Yesudas’s prejudice against jeans is not a one-off phenomenon. My parents and aunts are similarly prejudiced against jeans as much as some of your aunts and parents are. But that does not quite make my father or mother or scores of my other relatives misogynist. Neither would I like them to be at the center of a national debate on misogyny through which their credentials of being proper citizens of India are being judged over the past five days. Like similar such cultural tropes, ‘national modernity’ in a third-world country such as India was also created on the basis of a gendered and casteist understanding of our dress code. So an uppercaste man, expected to represent modernity and earn for the family, was also in sync with the cultural milieu that was generated by the circulation of colonial capital. By mid-nineteenth century many urban uppercaste Indian males, especially in Calcutta and Bombay, could expertly transition from wearing western attire to what was considered as ‘rightful attire’ in the particular cultural milieu from which they came from. Similarly, woman’s body became the site on which ideas of the caste-nationalist tradition were being tested and perfected against the corrupting influences of the Western-modern. In our national imagination, we have these opposing views of sartorial modernity, modernity all the same, in the popular depiction of Mohandas Gandhi and Dr B. R Ambedkar—one as a half-naked fakir, the other fully-attired in a western garb. Gandhi shedding clothes, after his tryst with the West, on behalf of the poor, and Ambedkar accoutring himself in a three-piece suit, positioning himself as a beacon of emancipation for the untouchables. From where I hail from, Southern Kerala, historical contestations over the right to wear dignified clothes have had a defining influence on my identity as a lowercaste man. Until the nineteenth century Travancore state had strict codes and conducts regarding how lowercaste women and men should have worn their attire. Nadars, a lower, predominantly toddy-tapping caste, for example, were prohibited from carrying umbrellas and wearing shoes, among other such things. As Bernard Cohn puts it: “Nadar women could not carry pots on their hips nor could they cover the upper parts of their bodies. Nair women were allowed to wear a light scarf around their shoulders, which at times would be draped over their breasts. However, they were expected to be bare-breasted in the presence of brahmans and other high-status people, as a sign of respect. In addition, all castes below the rank of Nair could wear only a single cloth of rough texture, which was worn by both men and women and which could come no lower than the knee nor higher than the waist. Syrian Christian and Moplah women were permitted to wear a short, tight-fitting jacket, the kuppayam.” It was the Nadar caste members’ gradual conversion to Christianity that helped them break this stranglehold of uppercaste control over their bodies. By the early nineteenth century, women from Nadar caste “began wearing “long clothes” at the request of the missionaries; as conversion spread across the border into Travancore, the Nadar women began to wear the Nair breast cloth”. However, Nadar women who wore the Nair breast cloth “were attacked, stripped, and beaten; chapels and schools were also burned.” However, the right to wear what was deemed as dignified clothing was soon extended to members of other lowercastes such as Ezhavas as well, thanks to protracted struggles waged by the lowercastes against uppercaste domination. In this context, it should be remembered that not very far from where I and Yesudas hail, in Cherthala, an Ezhava woman called Nangeli had cut off her breasts and bled to death over 200 years ago in protest against a breast tax imposed by the Travancore state. Much of the fabled wealth of the Travancore temple which was discovered recently was built over a period of several decades on such taxes imposed on lowercaste bodies and clothings. As ironical as it may sound, for the history of the Nadar caste’s struggles for a life of dignity, Cohn relies also on the documentation of these struggles done in 1980 by another Yesudas from Kerala, the historian R. N Yesudas. As Cohn puts it, “The controversy over the breast cloth lives on in the works of the historian R. N Yesudas”. It is no accident then that for people like R.N Yesudas and many other Yesudases from the pre-independence generation who hail from similar lowercaste communities, the right to live a sartorially dignified life has a radically different connotation from what can be quickly captured using casteist uppercaste slants like misogyny. (to be continued...)
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 11:48:45 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015