Contemporary YouTube advertising and the making of the Marathi Brahmin identity

This article focuses on an increasingly popular social media advertising strategy, in the form of brand films circulated on YouTube for two prominent brands, Chitale Bandhu Mithaiwaale and P. N. Gadgil Jewelers, based in Pune in western India. Through close reading of these films, I demonstrate how their constructions of a ‘Marathi’ identity through discourses of tradition and culture are distinctly Brahminical. Through a focus on the embodied, linguistic and spatial referents of the advertisement films, I illustrate how the latter consequently produce Marathi Brahmin culture as Marathiness. I further argue that these films constitute a fertile site for the project of Marathi Brahmin self-making in the context of globalized, neo-liberal, urban India, an important facet of which is to showcase the community as liberal and progressive via an agential representation of women.