture and the quotidian meanings they make for a range of participants in dramatic new carnivals of sociality. The sustained attention – still remarkably rare – to what commodities make of us is Bhattacharya’s important contribution towards an inventive understanding of contemporary Indian life."

Leela Fernandes (Professor, University of Michigan )

"Consumerist Encounters provides a theoretically insightful and engaging analysis of the complexities of consumer identities and relationships with commodities in post-liberalization India. The juxtaposition of highly visible commodities with spaces and sites of abandonment is a particularly thought-provoking approach that will be of value to anyone interested in grappling with the complexities of the middle classes and socio-cultural trends in contemporary India."

Ravi Sundaram (Professor, Center for the Study of Developing Society)

"This book offers a fresh perspective on the relationship of commodity worlds to the visual economies of contemporary capitalism. In Bhattacharya’s book the materiality of the commodity is connected with the disjunctive economies of visuality after globalization; we are presented with an arresting analysis of the fleeting world of surface culture. For Bhattacharya, the commodity surface exists in conjunction with ruin, decay and an obsessive desire, a remarkable collection of paradoxes that now define the contemporary. I am confident that Consumerist Encounters will open new debates on the making of contemporary India."

Christiane Brosius (Professor of Visual and Media Anthropology, Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies)

"Sreedeep releases ‘consumer culture’ from its earlier attribution to middle classness, trying to understand consumption as both a sensorial, agentive form of everyday culture and moral policing and as a potential field for critical thinking. In its broad, original and funky landscape of case-studies, this book is a fascinating read for various publics"

The Telegraph Review

Wear Che Guevara, Johnny Walker and Gandhi on your T-shirts, but it says nothing about you

"This book is a collection of thoughtful essays on a set of commodities and their images, which populate the everyday lives of an ever-increasing number of gratification-seeking Indians in the post-liberalization era. Bringing the material and the visual in a single analytical framework, Sreedeep Bhattacharya examines the changing relationships between objects of individual desire and their popular representations over the past few decades...Bhattacharya’s book is an evident exemplification of the much-celebrated ‘cultural turn’ in social sciences...Indeed, there is much in Bhattacharya’s book that is inventive and refreshingly insightful....Bhattacharya gives us a discomfiting sense of disappearing spaces and forms of sociability outside the world of consumption. Such an understanding makes his analyses of advertisements a profitable exercise where he plots the conceptual transition from the earlier ethos of restraint and thrift to present-day guilt-free consumption and material cravings...Scholars and laypersons alike would find Bhattacharya’s account of the Indian middle classes’ journey from “abstinence to indulgence”.



Wear Che Guevara, Johnny Walker and Gandhi on your T-shirts, but it says nothing about you

Book Extract in The Print

October 31, 2020

Consumerist Encounters: Understanding the psyche of the consumer

Book Review in The Week

September 12, 2020

Commodities as Trophies: How Advertisements Valorise the Elite

Book Extract in The Wire

November 18, 2021

Cityscapes and identities: What advertisements, images tell us about commodities and consumers

Book Extract in The  Scroll

May 13, 2022

This book examines the impact of materialism on societal behavior and explores visual manifestations of a consumption-driven economy 

Book Review in The  Hindu Businessline

May 13, 2022

Negotiating the Relationship between Commodities and their Images, by Nita Mathur

Book Review in EPW

November 19, 2022

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