Ad nauseam: Revisiting vintage Indian commercials

Long before Lalitaji taught us the how to zero in on the most effective and sasta-tikaau detergent, there was Lux who told us that the best way to have the 'right complexion' was to froth up your face with the 'beauty soap'. Sadhana, Sridevi, Jaya Prada, Zeenat Aman, Hema Malini and even Shabana Azmi told us to covet the lighter shade that only Lux could bring about.

Those were the days when women were generally expected to not look far beyond their usual chores of cooking and cleaning the house. A cousin who found his zen in collectibles – matchbox covers, comics, covers of film reels in movie theatres – also had a sizeable collection of old ads. He had a trusted source in a book market tucked in a corner of Delhi, who would get him LPs, old ads, maps – stuff that quirky Hauz Khas Village shops make a killing out of today.

I would sit for hours with him while he would tell me story after story about each of his collected treasures. I once chanced upon his old ads file and was fascinated. My cousin, usually the one I look up to for stuff, told me, "Let this be your first class in feminism," and laughed away. I must have been eight or nine then. Obviously, I did not get the joke.

But as I flipped through the file, there were women being spanked by husbands for not working, women lying at men's feet in shoe ads, husbands telling wives they look good when they worked hard and a specific one of Twiggy in a spacesuit with a tag line that said something like 'futuristic women will lead to a cleaner moon'. Outraged? Of course. And my cousin was right – those ads instilled a seething rage that no women's studies class ever could.

Even though ads haven't evolved much when it comes to gender representation, I'm thankful these particular ones are no longer around.