“DOING business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does,” goes the famous quote — thought up, perhaps, by a copywriter.
On the other hand, those who think advertising is not morally justifiable say things like what Thomas Wells has said in one of his articles: “Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention. We are the fish and we are not consulted.”
But advertising is an integral part of today’s world, whether we like it or not. It has a long history and advertising began much earlier than we assume: in ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, advertising was common and papyrus and wall paintings were used for the purpose. Tej K. Bhatia in his book Advertising and Marketing in Rural India: language, culture and communication (Macmillan, 2007) has opined that rock painting was a method used for advertising and it dates back to about 4000 years BC.
In our part of the world, too, advertisers have been around for quite long and the earliest advertisements in the subcontinent traced so far were the posters put up by East India Company in Kolkata in 1757, writes Dr Peerzada Sharaf-e-Alam in his book Urdu Ishtihariyaat Ki Tareekh. Just published by Islamabad’s Guftugu Publications, the book is in fact the author’s dissertation that earned him a PhD from the University of Karachi.
Hicky’s Bengal Gazette was the first newspaper published in the subcontinent. It was published in 1780 from Kolkata by James Hicky, a vociferous critic of governor-general Warren Hastings’ corruption, so the newspaper was closed down forcibly in 1782. Being an English newspaper, it did not carry any Urdu advertisements. As for Urdu, the first Urdu advertisement was the one that appeared in Calcutta Chronicles, an English language newspaper published from Kolkata. In its January 1788 issue, an advertisement appeared both in Urdu and English, publicising Divan-i-Hafiz. Another Urdu ad in those days promoted an edition of the famous tale Qissa-i-Chaar Darvish says Dr Sharaf-e-Alam. In his book he has reproduced images of some rare, early Urdu advertisements, such as one in October 29, 1861, issue of Sh’ola-i-Toor, Kanpur, and July 18, 1854, issue of Koh-i-Noor, Lahore. Some recent ads being run by the print media have been reproduced as well.
The book also takes into account the social, political, moral and linguistic aspects of Urdu advertisements while tracing the history of printing and journalism in the subcontinent. For instance, pieces publicising aphrodisiac medicines began appearing soon after advertisement became a ubiquitous part of mainstream Urdu journalism in the early 20th century. The flowery language used in such ads was in line with the products being offered and the author of the book under review had to strive hard to find a “less offensive” ad to be reproduced. The ad that he has quoted from September 1933 issue of Ilm-o-Amal, an Urdu magazine published from Lahore, is titled ‘Bahar-i-Javani’, promoting a book named Hidayat Nama-i-Khavand, or a guide for husbands. It shows that even serious and sober periodicals with moralistic-sounding names and pompous rhetoric had succumbed to the lures of advertising revenues.
Similarly, with the popularity of Urdu movies in the 1920s, a large number of advertisements began appearing in periodicals with photos or paintings of movie stars, especially actresses, something unheard of in those days.
Interestingly, says Dr Alam, the ads promoting consumer items were written comparatively in plain language but when it came to sophisticated or fancy things, such as books or aphrodisiacs, ornate or even poetic language was used as the era lacked modern-day facilities of attracting readers’ attentions, such as graphics.
Political pamphlets, posters and ads as well as banners displayed at political rallies have been studied in the book and two political movements have especially been studied from the point of view of advertising and publicity, namely, Pakistan Movement and the Subhas Chandra Bose’s ‘Azad Hind’ or Free India Movement. Some of the posters and banners show that Urdu, Hindi and English were used in political sloganeering.
Some adverts reproduced show the linguistic and orthographic changes through last decades, for instance, the use of English words and Romanised Urdu. Another aspect that may interest linguists is the commentary on idiosyncrasies of calligraphers shown by writing certain Urdu words either incorrectly or joining many Urdu words together unnecessarily, perhaps to save the space, a trend that can be noticed in the headlines of Urdu newspapers even today.
As Javed Jabbar and S.M. Shaid have mentioned in their blurbs, the book is the first such study on the topic of Urdu advertising and with his research Dr Sharaf-e-Alam has brought to light many an interesting fact regarding Urdu advertising, its history and linguistic features.
Published in Dawn, March 8th, 2021
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