Clothing - An Identity
“WHAT DO I WEAR TODAY?”
The way an individual answers this question, says a lot about how one expresses his/her own identity and reveals a world of information about society, history, politics and culture. My project shows how trends in clothing are not only related to caste, religion, wealth, urbanisation and levels of education, but also to a larger cultural debate about the nature of Indian identity before and after the British rule.
I think that clothing in today’s day and by reevaluating its history needs to be retraced and unraveled. Today, ones outlook on what they wear reveals how the west wanted to see itself then about the cultures they were appropriated from. My aim is to try decolonising the fashion imagination, and not the clothing. Illustrated through different textile techniques, this project shows how the British rule affected the mindset of Indian people, with urban Indians adopting “ethnic” dress as villagers seek modern fashions.
JUANG WOMEN
Classified as the Scheduled tribe by the Indian government, Juang declare themselves the true aborigines. Not so far advanced from the Adam and Eve, they dress up in long soft leaves, so as to form a scale like surface of the required size. Juang women were the first reluctant victims of colonial administrators, photographers and ethnographers, because their simply practical considerations were discarded in favour of exotic, erotic naked dancing women and angry goddesses.
THE FAMOUS INDIAN DRAPE
The oldest and the commonest form of dress in precolonial India consisted of various clothes draped around the body and held together with tucks and folds. Usually white and plain, made from cotton. Contrary to the popular belief that stitched clothes were first brought to India in the medieval period by Muslims, there is in fact evidence that Indian women were wearing stitched skirts (ghagras) , bodices (cholis) even as early as eleventh century BC. Tailored garments with advancement and sophistication gained further importance with the arrival of European traders, missionaries and colonial administrators. European dress differed from most forms of Indian dress, in the way it was cut, stitched and shaped to the contours of the body. Gender differences are also strongly demarcated in European dress, with women’s skirts and dresses giving them a distinctive and exaggeratedly curvaceous outline in relation to more linear form’s of men’s dress. In comparison to the Indian styles, European dress has appeared physically restrictive and often ill adapted to Indian climate.
EUROPEAN CLOTHING
HEAVY, RESTRICTIVE, UNSUITABLE
Although British did not want Indians to adopt European styles, they did want them to buy and wear British manufactured textiles. There were plenty of reasons why Indians might not have wanted to adopt European dress. It was heavy, restrictive, unsuitable to India’s climate, expensive by comparison to Indian dress and comparatively difficult to obtain. European dress is clearly a status symbol enabling them to distinguish themselves from the common people and participate in the mysteries of “civilisation”. Hence the Indians have now started mixing the European styles with Indian fabrics in their garments.
SWADESHI HOLI
There were a number of leading figures in India who were deeply concerned about the decline not only in traditional textiles, but in the whole realm of hand made artistic production. Hence, some early nationalist leaders such as Swantantrya Vir Savarkar, Dadabhai Naoroji, Justice Ranade , B.G Tilak advocated the need to buy Swadeshi (Indian Made) cloth in order to restore a declining Indian economy. Gandhi’s terminology of using Khadi is highly emotive, arousing mass hysteria from the crowds and stirring episodes where people stripped themselves of foreign garments and tossed them on to the communal fires.
IS KHADI A SOLUTION?
Rather than worrying about the extent to which they should westernise their dress, the Indian elite were now worrying about the extent to which they should simplify and Re-Indianise it. Gandhi actively encouraged people to interpret one another’s clothes as signs of personal and political belief. There were numerous pressures encouraging people to adopt khaki - not only from Gandhi’s constant speeches but also from a vast network of people , dedicated to the propagation of khaki, both the textile and the ideology surrounding it.
A woman married to a khadi-wearing husband is obliged to wear khadi herself. Once dress has attained
such elaborate symbolic importance, there was no escape from participation in the battle of clothes, no
matter whether a person wished to participate in it or not.
Headgear was important to men and women of both the origins. The British men removed their hat in front of a king or a person of higher social rank, as a way of showing respect. Whereas Indian women had to cover their faces with the ghoonghat to show respect towards the other person. Many Indian men who wore European dress maintained some form of Indian turban or cap, which was not only regarded as the centre of purity in Indian culture , but a distinctive badge of affiliation to different caste or religious groups.
CAPitalists
Gandhi’s primary motive was to invent a form of pan-Indian headwear which anyone could afford and wear. A man’s headwear, was important for revealing his social and religious identity. By promoting this small khadi cap, Gandhi hoped to attain a level of visual uniformity which had never existed in Indian headwear.
