Dressing Down
For women, each thing we wear is an acknowledgement of the world we live in, its demands and its joys
Acouple of years ago, my friend M said to me, “I don’t know why people say women are not raped because of their clothes. Of course they are.” I nearly fainted. Feminism had taught me that rape has nothing to do with what women wear and everything to do with men. Then M continued, “Men rape because of rage and power, not sex, right? And sometimes when they see a woman dressed a particular way, they feel, ‘How dare she? She must be punished’.” M made perfect sense. It reminded me of everyone, from the Mumbai airport official who stopped me mid-gallop to point out my bra strap to the two burly men who chased me through Kozhikode back when I was a bald-headed, pants-wearing teenager to any number of sneering male relatives.
In her poem, Varaiyaraigali Ezhuthuthal, Tamil poet Perundevi writes (translated by N. Kalyan Raman)
In how many ways can we understand the female tongue?
Not, certainly, as beads of vivacity – even their redness is not a pomegranate’s.
Nor as a pet parakeet’s song— with its recurring refrain, it’s the whirling signpost at the crossroads of a storm.
Old-fashioned people like to make Whatsapp-type jokes about how women think of clothes all the time and men not at all. Which is true. Not like we have a choice. Our clothes are almost always the whirling signposts at the crossroads of a storm in India.
Even when I was in school uniform, we never forgot what we wore. A teacher who spotted me in the corridor and said that the neckline of my pinafore (which had a shirt under it) was too low. My mother, knowing that every last rial of my father’s salary in those years was necessary to barely keep us kids in school, told me to ignore her. It was the only time my mother told me to ignore someone’s comments about my clothes. Much of her mothering has involved trying to make sure that I would not be criticised for what I wore. My early childhood was marked by too dowdy for Bangalore/ too racy for Kerala/ too weird for Muscat/ too Pentecostal/ too Tamil.
At 21, and freshly kicked out of my grandparents’ home, for a while I miraculously lost any sense of appropriate clothing. It was like a concussion or something that happens in the novels of Marquez imitators.
In that time I never wore a bra, had no sense of tight/ loose/ low/ high/ short/ long. I went all over the country heedlessly. Working in an office of 100-odd young people in and around Bangalore slums, we were constantly looking at each other and ourselves and our clothes, but mostly without judgement.
After that I worked for some years in an office in Delhi where for political correct-
IT’S NOT LIKE WE HAVE A CHOICE. OUR CLOTHES ARE ALMOST ALWAYS THE WHIRLING SIGNPOSTS AT THE CROSSROADS OF A STORM IN INDIA
ness no one commented on what you wore. I have never been more depressed in my life. I slid into a rotation of black dresses and saris. No enjoyment came from it. After all, I was in uniform and no one was looking.
In my 30s, back home in Bangalore, I came out of the boredom maya and gave away all my streamlined black dresses. Here I am surrounded by women, mostly cis, some trans, all equally interested in clothes. From my cook T who is trying to land a nice daughter-in-law for her son and is planning what to wear when the girls’ parents come to writer M who recently got Stella Jeanesque African-inspired clothing stitched by our favourite tailor, Salman Khan.
At The Ladies Finger, the feminist website I run, in the past year, we interviewed several women about why they wear what they wear to work. Through the series, we met college lecturers who wore Frida Kahlo sari blouses, women who wore the same thing every day to reduce thinking about clothes and a zoo vet who picked her colours based on whether it would alarm the animals.
Until recently, I never talked about clothes because it was considered frivolous. Meanwhile, women were beaten for wearing jeans, for wearing nuns’ habits, for not wearing dupattas. Dalit men were beaten for wearing moustaches, Muslim men for skullcaps, transpeople for wearing the clothes of their choice. In my neighbourhood, I see tiny, knee-high girls and full-grown women in shorts and in hijabs and gigantic poufy frocks. Any of these could cause them to be admired/ reviled/ beaten/ raped. But, you know, only women think about clothes.
Every day, men exercise their right to wreck women’s lives based on what they are wearing. Last fortnight, 19-year-old Hanan Hamid emerged in the public eye as a charming Kerala woman who goes to college and sells fish to support herself. She dreams, she told a newspaper, of working in Malayalam movies and on social media appeared filmi King Cophetuas to give her roles. Hanan was already working as a junior artiste. This detail was ignored. Trolls found her rather too well-dressed for poverty and viciously attacked her, all of which boiled down to ‘how dare she’. The Cophetuas turned cagey. Hanan reappeared in the media, cried, told her ‘full story’. But as author Sowmya Rajendran writes, “Hanan did not fit their image of a ‘poor little girl’ appealing to their mercy. She is neatly dressed, her hair cut fashionably, her voice assertive even in the face of adversity.” It’s hard to decide whether to focus on wishing Hanan well or wishing the rest a pustulous death.
In all this time, whatever the mid-life crisis of our nation, gents continue to dress dully. (Except for wearing their hair in what filmmaker Paromita Vohra memorably called ‘Iyengar Yoga wood blocks’). You only have to hear women complaining about how little effort men make to dress to dates or ladki-dekhoing to realise that men have little notion that a) clothes have a lot to do with romance; and b) romance is about pleasing the other, not self-aggrandisement. How do we transcend if we are always worried about our bra straps? Should we also become like men? Can we, even? Activist Christina Dhanraj recently took apart the idea of ‘leaning in’ as a Dalit woman in corporate India. She wrote, “In my experience, the typical profile of a female colleague who is most often encouraged or promoted, is that of a non-Dalit that is fair-skinned, generally regarded as a physically attractive woman, belongs to the upper or the upper-middle class, and is visible to most people.”
Twenty-three-year-old L is a nanny in Bangalore. She has experienced the joys and pains of freedom all her life. She ran away from home at 16 to work. She likes her work but her wardrobe is limited by each employer whose home she lives in. Sometimes, she has been scolded if her leggings ride above her ankle when she is asleep. Sometimes she has gone shopping with a young employer and bought identical fast fashion items together. She owns thousands of clothes—party dresses, hot pants, dungarees and studded ankle boots, all in the under Rs 1,000 range. She posts selfies and dubsmash videos online in these clothes. She has never ‘friended’ her husband on Facebook because even an on-duty kurtis could offend her in-laws with their lack of sleeves or tightness or colour (coz you know dark girls shouldn’t wear dark colours).
She loves the relative anonymity of cities. “I wish I could wear all my clothes whenever I wanted. When I go on holiday with my husband, I wear the clothes I like in places where no one knows me,” she says. On the other hand, she remembers with nostalgia and pride how well-known she was back home in Tamil Nadu. For being the girl in the
SURE, I WISH INTO THAT HEAVEN OF SARTORIAL FREEDOM, LET MY COUNTRY AWAKE. WHERE WE WOULDN’T BE LYNCHED FOR BARE ARMS, MOUSTACHES OR COVERED HEADS
village with the highest heels, the girl who all the boys would come to watch when she played cricket, the girl with the best clothes always.
Sometimes, like L, I begrudge the daily, near-hourly calibration of clothing I have to do. The rest of the time she and I forget what our wardrobes have to do with the demands of the world and just splash about in it like Scrooge McDuck in his gold coins.
Sure, I wish, every now and then, that into that heaven of sartorial freedom, let my country awake. Where we wouldn’t be lynched for moustaches or bare arms or covered heads. But I resent the calibration much less than before. And here is why.
As I get dressed I remember that every woman I know, regardless of how interested in clothes she is, is making these decisions too and in a strange way each thing we wear is an acknowledgement of the world we live in, its demands and its joys. We submit our finery or lack thereof to the gaze of the world because we live in it.
THE MAN PRINCIPLE
When most men get up in the morning and wear the first thing at hand, it is because they have been told that their bodies are there to trample the world.
Recently, a translator friend remarked on her two favourite online groups—a Facebook group for girls with curly hair and another a group of translators. Why were translators such nice people, she wondered. Then she quoted another translator in saying that translation was less about personal glory and more an act of literary citizenship, literary civic-mindedness.
I think of men wearing what they will— the equivalent of that uncle who won’t learn the local language, who won’t try new food on holidays and who, by god, will not use Google maps or ask for directions. Uncles who are lost but want others to find them and feed them.
And then I think of women across the country, figuring out what to wear and where to wear it, constantly translating themselves for others. Here is how that fantastic Perundevi poem ends.
The female word is our concord with freedom, as also grief over our remoteness therefrom; and in the card deck of sentences that befriend and betray the law of the father, a joker-trump.