Why ads rarely depict caste and religious minorities

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...

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