Re-tuning the past, selling the future: Tata-AIG and theTree of Love

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores the mobilisation of Indian popular music in the Tata-AIG life insurance company television advertisement ‘Tree of Love’ (2004). I address ways in which music representing different periods of Hindi film, along with visual representations of Indian material culture, have been integrated into an advertising narrative that alludes to India's technological and economic development. I suggest that a range of aural and visual signs subtly complement each other in creating a narrative that not only marks the passage of time, but reframes past social and economic debates into contemporary terms. I contextualise this advertisement – and the signs that it uses – within the field of the Indian insurance industry, as well as within the social-historical context of modern India. Then, utilising elements of Peircean semiotic theory, I closely analyse the aural representations of the passage of time and different eras of Indian musical culture. The analysis ties together the interactions of musical and non-musical signs with the cultural memories that the commercial is designed to evoke. Ultimately, I argue that musical meaning in this advertising context emerges from the complex interaction of these aural and visual signs, and produces memory as much as it reflects it.