Grassroots secularism growsThe farmers’ movement has strengthened the bonds between Muslims and Jats in western Uttar Pradesh

At a time when history is aggressively being redefined as moral science, and where its only purpose is to list out the ‘villains’ and ‘heroes’ of the past, in order to identify and vilify large sections of our society today, nuanced social/cultural histories must be restored to centre stage. Now more than ever, children need to learn ways of thinking historically, from which there may emerge some understanding, some tolerance, and hopefully, new forms of civility. This is the most urgent necessity of our times.

How would a history of clothing, for instance, be of any value at a time when young women are being deprived of an education and acrimonious debates are raging about whether or not the hijab has any meaning and place in the classroom? Since pedagogical efforts take long to bear fruit, this suggestion may even appear quite trivial. Yet, such a chapter on the complex histories of clothing over the last two centuries was indeed a part of the revised NCERT books of 2005-06, (Standard 9), before it was finally withdrawn in 2019.

Signifying power structures

A history of clothing can do several things: it will introduce students to thinking more about what ‘dress codes’, and opposition to them, have done in the past, and what they signify. For one, dress codes symbolised and affirmed power structures – whether these were colonial, upper caste, religious or patriarchal power structures. By using their power and even violence, states, religious authorities, upper castes, or even male heads of families could insist that people conform to prescribed ways of dressing. Societal hierarchies were thus sustained and perpetuated.

But this is where the history of the last 200 years is crucial, since it equally reveals the numerous and continual attempts made, often with success, to challenge these hierarchies, and adopt new codes of clothing. We need to understand both these processes in order to make sense of an almost irresolvable predicament: when a specific community is under siege, and the language of uniformity is used to naturalise majoritarian choices, the prohibition on the hijab imposes the choices of the majority community on a minority. We also know from history that wearing the hijab has not always been the choice made by young Muslim women, who have spent a good part of the 20th century throwing it off, in a rejection of patriarchal community authority. Thinking historically allows us to see the subversiveness of both these kinds of actions, i.e, adopting the hijab and throwing it off, depending on the context within which the woman makes that choice. Thinking historically allows us to understand what is disturbed when women, who are supposed to be only the bearers of ‘culture’, tradition and honour (since honour is always the property of men), wear or shed clothes in defiance of those wish to ‘save’ or ‘protect’ them.

A history of clothing will allow students to understand how such debates arose in the past and how they were resolved. Consider the issues that arose about headgear and footwear. At the beginning of the 19th century, it was customary for British officials to follow the Indian etiquette and remove their footwear in the courts of ruling kings or chiefs. There were some British officials who were comfortable in Indian clothes. But in 1830, Europeans were forbidden from wearing Indian clothes at official functions. Indians, meanwhile, were required to respect their own customs and take off their shoes when entering a government institution. This was seen as humiliating to the colonised elite, and was challenged by the Parsi Manockjee Cowasjee Entee, who refused to take off his shoes in court, saying, ‘in our social intercourse [we] never ever take off our shoes before any Parsee however great...’. It took 20 years of petitioning for the strict ‘shoe respect’ rules to change.

Debates in India

Those were colonial orders which were defied by the humiliated, usually elite Indians. Meanwhile, dress reform debates had grown to a crescendo between Indians themselves in places like Travancore in southern Kerala, where women and men conventionally did not clothe their upper bodies, especially when they appeared before deities or upper castes. Partly as a result of missionary work, there was a clamour for dress reform and in 1822, women of the ‘Shanar’ (later called Nadar) caste were attacked by upper caste Nairs in public places for wearing a cloth across their breasts. These disturbances, referred to by historians as the ‘breast cloth disturbances’, ended successfully when in 1859 the Travancore government passed an order permitting the Nadar women (who belonged to the community engaged in coconut cultivation) to use the breast covering. They thus gained the self-respect that they had long been denied.

These processes of dress reform were far from uniform even in late 19th century Kerala, where it remained customary for women, including upper caste women, to keep the upper body bare. There is a well-known recollection of a married woman who longed to wear a blouse, if only for her husband, but was scolded and thrashed by her mother for wanting to look like a Muslim. In Bengal, on the contrary, there were anguished cries heard from as early as 1872 to reform the scandalously fine and transparent clothing of women, worn without petticoats and underwear, and to urgently produce a more moralised and decent attire. To Gnanadanandini Devi Tagore goes the early credit for bringing the Parsi style of sari-wearing into widespread subcontinental use, adding layers to the draped sari, a blouse and a skirt as well as shoes and socks.

So, there is strength to thinking historically, and to understanding the great deliberation that has gone into the production of styles of dress – and their defiance – over the last two centuries alone. Should our students not know and understand the symbolic strength of M.K. Gandhi’s experiments with clothing, and his adoption of the peasant costume after more than 20 years of dressing like his colonial masters? He came in the long line of Indians who had experimented with styles of self-representation, ranging from Ramakrishna (who adopted Mohommedan clothes to understand Islam better) to Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghosh and Rabindranath Tagore, who all chose very different but deliberate ways of communicating their spirituality or Indianness through their sartorial choices. Should our students also not learn why B.R. Ambedkar’s decided to adhere to the three-piece (western) suit as a sign of social mobility, of modernity, and in defiance of upper caste proscriptions on lower caste dress, as did many self-assertive miners at the Kolar Gold Field beginning in the 1920s?

These rich, varied, and contradictory pasts, which are our heritage, must be brought back into the classroom, for discussion, debate, and above all for building greater civility, and respect for difference.

Janaki Nair retired as professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University