Mridula Sharma
Modern fashion systems have given women in independent India a `plethora of alternatives. Some argue that wearing Western clothing necessarily implies living in a colonial hangover. Others contend that Western fashion offers cheaper alternatives that are comfortable for the female body.
The act of wearing a sari is not personal anymore. This is particularly true for academics in India. Consider the example of Kerala. The state government in Kerala gave teachers the right to wear churidar or salwar in February 2008, yet the intervention of school management largely ensured teachers’ submission to institutional directives. What resulted was the emergence of a nexus of women intellectuals wearing saris during teaching so that their educational institutions could preserve ‘moral’ codes of conduct under the guise of customary practices.
The imposition of socially acceptable forms of public behaviour for women professionals sustains networks of misogyny in the digital space of online classes. Despite the severity of circumstances created during the pandemic, government-school teachers in Kerala continued to dress in saris in conformity with orthodox models of formal attire and idealised femininity. The picture of a particular teacher in a blue sari was promptly circulated on social media, followed by the dominant sexualisation of her body in the form of memes and clips. Vinita Teresa points out that such incidents uncover the glorification of vulgar depictions of teachers’ bodies in spaces of platonic masculine sociality.
When I was a student at Delhi Public School, I observed a similar pattern of aggrandisement of saris. The school had no formal dress code, yet the teachers were naturally expected to wear saris at annual events and parent-teacher meetings. The fact that it was an informal expectation probe an important question: why do social, economic, and political systems police female bodies?
Additionally, we cannot neglect the contribution of young adolescents toward existing systems of patriarchal oppression of women. The social space of male bonding often promotes the endorsement of misogynistic beliefs that perpetuate the process of objectification of women in academia.
I must have been in seventh or eighth grade when a new teacher joined the faculty of Commerce at my school. She was a smart woman who looked impeccable in modern saris. My seniors followed her from one class to another in groups of four. Carrying a pen and a notebook became the perfect pretext of stalking. Of course, one could always say that one wanted to clarify ‘queries.’
This indicates that the materialisation of sexual fantasies involving a female academic effectively shifts focus from her intellectual competence to her sensuality, which consciously encourages a culture of blatant sexism.
Non-male students also play a crucial role in glamorising saris. Their quotidian school uniforms deny them the opportunity to publicly showcase their bodies in the elaborate construction of the garment, which develops their fascination with its potentialities. For instance, on my high school farewell, almost all the girls in my batch donned a sari, either bought especially for the occasion or borrowed from a relative’s closet.
I belonged to the latter category. My aunt’s lemon-yellow sari was beautiful from a post-millennial perspective. It was the right combination of sass and elegance in my imagination, which was — now that I think about it — clouded with socially sanctioned ideas of beauty and desirability. Some of my friends experimented with contemporary designs of relatively conventional variants of the sari. In this way, farewell became an opportunity for us to embellish our bodies with über cool clothing and accessories that could easily enable the formation of a digital collection of memoranda, thereby documenting our youthful corporeality.
The politics of sari remains a contentious subject in university spaces as well, particularly in research conferences and seminars organised by English departments, to which I belong. As an aspiring academic, I have often wondered why professors of literature, a subject that actively participates in the dismantling of orthodox socio-cultural ‘values,’ continue the tradition of wearing saris on campus. Having worn the garment only once, I earlier presumed that it was as uncomfortable for everyone as me. Such an assumption was tempting because the sari’s structure gave the impression that it deliberately hindered mobility. That women’s professional clothing, in India or elsewhere, restricted bodily autonomy appeared absolutely plausible within the nexus of patriarchal power systems that seek to confine and domesticate the female body.
To understand the popularity of saris in academic spaces, we can also approach the reception of the cultural commodity from an ‘academic’ perspective. In one such interpretation, the sari can be seen as a postcolonial reclamation of an identity that has been suppressed by the hullabaloo of Western fashion. But is it appropriate to sacrifice the female body to underscore discourses of anti-coloniality?
Consider the example of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the leading thinkers of contemporary times. In an interview with Bulan Lahiri, Spivak, a professor of English at Columbia University, remarks that wearing a sari isn’t a statement of identity for her. It’s rather an economical choice.
She adds, “I don’t think of it as traditional because this way of wearing the sari came about from conversations with the Tagore family women and women from Bombay in order to make the sari more manageable for riding cycles and so on.”
My acquaintance with this insightful interview on the Internet dismantled my earlier hypothesis about the inherent discomfort of saris. The pleats of the garment are, in fact, positioned in the front to enable the wearer to move with ease. While some might still experience inconvenience, the fact remains that an individual choice of wearing a sari in universities and conferences need not imply conformity with parochial social norms.
A friend of mine, who started teaching literature at the University of Delhi four years back, acknowledges increasing opposition to saris. Institutional mandates that necessitate women intellectuals to adhere to cultural customs of clothing are demonstrably oppressive. However, in academic spaces where such obligations do not exist, the act of wearing a sari can indeed be subversive. For instance, my friend purchases cotton saris from local Indian vendors. This simple act dismantles the neocolonialist monopoly of giants like Amazon, challenges the network of capitalist exploitation, and supports marginalised families that might not have adequate resources for effective marketing in a globalised economic system.
Therefore, a sari produces a multitude of significations at once, particularly for the professors of literature in various colleges and universities. It holds on to the culture of the homeland. It can perpetuate the state’s oppression of women’s bodies. It might signal an economic choice that factors in bodily autonomy. It accentuates the curves of the female body and enables its sexualisation, particularly in latitudes governed by male domination. Sometimes, it can emerge as a signifier of postcolonial feminism. It is perhaps this ambivalence that makes discourses on sari simultaneously ever-changing and timeless.
