In 2021, a study from Pew Research reported that Indians strongly believe in religious tolerance and at the same time, in religious segregation. 84% of Indians in the study noted that while religious tolerance is integral to being Indian, they didn’t entertain the idea of having other communities as neighbours. The research also noted that Indians are generally opposed to the idea of inter-caste and inter-religious marriages, and prefer making friends within their own religious community.

Fascinating, from a data perspective. But from the vantage of Indian identity, you and I are not surprised. Inter-mingling of religions, languages and cultures for Indians is a theoretically romantic but practically threatening concept. Great on DD National. Induces nervousness if it happens 3 feet from your window.

"This points to a unique understanding of plurality of Indian society - it is more like a thali, rather than a melting pot," Neha Sahgal, one of the lead authors of the study aptly pointed out. Another description about India comes to mind. ‘For everything that is true of India, the opposite is also true.’ Cliched, but you can’t dispute its profound truth.

It’s baffling therefore, that when it comes to analysing, understanding and influencing the Indian consumer, we’re content with painting their behaviour in broad strokes and lumping all of us into just one category - Indians.

This is an inconvenient, annoying truth. But if you take a step back, you’d agree that it is impractical to imagine that the largest population in the world fits in neatly cut, panderable archetypes that are adapted from a larger, W.E.I.R.D nation idea of the consumer. Our ideas about India’s youth or the newly upward-mobile consumer come from a Looking West Talking East context. A global persona with a Jhankar Beats mix, if you will. Who knows what we would’ve found, had we looked at the Indian market sans these references?

Ten years ago, it led to a blanket labelling of the Indian Millennial as a passionate driver of his own narrative, chasing new unheard of dreams in a newly globalised India. This, when engineering and medical science were still the most sought after degrees in the country, and younger, big-earning first jobbers were taking up loans to build homes for their parents in small towns. Using urban trend reports as a mirror to youth sentiment was an error then. Had it been true, we would’ve seen the next evolution of generations and the stark differences between these transitory consumer cohorts from a mile away. Just because some of the trends our youth follow on social media come from Europe and North America, we wouldn’t assume that they have the same drivers, dreams and behaviours of Europe and North America.

• We wouldn’t believe that our youth cares about sustainable packaging.

• We wouldn’t craft HR policies in Bangalore and Gurgaon based on the West’s Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting and Great Exhaustion.

• We would realise that Diversity & Inclusion needs new definitions in the Indian ecosystem.

• Here is the big challenge - there isn’t even ‘one’ India.

• No, this isn’t about Bharat vs India.

We are talking about a deeper meditation on the phenomenon that Sajith Pai of Blume Ventures, points out - "India is not one country but three - India 1 (like Mexico), India 2 (like Philippines) and India 3 (like Sub Saharan Africa)". Pai also helps us understand that the fastest growing ‘caste’ in India is the ‘Indo Anglian’, desi families growing up in the Metros & Tier-1 cities where English is the first language.

• It's an inconvenient, annoying truth.

• But it's about time we face it.

• We don’t know India anymore.

Upward Mobile from the Bottom Up

We’ve learned that progress trickles down. But it can also grow from the grassroots.

As India sets the stage for the biggest election in the world in 2024, women - both urban and rural - are empowered by tradition and old world values, aware that they make a difference. The gig economy is in full display in urban cities, while its largest effects are felt back home. With no contractor to report to, the rural immigrant is now his own boss, deciding on his own work hours and daily wages.

This is a highly motivated, highly empowered breed of Indians with faded Lakshmanrekhas around their villages, communities and linguistic limits. They believe the world is open. Where Hindi is not a national language, YouTube tutorial zindabad. They earn daily wages in peri-urban Delhi and urban Chennai and change their phone every year. They own a second hand KTM/Bullet and wouldn’t be caught dead without their earpods.

This is not our conventional consumer. This is the guy who delivers the consumer's pizza. But the consumer persona and consumer behaviour fit remarkably. What now? SEC aside, is this who brands must create for and speak to? If this highly empowered, upward mobile, aspirational youth is not the average consumer, what’s the real consumer like?

The New Indian Kutumbakam

We are not exactly multicultural. More like cultural forts, complete with moat and drawbridge, living in passable harmony next to each other for 76 years. This has only been possible because in a sea of people, we are good at seeing only our own. It’s a unique superpower - so much diversity, yet so densely populated. It means that no matter where an Indian goes, there is no need to blend. Our own distinct group will always be available.

Like Neha Sehgal put it, we’re a thali. Lots of different textures and tastes sitting in their own bowl so they don’t touch.

Until now. It has been common practice across the world for economically weaker sections to move across states and borders in search of employment. The richer a home was, the more it could support its family, with no need for anyone to migrate. From the 60’s to the 80’s, educational reforms and government job opportunities meant a new steady migration of an educated class into newer, big cities. For the first time in the country, an educated class of government employed and job seeking youngsters came into contact with an Indian different from themselves. Second order effects were seen over the next decade with specific communities segregating themselves into specific suburbs, businesses and properties prominently belonging to particular groups. With the segregating, though, also came a surge in marriages between different language, caste and community members. In comparison to arranged marriages, these inter-religious and inter-caste marriages were tiny. But their impact was still felt, making their way into cinematic depictions like Ek Duje Ke Liye and Bobby. As opportunities grew in and around big cities, the phenomenon has spread. Minutely. But surely.

In the India we live in today, the first of the children from these mixed marriages are today’s consumers, with children of their own. This is a new normalised outlier, with a different ‘mother’ and ‘father’ tongue, and two native cultures to belong to. In Sahgal’s proverbial thali, the vaatis have begun to spill over.

The New Indian, regardless of economic class and social group, is building a home inside the segregated boundaries of community, but also with more and more new overarching communities to belong to. A true mixing of cultures, adhering to the codes of each.

• Now there’s a truly multicultural India.

• Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam: The World, Thus a Family.

It is this multiculturalism, this Kutumbakamization, that fuels the latest addition of a Haldi ceremony in Tamil weddings and the success of a North Indian South Indian cafe like Rameswaram in Bengaluru. It is why rice flour pooris and dosa (pronounced with a hard ‘D’) is served for breakfast in UP’s Bahraich, near the Nepal Border.

We’re living amidst the New Indians of Bharat. They’re not just ‘traditional yet modern’, ‘nationalistic yet global’ in mindset. They are 19 year olds with a strong sense of Sanathan and a loose sense of Hinduism. They watch content on 2X speed, on mute, and voraciously devour stories behind its making. They care about privacy but are consciously teaching YouTube how to curate content for them. And as woke as they might be on social media, they’re studying more than their parents did. But for the first time in our history, they may not be able to upgrade their parents’ lives like their parents did for theirs. For some, flights, 5-Star Hotels, Foreign Vacations - their parents have already seen it all. For others, information and entertainment doesn’t have to be learned from the child. What is this new cohort supposed to offer their parents? Or top their experience? Rather than free them, it has further tied them to familial expectations. Shravankumar, it seems, is in the DNA.

What does that mean for the brands we create and adapt for the Indian market? Clotaire Rapaille in “The Culture Code” writes how Jeep got its breakthrough in the 90s: the realisation that “For Americans, it’s a gallop. For Europeans, it’s a march.” Each culture has its own interpretation of different products and brands. Unless we understand the New Kutumbakam, our own subcontinental stories of brand successes cannot be written.

Truly Indian marketing knowledge needs to shine.

We now have a sizable population of the single child family, where both parents were also single children. What does this family of single individuals, who may not understand codes of sharing, like Indian families with multiple kids do, mean for consumer behaviour in 2024? In 2030? Field work in the villages in eastern UP showed our team how search itself is changing - kids as young as 3 years old were seen using Voice as the default search mode in smartphones in remote villages. What does it mean for the large e-commerce and media players who have been trying to design their products for the next billion? How is the switch to UPI impacting pocket money for the teenagers? Are we going to see fathers open up a second bank account so that their kids can connect it to UPI app? Will it be the mother, instead?

Contextualizing heavily for India, works. In our experience, cracking the Indian context with a meditation on the New Indian was the only way to understand why a dominant biscuit brand from one particular state could not be toppled as the market leader for 20 years. Or why an Ed Tech firm saw significant signups in one South Indian state but none in another culturally similar one. Or why a Q-commerce brand with a lions’ share of market in the South could barely make a dent in the North.

“One of the handicaps of the twentieth centuíy is that we still have the vaguest and most biased notions, not only of what makes Japan a nation of Japanese, but of what makes the United States a nation of Ameíicans, Fíance a nation of Fíenchmen, and Russia a nation of Russians    Lacking this knowledge, each countíy misundeístands the otheí.”, wíote Ruth Benedict in ‘The Chíysanthemum and the Swoíd.’

We need a focused effort to understand ourselves better. India needs to curate and record its own Marketing Vocab. After all, what does Boomer, Millennial, Gen Z even mean in an Indian Context? A more accurate articulation would be Pre Lib, Post Lib and Gen Jio.

It is 2024. ‘Why can’t we be the third largest GDP in the world?’, we ask ourselves. It won’t happen with pre-packaged notions of global consumerism refit to the Indian. The global bit, we seem to have figured out. Let’s get to the Indian part.