Sari and the Narrative of Nation in 20th-Century India

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GLOBAL TEXTILE ENCOUNTERS
edited by
Marie-Louise Nosch, Zhao Feng
and Lotika Varadarajan
Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78297-735-3
Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78297-736-0
ANCIENT TEXTILES SERIES VOL. 20
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Global textile encounters / edited by Marie-Louise Nosch, Zhao Feng and Lotika Varadarajan.
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Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-78297-735-3 (alk. paper)
1. Clothing and dress--Social aspects. 2. Textile fabrics--Social aspects. I. Nosch, Marie-Louise editor.
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Front cover: A richly embroidered child’s Jhabla or tunic patterned with an intercrossing Simurgh (senmurw)
and peacocks from the Indian tradition along with oral designs from Persia (Photographed by Ashdeen
Z. Lilaowala for the Parzor Foundation; © Unesco Parzor).
Back cover: European foliage and scallops form the base of this Parsi embroidered sari (Photographed by
Ashdeen Z. Lilaowala for the Parzor Foundation; © UNESCO Parzor).

Contents
1 Textiles and Elite Tastes between the Mediterranean, Iran and Asia
at the End of Antiquity
Matthew P. Canepa .............................................................................................................. 1
2 Palla, Pallu, Chador: Draped clothing in ancient and modern cultures
Mary Harlow .....................................................................................................................15
3 From Draupadi to Dido: The duties of dress in paintings inspired
by the Mahābhārata and the Aeneid
Linda Matheson ................................................................................................................. 25
4 The Kaftan: An unusual textile encounter in the Scandinavian Late Iron Age
Ulla Mannering ................................................................................................................. 33
5 Ancient Running Animals: Tablet-woven borders from China and Norway
Lise Ræder Knudsen .......................................................................................................... 37
6 The Development of Pattern Weaving Technology through Textile Exchange
along the Silk Road
Zhao Feng ...........................................................................................................................49
7 The Earliest Cotton Ikat Textiles from Nahal ´Omer Israel 650–810 CE
Orit Shamir and Alisa Baginski .........................................................................................65
8 Northerners: Global travellers in the Viking Age
Eva Andersson Strand .......................................................................................................75
9 Unravelling Textile Mysteries with DNA Analysis
Luise Ørsted Brandt ...........................................................................................................81
10 The Traceable Origin of Textiles
Karin Margarita Frei .........................................................................................................87
11 The World of Textiles in Three Spheres: European woollens,
Indian cottons and Chinese silks, 1300–1700
Giorgio Riello .................................................................................................................... 93

Contents
v
12 Chinese Silks in Mamluk Egypt
Helen Persson ................................................................................................................. 107
13 Woven Mythology: The textile encounter of makara, senmurw and phoenix
Mariachiara Gasparini ................................................................................................... 119
14 Textile in Art: The inuence of textile patterns on ornaments
in the architecture of medieval Zirikhgeran
Zvezdana Dode ............................................................................................................... 127
15 Coromandel Textiles: The changing face of consumer demand
and weavers’ responses 16th to 18th century CE
Vijaya Ramaswamy ........................................................................................................ 141
16 The Jesuit Dilemma in Asia: Being a naked ascetic or a court literate?
Selusi Ambrogio .............................................................................................................. 151
17 The Colourful Qualities of Desire: Fashion, colours
and industrial espionage
Vibe Maria Martens .......................................................................................................................159
18 Fashion Encounters: The “Siamoise”, or the impact of the Great Embassy
on textile design in Paris in 1687
Corinne Thépaut-Cabasset ............................................................................................. 165
19 The Chinoiserie of the 17th to 18th-century Soho Tapestry Makers
Mette Bruun ................................................................................................................... 171
20 Exoticism in Fashion: From British North America to the United States
Madelyn Shaw ................................................................................................................ 177
21 Textile Symbolism and Social Mobility during the Colonial Period
in Sydney Cove
Judith Cameron ............................................................................................................. 189
22 The Impact of British Rule on the Dressing Sensibilities
of Indian Aristocrats: A case study of the Maharaja of Baroda’s dress
Toolika Gupta ................................................................................................................. 199
23 Re-imagining the Dragon Robe: China chic in early twentieth-century
European fashion
Sarah Cheang ................................................................................................................ 205

vi Contents vi
24 Sari and the Narrative of Nation in 20th-Century India
Aarti Kawlra ................................................................................................................... 213
25 From Cool to Un-cool to Re-cool: Nehru and Mao tunics in the sixties
and post-sixties West
Michael A. Langkjær ..................................................................................................... 227
26 Too Old: Clothes and value in Norwegian and Indian wardrobes
Ingun Grimstad Klepp, Lill Vramo and Kirsi Laitala ..................................................... 237
27 A ‘Stinging’ Textile: Cultivation of nettle bre in Denmark and Asia
Ellen Bangsbo ................................................................................................................. 245
28 Fist-braided Slings from Peru and Tibet
Lena Bjerregaard ........................................................................................................... 255
29 Parsi Embroidery: An intercultural amalgam
Shernaz Cama ................................................................................................................. 263
30 The Navjote Ceremony and the Sudreh Kushti
Lotika Varadarajan ........................................................................................................ 275
31 Globalization, Identity and T-shirt Communication
Karl-Heinz Pogner .......................................................................................................... 283
32 India to Africa: Indian Madras and Kalabari creativity
Joanne B. Eicher .............................................................................................................. 295
33 Textile: The non-verbal language
Jasleen Dhamija .............................................................................................................. 303
Dedication ........................................................................................................................... 309
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ 311

Sari and the Narrative of Nation in
20th-Century India
AArti KAwlrA
24
Aarti Kawlra has a PhD in social anthropology from the Indian Institute of Technology,
Delhi (IITD). Currently she is a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library,
New Delhi and formerly a Fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden,
Netherlands. Her interest in the sari is part of a wider research focus on the politics
of the handloom and a two-decade long engagement with India’s craft traditions.
She has been a faculty member of the National Institute of Fashion Technology
in Chennai during which period she was a Mombusho Fellow (1999–2000) at
the National Museum of Ethnology, Japan to study the kimono for a comparative
understanding of textiles and clothing cultures. She has published in Design Issues
(MIT Press), Fashion Theory (Berg Publishers) and Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress
and Fashion: South Asia and South East Asia. She is presently working on a book
manuscript on a weaving community in south India.
This paper explores the sari as the site for creation of a pan-Indian identity in
nationalist imaginaries in pre-independence India and later, post-independence, in
the shaping of the ‘modern’ Indian woman within a gendered code of aesthetics.
The sari is viewed here as a cultural artifact within a wider politics of feminizing
tradition and nation in modernity.
The sari, prior to its ascription as the dress of the Indian woman in the 20th century,
was a medium of exchange for spices along the pre-industrial trade route between
Europe and south-east Asia. From the 16th century onwards, the famed double-ikat
or yarn-resist dyed and patterned silk patola saris, still woven in the town of Patan
in the western port of Gujarat, were exchanged for gold and silver in India, by the
Portuguese, the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company and,
in turn, traded for spices in the islands of Malaysia and Indonesia. Later, during the
colonial period, silk and cotton saris were used as textile design references for British
manufacturers in order to revitalize trade between the Empire and its colonies. This
is evident in the set of 18 volumes of the Collections of Specimens and Illustrations of the
Textile Manufactures of India produced in 1866 by Forbes Watson, the ocial reporter
on the products of India. The documentation features swatches of saris that have
been preserved and labelled as fabrics ‘plain’ and ‘ornamental’, ‘coarse’ and ‘ne’,
and ‘lower-class wear’ and ‘upper-class wear’ and is intended for the facilitation of
design replication and mass production in Britain.

AArt i KAwl rA214
Saris were also integral to orientalist perceptions of the customs and manners
of people under imperial rule and served to highlight dress as a marker of regional
and occupational identities highlighting dierences based on religion and caste. The
Company paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries rst brought to light by curator
Mildred Archer of the Indian Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum in
London depict this vividly (Fig. 24.1).
With the call for independence during the opening years of the 20th century,
however, began the nationalist phase of obliterating regional dierences of dress and
identity as part of the anti-colonial struggle and search for a pan-Indian nationalist
imaginary. The nationalist reclamation of culture and aesthetics generated a narrative
of nation that was intimately linked with, and in fact inscribed upon, the sari which
became the site for the articulation of ‘tradition’ through the reproduction of gender
specic dress codes in modernity.
Shaping a National Feminine Ideal
In the imperial government’s discourse, tradition was constructed as a historical past
within a cartographic paradigm of disciplinary authority and control. It involved
processes of spatial and temporal xing of India’s people and culture (including
Fig. 24.1: Company paintings in folios of castes and occupations. Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu. Gouache and watercolour.
A basket maker and his wife c. 1830. Museum no. IS.39:16-1987; a weaver and his wife c. 1830. Museum no.
IS.39:12-1987; a carpet weaver and his wife c. 1800. Museum no. AL.8940N; Telugu inscriptions (© Victoria and
Albert Museum, London). An Indo-European hybrid style patronized by the British, these paintings were intended
as souvenirs of life in the colony and produced as part of the colonial project of ‘knowing’ subject populations
through taxonomic descriptions of ‘natives’ and their cultural milieu for consumption back home. Bound in albums
or portfolios these paintings highlight sartorial differences among women belonging to specific occupational castes
and tribes, such as dancing girls, weavers, agriculturalists, basket makers, fisherwomen etc., across the occupied
territory. In these images, both women are wearing their saris high at the mid-calf level with pleats tucked in at
the back in the typical style of the lower castes in south India.

24. Sa ri and the narrative of nation in 20th- Cen tur y india 215
their dress) within a regionally identiable and locally distinct taxonomic order to
create an ideologically selective version of tradition. Nationalists, on the other hand,
canonized tradition as an idealized past representing India’s cultural and spiritual
evolution, and used it to counter the colonial interpretation of Indian society as
non-modern and ‘backward’.
The intellectual climate of the 19th century, represented by the philosophical
idealism (based on Christian, Hindu and Buddhist religious principles) of socialist
and theosophist Annie Besant (1847–1933), cultural nationalism of poet and artist
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1841) and the traditionalism of art historian Ananda
Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), had already paved the way for a nationalist revival
that posited Eastern spirituality and cultural values in opposition to the material
degradation of the West. For the anti-colonialists, the nationalist project was
therefore predicated upon a selective appropriation of only those aspects of western
modernity and Indian tradition that could be justied ideologically. By locating this
reconstituted world of ‘Indianness’ within the home, understood as the untouched,
authentic inner core of the nation, the nationalist discourse further proclaimed its
keepers – women, as repositories of tradition together with the sari as a symbol of
India’s cultural ethos and feminine beauty. So central was the sari to the nationalist
narrative that, from the early part of the 20th century, it was employed to create
the persona of a ‘proper’ Indian woman within the frame of increasingly gendered
societal norms.
Whereas Christian missionaries and colonial reformers emphasized the adoption
of Victorian morality and feminine ideals through dress and social reform, the
nationalist reformist agenda involved the feminization of women’s bodies and
their role in society. This had been the case, for instance in the upper/breast-cloth
controversy, which saw frontal and mid-ri nudity as indecent and the Anti-Nautch
campaign against the institution of devdasis, or dedication of young girls as temple
dancers in south India on account of charges of child-prostitution. Women’s sari-clad
bodies were postulated by them as palimpsests for the inscription of gender-based
standards of beauty recast as ‘traditional’ in a rapidly modernizing India.
Conformity within these gendered norms of familial propriety meant that
women’s bodies and their sexuality were bound within the framework and control
of a patriarchal household as devoted mothers, wives and daughters, rendering any
relation outside of it as both unnatural and immoral. Ideals of beauty and modesty
were, therefore, drawn from upper-caste homes and role models to achieve a
nationally appropriate gure representing both cultured upbringing and feminine
grace. In Kerala for instance, while covering the breasts with an upper cloth was
considered of utmost importance, the sartorial prescription was framed within a
familial norm of monogamous relations and pursuit of conjugal harmony established
upon the notion of an “ideally gendered” individuality within an emergent modern
caste order. It demanded a sanitisation or aestheticization of the female body to suit
modern male tastes and advocated “an idealised ‘womanly’ or ‘manly’ subjectivity,
in the distinct spheres of the domestic and the public” (Devika 2005,462).

AArt i KAwl rA216
The sari was vital to this project of the shaping of the modern Indian woman
now increasingly educated and urbanized unlike her still ‘traditional’, often
rural counterpart. Subjected to new patriarchal codes of conduct, the nationalist
discourse located the new woman squarely within the domestic order of the home
and family while connecting them to the outside world of the public. The emergent
social order was projected in contradistinction to western society but also seen as
distinct from the prevalent patriarchal order legitimized by tradition. The nationalist
interrogation of tradition proposed a culturally discriminatory identity based upon
an ancient cultural heritage that had been sanitized and secured against all charges
of primitivism and regression.
The re-instatement of the sari as the dress of the ‘cultured’ Indian woman had its
most conscious expression in Madras (now Chennai in south India) at Kalakshetra, the
international academy of arts set up by Rukminidevi Arundale (1904–1986), as part of
her eorts in the revival of the devadasi’s solo dance or sadir and its re-constitution
as the Bharata Natyam or traditional dance form of India. It was accompanied by the
invention of a new dance costume – a sari styled along the lines of already existing
elite sari varieties. The ‘new’ dancer at Kalakshetra was henceforth projected as the
bearer of ancient traditions; her body disciplined and trained to perform a sacred
practice in a pure and chaste state. Her dance costume was accordingly modied
and divested of all associations with the by now ill-reputed devadasi community.
Gradually, with the institutionalization of Bharata Natyam as a ‘classical dance form of
India’ in both national and international circles, the costume of its highly acclaimed
individual proponents too began to be recognized and emulated as the dress of the
cultured and educated elite Indian woman.
The popularization and spread of a national ideal of feminine beauty based on
‘tradition’ was made possible initially by the printing press and later with cinema
during the rst half of the 20th century. The creation of iconic Indian beauty was
achieved in the atelier of the modernist painter from the Travancore court, Raja Ravi
Varma (1848–1906) whose paintings of iconic Indian women are examples of such an
ideological narrative of ‘tradition’ that not only standardized ‘Indian’ womanhood but
also established it as a marker of national culture through what Guha Thakurta (1991)
has called the “domestication of divinity”. Varma’s feminine images exuded qualities
of femininity associated with characters drawn from select texts or classics of Hindu
myth and religion and very quickly became popular female gures representing
social and political values of a nation-in-the-making. ‘Tradition’ was thus embodied
in these mythic heroines whose iconography, even though regionally discernible,
was intended to signify a pan-Indian, national ideal-type.
Visual stereotypes of women, type-cast as faithful wives and nurturing mothers,
proliferated in homes across the country via calendars, magazines and lms. Regional
and local traditions of saris and their wearing styles were now articulated, their
parameters modied and drawn into the fashioning of a pan-Indian model of classical
beauty which not only feminized tradition but also the nation (Fig. 24.2).

24. Sa ri and the narrative of nation in 20th- Cen tur y india 217
By the early part of the 20th century, the emergent ethos of nationhood was
premised on a discourse of tradition feminized and visually represented through
a national iconography of deied womanhood whose virtues were vital to the
preservation and sustenance of ‘national culture’. Women were designated in the
nationalist discourse to be in service to their male counterparts at the helm of the
colonial onslaught, as well as to the nation now imagined as motherland in the gure
of Bharat-Mata, the epitomic ‘mother’ inspiring her ‘sons’ (citizens) to sacrice their
lives in the relentless struggle for freedom (Fig. 24.3).
Indeed the feminine embodiment of nation as ‘Mother India’ not only mediated
between tradition and modernity but provided a powerful unifying symbol of national
territory. The rhetoric of freedom frequently invoked by nationalists indexed Mother
India’s sari as a material symbol of nation, draped and duly contained from rapid
erosion by English mill-made fabrics and the tyranny of colonial rule. National
Fig. 24.2: Galaxy of Musicians. A painting by Raja Ravi Varma, c.1889. Oil on canvas (Jayachamarajendra Art
Gallery, Mysore). A tableau of 11 women from diverse regions and communities in India represented through
differences in dress for consumption in the colonial metropole, the painting is an allegory of a nation predicated
upon the gendering of the nation as female. It presents within a single image an ethnographic pageant of 11
diverse stereotypes of oriental beauty in their regional sartorial finery while alluding to the emergence of a unified
space of the Indian nation.

AArt i KAwl rA218
space was thus mapped as a feminized and divinized sari-scape via the image of
Mother India and represented consistently as a desexualized, fair-skinned woman
of an unspecied ethnic identity. The nationalist imagery was circulated via mass
media as the divine personication of a motherland worthy of both worship and
sacrice. Mother India and her sari were now instruments of territorial integration,
symbolizing the freedom struggle and the burgeoning of a nationalist spirit
established upon a feminine ideal.
Sari as ‘Dress’ of the Modern Indian Woman
Thus far we saw how the sari was implicated in the discourse of tradition and nation-
building within gendered socio-political norms and values. In this section, we examine
nationalist strategies that shaped the contemporary wearing style of the sari within
Fig. 24. 3: Vande Mataram, (I praise thee, Mother). Chromolithograph published by Rao Brothers, Coimbatore,
Tamil Nadu, 1937. Painting of Mother India by P. S. Ramachandra Rao (Kind permission of Erwin Neumayer and
Christine Schelberger, Vienna). The anthropomorphic representation of national space as a sari-clad Mother India
is vivid in this patriotic visualization from the pre-Independence period. The sari as producing the geo-body of the
emergent nation is evident in this poster produced possibly to celebrate the country-wide electoral victory of the
Indian National Congress. Not only is Mother India installed as and within the cartographic outline of the nation,
even her sari is the tri-coloured flag of the party espoused by M. K. Gandhi in the 1920s, a version of which later
became the Indian national flag.

24. Sa ri and the narrative of nation in 20th- Cen tur y india 219
an internationally dened dress reform and fashion system of appropriate feminine
attire. The Victorian morality of Christian missionaries and social reformers that saw
upper-body nudity as indecent and seductive had paved the way for Hindu women to
cover their breasts with ‘blouses’ which were earlier simply enwrapped in the sari.
By the rst half of the 20th century, the three-piece ensemble of sari, petticoat and
blouse had become the norm for the educated urban woman whose clothing choices
increasingly represented a progressive outlook while still emphasizing sartorial
elements representative of ‘Indianness’.
Many women from elite families began adopting the stitched blouse and
petticoat as essential accoutrements within a gendered code of dress as a marker
of emancipation and progress. The new mode of dress adopted was seen to be free
from the somewhat restrictive aspects of regional traditions, and considered a more
unifying wearing style for the gentlewomen in modernising India. Some women
acquired their sartorial inspiration from the English memsahib’s tailored outt. They
modelled their sari blouses with pleats, rues, fancy sleeves, elaborate necklines
and corsets, complemented by accessories such as heeled footwear and sumptuous
hairdos. Their sari drape and ensemble became more and more ‘ecient’ and ‘dress-
like’ to accentuate their recognition of fashionable trends of the colonial metropole.
Others, more involved in the social reform movement from the second half of the
19th century in Bengal and other parts of the country, devised regional variations
in draping styles and clothing ensembles to tactically mark dierences in religion,
caste, class, age and marital status while asserting the image of a modern, urban and
educated, Indian woman (Fig. 24.4).
The dress of British women who came to live in India, on the other hand, either
conformed to sartorial conventions of a memsahib or, as in the case of Annie Besant,
was modied to suit their role in Indian society and politics. Their clothing practices
often challenged prevailing notions of wifely and domestic duties within the context
of empire and often served as counter-cultural interventions of a politically sensitized
sociality for women negotiating colonialism (Fig. 24.5).
In the early years of nation-building, the nationalist ideology was largely
integrationist and sought to use India’s diverse regional textile traditions, evident in
the continued presence and resilience of the hand-woven sari, as a marker of India’s
cultural unity. The creation of a new national dress thus involved the incorporation
and renement of regional and local sari (textile design) traditions while adhering to
an emergent modernist ideal and sartorial conception of the Other, predicated upon a
rhetoric of nation based on ‘unity in diversity’. By postulating stitched clothing as the
attire of foreign invaders of the ancient land – Mughals and the British, the discourse
established an unbroken legacy and indigenous preference for the ‘unstitched’ or
draped garment as emblematic of the emergent, primarily Hindu, nation. It now also
featured the twin processes of specialization of India’s regional diversity, on the one
hand, and the development of a trans-regional, unifying dress, on the other.
While Gandhi called for the wearing of coarse khadi (hand-spun and hand-
woven) saris as a unied nationwide symbol of opposition to British manufactured

AArt i KAwl rA220
Fig. 24.4: Jnanadanandini Debi standing on the
left dressed in a high-necked, long-sleeved blouse
alongside her husband, Satyendranath Tagore,
older brother of Rabindranath Tagore, first Indian
to join the Indian Civil Service of the British Raj and
contributor to the cause of women’s emancipation.
She is glancing in the direction of Kadambari Debi
who is wearing a dark Parsi sari with the characteristic
attached border of Chinese floral silk embroidery
initially popularized by Parsi traders who brought
back all-over hand embroidered saris from China in
favorite motifs like the peony, butterfly and floral
tendrils from the mid-19th century. Kadambari Debi
is the wife of Jyotirindranath Tagore (another of the
Tagore brothers) who is seen seated. The photograph
was taken by P. Vuccino & Co. in the early 1880s
(Rabindra Bhavan, Visvabharati, Shantiniketan).
Jnanadanandini Debi, sister-in-law of poet and Nobel
laureate Rabindranath Tagore in Calcutta, is known to
have experimented with the regional (Bengal) drape
and form of her sari to suit travel and appearances at
public engagements with her civil servant husband in
her role as a Bhadramahila (mother, wife, daughter of
English educated professionals such as lawyer, doctors
and government servants). She was influenced by
prominent Parsi reformer Lady Bachoobai, known
for her work in bringing English education to
women at a time when they were still struggling for
individual expression. Her dress innovation for the
modern Indian woman of her time was an eclectic
mix of English, Muslim and Bengali clothing and
accessories while maintaining the ideal gender norms
of a Bhadramahila. The drape of the sari on the left
shoulder in the progressive Parsi manner, together
with a blouse and an optional chador later came
to be known as the “Thakurbarir sari” or the style
adopted by the Tagore family.
Fig. 24.5: Prominent British socialist, theosophist,
women’s rights activist, and supporter of Indian
self-rule, Annie Besant is seen here wearing a sari
with a long-sleeved shirt-blouse. She is flanked by
Henry Steel Olcott to her right and Charles Webster
Leadbeater to her left at the international headquarters
of the Theosophical Society in Adyar, Chennai,
December 1905. (From Wikimedia Commons, the
free media repository: http://commons.wikimedia.org/
wiki/File:Olcott_Besant_Leadbeater.jpg). Annie Besant’s
involvement in politics in India as a member and later
president of the Indian National Congress in 1917
necessitated a sartorial reworking of her public image as
the forerunner of a cultural nationalism founded upon
theosophical principles of the wisdom of the ‘East’.
In her later years, and particularly during her time in
Adyar until her death in 1933, she divested her western
dress in favour of saris and flowing ecclesiastical robes
as appropriate wear for her speeches and campaigns
across India. Her dress was indeed an affirmation of
both her anti-imperial sentiment as well as a nationalist
program for cultural awakening of women in India.

24. Sa ri and the narrative of nation in 20th- Cen tur y india 221
clothing, as part of his programme for self-rule or swaraj, elite women members of
the freedom movement sought to promote handloom saris from dierent regions as
a means to reiterate India’s cultural distinctiveness from the West. Social reformer
and craft revivalist, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya (1903–1988) for instance, is known
for providing new markets for artisanal products from remote corners of India. She
is well known for her role in the creation of numerous cultural institutions dedicated
to regional handicrafts, handlooms and performing art traditions in independent
India. She used the sari as a visible symbol of women’s participation in the freedom
movement and insisted that women Congress party workers wear bright kesaria or
saron orange saris in contrast to the white ensemble worn by their male colleagues
for their political work while also encouraging elite women, still entrenched in roles
dened by patriarchy, to contribute by patronizing local weavers and dyers for their
customary sari selections.
The post-independence era narrative of nation as ‘unity in diversity’ is best
articulated in the wardrobe of India’s rst woman Prime Minister Indira Gandhi
(1917–1984). Her collection of handloom saris emanate an aura of nationalist spirit
and feminine respectability so central to her political image of a leader taking pride
in the diversity of India’s cultural heritage on the national and international stage
(Fig. 24.6).
The middle-class appropriation of the sari as national fashion and the preferred
dress of the modern Indian woman took place through mainstream Indian cinema
and the rising popularity of mill-made saris, themselves products of mass production
and aspirational consumption patterns. Early lm heroines were modestly clad in
saris with blouses and petticoats and the, by now ubiquitous, left shoulder drape, as
epitomes of domestic complicity and conjugal sacrice in sharp contrast to the anti-
heroine’s seductive western outt portraying the model of a blatantly liberal virago.
Bollywood increasingly began employing mill saris, for the anonymity of provenance
they provided, to accentuate the image of the voluptuous female ideal of full breasts,
wide hips, fair skin and long owing hair, rst disseminated through Ravi Varma’s
chromolithographs. The stage was now set to propagate the image of a demure, yet
alluring, icon of female sexuality for India’s media-consuming masses (Fig. 24.7).
‘Miss India’ and the ‘Neo-Liberal Nostalgia’ for Homeland
The last decade of the 20th century has witnessed what may be called the creation of
a transnational feminine ideal through the circulation of fashion and global capitalist
consumption among the diaspora and cosmopolitan elite in India. Stripped of its
regional identity of drape and weave, the sari is now recast as a six-yard textile canvas
of ‘art-to-wear’ within a primarily global design aesthetic.
For the cosmopolitan Indian woman, the cultural semantics of the sari are rapidly
changing as it becomes the site for articulating norms of beauty inuenced by an
international fashion media promoting an ‘ideal’ female body form. According to

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this new code of aesthetics, the sari is a sensuous wrap that enhances its wearer’s
experience of ‛feeling beautiful’ (Fig. 24.8).
The sari together with its tailored blouse is now seen as a fashion garment ensemble
– its six-yard length a planar canvas for designers to explore their textile designing
skills, while the blouse, a fashionable bustier reminiscent of a garment from western
costume history. Indeed, the female mannequin or body form has been the nodal
point of experimentations with the sari among fashion designers, such as Germana
Fig. 24.6: Photo of the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi
clad in a cotton sari, hand-woven from south India as
a symbol of the nationalist slogan “unity in diversity”
(Courtesy of the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust; photo:
website of the Indian National Congress,<www.aicc.
org.in/new/index.php>). Drawing upon the same spirit
of an ‘all India mind’ with which Pandit Jawaharlal
Nehru, her father and first prime minister of India
articulated his political diplomacy in wearing a version of
the Muslim sherwani, Indira Gandhi selected her saris in
such a way that they represented the skill of the ‘Indian’
weaver and were sourced from each and every state in
the country and were recognisable as such from their
distinctive designs and styles. In the decades after her
death, Mrs Gandhi’s daughter-in-law, Sonia Gandhi, too
has built her own public persona along similar lines to
symbolize her political lineage and undisputed position
as the current head of the oldest (Congress) party of the
nation. Her own saris, often custom-woven by highly
skilled weavers from different states, undoubtedly
represent her allegiance to the cultural heritage of the
nation through its various constituencies (the regionally
distinct handloom weaving traditions), and continue to
be an indispensable feature of her party’s election image
of a powerful but respectable woman leader of India.
Fig. 24.7: Popular Bollywood actress Sridevi in a ‘wet sari’
song sequence in a mill-made blue chiffon sari from the
blockbuster film titled “Mr. India”, 1987 directed by Shekar
Kapur (Photo: Courtesy of Mr. Boney Kapoor, Producer of
Mr India; Shemaroo Entertainment, Mumbai: http://m.
indiatoday.in/gallery/bollywoods-top-10-navels/4/4841.html).
The eroticization of the sari often in ‘wet sari’ song sequences
is attributed to the famous actor-director of Indian cinema Raj
Kapur who is known to have acknowledged his debt to Ravi
Varma’s female body form (Dwyer, 2000). Even the wearing
style of draping the end-piece over the left shoulder, now
the overarching sari drape of the modern Indian women, is
implicated in this depiction of feminine appeal as it reveals
as much as it conceals the heroine’s body for the benefit of
‘Mister’ India.

24. Sa ri and the narrative of nation in 20th- Cen tur y india 223
Fig. 24.8: A well-known media personality and female
ambassador of India’s national sport, cricket, is seen
here wearing a designer sari graphically evoking the tri-
coloured flag of the nation. The image was not available
either from the model or from the textile design studio
on account of a national-level controversy and an artist’s
representation of the same has been reproduced here
instead by Sidsel Frisch from CTR, Copenhagen: www.
desipolitan.com/2009/02/ja-na-ga-na-ma-na.html).
Among Indian fashion designer Satya Paul’s numerous
art-to-wear saris is the graphic interpretation of the
national flag worn at an international sporting event
by cricket ambassador and media personality, Mandira
Bedi whose sari, unlike Bharat Mata’s sari in Fig. 24.3, is
not claiming the cartographic boundaries of the Indian
nation but rather the contoured and sculpted body of
the Indian female (fashion) model wearing it.
Marucelli in the 1950s and 1960s, Pierre Cardin and Zhandra Rhodes in the 1970s and
1980s and Gianni Versace in the 1990s, who pioneered reinterpretations of the Indian
sari by employing western garment draping and construction techniques to arrive at
novel sari drapes and blouses.
In its postmodern fashion articulation, the sari is now the dress of the cosmopolitan
Indian woman whose body is also the site for variously scripting the nation across
a transnational terrain of feminine beauty and gender codes. Miss India icons at
international beauty contests and pageants are invariably sari-clad during the national
costume round as they “perform India” even as they conform to an internationally

AArt i KAwl rA224
accepted model of Indian elegance and womanhood that continues to hark back to the
pre-independence rhetoric of the nation as the paragon of haloed femininity. Beauty
queen contestants see themselves not only representing India but as embodying the
nation in all its sovereign glory; “… at Miss Universe, you are India, you are everyone’s
idea of India and everything that it stands for” (Quoted in Runkle 2004, 156).
For the diaspora and cosmopolitan elite in India, the reconstitution of the sari
as a transnational fashion garment provides an alternative to western wear while
registering their allegiance to a shared cultural heritage. For the contemporary Indian
woman of classic taste and renement, the sari signies the nostalgia of tradition
while making a fashion statement of distinctiveness derived from the luxury of the
handmade amidst mass produced options (Fig. 24.9).
The liberalization of the Indian economy and circulation of global capital, since
the last decade of the 20th century, has created new consumption patterns among
transnational elite and led to the expansion of a market for “cultural” goods, such
as the handloom sari. The trend has fostered the design and production of a range
of artisanal saris that conjure nation in the deft hands of handloom weavers whose
products are increasingly being recast as culturally specic and geographically unique
novelties for the Indian diaspora.
The framing of historically distinct cultural products like the Kanchipuram sari
under the Geographical Indications of Goods or (GI) is part of a wider global trend to
standardise production and consumption and to set them apart from cheap imitations.
In India, the GI is part of a protective global circumscription of artisanal products
within a state-supported neo-liberal paradigm for economic growth under which
hand-woven saris, historically associated with specic localities and geographical
regions in the country, are gradually being incorporated. According to this altered
version of ‘tradition’, then the queen among silk handloom saris of India is now the
Intellectual Property of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, who is both owner and
arbitrator of a regional Indian artisanal heritage.
Confronted with global capitalist consumption and competition, the Indian sari,
in all its local variations in the 21st century, promises to yet again be the site for the
reclamation of nation through the GI’s cartographic remapping of ‘tradition’ in order
to spotlight ‘nation’ together with its (cultural) products in the global marketplace.
Only this time, it pregures a vastly altered version of the global, together with its
norms of feminine beauty and morality.

24. Sa ri and the narrative of nation in 20th- Cen tur y india 225
Fig. 24.9: The Raja Ravi Varma Sari, hand-woven in silk, gold and precious stones by Chennai Silks, Tamil Nadu India.
Recognized under the Guinness Book of World Records, 2008 (Chennai Silks Showroom, Chennai; © Photo Kritika
Sharma). ‘Tradition’ and ‘nation’ are both safely ensconced within the folds of this ‘most expensive’ sari studded
with precious stones and created over a period of nearly 5000 hours of hand work by weavers hailing from the
ancient town of Kanchipuram in southern India and officially protected under the Geographical Indications Act
of 1999 as the Intellectual Property of the Indian nation. The national ideal of femininity and snapshot of nation
exemplified by Raja Ravi Varma’s painting A Galaxy of Musicians (Fig. 24.2) is now transfigured into a cultural
product catering to a neo-liberal nostalgia for tradition.

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Further Reading
Partha Chatterjee (1992) The Nation and its Women. In The Nation and its Fragments. Colonial and
Postcolonial Histories, pp. 116–134.
Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, Sukhendu Ray (translator) and Malavika Karlekar (2010) The Many Worlds
of Sarala Devi: A Diary and The Tagores and Sartorial Styles: A Photo Essay.
Jayakumari Devika (2005) The Aesthetic Woman: Re-Forming Female Bodies and Minds in Early
20th Century Keralam. Modern Asian Studies 39:2, pp. 461–487.
Rachel Dwyer (2000) The Erotics of the Wet Sari in Hindi Films. Journal of South Asian Studies, 23:2,
pp. 143–160.
Tapati Guha Thakurta (1991) Women as ‘Calendar Art’ Icons: Emergence of Pictorial Stereotype in
Colonial India. In Economic and Political Weekly, 26:43, pp. 91–99.
Susan Runkle (2004) Making ‘Miss India’. Constructing Gender, Power and the Nation. South Asian
Popular Culture, 2:2, pp. 145–159.