Lipi Begum is Programme Leader in Fashion Management at the

Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton and former lecturer

in Marketing and Branding at the London College of Fashion, University of
the Arts London. She has worked as a United Nations global consultant for
the ready-made garment sector in Bangladesh and has developed fashion
education globally. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and currently
Open Space editor for the International Journal of Fashion Studies (Intellect).

Rohit K. Dasgupta is a lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the

Institute for Media and Creative Industries, Loughborough University. He
is the co-editor of Friendship as Social Justice Activism: Critical Solidarities in a Global
Perspective (2017); Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender and Art (2015) and Masculinity
and its Challenges in India (2014). Most recently he was the lead investigator on
the Wellcome Trust UK funded project ‘Mobile-ising for Sexual Health’.

Reina Lewis is Professor of Cultural Studies at London College of Fashion,

University of the Arts London. Her books include: Muslim Fashion:
Contemporary Style Cultures (2015); Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the
Ottoman Harem (2004); Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation
(1996). Edited volumes include: Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating
Faith (2013); Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western Women's
Writings: A Critical Reader (with Nancy Micklewright 2006); Feminist
Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (with Sara Mills 2003); Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay
Visual Cultures (with Peter Horne 1996). Reina Lewis co-edits two books
series: Dress Cultures with Elizabeth Wilson; and Cultures in Dialogue
with Teresa Heffernan.

‘This is a very much needed collection with a great range of highly

original ethnography and a helpful spread across the region . . . The
material is fascinating and ready to be picked up by comparativists
working in China, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and so on.’
– Caroline Osella, SOAS, University of London
 Series Editors: Reina Lewis & Elizabeth Wilson

Advisory Board: Christopher Breward, Hazel Clark, Joanne Entwistle,

Caroline Evans, Susan Kaiser, Angela McRobbie, Hiroshi Narumi,
€
Peter McNeil, Ozlem Sandikci, Simona Segre Reinach

Dress Cultures aims to foster innovative theoretical and methodological frameworks

to understand how and why we dress, exploring the connections between clothing,
commerce and creativity in global contexts.
Published and forthcoming:

Branding Fashion: Bridging the Self and the Niche Fashion Magazines: Changing the Shape of
Social Consumer Fashion
by Anthony Sullivan by Ane Lynge-Jorle n

Delft Blue to Denim Blue: Contemporary Dutch Sinophilia: Fashion, Western Modernity and
Fashion Things Chinese after 1900
edited by Anneke Smelik by Sarah Cheang
Dressing for Austerity: Aspiration, Leisure Styling South Asian Youth Cultures: Fashion,
and Fashion in Postwar Britain Media and Society
by Geraldine Biddle-Perry edited by Lipi Begum, Rohit K.
Experimental Fashion: Performance Art, Dasgupta and Reina Lewis
Carnival and the Grotesque Body Thinking Through Fashion: A Guide to Key
by Francesca Granata Theorists
Fashion in European Art: Dress and Identity, edited by Agne s Rocamora
Politics and the Body, 1775 – 1925 and Anneke Smelik
edited by Justine De Young
Veiling in Fashion: Space and the Hijab in
Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles Minority Communities
in the Transglobal Landscape by Anna- Mari Almila
edited by Wessie Ling and Simona
Wearing the Cheongsam: Dress and Culture in a
Segre Reinach
Chinese Diaspora
Fashioning Indie: Popular Fashion, Music By Cheryl Sim
and Gender
by Rachel Lifter Wearing the Niqab: Fashioning Identities among
Muslim Women in the UK
Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith
by Anna Piela
edited by Reina Lewis

Rei na Lewi s: [email protected]

Eli zabeth Wi lson: [email protected]
At the publisher, Phi li ppa Brewster: [email protected]
 Styling
South
Asian
Youth
Cultures
Fashion, Media & Society
edited by
Lipi Begum, Rohit K. Dasgupta and
Reina Lewis
 Published in 2018 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
London • New York
www.ibtauris.com

Copyright Editorial Selection q 2018 Lipi Begum, Rohit K. Dasgupta, Reina Lewis

Copyright Individual Chapters q 2018 Kaustav Bakshi, Lipi Begum, Rohit K. Dasgupta,
Sunil Gupta, Sandya Hewamanne, Raisa Kabir, Sneha Krishnan, Tereza Kuldova, Reina Lewis,
Arti Sandhu, Sarah Shepherd-Manandhar, Charan Singh, Paul Strickland, Priya Swamy

The right of Lipi Begum, Rohit K. Dasgupta and Reina Lewis to be identified as the editors
of this work has been asserted by the editors in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part
thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images
in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

References to websites were correct at the time of writing.

Dress Cultures

ISBN: 978 1 78453 917 7

eISBN: 978 1 78672 562 2
ePDF: 978 1 78673 562 1

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Typeset in Joanna MT by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
CONTENTS

List of Images vii

List of Plates ix
Contributor Notes xi
Acknowledgements xv

Style, Fashion and Media in South Asian Youth Cultures 1

Lipi Begum, Rohit K. Dasgupta and Reina Lewis
1. Street Style vs. Style on the Street?: Two Interpretations
of Indian Street Fashion 30
Arti Sandhu

2. Style-ish Girls and Local Boys: Young Women and

Fashion in Chennai 49
Sneha Krishnan

3. Rituparno Ghosh, Sartorial Codes and the Queer

Bengali Youth 65
Rohit K. Dasgupta and Kaustav Bakshi

4. In/Visible Space: Reflections on the Realm of Dimensional

Affect, Space and the Queer Racialised Self 86
Raisa Kabir in conversation with Lipi Begum and Rohit K. Dasgupta

5. Faces of Subversion: Queer Looks of India 96

Sunil Gupta and Charan Singh

6. Designing for ‘Zippies’ and the Madness of Bhootsavaar:

On Commercially Inflected Artistic Nationalism and
Branded ‘Subcultures’ 102
Tereza Kuldova
vi STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

7. Trouser Wearing Women: Changing Landscape of Fashion

among Free Trade Zone Factory Workers and Contemporary
Political Tensions in Sri Lanka 124
Sandya Hewamanne

8. Changing Fashions of Bhutanese Youth: Impacts on Cultural

and Individual Identity 146
Paul Strickland

9. Matching Clothes and Matching Couples: The Role of

Dress in Arranged Marriages in Kathmandu 165
Sarah Shepherd-Manandhar

10. ‘Of Course It’s Beautiful, but I can’t Wear It!’: Constructions
of Hindu Style among Young Hindustani Women
in Amsterdam 183
Priya Swamy
11. Bras are not for Burning: The Bra and Young Urban
Women in Delhi and Bombay 202
Lipi Begum

Index 223
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1 Camel traders wearing their traditional attire at the

annual cattle fair in Pushkar. From the blog post titled Camel
Traders of Rajasthan, 11 August 2014, wearabout.wordpress.com.
Image courtesy of Manou. 39
Figure 1.2 Fashion designer Anand Kabra on Day 2 of
Lakme India Fashion Week 2010, wearing a T-shirt from
Topman, shirt from CK Jeans, self-designed waistcoat and
pants from Fabindia. From a blog post dated 9 March 2010,
wearabout.wordpress.com. Image courtesy of Manou. 44
Figure 3.1 Rituparno Ghosh playing Rudra in Chitrangada
(2012). Image courtesy of Shri Venkatesh Films. 74
Figure 3.2 Rituparno at Kolkata Fashion Week 2009.
Image courtesy of Abhishek Datta. 78
Figure 3.3 Rituparno with actress Deepti Naval in Memories
in March (2012). Image courtesy of Shri Venkatesh Films. 80
Figure 6.1 Kalki Koechlin for Hello India, 27 May 2015.
Image courtesy of Hello India. 107
Figure 6.2 Nitin Bal Chauhan, New Delhi, 2012.
Image courtesy of Arash Taheri. 110
Figure 6.3 Rishi Raj, a stylist, Bhootsaavar, 2013, Crescent Mall.
Image courtesy of Nitin Bal Chauhan. 115
Figure 6.4 Ritika Singh, a singer, Bhootsavaar, 2013,
Crescent Mall. Image courtesy of Nitin Bal Chauhan. 117
viii STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Figure 8.1 Foreign road workers in Bhutan, 2016. Image

courtesy of Paul Strickland. 148
Figure 8.2 Western influence on youth fashion: dressed
for going out at the weekend, 2016. Image courtesy
of Paul Strickland. 150
Figure 8.3 His Majesty Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck and
Queen Jetsun Pema, 2011. Image courtesy of Yeewong Magazine. 152
LIST OF PLATES

Plate 1 Sita, Raisa Kabir, 2014. 35mm film, type C prints, paper montage,
64 cm £ 45 cm, from the series (In)visible Space. Courtesy of Raisa Kabir.
Plate 2 Ungendering Prayer, Raisa Kabir, 2014. 35mm film, type C prints,
paper montage, 64 cm £ 45 cm, from the series (In)visible Space. Courtesy
of Raisa Kabir.
Plate 3 Maryam, Raisa Kabir, 2014. 35mm film, type C prints, paper
montage, 64 cm £ 45 cm, from the series (In)visible Space. Courtesy of
Raisa Kabir.
Plate 4 Girl in Hijab, Raisa Kabir, 2014. 35mm film, type C prints, paper
montage, 64 cm £ 45 cm, from the series (In)visible Space. Courtesy of
Raisa Kabir.
Plate 5 Nikita, Raisa Kabir, 2014. 35mm film, type C prints, paper
montage, 64 cm £ 45 cm, from the series (In)visible Space. Courtesy of
Raisa Kabir.
Plate 6 Raju, Raisa Kabir, 2014. 35mm film, type C prints, paper
montage, 64 cm £ 45 cm, from the series (In)visible Space. Courtesy of
Raisa Kabir.
Plate 7 Raju detail, Raisa Kabir, 2014. 35mm film, type C prints, paper
montage, 64 cm £ 45 cm, from the series (In)visible Space. Courtesy of
Raisa Kabir.
Plate 8 Yasmin/Girl with Hijab detail, Raisa Kabir, 2014. 35mm film, type C
prints, paper montage, 64 cm £ 45 cm, from the series (In)visible Space.
Courtesy of Raisa Kabir.
x STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Plate 9 Arti, Greater Kailash, M-Block Market, from the series Mr Malhotra's Party,
Sunil Gupta, 2007– 2012. Courtesy of the artist and SepiaEye.
Plate 10 Anusha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, from the series Mr Malhotra's Party,
Sunil Gupta, 2007– 2012. Courtesy of the artist and SepiaEye.
Plate 11 Mario, Golf View Apartments, from the series Mr Malhotra's Party,
Sunil Gupta, 2007– 2012. Courtesy of the artist and SepiaEye.
Plate 12 Sonal, Yusuf Sarai, from the series Mr Malhotra's Party, Sunil Gupta,
2007– 2012. Courtesy of the artist and SepiaEye.
Plate 13 Untitled #5, from the series Kothis, Hijras, Giriyas and Others, Charan
Singh, 2013 –2014. Courtesy of the artist and SepiaEye.
Plate 14 Untitled #6, from the series Kothis, Hijras, Giriyas and Others, Charan
Singh, 2013 –2014. Courtesy of the artist and SepiaEye.
Plate 15 Untitled #1, from the series Kothis, Hijras, Giriyas and Others, Charan
Singh, 2013 –2014. Courtesy of the artist and SepiaEye.
Plate 16 Untitled #2, from the series Kothis, Hijras, Giriyas and Others, Charan
Singh, 2013 –2014. Courtesy of the artist and SepiaEye.
CONTRIBUTOR NOTES

Lipi Begum is Programme Leader of Fashion Management at the

Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton and former lecturer
in Marketing and Branding at the London College of Fashion, University
of the Arts London. She has worked as a United Nations global consultant
for the ready-made garment sector in Bangladesh and has developed
fashion education globally. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
and currently Open Space editor for the International Journal of Fashion Studies
(Intellect).

Rohit K. Dasgupta is a lecturer in media and cultural studies at the Institute

for Media and Creative Industries, Loughborough University. He is the co-
editor of Friendship as Social Justice Activism: Critical Solidarities in a Global Perspective
(2017); Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender and Art (2015) and Masculinity and its
Challenges in India (2014). Most recently he was the lead investigator on the
Wellcome Trust UK funded project ‘Mobile-ising for Sexual Health’.

Reina Lewis is Professor of Cultural Studies at London College of

Fashion, University of the Arts London. Her books include: Muslim Fashion:
Contemporary Style Cultures (2015); Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the
Ottoman Harem (2004); Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation
(1996). Edited volumes include: Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith
(2013); Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western Women’s Writings:
A Critical Reader (with Nancy Micklewright 2006); Feminist Postcolonial Theory:
A Reader (with Sara Mills 2003); Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Visual Cultures (with
Peter Horne 1996). Reina Lewis co-edits two books series: Dress Cultures
with Elizabeth Wilson; and Cultures in Dialogue with Teresa Heffernan.
Reina convenes the public talk series Faith and Fashion: http://www.
xii STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

arts.ac.uk/research/current-research/ual-research-projects/fashion-
design/faith-and-fashion/.

Arti Sandhu is Associate Professor in Fashion Design at the School of

Design in DAAP, University of Cincinnati. Her research is mainly centred
on contemporary Indian fashion and related design cultures. She is the
author of Indian Fashion: Tradition, Innovation, Style (2014).

Sneha Krishnan has a doctorate in Development Studies from the

University of Oxford, where she is currently a Research Fellow at
St John’s College. Her research interests lie at the intersection of youth,
gender and agency. She has previously researched masculinity and
nationalism in India and continues to research gender and youth in Tamil
Nadu.

Kaustav Bakshi is Assistant Professor in English at Jadavpur University,

India. He is the co-editor of Anxieties, Influences and After (2009) and Rituparno
Ghosh: Cinema, Gender and Art (2015). Most recently he received the Charles
Wallace India Trust research grant to further his research in the UK on Sri
Lankan expatriate fiction.

Raisa Kabir is a multidisciplinary artist, weaver and writer who uses

contemporary textiles, sound and photography to interrogate and
question concepts around the politics of dress in connection to gender,
race, and sexuality. Trained as a weaver at Chelsea College of Art,
University of the Arts London, she exhibits and curates work globally and
has undertaken creative residencies in Mexico, Bangladesh and the UK –
www.raisakabir.com, www.in.visiblespace.co.uk.

Sunil Gupta is a photographer, artist, educator and curator based in

London and New Delhi. Born in New Delhi (1953) and educated at the
Royal College of Art (London, 1983) he has been involved with cultural
activism and independent photography as a critical practice for many
years. He is currently Visiting Professor at University of the Creative Arts,
Farnham. His recent books include Wish You Were Here (2008) and Queer
(2011).
 CONTRIBUTOR NOTES xiii

Charan Singh lives and works from New Delhi and London. He is
currently a PhD candidate in Photography at the Royal College of Art,
London. Singh’s photographic practice is informed by HIV/AIDS work
and community activism in India, along with a formal study of the
history of art and photography. The principal common threads of his
works are memory, story-telling, and masculinity. His work has been
exhibited at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi (2014), The Photographers
Gallery, London (2015), FotoFest, Houston (2015), GFEST, London
(2015) and SepiaEye, New York (2016).

Tereza Kuldova is a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of

Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, and a Social
Anthropologist. She is currently part of the HERA II Enterprise of Culture
research project. Among her recent publications are the co-edited Urban
Utopias: Excess and Expulsion in Neoliberal South Asia (with Mathew A. Varghese,
2017), her monograph, Luxury Indian Fashion: A Social Critique (2016) and an
edited volume, Fashion India: Spectacular Capitalism (2013). She is Editor-in-
Chief for the Journal of Extreme Anthropology (University of Oslo).

Sandhya Hewamanne has worked as an assistant professor of

Anthropology at University of Essex, UK and Wake Forest University,
USA. She received her MA and PhD in Anthropology from the
University of Texas, Austin. Her research interests include globalisa-
tion, identity, cultural politics and feminist and postcolonial theory. She
is the author of Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone: Gender and Politics in
Sri Lanka (2008) and Sri Lanka’s Global Factory Workers: (Un) Disciplined Desires
and Sexual Struggles in a Post-Colonial Society (2016).

Priya Swamy holds a BA in World Religions from McGill University and

an MPhil in Asian Studies from Leiden University. Her doctoral research
explored the emergence of a public Hindu identity in relation to temple
building processes in Amsterdam Southeast. Her postdoctoral research at
the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies
(KITLV) in Leiden examines the relationship between active citizenship
and Surinamese Hindu identity in temples in Amsterdam.
xiv STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Paul Strickland is a lecturer and course coordinator for tourism,

hospitality and event management programmes within the La Trobe
Business School in Melbourne, Australia. Paul has extensive industry
experience and has taught hotel management in Bhutan. Paul’s research
areas include ethnic restaurants, Bhutanese studies, wine and event
tourism. Paul is currently a PhD candidate in wine events and innovation.

Sarah Shepherd-Manandhar is currently a PhD candidate in the

Anthropology department at the University of Illinois at Chicago where
she is a Graduate Research Fellow. She has spent the last ten years
travelling back and forth between Nepal and the USA. Her primary
research interests include gender, performance theory, consumption and
material culture.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the dedication of the
contributors, editors and readers. We thank them greatly for being part of
this book. Particular thanks to Amrit Kumar and Mriga Kapadia for the
cover image; the copy-editor, indexer, reviewers and series editor
Philippa Brewster at I.B.Tauris for her professional advice throughout.
Thanks to the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London
and the University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art for kindly
supporting us with funding. Finally, thanks to the anonymous peer
reviewers for their detailed feedback and comments. We would also
like to thank our friends, family and colleagues who have continually
motivated and inspired us throughout the process.
STYLE, FASHION AND
MEDIA IN SOUTH ASIAN
YOUTH CULTURES
Lipi Begum, Rohit K. Dasgupta and Reina Lewis

For the part of the world commonly known as South Asia, fashion and
consumption has come to play an increasingly important role in the
lives of young people and in the formation of youth cultures.
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and
Sri Lanka have all, in related and distinctive ways, seen a growth of
the middle class: this, along with the increased reach of globalised
consumer cultures and a surge in youth population, has produced an
increase in the demand for fashion consumption. The region is the most
youthful of Asia’s sub-regions; it is home to 26 per cent of the entire
world’s youth (the under 25s) and is set to maintain its peak till 2030
(www.social.un.org/youthyear 2011). Collectively, and in different ways
individually, countries discussed in this book have been constituted as
important ‘emerging’ markets for lifestyle goods and services in general,
and for fashion in particular. At a time when established fashion markets
(amongst them the UK, USA and Japan) are exploring the impact of the
world’s increasingly older population, we draw attention to the impact and
implication of demographic shift in South Asia and its related diasporas
which have seen a growth of young people compared to older generations
(Chakma 2014).
2 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Focusing as much as possible on the South Asian region and its

diasporas, this book builds on existing scholarship on youth cultures and
style in the region (Lukose 2009; Nakassis 2016), which to date has
mostly focused on India’s consumer cultures. Market research too has
focused on the size of the Indian market, where the annual expenditure
on apparel has consistently risen over the last decade. However, the
growth of fashion markets and practices within other South Asian regions
is less well-documented, and one of our aims with this book was to put
into articulation under the rubric of ‘South Asia’ far more of the nations
in the region than are usually the focus of study, bringing in new
scholarship on Bhutan, Pakistan, and Nepal.
Whilst there is an intrinsic value to providing some of the first
studies of particular countries, regions or populations, as is the case
most spectacularly with Bhutan, our purpose goes beyond a desire to be
geographically comprehensive. Framed by a historically informed
critical engagement with the constructed entity of South Asia, the
geographical scope of this book brings opportunities for new
comparative studies that value the intra-South Asian transmission of
styles and cultural forms alongside a nuanced understanding of
multiple and interlinking diasporas in diverse postcolonial contexts.
We hope that the reader will be able to see over-arching themes in
relation to youth cultures – generation, age, market, sexuality, religion,
caste, ethnicity, gender, media, the body – in ways that enliven the
understanding of local, national, international and transnational
convergences in and contestations over cultural values and identity.

WHY SOUTH ASIA AS A REGION?

The interconnectedness and differences within the South Asian region

have long demonstrated an ongoing modernity, characterised by
distinctive combinations of traditionalism and neoliberalism (Begum
and Dasgupta 2015; Tarlo 1996), which shape the sartorial identity of
youth across South Asia as explored in this book. Within a comparative
frame our contributors both supply new case studies and bring new
critical frames to the study of those regional fashion practices that have
previously received research attention.
 STYLE, FASHION AND MEDIA IN SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES 3

We propose that studies of contemporary youth cultures and fashion

need to be both specific and comparative, avoiding the tendency of
approaches to regional studies that often disregard the specificities of
different South Asian nations (Dasgupta 2007: xxii). In this way, our
use of the term ‘South Asia’ does not seek to homogenise the different
perspectives found within the region, but to identify and evaluate the
intra-regional influences, conflicts, and possibilities produced by
shared colonial histories and entwined cultural landscapes. South Asia is
not merely a geographic classification coincident with Southern Asia,
though geography is implicit in its appellation. Nor is it a political
entity to be only identified through its more economically powerful
regions, often defined as the Indian sub-continent (India, Pakistan and
Bangladesh). Very few people would give South Asian as their primary
form of identification. Most commonly people name themselves in
terms of nation; as Afghanis, Bangladeshis, Bhutanese, Indians,
Maldivians or Pakistanis. Yet, as diaspora politics have shown, the
components that make these sometimes essentialised national identities are
themselves shifting (Gopinath 2005) in relation to changing patterns of
globalisation and economic fluctuation.
Although the inter-connected regional focus of the book celebrates
multiple cultural identities, the increasing primacy of national identities
in South Asia arising from postcolonial tensions has fuelled xenophobic
brands of nationalist rhetoric whose worldview often erases
commonalities of rich cultural exchange. Spivak has argued that it is
important to not let the plurality of South Asia (or Asia as she describes)
be studied according to the national distinctions favoured by western
political policies. She argues: ‘the pluralised Asia I am thinking of not
only respects, but attempts to know the differences within Asia as
imaginatively as possible’ (Spivak 2008: 2). In this light, the chapters
of this book provide an exercise in imagining the plurality of the
region in terms of dress cultures, clothing and media politics, in
conjunction with responses to the specificity of individual situations.
This interaction between ideas of nationalism(s) and communities
(Anderson 1991) is further discussed by Partha Chatterjee (1993) in
the opening chapter of his book The Nation and its Fragments, maintaining
that nationalisms in the postcolonial world do not necessarily choose
4 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

their ‘imagined community’; questioning the extent to which models

premised on western norms can be applied to postcolonial nations in
South Asia.
Whilst there has been some study of South Asian fashion and
dressing cultures within history, anthropology (Banerjee and Miller
2003; Kuldova 2016; Lukose 2009; Nakassis 2016; Srivastava 2007;
Tarlo 1996), cinema (Dwyer 2000; Wilkinson-Weber, 2014), diaspora
(Bhachu 2004; Mani 2003; Reddy 2016) and in relation to orientalist
transnational implications (Niessen et al. 2003), there has been little
work that has looked directly at transnational implications through a
contemporary youth perspective for the various South Asian regions.
As Emma Tarlo (1996) has argued, dress in India and more largely
South Asia has been and is used to instigate change, question national
identities and assert power. Building on Tarlo’s important intervention
into Indian dress and identity, this collection looks at the South Asian
region as a whole and focuses specifically on contemporary youth
cultures.
For youth in South Asia, the experience of youth as a life stage is
distinctive in a number of ways, framed by gendered codes of
respectability. South Asian young people encounter, and contribute to, a
network of formal and informal surveillance, whose effects are
themselves formative of and formed by discourses of gender, sexuality,
religion, ethnicity and class. As a liminal life phase in which behaviours
that transgress norms of gender, sexuality and respectability may be
temporarily permitted, the exceptionalism of young adulthood
simultaneously reaffirms the status of those norms as essential to
‘adult’ sociality. Across the region and in the diaspora, degrees of fitting
in and/or standing out are subject to the regulatory gazes of schools,
employers, government, states, and religions.

COMPARATIVE FRAME: TEMPORAL, SPATIAL LINKS

AND DISSONANCES

The complexity of globalisation and economic change marked by

transnational cross-flows, disjuncture and difference (Appadurai 1996),
and the destabilising power of nation-states, gives way to exciting
 STYLE, FASHION AND MEDIA IN SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES 5

forms of identity and self-making through digital cultures, globally

connected employment within the fashion, media and textiles sector and
increasing access to transnational flows of creative education (Mora et al.
2014). For Kuldova and Varghese, neoliberalism in South Asia is leading
to a culture of both excess and expulsion, proposing that ‘special
economic zones, the GDP-centred developmentalism, the corporate state,
the liquidation of public spaces, and the increase of the spectacular and
excessive can be all seen also as the signs of the materialization of
exclusions’ (2017: 7).
We hope that our inclusive South Asian comparative frame will have
intrinsic value for regional specialists of South Asia, as also for those
specialising in other emerging fashion regions, whether post-Soviet
Russia, Latin America, and East and Central Asia, or MENA, and sub-
Saharan Africa. In the mix of approaches and critical frameworks utilised
by our authors we also see the richness of cross fertilisation between
related research fields. Conceptualising youth cultures as historically and
spatially located, our contributors provide corollaries for and correctives
to the canon of subcultural youth studies initially formulated in relation
to western, male and white youth cultures. In locating youth cultures in
relation to regional economies and state cultural policies, the essays here
feed into several strands of postcolonial cultural studies, framed by an
understanding of multiple and alternative modernities (Breckenridge
1995; Eisenstadt 2000; Gaonkar 2001), situating class in relation to caste
and religion, and identifying how experiences of gender, as of
generation, are similarly intersectional.
We have chosen contributors from a number of different fields,
finding richness in their range of critical registers and methodological
approaches. Readers will find a creative tension in the use of terms and
concepts; whilst we endeavour in this introduction to provide a
sufficiently cohesive explanation of key terms and concepts and the
different ways in which they are used to help navigate the book, in the
chapters that follow our contributors – driven in part by the
distinctiveness of their particular case studies – may utilise terms and
disciplinary frames in different ways. Our contributors use a variety of
visual, literary, and material sources and generate a range of data in their
research field. This includes ethnographic interviews and observation and
6 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

several approaches to visuality, space and the dressed body. As well as

more conventional forms of data gathering and presentation, we also
feature two photo essays, allowing creative practitioners to provide
different observations on the processes and politics of styling for
representation of the South Asian body. If the resultant images aimed to
intervene into a variety of related pictorial codes, so too do their
conditions of production – as discussed here – intervene into the
gendered, classed, and religiously marked spaces of South Asia and its
diasporas, revealing the socialising impact of spatial relations and the
spatialisations of society (Massey 1994).

CONSTRUCTING YOUTH: GENERATION, CLASS,

GENDER, RELIGION

As with the best work in popular and media studies, the case studies in
this book demonstrate the ways in which South Asian youth cultures
relate to and reframe the multiple cultural forms and social conventions
of South Asian societies. This collection’s insights into how the South
Asian and diaspora context often foregrounds religious and religio-
ethnic components of individual and group identity provides a valuable
antidote to the secularist presumptions that have often underpinned
studies in youth and popular culture, as in fashion studies. Rather
than regard religion as a specialist research field and an inevitably
minority experience, our contributors elegantly integrate the myriad
ways in which religious and spiritual cultures and beliefs inform the
dressing, styling, presentation, and reception of bodies, matching this
to the consideration of other intersectional factors, each spatially and
temporally located.
Whilst many in the West are concerned with, or celebrating, the
perceived return of religion to the public square (whether by recognising
as religion new practices and beliefs or detecting apparently unchanged
the reactivation of previous modes of religious behaviour (Hoelzl and
Ward 2008; Woodhead and Catto 2012), the fact that, in parts of the
world including South Asia, religion never went away has long provided
questions for the secularisation thesis. Religion has not remained static,
and this book provides several compelling examples of how youth
 STYLE, FASHION AND MEDIA IN SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES 7

cultures are framed by religion and belief in South Asian and diaspora
contexts; including the navigation of codes of honour and shame,
changing attitudes to the body and its representation, and the use of
fashion media – especially the increasingly affordable and available
mobile smart devices of digital fashion social media. In attending to
religious and religio-ethnic cultures and practices, the differences
between co-religionists and the policing of boundaries against those
considered heterodox reveal fault lines that go beyond national or
political boundaries.
In all of this, social class plays a distinctive role, given that in South
Asian regions such as India class is foregrounded in caste. At present it is
clear that the access created to symbolic capital through increasing means
of consumption, production and labour force mobility have weakened
caste ties (Beteille 1996; Sheth 1999), and further studies looking at the
interconnections of social class and caste, especially in relation to dress
and embodiment, remain urgent. Studies on youth and class in the
region, particularly India and Nepal, establish that middle-class-ness is
a contested category, not easily definable or homogenous (Liechty 2003;
Mazarella 2006; Osella and Osella 1998), particularly as South Asian
regions move away from savings-ethics towards consumption and
consumer cultures (Srivastava 2007; Jeffery 2010). In the context of
modernism, liberalism and rapid economic growth (varying across the
region), our contributors reveal the many shifting, contested, and
competing sub-categories of ‘middle-class’ that characterise the South
Asian context, explicating, for example, the nuanced distinctions
between lower-middle-class and middle-middle-class as gendered as well
as age-related classifications. As Nisbett cautions, an overly inclusive
definition of middle-class status ‘that includes “schoolteachers in the
moffusil” [small towns] and jet-setting corporate executives assumes too
many similarities between the social norms, status, ambition and means
of a very disparate group of people’ (Nisbett 2009: 32). Crucially, as
Mazarella (2006) has written, the problem is not how the term middle-
class is used but why it has come to dominate; ‘what is more interesting
is to attempt to understand how the concept structures and enables a
certain set of imagined identities – both utopian and dystopian – to be
articulated’ (Mazarella 2006: 3). This is particularly of relevance to
8 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

sartorial identities, as class has come to be continually and dynamically

practiced by ‘doing fashion’ (Liechty 2003: 135 –140). In the Indian,
and now wider South Asian, context, doing fashion is often
conceptualised in relation to the contrast between style and ‘ishtyle’
(Nakassis 2016; Srivastava 2007). Ishstyle, the north Indian borrowing
of the English term style and fashion now commonly used in Bangladesh,
Pakistan and Sri Lanka, is often used to suggest the fashion choices of the
rural or non-middle-class population characterised as gaudy and
excessive in contrast to the ‘more sophisticated’ aesthetic embodied by
the cosmopolitan upper-middle classes and consecrated by fashion
advertising and editorial (Srivastava 2007: 227). Osella and Osella
(1998) note how ishtyle serves as a referent for the film-driven
vernacular aesthetic of working-class taste.
The growing liberalisation of Indian fashion, retail, media and
advertising since the 1990s (Athique 2012), includes an increased focus
on social mobility and the acquisition of social status through the
consumption of material goods in fashion blogs, beauty magazines, to
retail advertising (Mazzarella 2006). As elsewhere, clothing continues to
function as a visual indicator of class status, cultural capital, and is
imbricated in forms of social belonging and exclusion (Bourdieu 1984).
The formation of social identity through consumption of global and local
consumer goods in South Asia is intertwined with and shaped by the long
history of social and religious hierarchies and colonisation of the region
dating back to the sixth century (Shukla 2008). This is complicated by the
interconnectedness between rural and urban geographies, class, gender
and larger processes of globalisation and nationalism.
The doing of style is both spatially and temporally contingent
and differentially available to men and women. As well as being a
characteristic of youth as a life stage, the concept of ‘waiting’, or
‘timepass’ (Jeffrey 2010), is itself a key dimension of doing style, in the
setting of offices, colleges, shopping malls, and cinemas, that make
middle-class youth highly visible. This is particularly relevant for men
who are more visible than women in public spaces within the region.
Class differences are prevalent in the way that lower-middle-class male
youth engage with fashion and style. Threats to middle-class power in
India are often especially keenly felt by lower-middle-class educated
 STYLE, FASHION AND MEDIA IN SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES 9

men excluded from secure employment (Nisbett 2009: 9), and

therefore educated employed men feel they need to pass time in new
ways, with simply hanging around doing style (Nakassis 2016)
emerging as a method for negotiating not being left behind but
engaging with material representations of masculine success (Osella
and Osella 1998).
For female youth, everyday dress practices are shaped by a multiplicity
of moral codes of dress, closely linked to religious, familial and
community expectations of heterosexuality, including South Asian
traditions of arranged marriages (Liechty 1995). Social expectations of
how one should dress and behave are frequently framed by the recurring
theme of shame (lajja/lojja/laaj) and honour (izzat/ijat). South Asian youth
of both genders use ‘code-switching’ appearance management
techniques to dress differently for familial domains or social scenes,
switching between traditional clothes for the home and family events and
western clothing for school or the workplace (Bhachu 2004).
Most prominent in women’s dress, sartorial code-switching is an
ambivalent mode of appearance management. Code-switching is not
always a choice nor a conscious system of dressing and, similar to other
non-south Asian regions, is symbolic of wider regimes of patriarchal
power enacted upon the female body and sexuality (Entwistle 2000).
In the South Asian region however, this is complicated further by the
history of anti- and post-colonial and national struggles against western
forms of modernisation inseparable from western capitalism.
The dichotomous meanings attached to traditional and western
clothes going back to the Gandhian Swadesi (self-rule) independence
movement, have left an ongoing and gendered legacy. In a paradoxical
anti-consumption independence narrative, the boycotting of western
consumer goods was promoted alongside the consumption of more local
products. The Swadesi movement did not simply boycott foreign clothes
and western clothes on economic grounds; they were also to be
disavowed as symbols of western capitalism and sexual hedonism
(Hardiman 2003; Trivedi 2007). Local patriarchies meant that this moral
consumption discourse impacted differently on Indian women than men.
Where men adopted western clothing after Indian independence,
women were expected to retain traditional dress choices to mark their
10 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

role as guardians of nationhood (Tarlo 1996). To this day, in many parts

of South Asia, western clothing is associated with western modernity
in ways strongly linked to cultural loss and hyper-sexuality, whilst
traditional clothes are more routinely associated with chastity,
nationhood and cultural and religious purity (Begum and Dasgupta
2015; Tarlo 1996). In countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh, these
patriarchal and nationalistic meanings are further complicated by Islamic
codes of modest dressing (also see Cook 2005).
As several of our contributors reveal, the meanings of code-switching
between western and traditional dress are shifting. Switching to western
clothes is no longer mostly perceived as symbolic of western values and
western capitalism, but may also be perceived as forms of fashioning
resistance related to becoming, performativity, desire and comfort.
Early associations of style and subculture (whether mods, goths, or
punks) with forms of resistance and youth (Davis 1992; Hebdige 1979;
Polhemus 2010), are now under review with attention to ‘adult’
participation in subcultures as a potentially ongoing life-project (Bennet
and Hodkinson 2012). In the context of South Asia, when rural ishstyle
(Srivastava 2007) is adopted by affluent upper-middle-class hipsters,
what may seem like resistance may also be a ‘counterculture insult’ – an
anti-fashion movement that integrates easily with mainstream fashion,
despite being an anti-fashion statement (Davis 1992).
Whilst South Asian subcultural trends have been under-researched,
there are a number of similarities to the interplay of resistance and
appropriation and accommodation identified in research on non South
Asian subcultures. In this book some of the dress choices that South Asian
youth are making reflect emerging movements of resistance against
socio-political power structures similar to those previously documented
by South Asian and non-South Asian scholars of the region, such as the
Taqwacore Punk Pakistani Muslim scene (Murthy 2010), Hip-Hop Desis
in the USA (Sharma 2010), Asian Kool of the 1990s in the UK (Sharma
2006), British Bhangra Style (Dudrah 2016) and ‘freak style’ in Tamil
Nadu (Osella and Osella 1998).
The people described in the chapters of this book are able to play with
their dress choices to varying extents, mixing and matching South Asian
and non-South Asian styles as they negotiate conventional or prevailing
 STYLE, FASHION AND MEDIA IN SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES 11

classifications of gender and sexuality, moving between resistance and

control. Indian feminist demands for sexual freedom linked to the
freedom to choose what to wear are heartening resistant tactics;
(Menon 2012; McRobbie 2000) yet the violence that underlies socially-
sanctioned eve teasing combines with class-based divisions of public
space to produce persistent and structural forms of gender, class, and
caste exclusion.
As this book demonstrates, it is not enough simply to widen the frame
of fashion to include South Asian styles, bodies, and markets: it is
imperative that these new examples and the new understandings they
bring are used to recalibrate the still often universalised norms that
underwrite fashion practice, marketing, media, and, sometimes,
academic fashion studies. One such instance is the often-thoughtless
sanctification of the street as a zone of fashion innovation and style in
global fashion media and in some academic studies. The varying degrees
of access to, and comfort and discomfort in, the space of the street
discussed in these South Asian contexts will doubtless find parallels in
studies of other non-western and emerging markets, as too in the dis/
comfort of migrant, refugee, and minority populations in the long-
standing Euro-American and Australian capitals of the ‘fashion world’.
Fashion cultures may be closely linked to attempts by minority groups
and religious groups to distinguish themselves. We see this with North-
American ‘turban chic’, an assemblage of heterogenous discourses about
‘religious identity, fashionability, terrorism and pathologized South
Asian immigrant bodies and labour’ (Reddy 2016: 209). In queer youth
cultures, we note how the particularities of queer youth differ from
adult queer concerns (Pullen 2014). In the context of a colonial legal
legacy and postcolonial struggles over the morality of the individual qua
the nation, key sites of struggle in queer life such as coming out,
education and bullying are compounded by the lack of historical
documentation of queer South Asian communities. Into this gap, this
book uses visual and cultural analysis of photography and film to explore
how queer South Asian youth within South Asia and its diasporas
perform their sexual identities by breaking gendered norms of dressing
(see Chapters 4 and 5). As studies of sexuality and histories move away
from their Eurocentric focus, also prompted by critical studies of
12 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

heteronormativity and multiple modernities and histories of sexuality,

future research is yet to develop on queer youth cultures across the South
Asian regions. It should be noted that Nepal has become the first state
in South Asia to enshrine anti-discriminatory provisions for sexual
minorities, a big statement when its near neighbours India and Pakistan
still criminalise queer people (Dasgupta 2017; Dasgupta 2014; Dasgupta
and Gokulsing 2014). Scholarship on queer youth cultures has mostly
focused on popular and independent cinema, however there is scope to
examine self-making through sartorial depiction of queer youth cultures
within creative practices such as online magazines, Tumblr pages and
graphic arts; for example, in 2015, Boys of Bangladesh, the country’s
largest gay rights group, launched ‘Dhee’ Bangladesh’s first lesbian comic
strip to raise awareness against lesbian discrimination.

FASHION AND STYLE-PRODUCTION AND

CONSUMPTION IN THE SOUTH ASIAN CONTEXT

It is evident in this book that South Asian youth are increasingly taking
part in style-production as well as consumption. Networks of fashion
production and consumption have both deepened and widened in South
Asia with easier access to modes of production such as digital media and,
on a grand scale, garment manufacturing and global free trade zones
across the region. Since the 2000s, the economic success of the region’s
garment manufacturing sectors linked to outsourcing of fast fashion
manufacturing from the West has generated competition within the
region to stabilise large orders from global fashion retailers.
Countries like Pakistan and Sri Lanka, which have been overshadowed
directly by separatist independence movements from India (see Chakma
2014) have launched their own successful international fashion weeks
and have taken part in London Fashion Week’s International Fashion
Showcase, a platform that includes other emerging fashion regions such as
Latin America and Africa (http://design.britishcouncil.org/projects/ifs/).
Participation in such events is part of national development strategies to
promote the country as a high quality, reliable destination for outsourcing,
making and manufacturing. Global fashion events demonstrate the
complicated and multiple ways in which cultural imperialism is
 STYLE, FASHION AND MEDIA IN SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES 13

reproduced and re-orientalised (Niessen et al. 2003) through the need

to compete with Eurocentric standards of fashion. However, these
competitive activities can also create countertrends and opportunities
for agency, indicating the complex relationships between indigenous
local ‘costumes’ and colonial modes of dress (Banaji 2006; Roach and
Eicher 2007; Wilson 2005), as traditional codes of dressing are reframed
by globalised conditions of economic change. In the case of Pakistan and
Sri Lanka, access to global fashion networks and access to formalised
creative education has prompted local designers to research and showcase
‘lost’ sartorial identities erased by religiously inflected nationalist and
colonialist movements. This complicates classical orientalist theoretical
frameworks (Niessen et al. 2003; Said 1978) that would suggest power
relations as only oppressive and flowing from West to East.
In the early years of economic liberalisation in Nepal, as Liechty’s
study in the mid 1990s demonstrated, it was young people in particular
who began to frame themselves in terms of materiality and consumer
culture (Liechty 1995). At that point, aspiration for consumer lifestyles
was both generic and framed in relation to global youth cultures which
were then becoming more accessible through new forms of media
transmission such as satellite television. Similarly, in the lesser
documented regional consumer cultures of Bhutan, the recent global
popularity of the Bhutan Street Fashion blog1 illustrates how strict
national dress codes imposed since the 1990s in Bhutan are becoming
blurred by the availability of western-style clothing influenced by a
larger global youth culture made accessible through the proliferation of
Internet access through mobile phones (Newbold 2016). However,
these countries are marked by an inability to accommodate satisfactorily
local aspirations and diverse social and political agendas within the
national agendas of the different constituent countries. This can be seen
in a number of ways, such as the new constitution of Nepal in 2015
which, despite its progressive attitudes over certain issues such as
secularism, has been marked by widespread protest over the refusal to
recognise class and minority status in Bhutan (see Rizal 2015).
Popular Indian cinema has nearly always been the referent for style
coverage in South Asian media (Dwyer 2000; Gokulsing and Dissanayake
2012). Bollywood, having overtaken any other form of Indian and South
14 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Asian cinema, remains a potent site for interrogating diverse histories of

style and fashion within the subcontinent. In Hindi cinema actors and
actresses switch seamlessly between western and regional styles without
the dichotomous connotations of Indian dress as traditional and modern
dress as western. It is not to say that orientalist legacies or the pressures of
globalisation tied to Americanisation (Lukose 2009) within sartorial
styles across South Asia have disappeared. However, the increasing
revival of local dress within its own non-western fashion system as a site
of fantasy and desire, productive of pleasure, challenges and complicates
hegemonic western and non-western fashion systems which render local
fashions as other to and inferior to the West or the rest.
Cinema has conventionally been linked to the music industry in the
region (not least through revenue from music sales (Dudrah and Malik
2017; Gokulsing and Dissanayake 2012), and the growing digital landscape
means that music cultures themselves play an increasing role in the
development and spread of style cultures. South Asian singers such as Ali
Zafar from Pakistan, Neeti Mohan and transnational diaspora artists such as
rapper Heems (USA), singers Alo Wala (USA) and M.I.A (UK) and Shapla
Salique (UK) are changing the listening experience and emerging as style
icons. The connection between popular music and individual personality is
not just limited to pop artistes: rather, as Frith (1996: 185) has argued, ‘as
listeners we assume we can hear someone’s life in their voice’. Most of these
artists are regular fixtures on music programmes produced by MTV, Coke
Studio and The Deewarists, representing aspirational cultural and social
capital on programmes that endorse luxury consumer lifestyles only
accessible to a middle-class target audience.
As in other regions, ‘fashion, blogging, and photography as
technologies of the self come together through a fourth technology of
the self, a contemporary space of individual expression: the computer
screen’ (Rocamora 2015: 414). In South Asia the extension of Internet
infrastructure and the increased affordability of mobile smart devices
(phones, tablets) brings interactive social media and e-commerce
into the reach of vastly more of the population. As elsewhere, the
opportunity to become a social media ‘influencer’ can be a major
reputation building opportunity and potential income stream for
designers and creatives. Several well-known South Asian designers such
 STYLE, FASHION AND MEDIA IN SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES 15

as Neeta Lulla, Manish Malhotra, Shivan and Naresh all have a strong
online and social media presence. The reach of social media allows
youth brands such as NorBlack NorWhite (NBNW) to reach out and sell
to a mixture of South Asian, South Asian diaspora and non-south Asian
fans outside of India through their online store.2 A strong Instagram
presence, fashion gifs, video blogs and posting of the designer’s studio
life and collections inspired by black North-American and Caribbean
cultures are some of the ways NBNW followers engage with the brand’s
strong transnational and diaspora Indian strategy. In Pakistan, the
popular online brand Secret Closet3 features regular blog columns and
videos. In India, Vogue India regularly publicises successful Indian
fashion bloggers who have developed cult followings around the
world. These online platforms, like digital fashion cultures across the
world, are not just entrepreneurial enterprises, or a means to ship
products across trade barriers; they serve as platforms that tell
transnational stories exploring brand cultures, street-style and local
events and youth cultures. Digital platforms allow South Asian bloggers
to stage a presence and compete in the global fashion industry.
South Asian sartorial practises of code-switching are revisited, played
out and blurred on online platforms. For example, Myntra.com (accessed
20th April 2018), an online shopping platform for designer lingerie,
allows young Indian women to purchase lingerie in private and away
from traditional male vendors and at the same time allows them to
publicly engage with their sexuality through personal profiles and
discussion groups available on the site. Where once South Asian youth
would pursue courtship through love-letters and arranged marriages,
these online shopping practices reflect some of the changing attitudes
that youth in South Asia have towards marriage, gender, sexuality and
companionate marriage (Dasgupta 2017; Nisbett 2009), indicating how
dominant codes of gender and sexuality are being challenged, resisted
and also reconfigured through sartorial practices. For young people, the
discretion afforded by mobile devices permits social media participation
unmonitored (less monitored) by the passing eye of parents and elders:
young women may find themselves stalked and trolled online in ways that
re-exert pre-existing codes of shame and honour, and may themselves
surveille the social media profiles of prospective marriage partners.
16 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Personal fashion blogs as gendered spaces of introspection and

surveillance, have also enabled those traditionally excluded from fashion
imagery to enter its visual scape (Rocamora 2015: 414).
Further changes to creative practice and production are also marked by
global shifts within the fashion and textiles sector making fashion imports
more readily available. In the case of Bhutan, increasing tourism correlates
with increased imports of western fashion brands. In Bangladesh,
production of global fast fashion brands through its ready-made garment
sector has fostered the critical debate around the production and
consumption of sustainable fashion.4
Bangladesh, once derided as an economic basket case by western
economists, is now hailed as a best practice scenario for India and its
regions, in terms of re-connecting with inherently positive gender values
and activism (Begum and Anjum 2018) to develop a successful ready-
made garments sector (Dre
ze and Sen 2013). It is also home to a rich
history of a crafts and textiles industry that is pioneering development
and sustainable design processes (Parker 2011) such as artisan and
designer collaborations using natural dyes5 and intergenerational
practices to ensure the preservation and revival of heritage fabrics and
their respective artisan weaving communities.6 Yet, the exponential
growth of Bangladesh’s ready-made garment sector in the past twenty
years, now the second largest in the world after China, has also produced
challenges connected to exploitative capital flows of the western fast
fashion industry (Fletcher 2016), including factory fires, precarity,
gendered divisions of labour, un-sustainable mass-migration and low
pay (Begum and Anjum 2018; Hewamanne 2008; Saxena 2014).
Evidence from recent research on the creative industries in Bangladesh
highlights the potential for rapid growth in the areas of fashion and
design as a result of the country’s growing ready-made-garment sector
(British Council 2013) and increasing numbers of second and third
generation diaspora youth pursuing art and design education pathways
(Begum and Anjum 2017). In Britain, Lipi Begum has been working
with the creative collective Oitij-jo7 to promote the creative industries,
including the fashion design and textiles creative industries of
Bangladeshi heritage in Britain and Bangladesh. A large part of the
project involves intergenerational skills-sharing between young
 STYLE, FASHION AND MEDIA IN SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES 17

diaspora designers working with craft communities in Bangladesh.

These sustainability projects bring into the South Asian artisan theatre a
set of British-born, diaspora subjects who themselves consider the cross
generational transmission of skills and dispositions as essential to their
success. In Britain, Reina Lewis has been working with a group of
industry professionals to establish the British Asian Fashion Network,
a pan-Asian organisation intended to celebrate and promote the
contribution of Asians to fashion and textiles in Britain and to the
British Asian fashion industries.8 In Pakistan, the creative industries are
an important contributor to the country’s employment base, providing
opportunities for skills development, entrepreneurship and business
start-up – though with the notable exception of fashion design (British
Council 2014). However, for youth from lower socio-economic
backgrounds in South Asia and its diasporas, success within the fashion
industry and the creative industries continues to be challenged by euro-
centric cultural and creative policy, lack of access to creative education,
social capital and, to an extent, the finance necessary for local creative
start-up businesses, including fashion start-up businesses (Begum and
Anjum 2017; Dudrah and Malik 2017). This is comparable to other
regions of the global south where, as in MENA, poor employment
prospects for artisan work (many of whom are South Asian migrant
workers from South Asia) mean that youth do not see the value in
continuing family artisan businesses. Within the British South Asian
fashion industry many first-generation designers, who have themselves
maintained relationships with artisans in the sub-continent over decades,
report concerns that younger designers, Asian and non-Asian, lack
knowledge about what artisan skills can do and often lack the social capital
necessary for brokering successful working relationships with small artisan
businesses. This combination, they fear, threatens and compounds the
ongoing reduction within South Asia of the artisan skills base.

CHAPTER OUTLINES

In a book concerned with youth cultures and fashion it is refreshing to

see an understanding of temporality that can situate reportage about
youth cultures and fashions of the moment in relation to the styling of
18 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

youth from the past. The photo essay by Sunil Gupta and Charan Singh
looks back at their earlier agenda-setting projects, providing the inside
scoop on the conditions of production that allowed the work to go
forward. For Gupta, seeking to provide for India a documentation of
contemporary queer cultures post-economic liberalisation and the
absence of a ‘queer public street’ became central to the staging of
educated, middle-class alternate sexualities. For Singh, the gravitas of
portraiture served to bring into the studio the non-elite youth usually
disregarded by the posterity-creating gaze of commemorative visual
culture. Their reflections on process and on their changing relationships
with sitters bring the creative visual arts into developments in post-
subcultural studies: no longer regarded as a temporary youthful
phenomenon, forms of subcultural knowledge and capital can be
understood as carried through life and transmitted in both directions
between generations. For queer subcultures this is especially apposite;
the photographers’ ability to situate their intervention in relation both to
the western norms that so often underwrite ideas of a ‘gay international’
and to histories of gender in South Asian visuality bring rich insights.
The photographic engagement with mass media forms in the
manufacture and staging of queer masculinities, highlighted by Singh,
dovetails with the account of how Indian auteur and media personality
Rituparno Ghosh was variously and variably visible as queer to his
diverse audiences across a long career. Making adroit use of gossip that
circulated at the time to create knowledge for those who knew what to
look for, Rohit K. Dasgupta and Kaustav Bakshi argue that Ghosh
deliberately used his embodied public presence on and off screen to
validate effeminate forms of masculinity as an alternative to dominant
heteronormative definitions of proper manliness. Emblematic to many
gay men in the decades before he came out, the subcultural competencies
required to share in the gay pleasures of insider knowledge are learned
through immersion into a cultural world that historically, and still now,
has often been disregarded, trivialised, and stigmatised.
In contexts where codes of honour and shame produce forms of
surveillance that intersect with caste, class, gender, religion and nation,
the changeable mixture of religious cultural norms, as Lipi Begum
elaborates in her account of advertising and retail in the bra sector in
 STYLE, FASHION AND MEDIA IN SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES 19

India, suffuses the spaces of representation and the spaces of the market.
Discourses of female respectability and sexuality, reframed by rising
Hindu nationalism, produce a circuit of culture in which where and from
whom you buy your bra (male vendors at ‘Chinese’ market stalls or the
privacy of e-commerce) can have as much impact on the purchase choice
as brand advertising featuring Bollywood actresses. Tracking the
discursive life of the garment in the construction of modern urban
femininities, Begum draws out how young and youngish women
demonstrate micro-generational change in attitudes to the body, with
discussions about bra selection creating conduits for the production and
transmission of knowledge about sex and reproductive health.
Two of the sequences in Raisa Kabir’s photo essay articulate and
re-imagine the regulatory powers of religiously coded spaces, restaging
the prayer spaces of Islam in ways that render illusory the idealised
egalitarianism of the mosque. For one woman, the segregation of women
within the mosque can be subverted by replacing the headscarf or hijab –
seen as symbolic of female seclusion – with a beanie cap that stands in
for the man’s topi or prayer cap. But for another female worshipper
the dangers of the mosque space are beyond recuperation. Collaborating
to create a sacralised mosque-like space for a non-binary identified
individual to pray safely, Kabir’s image connects the specifics of a London
South Asian diasporic experience to an alternative Muslim imaginary
which, often under the rubric of progressive Islam, seeks (off and online)
to house inclusive interpretations of the faith for the supranational multi-
ethnic umma or community of believers.
The accounts by the three photographers foreground the importance
of relationships with artists and attachments to cultural producers for
social subjects otherwise culturally marginalised or disenfranchised. Like
the possessive pleasure of ‘knowing’ about Ghosh’s queerness before he
came out, the connections with artists equipped to ‘see’ the queer body
perform important personal, social, and political as well as artistic
cultural work. For young Hindu Surinamese women in the Netherlands,
as Priya Swamy discusses, mediatised cultural representations are
differently valued by successive generations and micro-generations.
Fashions and related models of femininity for which Bollywood movies
previously provided diaspora inspiration are viewed critically by young
20 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

women, selectively rejecting or adapting the movie industry’s

predominant modes of Indian or Hindu or Hindustani femininity.
In generally heteronormative South Asian postcolonial contexts, youth
is constituted for many social groups as a period of freedom before
marriage. Dressed embodiment and youth cultural practices provide
opportunities for the development of forms of capital and agency that –
in contingent and constrained ways – can be used by young people to
challenge the limits of permissibility and to create social assets with the
potential to be transformative in future adult life. The ways in which
youthful dress and behaviours are spatially and temporally relational to
both the lifespan of the individual and to wider political and social
change are illustrated by Sandya Hewamanne’s ethnographic study of
Sinhalese Buddhist rural women workers in a Sri Lankan clothing factory.
Transgressing gender norms in trousers and assertively refusing to
adhere to middle-class aesthetics in their valorisation of colour and
embellishment, newcomers are inducted, sometimes pressured, into
distinctive group dress practices that forge collective identities and
loyalties in a work context that outlaws collective trade union
associations. Subject to surveillance by local men working in the Free
Trade Zone (FTZ) of Katunayake, the women maintain village dress
conventions on visits home because they will have to dress in this way
when they move back, often, ideally, to get married, after the temporary
young adult experience of living in the city for work. Social capital
developed in the FTZ may be strategically re-developed in the village
setting, to build new networks essential to surviving married life in
sometimes their husband’s village.
Code-switching between multiple co-existent fashion and dress
systems is revealed in this book as a widely honed skills set among South
Asian young people, deployed both to dress and style their own bodies
and to read and evaluate those of others. Regarded as not yet fully
responsible, youth may be permitted heightened flexibility in wardrobe
choices, which as Sarah Shepherd-Manandhar discusses in relation to
young women of ‘marriage’ age in Nepal, provides opportunities to
operationalise fashion capital to gain leverage in arranged marriage
processes. Moving between garments designated locally as ‘modern’
(jeans, imported garments) or ‘traditional’ (saris for married women or
 STYLE, FASHION AND MEDIA IN SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES 21

kurta surawel for unmarried) available in the Kathmandu consumption-

scape, young women utilise fashion judgements to read consumption
practices as indicators of their potential futures with husbands and their
families. It is well established that the dressed embodiment and visible
consumption practices of women are seen as an indicator of, or threat to,
the social status of families or kin; fascinating here is how the extension
of the surveilling gaze to digital communications opens vistas for young
women to intervene, as with one young woman who mobilised women
elders in her rejection of a suitor as insufficiently modern for her future
when their online investigation revealed that he was never pictured on
Facebook in jeans.
The ways in which young people consciously stage their dressed
embodiment in relation to an understanding of themselves as owner of
and subject to the regulatory gaze on and offline is brought forward
across the book. If one young man in Kathmandu may be disappointed to
discover that the aspirational western commodities featured on his
bride’s social media were fake, and that she is not engaged in the level of
status-building consumption he desired for his family, other young
people in Bhutan collaborate to share valued western goods in the
collective achievement of cool. As Paul Strickland reports, the interest
shown by young people in western and imported fashion in the context of
government mandated ‘national’ dress raises concerns about losing
authentic Bhutanese identity. Here, point of origin blurs the divide between
western and Asian styles and commodities, so that jeans manufactured in
China or India may hover between categories for Bhutanese consumers
aware of unequal power relations with neighbouring Asian superpowers.
In addition to a fluid classification system, it is also clear that the processes
by which western clothing is indigenised represent an adaptation of
existing local customs and of western clothes: youth lend costly western
garments, building the social capital of conventional family and kin
affiliations into youth based friendship networks that, underwritten by
Buddhist ethics of sharing, allow them to pool fashion goods in a collective
project of staging modern Bhutanese identities.
Collective understandings of what counts as cool underwrite the
complex mechanisms of style in Sneha Krishnan’s account of student
life in Chennai. The co-ordinates of space and time essential to the
22 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

doing of ‘style’ – hanging out, performing leisure by doing nothing,

in public places – are gender and class specific with finely nuanced
distinctions between lower- and middle-class young people
demarcated by choice of clothes and place of display. The politics
of the gaze – looking, constituting oneself as object of gaze, and
gazing oneself – bring significant risk for young women in South Asian
urban spaces where the fla^neur’s loitering is likely to bring police
attention for gender deviant behaviour. In addition to formal
regulation, so called ‘eve teasing’ recurs across the book as a
determinant of and impediment to women’s access to public spaces and
public transport with male peers as well as elders regulating young
women’s behaviour. Yet, young women may sometimes be able to
turn routinised eve teasing into banter, co-opting the college bus-
stop as temporary stage for the presentation of scene where they
nonchalantly flick hair whilst sizing up passing boys, ready to appear
ironic and self-knowing and using big sisterly mocking to puncture the
posture of youthful male cool.
Arti Sandhu reflects on her difficulties in dressing for the street
of Delhi fashion week when public transport is a hazard and the
physical environment outside of the gated commercial space of the
fashion week provides a very different set of interlocutors for the style
efforts now mandated as industry standard for attendees. In India, the
fashion discourse of street style reframes both constituent terms.
Street is reconceptualised in relation to the recently created privatised
spaces of consumption and elite/middle-class leisure which protect
affluent dressers from dirt, noise, and the general public gaze, and
for women, the persistent sexual harassment of eve teasing. Style is
also repositioned as a component of the post-liberalisation economy;
emblematised by the new liberal subject of the ‘global Desi’, the
Indian at ease with transnational consumer goods and consumer
behaviours. Whilst style is performed for the media and fashion public
in the corralled spaces of Delhi fashion week, the urbanised fashion
elite reify the dress of subaltern bodies excluded from the temporality
and spatiality of modernity, commodifying traditional, regional, or
folk style, and artisan techniques, colours, and textiles as aesthetic
inspiration.
 STYLE, FASHION AND MEDIA IN SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES 23

The contrast between the shabby chic of the youthful fashion elite and
the real holes in the clothing of the poor underlies Tereza Kuldova’s
polemic. Identifying participation in esteem-enhancing fashion events,
such as designer Nitin Bal Chauhan’s fashion shows ‘street cast’ from the
cohort of fashion insiders and avant-garde creatives who make up his
brand ‘family’, she discusses how the younger generation are pivotal to
the construction of the ideal consumer citizen of the post-liberalisation
Indian economy. Glorified as emblematic of Indian success yet chided for
irresponsible spending by financially prudent parents, corporate social
responsibility recalibrates consumption as a moral obligation, despite
that the subaltern makers and craftspeople are rarely appropriately
rewarded.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS

In the past decade young people in South Asia have become important
participants in popular culture narratives, consumerist market
economies, the fashion and textile sector, and media cultures. Young
people through their several modes of representation have challenged
us to re-think and re-imagine youth cultures (also see Boyce and
Dasgupta 2017). In this book we see how the South Asian youth
fashion landscape is increasingly changing as local dress cultures
collide with global fashion cultures, and subcultural styles collide
with styles on the street. Complex patterns of change do not follow a
simple pattern of western imperial mimesis. Classificatory binaries of
modern/traditional, Asian/western, male/female, artisan/designer
have not disappeared, but are rapidly changing and increasingly
understood as ambiguous as a result of globalisation, trade liberal-
isation and multivalent mediated processes between South Asia and rest
of the world.
South Asia may be still shaped by the dichotomising classifications of
what it is to be traditional and be modern. Yet increasingly scholars
studying South Asia and dress cultures, including authors in this book,
seek to acknowledge alternative modernities (Breckenridge 1995;
Gaonkar 2001) with future work likely to incorporate attention to the
long history of men and women’s fashion in South Asia that pre-dates
24 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

classification systems of modern and traditional (Begum and Dasgupta

2015; Shukla 2008; Vanita 2014). Our authors mark a shift beyond
Bollywood towards online and digital platforms such as street-fashion
blogs, YouTube videos and online fashion stores. Future work exploring
technology and digital cultures is still required to understand virtual
identity amongst a youth demographic group which has the highest
digital media usage in South Asia (Athique 2012). This is likely to further
emphasise the heterogeneity of South Asian sartorial identity, a
heterogeneity that this book strongly points towards.
Future research that can document and analyse the intra-South Asian
and diaspora social relationships which underlie globalised fashion
production in the South Asian context will be essential to new
understandings of the fashion industry, disallowing orientalist east/west
collectivist/individualist binarisms by demonstrating the complex
workings of capital and culture within a network of multiple modernities
and postmodernities. A desire to mitigate fashion’s role in contributing
to social and environmental damage is now prevalent among fashion
students, designers, creative entrepreneurs, and consumers: cautioning
against simplistic good intentions, this book provides evidence and
analysis of the network of business, government, NGO, and diaspora
relationships, including the role of postcolonial elites which foster or
inhibit success in sustainable fashion. We hope that this volume’s
attention to different national, ethnic and cultural business cultures, and
to complex layers of collectivism and individualism will provide
demonstrable value to the research field in fashion marketing and studies
of the creative industries more widely.
One significant change since we started working on this project has
been the constitution of Muslims as a global consumer segment, an
expansion of previous ethnic marketing into the faith sector. It is well
established that in South Asia the creation of class identities and
pursuance of class interests intersect with regionally specific divisions
of caste and ‘tribe’ as well as with local variants of gender, sexuality,
and age. The role of religion as a factor in communal, regional and
national politics is also evident in scholarship to date as in this volume,
whilst the incorporation of religious distinction into the formation of
regional consumer cultures has been discussed in ground-breaking
 STYLE, FASHION AND MEDIA IN SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES 25

studies by Mazarella (2006). Yet, whilst marketing activity has so far

focused on the petro-dollar, super-rich consumers of the Gulf, and on
the growing middle classes of Indonesia and the Philippines, the
availability of Muslim consumers with spending power in parts of
South Asia will raise different opportunities and challenges: despite that
the so-called ‘Muslim world’ contains within it many non-Muslims.
What will it mean to hail as Muslim consumers in India, where they
form the second largest religious group in a country governed at the
time of writing by Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP)? Will South Asia provide a catalyst for global brands to
commodify other forms of institutional religion? Given that marketing
does not merely reflect pre-existing forms of social identity but is itself
generative of new forms of identity, what might be the impact of the
commodification of religious dispositions on the syncretic blending of
traditions that makes up daily religious practice (Ammerman 2007;
McGuire 2008) for so many in the region? At a point when the
extension to South Asia of Islamic branding and Muslim marketing to
South Asia looks inevitable we hope this volume will be of value to
researchers in critical marketing studies. The rich heterogeneity of the
studies here come through from the intersectional and multi-
disciplinary background of our authors, illustrating sartorial codes
and fashion practices across the spectrum of gender, class, race,
sexuality and religion, which are often homogenised in academic
fashion studies pertaining to this region. Nonetheless, we encountered
limitations: further work is required to advance understandings of
caste and its relation to youth cultures and dress. Geographically,
we were unable to cover equally the richness of style across all the
South Asian regions: Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Maldives remain
absent from this collection but we believe that initiating the dialogue on
youth and style cultures in emerging fashion markets like Bhutan,
Bangladesh and under-researched South Asian diaspora communities
can only encourage further research and add to the existing dress
cultures knowledge for this complicated region, enabling consumer
culture theorists, scholars of dress cultures and cross-cultural marketers
across the world to better understand alternative formations of South
Asian identity.
26 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

NOTES

1. See www.facebook.com/BhutanStreetFashion. Accessed 20th April 2018.

2. See www.norblacknorwhite.com. Accessed 20th April 2018.
3. See www.secretcloset.pk/blog. Accessed on 20th April 2018.
4. See www.fashionrevolution.org. Accessed 20th April 2018.
5. See www.aranya.com.bd. Accessed on 20th April 2018.
6. See www.bengalfoundation.org. Accessed 20th April 2018.
7. See oitijjofdtc.wordpress.com. Accessed 20th April 2018.
8. See www.bafn.org.uk. Accessed 20th April 2018.

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1
STREET STYLE VS. STYLE
ON THE STREET?
Two Interpretations of Indian Street Fashion

Arti Sandhu

In 2013, while conducting field research on Indian fashion and designers in New Delhi I
had the opportunity to attend Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week1 (WLIFW S/S 2014,
October 2013). The venue for this bi-annual fashion event was the expansive exhibition
and convention centre Pragati Maidan. In spite of its central location – accessible by
arterial main roads [sic] and various means of public transport – Pragati Maidan suffers
from traffic congestion and general infrastructural issues that are characteristic of all urban
centres in India.
Despite being aware of the platform India fashion week would offer for showing off trendy
and experimental fashion, my personal style choices ended up in the fairly practical and
understated realm. This was due to the fact that I had decided to make use of the Delhi Metro
to commute to and from the venue, and hence needed to dress suitably for public transport and
the transition from public to private space and vice-versa. Navigating several traffic crossings
in South Delhi without any sidewalk access, pedestrian crossings or designated traffic signals,
along with ongoing construction sites all around, further affirmed the appropriateness of my
clothing choices. However, on seeing a number of women belonging to the labouring classes
working on these construction sites – lifting bricks, shifting rubble, mixing concrete –
dressed in once vibrant but now dusty ghaghras and short cholis, wearing flimsy rubber
chappals on their weathered feet that were adorned with dull silver payals, I could not help but
reflect on my own discomfort in wearing a more flamboyant ensemble in a similar public
street setting.
 INDIAN STREET STYLE 31

Immediately outside WLIFW’s venue at the entry ticket counters a nervous group of
young fashion bloggers giggled and chatted about the styles of well-known fashion
personalities – models, fashion editors and designers – as they hastily walked past. This
group of mostly female bloggers openly spoke about their own hopes of being ‘spotted’ by
other more prominent fashion bloggers, journalists and ‘street style’ photographers based on
what they had chosen to wear that day.
Once inside, the transformation from Delhi’s heat, dust, traffic, and unruly and uneven
streets to a place where one could realise one’s potential for taking fashion risks was instantly
noticeable. Notable fashionistas hung about designer stalls, eating at Delhi Smoke House
Grill’s makeshift cafe, sampling coffee and doughnuts at the newly launched Dunkin’ Donuts
stall, while at the same time regularly taking selfies and posing for photographers in these
spaces or during their ‘ciggie’ breaks outside the main hall. The queues for the back-to-back
runway shows additionally presented a new assortment of fashionable industry professionals
and guests each day, many of whom had made the effort to style themselves in accordance to
the designer show they were waiting to attend.
The overall styles worn at WLIFW were a stark contrast to the basic everyday clothing
worn by the urban classes in public spaces such as at metro stations and local markets.
At WLIFW neon see-through Louis Vuitton bags, Zara skorts, men in skirts and lungis,
Pe
ro designer saris worn in interesting drapes, Kallol Datta’s amorphous dresses, Oxford
shoes, Cambridge satchels, kedia tops, jodhpur pants, colorful stockings, tribal jewellery,
and copious layers of draped scarves were all the norm.

INTRODUCTION

The vignette above highlights how certain protocols emanating from

established fashion capitals are now universal norms of a globalised
fashion industry. In addition to designer runway shows, personal style
statements by fashion enthusiasts and industry professionals en route to
catwalk shows – classified as contemporary ‘street style’ – not only
garner significant media attention in London and Paris, but also in non-
western fashion centres and at events such as New Delhi’s bi-annual
fashion week.
The central aim of this chapter is to investigate the concept of street
style as it relates to contemporary Indian dress and fashion, and the
different interpretations that can be drawn while examining this
phenomenon within India. In doing so, the chapter first examines the
32 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

aforementioned displays of personal fashion that occur off the actual

street at fashion weeks and other fashion related events by cosmopolitan
Indians belonging to the upper middle and elite classes.2 Here the
discussion not only highlights how these sartorial displays align with the
parameters of contemporary global street style, but also how such
localised interpretations allow for the establishment and assertion of a
unique Indian fashion identity. Following from this, the chapter offers
another interpretation that can be made when one studies the clothing
worn by those belonging to lower or labouring classes and rural
communities that inhabit India’s real streetscapes. Such instances of
unstaged and unintended style on the street are often considered more
authentic representations of Indian street style or fashion by local
designers and industry professionals, which points to the constructed and
contested classification of the term. Taken together, both interpretations
highlight the resurgence of orientalist viewpoints in the way fashion is
designed and visually promoted on blogs and fashion magazines (Sandhu
2014) – all of which invariably leads to the othering of a significant
portion of India.

INDIA’S GLOBAL DESI STREET STYLE

A survey of personal style statements at India fashion week as well as those

documented on blogs like Manou’s wearabout, Santu Misra’s devil wore and
on the pages of various Indian editions of international fashion
magazines like Elle, Vogue, and Marie Claire3 points to the first interpretation
of the term ‘street style’ that can be made in the context of India. Usually
comprising quirky and experimental ensembles worn by trendy upper-
middle-class or elite Indians, such street style can be observed at art fairs,
literary festivals and other fashion events, featured on personal blogs, or
reserved solely for display at exclusive private parties (Tewari 2014).4
The format of these sartorial presentations bears semblance to the
display of personal style by well-known fashion personalities and
industry professionals in western fashion capitals like London and New
York. Made popular by its documentation by equally hip photographers
like Scott Schuman for the blog Sartorialist, for example, this type of
street style is a marked shift from earlier linkages to subcultural style
 INDIAN STREET STYLE 33

statements that were more obviously about resistance to dominant

culture (Evans 1997). Rocamora and O’Neill (2008) note how displays
of contemporary street fashion and its documentation are now extremely
commonplace, where interestingly

not only do [fashion] journalists offer selective definitions of the

fashionable city subject, but they simultaneously construct and
define their own roles. Although concessions are made to the
creative style and the authorship of the people, readers are reminded
that true expertise remains the attribute of fashion journalists.
(Rocamora and O’Neill 2008: 194)

There is also a shift away from the representation of ‘the people, the real
and the street’, as ‘[t]he figures they depict are far from ordinary . . .
while the settings are confined to fashionable districts’ (Rocamora and
O’Neill 2008: 195– 196).
The general pattern and composition of this interpretation of Indian
street style follow aforementioned formats emanating from western
fashion centres. This is firstly evident in the style of documentation by
fashion journalists and photographers using ‘straight-up shots’
(Rocamora and O’Neill 2008) with emphasis on highlighting the
juxtaposition of various garments and brands, along with a list of items
(purchases) worn. Through these images the journalist’s role is elevated
as an arbitrator of good taste and style. This type of street style also lies
firmly in the domain of those who have adequate fashion pedigree,
hailing from India’s elite or upper middle classes, or have aspirations to
the same.
Other similarities are evident in the way these cosmopolitan style
statements juxtapose international high-street brands – such as Zara and
Forever 21 that are recent entrants into the Indian market – with thrifted
[sic] items or edgy pieces from emerging local designers. The general
lack of elaborate Indian traditional couture garments in contrast to the
predominance of high-street branded clothing does not disqualify these
personal style statements from being worthy of recognition from the
leading fashion magazines I mention above. This is because of the
cultural capital associated with many of these brands, which in some
cases has accumulated over a number of years even prior to their
34 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

availability in the Indian market, as well as due to the fact that they retail
at price points (and locations) that are accessible only to upper-middle-
class and elite shoppers.
Another key point of difference is that most of these displays occur
completely off-the-street. This can be attributed to the chaotic and
congested nature of Indian streetscapes5 and the absence of prestigious
shopping districts such as Avenue Montaigne in Paris or Fifth Avenue in
New York. In addition, a significant portion of India’s elite can afford to
lead lives out of view of the wider population of India – in that they
reside in gated communities, shop in exclusive malls, and socialise in
clubs, bars, hotels, etc. that restrict general public entry.
Despite being closeted, highly curated and off-the-street, the medium
and label of ‘street style’ is an exciting platform for sartorial self-
expression for urban fashionistas in a post-liberalised era – a time period
that has witnessed significant socio-cultural and economic shifts as a
result of the financial reforms initiated in the 1990s by the Indian
government. These reforms directly led to the rise of an increasingly
globalised and cosmopolitan elite and middle class, who are now in a
position to lead lifestyles on a par with many of their global counterparts.
Understandably, this also had implications for fashionable dress in
urban centres – where we see greater acceptance of western clothing
as well as easy availability of global brands alongside Indian designer
wear. The boom experienced within Indian fashion retail in recent years
as well as the rise of a local fashion design industry has meant that
New Delhi and Mumbai are now counted amongst the world’s top global
fashion cities (Global Language Monitor 2014). Also impacting fashion
and strategies of self- and collective-fashioning amongst the urban classes
is the overall sense of positivity experienced as a result of India’s
economic gains that have led to a sharp rise in patterns of conspicuous
consumption. The mushrooming of numerous shopping malls, private
clubs, luxury resorts, etc., in all major urban centres alongside online
formats of fashion blogging further aid the consumption and display of
material possessions including fashion goods, and have led to a
significant change in the way fashion is worn and performed in urban
settings. The overall shift away from India’s older nationalist ideals that
emphasised austerity has also meant that there are now fewer stigmas
 INDIAN STREET STYLE 35

attached to openly showing off material possessions and related lifestyles.

In tandem with these attitudinal changes, all forms of visual media
actively promote idealised constructions of upper-class lifestyles where
luxury products, designer and branded items are seen as markers of
success.
While there is much criticism within India from various social
commentators about this shift in mentality and the general public image
it has created, Fernandes notes that a distinctive feature of India’s
prospering urban classes (in particular, those she and popular media
platforms refer to as the ‘new’ middle class)6 is their position as a ‘new
class’ of entrepreneurs ‘who are potential leaders of the Indian nation
with a new global outlook’ (Fernandes 2000: 92). This is evident in the
way all forms of visual and print media openly celebrate their individual
achievements and collective contributions towards the nation’s economic
success. Fernandes sees this group additionally charged with the role of
cultural mediation between India and the rest of the world, which hinges
on their ability to

negotiate India’s new relationship with the global economy in both

cultural and economic terms; in cultural terms by defining a new
cultural standard that rests on the socio symbolic practices of
commodity consumption, and in economic terms as the beneficiaries
of the material benefits of jobs in India’s ‘new economy’.
(Fernandes 2000: 91)

This results in the culmination of the very popular media construction

dubbed the global Indian or global desi – an idealised representation of
cosmopolitan Indianness that many urban Indians can relate to and aspire
to (Sandhu 2014).
Most media publications tend to portray the global desi as the ‘ideal
Indian consumer who is young, hip, and conscious of his or her sense of
locality and simultaneously aware of global trends, while being socially
mobile and financially able to indulge in them’ (Sandhu 2014: 106).
This is immediately noticeable in the way street style is performed and
documented, as today’s fashionable global desis’ individual fashion
statements are indicative of their acquired fashion capital and
cosmopolitanism, either as a result of their social standing combined
36 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

with experiences of travelling overseas, styling for magazines and blogs,

etc., or their aspiration for these lifestyle markers.
Fashion for the global desi as promoted by leading fashion magazines is
characterised by a heightened interplay between local and global trends,
designer brands, and dress practices. This confluence, which is a natural
outcome of contemporary globalisation and can be observed in other
non-western centres (Jones and Leshkowich 2003), is more complex
and multi-layered than a simple case of ‘East meets West’ or
westernisation of Indian clothing; especially as liberalisation brought
with it a renewed sense of anxiety about the preservation of Indian
identity in the wake of global influences (Sandhu 2014), which I discuss
in a little more detail later in this chapter. The heightened emphasis on
class, status, and the consumption and display of material goods means
that branded high-street and designer clothing and accessories that are
now available in India take on extra prominence in the performance of
global desi street style. A point of difference, which I have already
mentioned, is that while leading examples of western street style as
promoted by the global fashion press rely less heavily on high-street
brands, and instead include an eclectic mix of high-fashion and luxury
items, in India, international high-street brands tend to be more popular
in cosmopolitan displays of street style online, at fashion events, and in
fashion magazines.
Finally, due to its display off-the-street it is clear that the ‘street’ in the
construction of cosmopolitan street style is not so much a real space but
a conceptual space where fashion forward Indians can present their
own individual takes on fashion to a global audience. This is increasingly
possible through the medium of fashion blogs (where much of
contemporary global street style comes to be recorded), which act as
virtual sites for challenging the Eurocentric frameworks of fashion that
have historically excluded non-western centres of dress from the
definition of ‘fashion’. Even though western fashion capitals of London,
Paris, New York and Milan continue to remain the leading sources of
global fashion trends, recent years have witnessed significant shifts in the
way fashion opinion leadership has become decentralised through the
popularity of blogs and the opportunity they present to bloggers to
provide ‘the narrative and meaning for fashion that had previously been
 INDIAN STREET STYLE 37

the domain of traditional fashion media’ (Berry 2010a). Street style

blogs in particular ‘encourage a global dialogue’ and through ‘their
photographic coverage of emerging fashion cities, [they] have also
contributed to an extension of the democratisation of fashion through the
decentralisation of elite capitals of style’ (Berry 2010a). In this way it is
possible to see how crucial the role of fashion blogs and related discourse
on non-western street style is to asserting India’s presence globally as a
potential fashion and design capital.

THE ‘OTHER’ INTERPRETATION

Interestingly, during my field research in 2013 in Delhi and Mumbai, the

existence of cosmopolitan Indian street style was always met with a firm
denial by leading fashion professionals – designers, stylists, magazine
editors, etc. Much of their disagreement centred on issues of authenticity.
In some cases this interpretation of Indian street style was seen to be
blindly mimicking western exemplars and in others was considered not
as good as the same. Yet, as most saw little stylistic merit in what I had
witnessed at WLIFW, for example, they countered by emphasising the
richness of real and un-staged style on Indian streets. In doing so, they
were referring to clothing worn by those belonging to lower segments of
society, namely the labouring classes, rural villagers and tribal groups
seen on urban and rural streets and roadsides across India. While by no
means lacking in individualism, creativity and in many cases aesthetic
sophistication, such styles of dress – composed of various types of
regional and/or tribal clothing as well as weathered workwear worn
by segments of society who do not have the means or access to high-
fashion – offer a stark contrast to the carefully orchestrated street style I
had witnessed at fashion week.
Many of these styles along with their wearers have in recent years been
pushed further out of view from India’s newly developed metropolitan
sites, yet in all my conversations with noted designers, stylists, writers
and fashion commentators these were categorised as ‘authentic’ Indian
street fashion.
According to these fashion professionals, items of dress like
Rajasthani men’s turbans, cattle herders’ outfits (see Figure 1.1),
38 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

a fisherwoman’s sari, or the construction workers’ ghagharas I mentioned

at the start of the chapter, were all accurate representations of Indian
style in the truest sense and deeply influential in shaping the design of
contemporary high-fashion and couture. This was clearly evident in the
catwalk presentations at WLIFW S/S 2014 for example, where I noted a
proliferation of design references to tribal dress and regional drapes,
not only in the garments showcased but also in the general styling of
models and their jewellery, footwear, and other accessories. At times
this influence also stretched to the physical setting and props on the
catwalk, where on occasion tribal performers, dancers or street scenes
were presented to the audience.
Fashion photographer and blogger Manou records instances of
authentic Indian street fashion alongside posts on ‘fashion-obsessed
regulars’ (Manou cf. Anon. 2011) on his extremely popular blog
wearabout. He travels across India and parts of the South Asian subcontinent
to smaller towns and cities like Salem, Pushkar, Jodhpur and Shillong, to
venues ranging from roadside bazaars, cattle fairs, local festivals, etc., in
search of diverse clothing styles and dress practices worn by communities
that have been pushed further out of view from upscale urban settings in
cities such as Delhi and Mumbai. He says, ‘geographically speaking, I’ve
found the best [street style] in small towns, or in beaten down areas,
mostly the poorest people’ (Manou cf. Anon. 2011). His posts often
capture multiple styles of one garment type or a regional style as well as
feature images of clothing worn by vagrants and homeless people
photographed in great detail.
Posts such as the one titled The Last People (Manou 2012) or those from
his recent travels to Pushkar (Figure 1.1) and Nagaland appear to be an
attempt towards not only providing thorough documentation of local
dress practices but also a way of bringing to the forefront fading
traditional styles and asserting India’s fashion lineage. According to
Manou, what sets Indian street fashion apart from the rest of the world
is that it is ‘unexpected, inconsistent, and sometimes improvised’ and
‘more individualistic, at times effortless, [and] out of basic necessities’.
Interestingly, he notices ‘a strong connect between style of the poorest
and the chic-est [sic]’ in the way both groups tend to juxtapose and
improvise mismatched items of clothing (Manou cited in Anon. 2011).
Figure 1.1 Camel traders wearing their traditional attire at the annual cattle fair in
Pushkar. From the blog post titled Camel Traders of Rajasthan, 11 August 2014, wearabout.
wordpress.com. Image courtesy of Manou.
40 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

The strong following enjoyed by Manou’s blog posts – evident in the

long comment threads and multiple re-posts that have even appeared on
international news and fashion websites – points to the fascination
India’s cosmopolitan classes and global audiences have with these
fashions. Through reviewing his posts it is clear to see that many of
Manou’s photographs are reminiscent of those taken by tourists who
regularly travel to India in search of inspiration and document their
fascination with the ‘exotic’ quality of Indian costume, crafts, and
clothing, that appear untouched by the forces of globalisation or are
worn in unabashed ignorance of global fashion trends. It is also possible
to see parallels between his desire to record a plethora of authentic
indigenous styles and the methodological documentation of unique
sartorial [native] styles in conjunction with the diversity of castes and
ethnicities encountered in India by British photographers, anthropolo-
gists, illustrators and artists during colonial times. At times Manou’s
photographic stance and style of selection and representation of his
subject matter mimics what Pinney categorises as the ‘salvage paradigm’
of photography that emerged in India during the nineteenth century,
‘which was applied to what were perceived to be fragile tribal
communities’ (Pinney 1997: 45). In addition, cosmopolitan Indians’
penchant for the authentic dress practices featured on Manou’s blog is
similar to the way the British felt a strong connection to Indian artifacts
due to their ability to remind them of their own distant ‘primitive’ pre-
capitalist past (Mathur 2007: 19) – as a result of which attempts were
made to study, classify and make detailed records of these artifacts.
In colonial times, the popularity of photographic collections of
indigenous people that offered visual documentation of a range of
physical attributes, including dress and adornment practices – such as
those presented in the infamous eight volume study entitled The People of
India, compiled by John Forbes Watson and John William Kaye during the
late nineteenth century7 – further ‘distinguish[ed] the civilized from the
primitive, the leisured tourist from the commodified Other, the spectator
from the object of sight seeing gaze’ (Strain 1996: 96). The renewed
interest in the documentation of clothing worn by indigenous groups or
those hailing from lower segments of society in contemporary times, and
its classification as Indian street fashion once again labels them as Other.
 INDIAN STREET STYLE 41

Only this time it is not through the colonial lens but through that of
fashion and re-orientalism.

NOSTALGIA AND RE-ORIENTALISM IN INDIAN

FASHION DESIGN AND STREET STYLE

The resurgence of orientalist viewpoints in contemporary couture and

high-fashion is a key characteristic of India’s emerging fashion identity,
and worth noting in this section as it is not only evident across a number
of designer collections showcased at fashion weeks, but also influences
the way cosmopolitan Indians fashion themselves.
Fashion designers like Sabyasachi Mukherjee, Ritu Kumar and JJ
Valaya, to name but a few, regularly refer to India’s royal past, traditional
styles, local crafts, forgotten textiles, and embroidery motifs for their
collections as well as promotional materials such as photoshoots, catwalk
shows, etc. Kondo (1997) links such design strategies to the lasting
legacy of the imbalances and viewpoints established by orientalism
itself, that led to the labelling of India and Indian artifacts as timeless,
‘exotic, luxurious and “Other,” [when compared] to a more rationalist,
industrializing Europe’ (McGowan 2005: 265). She proposes the
concept of re- or self-Orientalising for describing those methods of
design and self-fashioning, whereby fashion designers internalise the
Orientalised western gaze and begin to regard their own culture,
traditions, past, dress, crafts and people as exotic sources of inspiration
(Kondo 1997: 57).
Jones and Leshkowich (2003) consider re-orientalising strategies of
design to be logical outcomes of globalisation and have observed similar
trends in other centres of non-western fashion. In India they can be
attributed to changes occurring post-liberalisation and the broader
identity based anxieties experienced by urban classes about the
preservation of Indian traditions – where for example, the tastes of the
younger generations, especially in clothing, food, films and music, for a
large part are no longer identifiable as solely ‘Indian’. In some cases they
are indistinguishable (at least on the surface in terms of clothing and
fashion) from their global counterparts, thereby creating an inherent fear
of homogenisation and the deep desire to retain a point of difference,
42 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

without turning back the clock of globalisation. Hence, concurrent to the

enshrining of western and global brands there is also a growing interest
in the meaning and value of local identity amongst the urban classes. This
ranges from a renewed interest in the study, preservation and revival of
Indian traditions and related rituals, vernacular cultural forms and
traditional dress practices, which include clothing styles, textiles and craft
techniques – evident at India’s fashion weeks.
The strategy of self-orientalising design and fashion could be misread
as a position of inferiority when read outside of the context of India as it
reaffirms and recreates western fantasies of the ‘oriental other’ and related
stereotypes of viewing Indian dress and textiles; and yet it still relies
on western frameworks, i.e. western styles of clothing, trends, catwalk
shows and print media to legitimise it as ‘fashion’ (Kondo 1997: 78).
Furthermore, since such approaches to design were further emphasised
over the past century by western designers – who worked with Indian and
other non-western cultures as exotic inspiration for their collections –
these have also come to determine the framework within which Indian
designers come to find themselves. Within India, however, the idea that
‘one’s own heritage and culture have become an important stepping-off
point in the design process’ (Teunissen 2005: 11) is extremely successful
with local consumers and popular across all fields of design. In the case of
fashion, much like the way traditional dress allowed for non-western
cultures like India to maintain crucial points of difference from the West
during colonial rule, the deliberate celebration of ‘anti-[western]-fashion’
(Niessen 2003) in contemporary times not only promotes local resources
and design innovation, but is also an assertion of local distinction towards
the establishment of India as a legitimate fashion capital.
Not only do contemporary designers internalise the Orientalised
western gaze, the same also is evident in the way cosmopolitan Indians
fashion their own personal looks. Their style experimentations, which fit
under the first category of cosmopolitan street style I discussed earlier,
highlight their ability to draw from current global fashion cues, yet at the
same time present their own individual stance that often draws upon
familiar traditional dress practices.
As is evident on Manou’s blog that also documents the elite version
of Indian street style, the other India is yet again a valuable source of
 INDIAN STREET STYLE 43

inspiration as lungis, gamchas, dhotis, cholis, ankle bracelets, nose rings and
banyans get re-fashioned and combined with high-street and high-
fashion brands in order to create vibrant, playful and original outcomes
(see Figure 1.2). In this way not only are the two interpretations of
street style highlighted in this chapter linked because of strategies of
sartorial juxtaposition, they are also visually connected due to the way
cosmopolitan Indians borrow from the clothing styles they see on the
street.
As I have discussed in greater depth elsewhere,8 such strategies of
fashion fusion are practiced at differing levels across all social strata in
India as they allow for the preservation and maintenance of traditional
values, beliefs, cloth and clothing that Indians are so fiercely proud of,
alongside the possibility of enjoying highly attractive modes of
experiencing modern lifestyles that are on par with the rest of the
world. Much like the re-orientalising strategies employed by designers,
ensuring the compatibility of Indian and western garments as a strategy
for personal and collective styling also acts as a medium for maintaining
a point of difference while experiencing a sense of national pride – a
strategy that is strongly encouraged in the way contemporary fashion is
represented in fashion magazines and on blog posts.
Important to note also is that current strategies for design and self-
fashioning that rely on nostalgia for India’s past as well as a fascination
for the ‘other’ India that has been pushed further away or out of sight
from contemporary cosmopolitan lifestyles subdue any negative
elements – such as dirt, dust or poverty – that could be associated or
experienced in real terms. Instead these are turned into pleasurable
experiences that can be consumed, as well as symbols that reinforce
identity and belonging, and act as markers of distinction from the rest of
the world.

CONCLUSION

Despite Edensor’s observation of the Indian street as a ‘spatial complex’

that ‘provides for a meeting point for several communities’ and functions
as a ‘gregarious environment, which privileges speech’, announcements,
demonstrations on what he refers to as a ‘temporary stage’, with the
Figure 1.2 Fashion designer Anand Kabra on Day 2 of Lakme
India Fashion Week
2010, wearing a T-shirt from Topman, shirt from CK Jeans, self-designed waistcoat and pants
from Fabindia. From a blog post dated 9 March 2010, wearabout.wordpress.com. Image
courtesy of Manou.
 INDIAN STREET STYLE 45

exception of some staged photo opportunities, most fashion forward

Indians are uncomfortable displaying their interpretations of street style
in these settings (Edensor 1998: 206– 207). And while it is possible to
view Indian streets as ‘centres of social life, of communication, of
political and judicial activity, of cultural and religious events and places
for the exchange of news, information and gossip’ (Buie 1996 cited in
Edensor 1998: 206), there exists a wide and un-scalable physical gap
between ‘authentic’ style on the streets and fashionable displays of
cosmopolitan street style in idealised spaces (where most of India has
been airbrushed out). This gap reflects the heightening polarity between
India’s rich and poor subsequent to liberalisation and the resulting sense
of ‘split public’, especially in media constructions (Rajagopal 1997 cited
in Kumar 2010), where Indian society is demarcated; with the well-
presented, well-networked classes (and their idealised representations)
on one side, and the rest as other.
Yet, as the discussion in this chapter has shown, despite the two
distinct interpretations of street style that can be drawn in India, visually
and stylistically the two are often linked through sartorial strategies of
juxtaposition as well as the borrowing of style cues from the lower
segments by those in elite segments, who come to view these dress
practices as exotic. However, through the lens of re-orientalism and that
of the fashion journalist’s camera, the othering of a significant portion of
India persists.
Nonetheless, through its popularity and success, mostly via fashion
blogs as well as magazine features, it is possible to see how the ‘street’ for
the cosmopolitan display of street style is a crucial conceptual and virtual
space to assert a sense of distinction for Indian style – that additionally
has the ability to challenge the stereotypes and Eurocentric frameworks
that have historically excluded India as a legitimate fashion centre.
As an endnote, I offer another observation – one that does not really fit
with the chapter’s intention but became apparent as I closely examined
fashion photographer and blogger Manou’s posts on Indian street style vs.
style on the streets. Edensor notes the allure and ‘sensuality’ of Indian
streets settings that can be likened to early modern European metropolitan
streets. Hence these are, once again, conducive to the roaming of the
fla^ neur, as originally theorised by Baudelaire, as one ‘wallowing in flux,
46 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

observing the fleeting and the transitionary, witnessing unique

juxtapositions and incidental meetings’ (Edensor 1998: 217). More
recently Berry (2010b) has also linked fashion blogging and street fashion
photography to the notion of the twenty-first-century fla^neur due to the
way these mediums ‘provide an alternative urban space to observe fashion
that expands the boundaries of the city into cyberspace, to be experienced
by visitors from across the globe’ (Berry 2010b). The distinctive nature of
Indian streets, combined with virtual formats of fashion blogging allow for
both the old and new interpretations of fla^ nerie to be applied to Manou’s
street fashion blog as he roams across the country in search of stylish
samplings of the other India and posts them online for India’s urban
cosmopolitan classes to appreciate and re-fashion.

NOTES

1. During the time of my field research (2013) Wills Lifestyle was the main sponsor
for Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week, New Delhi. In 2015, Amazon India took
over sponsorship of this event. Held in partnership with FDCI (Fashion Design
Council of India), Amazon India Fashion Week (AIFW) and Lakme
India Fashion
Week (LIFW, held in Mumbai) are the two main bi-annual fashion weeks in
India’s fashion calendar.
2. For the purpose of this discussion I refer to a report generated by McKinsey Global
Institute (MGI) in 2007 that classifies Indian households earning within Rupees
200,000 to 10 lakh per year as middle class, and those earning more than Rupees
10 lakh a year as [elite] ‘global Indians’. The chapter’s reference to India’s upper
middle class, elite and global-desis relates mainly to the second segment and the
upper rung of the first segment outlined in MGI’s report. MGI’s report also
projects that the ‘global Indian’ segment will account for two per cent of India’s
total population by the year 2025. While it may appear to be a small percentage,
this elite segment in actual numbers is greater than the entire population of
Australia.
3. No longer in print as of July 2013.
4. Bandana Tewari, Vogue India Fashion Features Director, in a personal conversation
with the author in 2014.
5. Choosing what to wear for open street spaces in India relies on making the
distinction between public vs. private, modes of transport and the time of day or
night, among other things. Hence most street settings in India tend to better suit
clothing that Grazia India’s editor Ekta Rajani describes as ‘simple and convenient’
(Rajani cited in Sandhu 2014: 5). The dilemmas for women are even greater
when it comes to making personal clothing choices, and subsequently their styles
of dress can differ significantly when comparing what is acceptable in private or
 INDIAN STREET STYLE 47

domestic spaces to what is safe or appropriate for openly public spaces. See S€aa€ v€al€a
(2012) for a discussion on the demarcation between the domestic and public
sphere when it comes to women’s dress in India – where at home or in more
private social settings women from middle-class or upper-class social groups may
be comfortable wearing shorts, mini-skirts and dresses, while they are more
conservative in wider open settings.
6. The use of the word ‘new’, commonly employed when referring to India’s
growing middle class, for the most part, is not to signify that it is a new social class
but that it is ‘novel’ in the way that new segments of society and professions now
make up this class (Fernandes 2000; Sa€a€ va€ la€ 2012), and secondly, due to their
shared experience of changing lifestyles and social status following India’s
economic reforms (S€aa€ a€ v€al€a 2012).
7. The People of India: a series of Photographic Illustrations, with Descriptive
Letterpress, of the Races and Tribes of Hindustan by Great Britain. India Office;
Kaye, John William, Sir, 1814 – 1876; Taylor, Meadows, 1808-1876; Watson, J.
Forbes (John Forbes), 1827 – 1892. Publication date 1868. These collections
were a reflection of an overall effort to ensure there existed reference points by
which various physical characteristics and related material artifacts could be better
understood and authenticated (Pinney 1997), as a result of which ‘minute
material aspects of their supposedly “untouched” culture were focal points of the
photos. . . Additionally, many photos appeared to appeal to a certain romanticism
about “a simpler age”’ (Strain 1996: 92).
8. See Sandhu (2014: 16– 21).

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Berry, J. (2010a) ‘Street-Style: Fashion Photography, Web Logs and the Urban
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48 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Jones, C. and Leshkowich, A.M. (2003) ‘What Happens When Asian Chic Becomes
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2
STYLE-ISH GIRLS AND
LOCAL BOYS
Young Women and Fashion in Chennai

Sneha Krishnan

Amma, wake me up Mother, wake me up

Kalai-ile nine o'clock At nine in the morning
Shopping poganum I have to go shopping
Lip-gloss vaanga To buy lip-gloss
Ten o'clock friend varaa A friend of mine is coming over at ten
Ten-thirty share auto At ten-thirty we're taking a share-auto
Three hundred change kudu Give me change for three hundred (rupees)
Breakfast vendam I don't want breakfast
Daddy-tte solladhe Don't tell Daddy
Sayankaalam late aagum I'll be late this evening
Engay ponaalum Wherever I go
Boys, baba, boys There are boys, baba, boys

From Vathikutchi (The Matchstick, 2013)

Few of the young women I met in Chennai would actually be able to tell
their mothers the audacious truths of their wandering in the city and they
certainly would not boast about the ubiquity of ‘boys, baba, boys’ in their
lives. In reality, a few hours of mall-going are usually won in exchange for
babysitting siblings, or more often, stolen away when parents think their
daughters are attending extra classes. Except for this difference, this song
50 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

and its video ring endearingly close to home. It begins with a group of
young women who meet in a middle-class locality and go to a popular
mall in the city. They wear the dark leggings and tunics that were popular
among girls of this age and class during my fieldwork period; accessorised
with a pottu (mark on the forehead), watch, as well as ballerina slippers and
counterfeit fake-leather handbags, bearing such haute couture labels as
Gucci and Louis Vuitton. They take pictures of each other in posh shops,
giggling in the dressing room, wearing clothes they would never be able
to afford, and also never dare to wear out: halter tops and backless dresses.
This song, which gained great popularity with youth in the city, is
representative of a fantasy of youth nursed by many young women: of
waking up late, going shopping for make-up with their friends, and
being surrounded by romantic opportunity. Such fantasies, as a wide
scholarship now suggests (Mankekar 1999; Favero 2003; Lukose 2009),
are means of imagining global modernities centred on idioms of style,
fashion and consumption. This chapter draws on ethnographic fieldwork
conducted towards a doctoral thesis to examine the performance of style as
a local idiom in Chennai, by young lower middle-class women attending
colleges in the city. Nakassis (2010) connects style with the exteriority
that has been historically associated with male youth in Chennai (see also
Rogers 2008): to do style is to situate oneself exterior to notions of ‘adult’
middle-class hierarchy. Doing style is the mark of youth rather than status-
bearing adulthood. The performance of style is also exterior in that it is
usually physically located in public spaces and solicits viewing publics for
its performance. This typically places young women doing style in a
precarious position vis-a
-vis prevailing norms of middle-class feminin-
ity. In this chapter I demonstrate that nevertheless, young women use
style in two ways. First, they often use it to negotiate status among peers.
Secondly, style also mediates young women’s claims to both discursive
and physical spaces of ‘youth’.

SETTING AND CONTEXT: COLLEGE AND

FASHION IN CHENNAI

This chapter is based on research I conducted with college-going

women in Chennai in 2012 and 2013. I call the colleges I spent time in
 STYLE-ISH GIRLS AND LOCAL BOYS 51

Church College and NT College. Besides this, I also lived in a women’s

hostel, as accommodation for students is popularly called in this region.
Central and Southern Chennai – from about Anna Nagar in the west of
the city to Adyar in the southern end of the city – tended to be the
primary areas where the women I met spent their time. This was the
area in which hostels were located and it was also regarded as the ‘safe’
centre of the city.
The young people that this study focuses on all identified as ‘middle
class’, a category that forms as much part of the problematic that this
study investigates as one of its parameters. To be ‘middle class’ in India, it
has been suggested, is increasingly a balancing act (Radhakrishnan 2011)
between the ‘backward’ failure to enter global modernity associated with
the working classes and the elites’ disregard for ‘Indian culture’.
As Mankekar (1999: 9) writes: ‘If the middle classes seemed eager to
adopt modern lifestyles through the acquisition of consumer goods, they
also became the self-appointed protectors of tradition.’ Seeing
themselves, then, as representatives of a global nationalism (Gilbertson
2014: 121), the middle classes seek to consolidate this position through
a range of strategies: for instance, the acquisition of education, jobs in the
private sector and consumption, to prevent downward mobility. At the
same time, they seek to be ‘appropriately Indian’ (Radhakrishnan 2011)
through strategies of moderated consumption and a resurgent politics of
traditionalism (Sa€ a€va€la€ 2010).
Further, the disproportionate weight of this balancing act falls on
women, particularly young women (Gilbertson 2014), who are called
on to demonstrate their ability to straddle both a ‘global’ world of
education, work and economic opportunity, as well as a family-centric
‘India world’, as one student I met put it. It is within consumption’s
precarious place in making middle-class subjectivity, and particularly a
gendered middle-class subjectivity for young women that I locate the
arguments laid out in this chapter.
A small but growing body of work has examined ‘college culture’
among youth in Chennai (Nakassis 2013, 2010; Rogers 2008), focussing
primarily on men. While this literature draws attention to everyday
practices that mark youth for men, in engagement with the college, it leaves
room to further this line of enquiry in the context of young women’s lives.
52 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

As Nakassis (2013) indicates, women are often under a far greater deal of
surveillance than men, whether at home or in their colleges and student
residence halls. As the debates that occur on the topics of dress codes for
women in college, women’s safety, and questions of love and sex every
year in Chennai’s newspapers and television outlets suggest, women’s
participation in ‘college culture’ is a site where middle-class modes of life
are contested and produced in the city.
‘Youth’ and ‘childhood’ as social categories of experience in India, it
has been suggested (Nakassis 2013; Jeffrey 2010), are located at the
intersection of age, kinship hierarchies, position relative to institutions of
schooling and marriage, and since liberalisation, media discourses that
have produced a range of cultural products addressing this category.
As such, ‘youth’ is often described in terms of time stretching endlessly,
a lack of responsibility, combined with freedoms that were inaccessible
during childhood, and access to consumer products such as motorbikes,
MP3 players, and mobile phones.1 ‘College’ is about ‘freedom’. ‘Youth’ it
has also been suggested is widely seen as male by default (Nakassis 2010,
2013), and women’s access to the practices, spaces and temporalities that
define ‘youth’ remain tenuous. Closely connected to ‘youth’ is the notion
of a ‘youth culture’, or as Osella and Osella (1998) define it, ‘college
culture’. Usually connected with practices of fun, friendship and mischief,
these practices are seen as subversive to though not transformative of the
adult world order. Seen widely within Tamil culture as natural and even
expected and conducive for the development of adult masculinity (Mines
1994), young men are encouraged to leave the home and engage in some
‘mischief’ with friends.
In laying claim to ‘youth culture’ young women, I will demonstrate,
increasingly enact ambivalent and conflicting practices that challenge
prevailing norms of class and gender on the one hand, while
consolidating these hierarchies and their own positions within middle-
classness. These technologies and practices, as I will show, allow for
forms of un-heroic and everyday agency that allow young women to
disturb and question dominant social paradigms without necessarily
upending them or causing transformative change. Shopping, fashion and
a politics of display popularly termed ‘style’ is here presented as one of
a number of practices young women engage in that allows them to lay
 STYLE-ISH GIRLS AND LOCAL BOYS 53

claim to a ‘youth culture’ otherwise marked male, while also positioning

themselves as subjects of a globalised urban middle-class milieu.

‘STYLE’ AND GENDER

When I asked students in Chennai – largely between the ages of 18 and

23 years – what they most closely associated with their lives as college-
goers, the answers I usually got centred on fun and friendship. Oor
sutharathu – to wander about the city – seemed to be the iconic practice
that marked youth and the time of leisure associated with it. It was the one
thing that to many was impossible when adulthood struck, whether in the
form of graduation from college, marriage or holding a job. Associated
closely with ‘doing nothing’ and indeed often used synonymously with
this mark of youthful leisure was the practice of ‘doing style’. Typically
referring to acting ‘stylish’ – i.e. dressing in fashionable clothing, and
engaging in practices of display by standing around on public streets –
youth practices of ‘doing style’ are often central to a spatial politics of youth
in the city, as well as to young people’s deployment of consumption as a
means to claim a global identity and culture.
‘Style’ as Nakassis (2013: 251) writes: ‘crystallises and diagrams
youth’s liminality, functioning as the register through which young
men’s ideas of status come to be expressed and negotiated as a double
distancing from childhood and adulthood’. Through ‘style’, in this
formulation, youth is imagined as a liminal period, between childhood
and adulthood, during which youth is ‘exterior’ to their families and is
away from the surveillance of kin. Style is also exterior in that the doing of
style is usually physically located in public spaces and solicits viewing
publics for its performance. Young men ‘do style’ by wearing jeans and
T-shirts with brand names prominently displayed on them, and standing
around near women’s colleges.
‘Style’, as Nakassis (2013) goes on to establish, is a means of
differentiating oneself from the peer group: to stand out, and display
one’s uniqueness. Through this, youth disturbs traditional value systems
in which this form of individualism might be seen as a form of
undesirable arrogance (timir), that is disruptive to society (Mines 1994).
To ‘do style’ therefore is to set up an alternative value system that disturbs
54 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

notions of respectability and propriety. In this, it resembles Osella and

Osella’s (1998) ‘college culture’, which is similarly predicated on youth
breaking the ‘rules’ of middle-class society: for instance negating
physical distance by sharing cigarettes and engaging in unproductive
uses of time such as simply standing around and staring. It is worth
noting that such practices have been studied largely in the context of men
by scholars like Osella and Osella (1998) who describe young men in
rural Kerala who go vaaya nokkan – literally a phrase meaning ‘to stare at
the mouth’ but connoting practices of wandering about and looking at
girls, and Lukose (2009) who examines youth practices of ‘wasting time’
by riding bikes, sitting around in beer parlours and purchasing and
publicly wearing fake branded clothes.
Despite young women’s increasing participation in these activities,
for many I spoke to, wandering about the city and ‘doing style’ are
predominantly masculine practices, in which their participation is a
pleasurable act of transgression. One major reason for this is that loitering
remains a laden and difficult practice for young women to engage in.
As Phadke et al. (2011) amply demonstrate, women in Indian cities
typically do not feel free to wander about without purpose, feeling
watched and sexualised simply for their presence in public spaces, as well
as positioned as ‘loose’ or ‘immoral’ women if they are seen to be simply
loitering without actually going somewhere. A number of women I met
talked about how they would be stopped by policemen who would want
to enquire why they were out and about in the middle of the day: Didn’t
they have homes to return to if classes were finished? If they didn’t want
to go home right away, why not go to a mall? One of my roommates,
was having some fun late one afternoon, hanging around on the road
‘doing style’ by simply flicking her hair back and forth, and walking up
and down while enjoying the looks of appreciation she got from young
men, when she was stopped by a policeman, and aggressively asked what
she was doing out at this time. When she said she had attended an
afternoon seminar and was just returning home, the policeman asked her
how he could be sure she was telling the truth – might she not be a sex
worker soliciting. Practices of standing around in public, and staring are
also widely banned in women’s colleges, where staff routinely round up
students sitting around under trees or in the canteen, and send them back
 STYLE-ISH GIRLS AND LOCAL BOYS 55

to classes. At NT College, the ‘Home Ministry’ of the student parliament

takes on this policing duty: members of this ministry routinely check the
canteen for students ‘bunking’ – i.e. skipping classes – and send them
back, or interrogate them about why they are there. At college gates,
security guards typically hurry students along so they do not hang
around, often just staring at passers by, and assessing the men standing
that day at the bus stop, while they wait for more friends to arrive.
Concepts of maanam (honour) and karpu (chastity) were often brought
into play in this context and women feared that they might be seen as
arrogant – having ‘head weight’ – and the perception of ‘arrogance’
always exposed a woman to some mechanism of disciplining. That these
concepts circulate popularly among youth today is obvious among
students in the city. Soon after my arrival in Chennai for ethnography in
2012, a song called Clubbu-le Mabbu-le (in the club), by a local band named
Hiphop Tamizha gained popularity on social network websites and
YouTube. In this song a male singer bemoans the loss of his maanam at the
mere sight of Tamil women in revealing clothing at clubs, performing
‘transgressive’ acts such as drinking, smoking and engaging in casual
flirtation. Both in everyday conversation and on the comments of the
song’s YouTube page, a number of young people, both male and female
defended the song, arguing that karpu and maanam appear threatened in the
face of rapid urban transformation and advancing consumer culture.
It does not address ‘all women’ was the explanation I was often given,
but only ‘bad girls, who do dirty things’. It is worth noting that the song
was often described as ‘style-ana’ – i.e. bearing or having style – and the
lead singer’s movements in the song – raising his collar, wearing
sunglasses, and standing around, while a group of women sigh in his
direction – as being ‘stylish’. These practices mark ‘style’ as being located
in the domain of masculine display and a spatial politics of male youth.
As Kapur (2012) points out, however, it would be wrong to be too hasty
and judge this within a unilateral framework that allows no place for the
expression of women’s agency and desire. Instead, we might explore the
street as a place of possibility.
Young women’s engagement in ‘doing style’ further also disturbs the
narrative of women’s agency on the street as being located in demure
and feminine acts that nevertheless constitute instances of conscious
56 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

self-positioning (Osella and Osella 1998). When young women dress in

fashionable – often also ‘western’ – clothing and stand around in public
spaces, they are drawing attention to themselves, and positioning
themselves as active agents in an economy of gazing. As opposed to the
demure play of gazes that Osella and Osella (1998) describe – which is
also a widely occurring phenomenon – when they ‘do style’, young
women occupy what is otherwise marked as a masculine place of self-
conscious and visible positioning. ‘Doing style’ can be, for many young
women, a means of gaining attention and becoming popular among their
peers. The ability to ‘do style’, one group of women told me, shows
‘boldness’: a girl who does style is widely regarded as a challenge to men
around her, and unlike the demure play of gazing, the purpose of ‘doing
style’ is not to start a romance but to flirtatiously question young men’s
occupation of public spaces, and their usually exclusive and gendered
claim over ‘youth culture’.
‘Doing style’ also skirted the boundaries of tomboyish play in young
women’s lives. Elsewhere, I have shown that young women sometimes
‘play male’ in joking situations with other women, allowing them to
engage in surrogate practices of flirting, and erotic touching that are all
passed off as parody, even as they suggest queer potentials (Krishnan
2016). In public, young women rarely engage in erotic play of this kind:
rather the street is recreated in the hostel, and boyish style is exaggerated
into picaresque caricature in the safety of the hostel’s intimacies. This was
not so much straightforwardly ‘doing style’ as a self-conscious parody of
young men’s uninhibited ‘style’: it was not meant to subvert these
masculine performances publicly, but instead created a space of mocking
and flirtation in a space of safety.
In some ways, ‘style’ and its forms of playful subversion are only
enabled by the boundary young women occupy between childhood, and
its transgressive possibilities, and respectable adulthood. Even as young
women were under a lot of pressure to demonstrate respectability, they
also saw their college-going years as a final period of childish playfulness,
during which such transgressions were tacitly permitted. Here, playing
the male ‘rowdy’ and doing ‘style’ in imitation of male filmstars was
childish and funny, rather than inappropriate for a young woman.
‘Boldness’ is a good thing within this context, because it is a way of
 STYLE-ISH GIRLS AND LOCAL BOYS 57

engaging playful possibilities that young women often want to make the
most of, before the responsibilities of adulthood close in on them.

‘I DON’T NEED TO DO STYLE’: NEGOTIATING

HIERARCHY

Style serves also as a site of social differentiation, producing caste and class
through a visual aesthetic. Women inhabiting an upper-middle-class
‘English-medium’ world, thus saw doing style as a definitive aspect of
lower-middle-class ‘popular culture’. Many of these students tended to
wear crumpled cotton kurta, with either jeans, or baggy pyjamas, in
imitation of the style popularised by students of more elite universities
like Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University – a popular graduate school
destination for many – and which was described often to me as the
nation’s ‘intellectual uniform’, worn by journalists, NGO workers, and
students alike. Ironically of course, these clothes – often made of hand-
spun cotton, and featuring ‘ethnic’ prints – much as they are made to
look unassuming, are more expensive than the flashy usually chiffon or
polyester style-ish clothes less privileged peers tend to wear. As Nakassis
(2010) notes correctly, one does not have to do style, when one already
has style. In their refusal to acknowledge their own transcendence of style,
in many ways these students were the sought after ideal. They also
typically did not stand around at bus stops, or even go to malls, to engage
in sight adikkarathu – gazing – more often than not having access to social
spaces where they could meet, interact with, and ‘date’ within western
idioms of this term, young men of their own age and social class. Some of
these women described sight and style to me, as ‘juvenile’ and not clued
into global discourses of erotics and romance.
This might be unpacked as a politics of scale, in which the aesthetically
reimagined ‘local’ and ‘authentic’ increasingly displaces communities
that do not have access to the global economies in which this re-
imagination is embedded. Emma Tarlo (1996) makes an illustrative
argument in her discussion of the social history of Delhi’s Hauz Khas
village – formerly an actual village now converted into an elite antique-
shopping destination. Tracing the story of Bina Ramani, one of the first
designers to set up at Hauz Khas, Tarlo (1996) describes how the
58 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

‘ordinary’ Indian clad in an everyday polyester sari or tight shirt and jeans
came to be ignored as ‘un-Indian’ and profoundly westernised in the
tourist lens of the elite. Instead, the village, and the labourer, taken out of
their context, and placed in glass-windowed, air-conditioned shops were
celebrated as the ‘real India’ in its global avatar. This recovered ‘ethnic
chic’ (Tarlo 1996: 295) ‘which displayed only the decorative aspect of
tradition without any of its associated hardship or discomfort’ (Tarlo
1996: 304) was only accessible to a globalised upper-middle and elite
class. To others this still represented what the modernising impulse had
bid them leave behind and move out of.
For the lower middle-class woman in Chennai, wearing striped jeans
and giggling with her girlfriends about boys in the mall is what
represents a ‘modern’ India. Whereas to the upper-middle-class urban
woman, wearing rumpled Fabindia tunics and traditional hard-leather
kolhapuri sandals while singing along to Bollywood’s latest risque number
that mimics the elite imagination of working-class life and ribaldry might
better represent the same ideal of modernity. As an upper caste and elite
male student in the city put it: ‘If you’re trying too hard, then you’re not
happening.’ Seeking to go to a club or wanting a Vespa whilst one was
still distant from being able to realise these desires was the position of the
person who is doing style.
Scene podarathu is a practice very closely related to ‘style’ and suggests
attracting attention to oneself by publicly performing something.
So for instance, when Kumari walked in to college one day and
announced, in a melodramatic tone, recalling the heroines of dramatic
Tamil cinema: ‘Intha kaadhaley oru thalavali’ (This love is a headache), one
of her friends turned to the others, and mockingly said, ‘scene podara
paaru’ (look – she’s making a scene). Similarly, we would be standing
at the bus stop, and one of the young women in the crowd would start
to do something attention-drawing like swishing her loose, long hair
around, as she noisily used her mobile phone, or even posed, say one
leg out, hips thrust to one side. The others would then declare that she
was doing scene podarathu. The purpose of the scene was usually to attract
the attention of those present, making oneself visible albeit in an ironic
gesture. If one did a scene without meaning to – i.e. came off as being
overly melodramatic with no intent of drama – others then pointed
 STYLE-ISH GIRLS AND LOCAL BOYS 59

out that this was a scene, thus rendering it ridiculous and vulnerable to
friendly mocking.
Scene podarathu was also used mockingly by young women of the
middle and lower middle classes to describe the attention-drawing
practices of upper middle-class and elite students who were their peers.
So for instance, sunglasses are, in Chennai, often the singular commodity
sign of scene – students typically do not wear them even at the height of
summer in 40 degrees centigrade or over, unless they are trying to do
scene. In Tamil films, typically, the ‘hero’ whips out his sunglasses in a
scene where he is showing off, either to impress the heroine or to
intimidate villains. In Rajni Kant’s iconic films, the moment where the
‘hero’ puts on his sunglasses typically also presages an eventful scene.
To wear sunglasses, then, is to presume that one has the status of the
‘hero’ – the ability and panache to carry off this very loaded commodity.
Hence, when occasionally middle- or upper middle-class students
turned up in college in cars, and wearing sunglasses, others pointed and
said ‘scene podara paaru’ (Look, she’s making a scene). In mocking those
who possessed these much sought-after symbols of class status, those
who do the mocking suggest that they in fact cannot carry them off:
that they look ridiculous trying. Through ‘style’ and the practices
associated with it, young women therefore negotiate hierarchies of class
and caste, which otherwise fracture and deeply complicate experiences
of being middle-class.

‘EVE TEASING’: ‘STYLE’ AS AGENCY

Flirtation and ‘doing style’ with each other, also sometimes pales into the
territory of ‘eve teasing’ as sexual harassment on the streets is often
called. So ubiquitous that most young women now carry pins or
umbrellas with sharp tips when they board buses, to ward off the roving
hands of male passengers, eve teasing is an experience many connect to
the dangers of simply ‘hanging out’ in places. As Rogers (2005)
suggests, for young men, eve teasing is often both an aspect of masculine
competition with other young men, as well as a means of exercising
control over women who are seen as being arrogant, or otherwise
transgressing the bounds of femininity.
60 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

As Kapur (2012) writes, women in Indian cities are ogled and

sexualised in any context where they are present in public spaces:
whether as shoppers, workers or students. Following the death of a
student in a road traffic accident that was directly related to this form of
harassment in Chennai, the Tamil Nadu government passed the Prohibition
of Eve Teasing Act (1998) that recognises this practice as a crime, carrying a
sentence of up to ten years’ imprisonment for particularly heinous
forms of harassment. In the years that I conducted fieldwork – 2012 and
2013 – ‘eve teasing’ was back in the focus in the context of renewed
debates on dress codes in Chennai’s colleges. Institutions often also used
‘eve teasing’ as justification for imposing dress codes on students. College
authorities typically argued that ‘undignified behaviour’ by young women
was a cause for ‘eve teasing’ on the streets. In particular, an NT College
teacher argued that the ‘type of girls’ who enrolled in her college these
days – i.e. lower middle-class and lower caste students – appeared not to
care about the ‘type of men’ they might attract by wearing revealing
clothing. In positioning sexual harassment on the streets as a problem
centered on the public presence of subaltern bodies, this teacher echoes a
widely heard middle-class opinion in Chennai and elsewhere.
In the everyday lives of young women, ‘eve teasing’ often occupies a
murky boundary between the aggressive banter that characterises
flirtatious games and sexual harassment as a form of violence. It indexes
forms of play between young men and women where young men use a
challenging, hypermasculine tone in addressing women they wish to flirt
with. As Osella and Osella (1998: 194) suggest, the effect of this is most
often ‘to rupture social distance, reducing formality and restraint and
bringing the girl and the youth into the same space’. The context is most
often left ambivalent; allowing the young woman and her friends either
to accept the invitation to banter, or to interpret it as harassment, and in
this latter case, usually walk away. And, confusingly, in this dynamic,
sometimes ‘no’ does mean ‘yes’.
Young women often used the idioms of scene and style to mock men
who would woo them, thus embarrassing these young men in front of
their friends. In these cases, to point these practices of class out as style or
scene is in fact to lower their status and value, and reduce them to mere
bravado. In doing so, young women assume considerable agency over
 STYLE-ISH GIRLS AND LOCAL BOYS 61

the practice of sight adikkarathu – often using this to deflect overtures that
may not have been welcome or pleasant, and turning them back on the
men who made them, by embarrassing them. One common way in
which some women did this was by addressing the man who made this
overture as a brother, with mockingly exaggerated ignorance as to his
erotic intent. This, by nullifying the possibility of romantic attachment,
embarrasses the young man, snubbing him in the moment of the making
of his gesture. Kalaiselvi, a serious athlete, often found herself in this
position. For various reasons, Kalaiselvi had decided she did not want to
engage in any romantic attachments with boys around her. She told me
she found them immature: they were chinna pasangka – ‘little boys’ – and
she wanted a ‘man’ – a periya aal. She was, nevertheless, often the object of
sight adikkarathu for the young men around her. She added that many
gathered to watch and comment on her body or figaru – a widely used
Tamil modification of the English ‘figure’ – as she did her long jumps.
While she ignored them most of the time, she said she sometimes
enjoyed bantering with them and then eventually snubbing them, calling
them tambi (little brother) or pasangkala (children), so they did not
seriously pursue her. Often this bursts the style or scene balloon, rendering
these young men ridiculous for having assumed a status that they did not
possess. However, interestingly, Kalaiselvi described her own perform-
ance as style as well. In acting cool – and demonstrating her status over
the young men who were sight-ing her, Kalaiselvi had assumed style, in a
way that did not do a scene, or make a ridiculous figure of her. Kalaiselvi
had also, in doing so, managed to appropriate control of the space of the
act of sight-ing and refigure it in her own terms. During this time, she
would also sight some men in her own right. However, by snubbing
them, she left herself invulnerable. Kalaiselvi managed, thus, to create a
space for erotic expression without letting herself feel precarious in a
public space. In this, Kalaiselvi’s friends considered her ‘smart’ – using
the English word.
Another often-used tactic was to position oneself as being above
‘style’, by declaring the man doing ‘style’ as ceri. Literally referring to the
Dalit settlements outside villages, ceri has now migrated from a literal
meaning to being a deeply casteist metaphor for anyone whom youth
regard as ‘uncool’ or in the more interesting translation, ‘local’. Here the
62 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

word ‘local’ refers not merely to proximity of ‘location’ but to something

that is the opposite of ‘global’. Ceri and local boys, I was told, wear fakes,
and do not have global cultural references. They are imagined to be
‘backward’ and ‘uneducated’, even if they are fellow college-students.
Style when it goes ‘over-a’ or is seen to cross a boundary to being ‘too
much’ – here referring usually to the murky boundary crossed between
aggressive masculine self-positioning and sexual harassment – is then
often declared ‘ceri’ or ‘local’. Such men, I was often told, are ‘unused’ to
‘fashionable girls’ and to ‘style-ana’ clothes, such as jeans, tight T-shirts,
and sunglasses. It might be worth noting here that women often draw on
certain discourses of power – here caste and class – to counter sexual
threat, and to position themselves as being beyond reproach and within a
‘safe’ zone. By marking the men who threaten them as ‘ceri’ or ‘local’, the
young women here reinforce caste-inflected ideologies about which men
are ‘safe’ to flirt with, and who is ‘dangerous’, while simultaneously
expressing dissent against the normalised practice of ‘eve teasing’.

CONCLUSION

In this chapter I have shown that ‘style’ as an idiom is useful to examine

the ways in which young women practice forms of everyday agency,
whether in negotiating hierarchies with peers or in countering the threat
of sexual harassment on the street. These forms of agency, as I have
shown, are ambivalent, often reinforcing some dominant discourses
even as they resist others. ‘Style’ has also been shown to be a means for
young women to stake claims to an otherwise masculine ‘youth culture’
in which, unlike their male counterparts, they face a great deal of
surveillance.
As a playful appropriation of young men’s cultural practice, ‘style’
allows young women to occupy an ironic site of critique vis-a
-vis the
social norms through which they are gendered, as well as made
respectable and middle class. In this, ‘style’ allows young women to play
‘rowdy’ and inhabit masculine forms of comportment, as a means of
ironically interrupting scripts of demure respectability. This itself is
enabled mostly because young women – particularly college-going
women – occupy a middle ground between childhood innocence and
 STYLE-ISH GIRLS AND LOCAL BOYS 63

adult respectability. So, for instance, Masters students that I met in

Chennai did not engage in such practices. Many of them wanted to be
married soon, and saw the play of ‘style’ as a childish preoccupation.
Similarly, the numerous ‘working women’ – usually young graduates in
their early twenties – who live in women’s hostels, do not engage in
‘style’, and even feared that they might be seen as being too playful and
improperly adult both in the hostel and in public if they did so.
The boundary of ‘style’, therefore, was adulthood, marked by
graduation from college and entry into a world of respectable futures, in
which marriage featured brightly. In marking ‘style’ as childish, young
women who had recently graduated from college marked themselves
above college culture, and ready for a life of responsibility.

NOTE

1. While this paper is focused more on the space and embodied politics of style, we
might note that gendered experiences of time are also central to the different ways
in which young men and women think of leisure and even of the performance of
style. In a paper recently delivered at the American Anthropological Association’s
Conference (2016), I argued that young women experience time as fleeting: their
youth is widely imagined and described as a ‘blink’ and a ‘breath’. Ironically, the
only way to make the most of this fast-moving time is to ‘waste’ it by engaging in
practices that are normatively imagined as non-productive, such as wandering
around the city, and window-shopping. This is the temporal framework in which
we might locate young women’s performance of ‘style’ as a site of subversion.

REFERENCES

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Gilbertson, A. (2014) ‘A Fine Balance: Negotiating Fashion and Respectable Femininity
in Middle-Class Hyderabad, India’, Modern Asian Studies, 48(1): 120–158.
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Men in India’, American Ethnologist 37(3): 465 –481.
Kapur, R. (2012) ‘Pink Chaddis and SlutWalk Couture: The Postcolonial Politics of
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Krishnan, S. (2016) ‘Agency, Intimacy, and Rape Jokes: An Ethnographic Study of
Young Women and Sexual Risk in Chennai’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
22(1): 67 – 83.
64 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Lukose, R.A. (2009) Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in
Globalizing India, Durham: Duke University Press.
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Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India, Durham: Duke University Press.
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Berkeley: University of California Press.
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——— (2013) ‘Youth Masculinity, “Style” and the Peer Group in Tamil Nadu,
India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 47(2): 245 – 269.
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South India’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(2): 189 – 206.
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New Delhi: Penguin.
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Durham: Duke University Press.
Rogers, M. (2005) Tamil Youth: The Performance of Hierarchical Masculinities: An Anthropological
Study of Youth Groups in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, Unpublished DPhil thesis,
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Raj. AR Murugadoss Productions and FOX Star Studios.
3
RITUPARNO GHOSH,
SARTORIAL CODES AND
THE QUEER BENGALI
YOUTH
Rohit K. Dasgupta and Kaustav Bakshi

INTRODUCTION1

In this chapter we examine Rituparno Ghosh, a queer filmmaker from

Bengal, India, who left an indelible mark on the public consciousness and
sartorial identity of young Bengali queer men in contemporary India.
Since emerging onto the public stage with his first film Hirer Angti (The
Diamond Ring) in 1992, and even before formally ‘coming out’ with
visible sartorial markers, Rituparno experimented with his wardrobe
through pushing male fashion to its androgynous limits. His evolving
style was a manifestation of the abstract notion of an androgynous artist
which he attributed to his cultural mentor, the Nobel laureate and
national poet, Rabindranath Tagore (1861– 1941). In a number of
newspaper and magazine articles which came out following Ghosh’s
death on 30 May 2013, considerable space was devoted to recollecting
his androgynous approach towards fashion and style. Whilst Kolkata-
based designers like Sharbari Dutta are credited for popularising a
flamboyant, non-western fashion aesthetic for men during the late 1990s
and early 2000s, Ghosh had already set a precedent.
66 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Based on ethnography and textual analysis of Ghosh’s films and

media appearances we argue that Ghosh’s sartorial expressions can be
read as a case of performed queer fashion at the time of an
androgynous turn in the works of Indian fashion designers in the
mid 1990s. The chapter includes voices of fashion designers who
knew Ghosh well and contemporary young Bengali queer men
who have looked upon Ghosh as a source of sartorial inspiration and
encouragement to come out.

RITUPARNO

Rituparno Ghosh (1961 –2013) was a cultural producer who wrote,

directed and later acted in films, wrote lyrics, edited magazines, hosted
television shows and became a queer style icon in India. While Ghosh
was criticised for unabashedly conforming to bourgeois values and
celebrating the ‘good life’ in the films he made, he was also widely
applauded for their transgressive narratives. His stories explored
transgressive social codes, marital rape, sexual desires of widows,
same-sex love and moral hypocrisies of the new middle class. His films,
featuring young directors, teachers, poets, career women, teenagers and
queer men as protagonists, opened new windows to the ‘cultured youth’
of Bengal and India, straddling both tradition and modernity in the face
of rapid globalisation. Ghosh’s arrival in the film industry happened at a
critical moment when the predominantly socialist nation state was slowly
transforming into a late capitalist one, owing largely to the liberalisation
of the Indian economy in the early 1990s (Dasgupta 2014; Dasgupta
2017; Dasgupta and Gokulsing 2014; Gokulsing and Dissanayake 2013).
It goes without saying that Ghosh’s films were informed by the social,
cultural and economic changes wrought by liberalisation in the lives of
the Bengali middle class. Ghosh was at once a product and producer of
the schizophrenic consumerist culture effectuated by the open market
(Dasgupta, Datta and Bakshi 2016). His iconoclastic decision to ‘come
out’ officially and to associate himself with films on queer subjects was
also conditioned by neoliberal discourses of sexual identity politics of a
late capitalist society. However, the process of ‘coming out’ was long and
drawn out; Ghosh’s films revolving around female protagonists and their
 RITUPARNO GHOSH, SARTORIAL CODES 67

predicament within a hetero-patriarchal family betrayed unambiguous

markers of queerness. His filmic critiques of arranged marriage, the
commodification of women as sexual objects within the approved social
structure of marriage and family, the lack of freedom they suffer from,
and his endorsement of polyamory as a possible alternative to
monogamous romantic associations, all insinuated a radical disposition
that would culminate into liberal queer politics in his later films.
Wimal Dissanayake (2016) in his article, ‘Rituparno Ghosh and
the Pursuit of Freedom’, while analysing Chokher Bali/A Passion Play
(2003), which was released at least six years before Ghosh officially
came out, observes; ‘He was always concerned about the lack of
freedom that characterised the lives of women in India and elsewhere
and later began to explore issues of homosexual relations and
transgender desires as articulations and effects of freedom’ (49).
In our personal interactions with Ghosh, we often heard him talk of
how his female characters were sometimes inspired by his own life.
In other words, before Ghosh actually came out, he channelled his
desires, misgivings, and feelings of betrayal (in love) into the
portraiture of many of his female protagonists. It was not until Arekti
Premer Golpo/Just Another Love Story (2010) directed by Kaushik Ganguly
finally pushed open the closet door, that Ghosh appeared in public,
exhibiting his queerness, not only in his mannerisms but in his
sartorial excesses too.
Before and after the release of Arekti Premer Golpo/Just Another Love Story
(2010),2 where he played a transsexual filmmaker (which was read by
the audiences as autobiographical), Ghosh began appearing in
flamboyant clothes and loud makeup in public. He raised a controversy
in 2009 by publicly challenging a stand-up comic of Bengali television in
his much acclaimed talk-show, Ghosh & Company:

When you are mimicking me, are you mimicking Rituparno

Ghosh, the person or are you mimicking a generic effeminate
man? . . . What message are you putting across? Have you ever
thought that when you mimic me, you actually end up humiliating
all effeminate men in Kolkata? . . . You should be sensitive to the
fact that you are hurting the sentiments of a sexual minority. I am
objecting to your act not because I am inconvenienced myself;
68 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

rather I am objecting to it on the behalf of all those for whom I may

be a representative.3

Ghosh reiterated several times that the lewd jokes addressed to him did
not bother him as such; he was more concerned that the jokes were
debilitating for other ‘effeminate’ men in Kolkata, who were regularly
abused on the streets or within the home for being ‘unmanly’.
He asserted that since these men could not articulate their discomfort, he
was taking up their cause with the stand-up comic who had been
insulting them for years. Whilst Ghosh’s films and his own sartorial
choice have been instrumental in propagating the myth that all feminine
men are gay and all gay men have a fascination for gender-bending
apparel (due to the absence of any other equally eminent and trendsetting
queer icon in the public domain to this date), it remains immutable that
Ghosh’s extraordinary style and visible alternative way of being came as a
surprise shock to the Bengali populace and to Indians at large. But this, in
our opinion, was actually Ghosh’s activism – the performance of his
queerness, destabilising normative assumptions about gender roles, and
sexual choices. We believe that Ghosh’s stardom which travelled across
multiple media platforms was instrumental in also getting issues of
queerness and queer identities in the Bengali mainstream public
(Dasgupta and Banerjee 2016). Richard Dyer (1979), writing about
stars, surmises that stars are constructed not only from their public
performances but also publicity materials, magazine columns and so on.
Ghosh effectively used all forms of media – television, film, Internet and
print magazine – to become an important voice and ‘face’ of queerness
in Bengal. In the following section, we locate our reading of Ghosh’s
fashion and its political implications within the discourses of global
queer fashion that have emerged in the past two decades.

DRESSES, DRAGS AND DARE: THE POLITICS AND

PRECEDENTS OF GHOSH’S WARDROBE

Dress in India, as anywhere else, plays an important role; it instigates

change, questions national identities and asserts power (Tarlo 1996).
The impact of colonialism upon dress in South Asia has been and
 RITUPARNO GHOSH, SARTORIAL CODES 69

continues to be twofold. On the one hand dress became a site of protest

when Gandhi promoted a return to homespun khadi against the British
clothes,4 and on the other hand dress also signified religion and ethnicity
for most Indians. Western clothing in India as Begum and Dasgupta
(2015) have discussed was often associated with the contaminating
forces of a heterogeneous, hyper-sexualised colonial (western)
modernity whilst Indian clothes were often used to signify chastity,
purity and tradition. This is still most pronounced within Indian
cinema.5 Whilst this duality has been discussed in relation to female dress
and sexuality, we would argue that these dualities also affect male dress
choice, especially during political protests and the Swadeshi indepen-
dence movement when Indian men were encouraged to discard western
clothing and return to the ‘traditional’ and ‘pure’ homespun khadi clothes.
Indian clothing for men, as scholars such as Vanita (2014) have
argued, has been androgynous before the arrival of colonial modernity
which, among many cultural changes, effectuated and advocated strict
distinction between male and female ways of dressing. Representations
of Hindu male gods (even the most virile ones such as Shiva, Kama
and Kartik), for example, often have them wearing heavy jewellery,
including ornate crowns or headgears, dangling earrings, navel-length
neckpieces, waistbands, armlets, bracelets and bangles. They are usually
portrayed as donning silken uttariyas over a bare body and flowing
embroidered dhotis. The same is true of epic characters, including the
most hypermasculine heroes of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Within
Islamic cultures too, men are known to have displayed very refined
sartorial tastes, as underscored by available Islamic paintings, Urdu
poetry and songs from medieval India (Vanita and Kidwai 2000). Ruth
Vanita, in her foreword to Masculinity and its Challenges in India (2014),
elaborates on pre-colonial dress codes of men and women arguing that
what came to be identified as feminine clothing post 1857, was not so
earlier. To quote Vanita:

Such attire was not read by Indians as signaling effeminacy or any

particular sexual predilection, although it is relevant that attraction
to a beautiful young person of either sex was considered par for the
course and had no bearing on a man’s masculinity.
(Vanita 2014: 2)
70 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

The linkages between pre-colonial dressing and androgyny to

contemporary queer fashion amongst Bengali males is exemplified by
Ghosh who acknowledges his queer sartorial choices as an invocation
and nostalgia for a precolonial/ancient Indian tradition. As Bakshi
observes, ‘Ghosh claimed that he was merely reviving an ancient
tradition in which jewellery and the uttariya were integral to the male
attire’ (Bakshi 2013: 121). Gayatri Gopinath (2005: 21) in her seminal
work on queer diasporic South Asian public cultures writes that it ‘takes
the form of easily “recognizable” cultural texts such as musical genres,
films, videos, and novels that have a specifically transnational address
even as they are deeply rooted in the politics of the local’. We surmise
that Ghosh’s clothes in this sense were also creating a recognisable
cultural text for his Bengali queer audiences.
Ghosh saw himself as an androgynous man. He considered
androgyny as a privilege for any artist. He observed that Tagore’s
androgyny was thematically played out in his works, for example in
Ghare Baire (Home and the World, 1916) in which he modelled the character
of Nikhilesh on that of a birahini, a woman who is awaiting her lover:
Nikhilesh waits for his wife to come back from the path of infidelity.
This, according to Ghosh, has a subversive charge as Tagore tried to
create the traits of a feminine sensibility in a male character (Sarkar
2011: 83). He pointed out that even certain songs of Tagore have an
ambiguous androgynous voice underneath, since ‘pronouns and verbs
in the Bengali language are not gender sensitive . . . the mysterious and
mystical ambiguity of androgyny is a treasure’ commented Ghosh in
an interview (Sarkar 2011: 83). His own practiced androgyny, he
believed, came from this kind of influence. Androgyny, however, is not
very unfamiliar in Bengali culture as at least two of the adored Bengali
icons, Sri Chaitanya and Sri Ramakrishna, are widely represented as
androgynous. In fact, in Arekti Premer Golpo, the androgynous figure of Sri
Chaitanya acts as a constant symbolic reference vis-a-vis which the
protagonist’s gender fluidity is played out.
Interestingly, noted socialite designer Sharbari Dutta, who has been
designing clothes for men since 1991, also has a similar kind of approach
towards changing mindsets when it comes to dressing men.6 According
to her, Indian men are very inhibited when it comes to dressing up.
 RITUPARNO GHOSH, SARTORIAL CODES 71

Due to the British influence and colonial hangover, Indians have always
considered grey, pale blue or navy blue as masculine colours that make
for smart outfits (Roychowdhury 2011: 4). In an interview, Dutta says:

I wanted to prove that there’s no clash between masculinity and

bright colours. Our Indian tradition in menswear is of bright
colours and nakshas. So why have we ignored it completely? A three-
piece suit is not the only fashion statement for an Indian man.
He can also make a statement in traditional Indian clothes.
(Roychowdhury 2011)

In a way both Ghosh and Dutta seem to assert that fashion does not need
to restrict itself to the socially sanctioned and culturally codified gender
binaries. Fashion constitutes a major area in gender discourses as it has
a ‘queer’ quality to itself and an ability to break conventions and set
patterns. For instance Richard Dyer points out: ‘Feminization of male
attire [does] not mean wearing women’s clothes but a readiness to wear
bright or pastel colours, to put extra flounce or decoration to an outfit, to
do things, in short, that only women were supposed to do’ (2002: 63).
Ghosh’s fashion statements exemplify what Dyer says about feminisation
of men’s clothes.
In the case of Ghosh, his fashion statements can be seen as having the
power of expanding the purview of the male wardrobe.7 Even if
Ghosh’s attire is discerned as located on the borderline of cross-dressing
or transvestism it causes a ‘category crisis’ (Garber 1992). Transvestism
generally problematises, exposes and challenges the very notion of
‘original’ and stable identities. It also ‘calls[s] attention to cultural,
social or aesthetic dissonances’ (Garber 1992: 16). In the same manner,
Ghosh’s wardrobe can be seen to demonstrate a failure of ‘definitional
distinction, a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits border
crossing, from one (apparently distinct) category to the other’ (Garber
1992: 16). In his queer films too, the costumes given to his
protagonists also bordered on androgyny, highlighting this category
crisis. In Arekti Premer Golpo, for example, Abhiroop (played by Ghosh),
the queer filmmaker, is seen mostly in tops, stoles, plazo suits, pendants
and colourful jackets, teamed with eye liner, lip gloss, rings and
earrings, the kind of clothes and accessories Ghosh sported in real life.
72 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

In this context, it would be interesting to quote fashion connoisseur

Parmesh Shahni:

There is a new wave of androgynous dressing coming out of urban

India, and I like it very much. In each case, it is a very unique form
of individual expression . . . I’ve silently admired the award-
winning film director Rituparno Ghosh’s several stunning public
appearances in the past year. In February, at the Berlin premiere of
the film Areki Premer Golpo, in which he makes his acting debut,
Rituparno made heads turn with his turban, choker, salwar-kameez,
lipstick and eye-liner. Was he dressing in character (he plays two
roles in the film, one of a gay director and another of a jatra
performer) – or was he just reinventing himself in the public eye?
Why does it matter? He was (is!) fabulous, full stop.
(Shahni 2010)

The androgyny Ghosh projected, worked towards augmenting queer

visibility in media and the public sphere. As Ruth Holliday argues, ‘having
been invisible (or pathologized) for so long in writing, the media, law and
culture more generally’ now queer identities have been ‘increasingly
visible through a number of mechanisms’ (2001: 215). She argues:

The politics of visibility as well as the many everyday cues and

codes of dress, gesture or conduct are often used to communicate
identity to others of the same or different groups. For example, the
development of queer styles such as butch and camp (to name but
two) have become signifiers of sexuality and are mapped onto the
surface of bodies, not least through clothes.
(Holliday 2001: 215)

FASHION, SUBLIMATION AND GHOSH

Rituparno Ghosh’s negotiation with fashion in his films is almost an act

of creative sublimation, articulating his queer subjectivity. All his films
display tremendous obsession with refined couture, jewellery and bridal
makeup. In this context, Chokher Bali (A Passion Play, 2003), a period film,
 RITUPARNO GHOSH, SARTORIAL CODES 73

inspired by a Tagore novel, demands special attention; for its protagonist

Binodini seems to have an unmistakable bearing on the queer characters
later essayed by Ghosh. Although a narrative on female emancipation, in
the film gold jewellery emerges as an object of Binodini’s forbidden
desire; this is because, as a widow, Binodini is socially forbidden from
popular South Asian ritualistic codes of ornamentation, shringar. Shringar
through particularly gold jewellery from early Hindu mythology to the
contemporary context denotes self-adornment and a powerful means to
expressing status, beauty, romantic or erotic love ‘the substance of
aesthetic experience’ (Shukla 2008: 4).
In desiring gold jewellery and wearing it to seduce potential lovers,
Binodini remorselessly transgresses a stringent social code. In an editorial
piece, Ghosh wrote, ‘I developed my Binodini as an extension of my own
self’ (Ghosh 2013). This identification with Binodini is played out
explicitly in his later queer films, in terms of characterisation as well as
costumes. Mahendra’s adulterous affair with Binodini renders her an
‘other’, illegitimately intruding into the life of an apparently happily
married couple and separating them. In both Arekti Premer Golpo and
Chitrangada: A Crowning Wish (Ghosh 2012),8 the queer protagonists
(played by Ghosh) replicate Binodini’s otherness: in their relationship
with bisexual men, who prioritise and socially acknowledge their
heterosexual relationships as against their same sex lovers. Ghosh’s queer
men suffer neglect, insult, and eventual abandonment. Ghosh’s
identification with Binodini is brought out through certain scenes and
sartorial desires in both these films. It is important to make this
connection, for it underscores how Ghosh projected his queer desires on
his heroines, before he eventually came out in public.
To demonstrate this, we may allude to two similar sequences from
Arekti Premer Galpo and Chitrangada: A Crowning Wish and then link them to
a sequence in Chokher Bali. In a sequence in Arekti Premer Galpo, a young
Chapal Bhaduri,9 played by Ghosh, suddenly arrives at Kumar Babu’s
house, his mentor and lover (played by Indraneil Sengupta), in the
early hours of the night. The sequence opens with a bejewelled Chapal
entering the room, removing his shawl with a flourish revealing a fully
ornamented get-up. This dramatic entry is followed by a conversation
between them, in which Chapal, erotically reclining on the bed, teases
74 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Figure 3.1 Rituparno Ghosh playing Rudra in Chitrangada (2012). Image courtesy of
Shri Venkatesh Films.

Kumar, lightly reproving him for his inability to acknowledge

his relationship with him. Again in the film Chitrangada, Rudra sits
pensively in the dressing room, wearing elaborate jewellery just before
his stage performance. His boyfriend Partho (Jishu Sengupta) finds
his way to the room in an inebriated state. This is followed by an
emotional altercation between the two, which finally leads to vigorous
lovemaking. However, Rudra is constantly aware of the difficulty of
carrying this relationship forward all along. These two characters in the
abovementioned sequences find a cinematic predecessor in Chokher Bali.
Binodini visits her love interest Bihari late at night, wearing all her
jewels with the intention of seducing him. She fails, as Bihari, a sworn
celibate, ignores her, despite her snide attacks on his manliness. In all
three sequences an abundance of shringar of gold jewellery, the most
desired ornamentation for unmarried and married women, dominates
the narrative. By desiring and donning a forbidden object, in this case,
gold jewellery, the widow as well as the queer men demand
acknowledgement of their status and sexual desires which are either
repressed by violence or are treated as non-existent.
 RITUPARNO GHOSH, SARTORIAL CODES 75

GHOSH, ICONISM AND QUEER FANS10

Even before he began acting in queer-themed films, Ghosh had been

extremely visible in the public domain, owing to the proliferation of the
television industry in the early 1990s. Ghosh appeared regularly on
television, sometimes hosting talk-shows, at other times as an
interviewee. The clothes he wore immediately caught attention, for he
was always dressed in long handloom kurtas, accessorised with a dupatta or
an uttariya. In his mannerisms too he appeared different, for he never tried
to hide his effeminacy. It did not take long for people to identify his
uniqueness, which was visibly different from other male filmmakers
who had emerged from the stable of Tollygunje.11
We are talking of a time, the mid 1990s, when discourses on queer
sexualities and alternative registers of love and eroticism were slowly
entering the public domain in Kolkata through books, American
magazines, television series and films. The word ‘gay’ had not entered
the everyday parlance; but the more informed people, particularly the
English-educated metropolitan elite, had begun to realise that ‘gay’ no
longer simply implied ‘happy’; the word had a more political bearing,
hitherto unknown.
In the beginning, Ghosh was not open about his sexuality. His
sartorial statements were indicative of his same-sex leanings, but were
not unambiguous markers. Although he was mostly seen in jeans and
crew-neck T-shirts on his sets, he sported a very different style when he
appeared on television or any public event. His first talk-show Ebong
Rituparno, aired on ETV Bangla, marked him out as ‘different’. However,
his dressing sense often passed as carrying forward the Shantiniketani
style of men’s clothing, which was quite popular among the Bengali
intellectuals. The Shantiniketani style, consisting of handloom kurtas
(with floral patterns, large block prints or side panels, or batik prints on
them), pyjamas, and jholas (embroidered or printed sling bags), originated
in Tagore’s ashram years back and caught up with Kolkata intellectuals
from the early 1970s onwards. This style was often ridiculed by
more westernised folks for being feminine. Very rarely, though, was
homosexuality associated with such clothing. At the time of Ebong
Rituparno (early 2000s), Ghosh’s wardrobe flaunted an ethnic revival,
76 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

which was a trend in women’s fashion then. Sabarni Das, who worked as
costume designer in many of Ghosh’s films, has observed:

During Ebong Rituparno, a sharp change12 was noticed in

Rituparno’s fashion . . . Indian fashion world was then immersed in
ethnic styles: long kalidaar kurta, dogri pyajama, kantha sari,
kachhi waistcoat, tie and die dupatta, ikkat blouse and what not!
Regional fashion had a heyday . . . In Rituparno’s clothes too this
influence was clearly noticeable.
(Bakshi, 2013: 53)

However, among those who were more informed about queer

sexualities, there used to be a lot of speculation about the possibility of
Ghosh being ‘gay’. Having grown up and spending a major part of our
life in Kolkata, we can attest to the fact that people gossipped about
Ghosh’s sexuality, his habit of cross-dressing at home,13 his alleged
affairs with male film-stars, and his several idiosyncrasies, which had
no verifiable evidence in public. But the pieces of gossip nonetheless
circulated and were relished by the queer community, in and outside
Kolkata. In an interview with us, Anindya Hazra, a queer activist based
in the city, recalled that they had once invited Ghosh to a panel
discussion entitled, ‘Purush: Oitijhye, Sanskritite, Dharanoe Biborton’
(Changing Ideas of Men and Masculinity in Tradition and Culture) in
2000, almost certain of Ghosh’s sexuality. Ghosh had still not ‘come
out’; but they had invited him for the way in which he had redefined
men’s fashion, which was still not identified as specifically queer. In the
same panel, Sharbari Dutta, who had remarkably transformed Bengali
men’s traditional wardrobe, was also invited to speak. However Ghosh
declined the invitation. Hazra believes this was because Ghosh was still
not ready to ‘come out’. It would take another nine years for Ghosh to
officially announce his sexuality. Growing up in the same city with
Ghosh, people were often heard making snide remarks at men’s clothes,
if they were not specifically ‘masculine’. An accessory, such as a dupatta
or an uttariya, an ornate bag or a ring, almost certainly drew a sarcastic
‘oi dekh Rituparno jachche’ (there goes another Rituparno) from
people on the street. Many effeminate men in Kolkata began to be
identified as ‘Rituparno’, the term now replacing other derogatory
 RITUPARNO GHOSH, SARTORIAL CODES 77

labels like ‘ladies’ or sakhi. Much later, in his introduction to a queer

journal, Hazra brought to light this phenomenon:

I feel like asking whether that name apart from becoming a cultural
icon of the feminine man is also standing-in for something else for
the Bengalis. Is this name (which among many other things is also a
brand of sorts for gendered performativity), unwittingly, carving out
a comfort zone for the middle/upper class Bengalis? Is this name
nothing but a sanitized version of such offensive terms as ‘ladies’,
boudi, sakhi (and more recently and increasingly ‘homo’) . . . by which
the Bengali bhadrolok has always abused his effeminate classmate
mauling the latter’s self-confidence, his self-respect?
(Hazra, 2011, 4)

Any visibly feminine man who has grown up in Kolkata, after Ghosh
became a popular icon, would corroborate the point Hazra is making here
(also see Dey 1998). However, Ghosh was silently bringing about a
change in how men’s clothing was to be perceived. Several queer men we
interviewed remarked how Ghosh made them feel more confident about
wearing androgynous clothes or even cross-dressing in public. Later, when
Ghosh ‘came out’ in public and made his sexuality unambiguous through
his sartorial statements, he simultaneously endeared and alienated his
audience. While the more conservative people were scandalised, the queer-
identified individuals found in him an icon to look up to. Ghosh was
completely aware of this. In an interview with Bakshi, he rued:

I have indeed estranged a section of my audience. I am aware of the

loss. A lot of them are wary of my cross-dressing in public! In fact,
the respect I used to command has been seriously affected by my
decision to proclaim my sexuality.
(Bakshi, 2013: 12)

Nevertheless, he did set an example for the queer men and women who
desperately needed a local queer icon, who would tell their stories and
prove to the world that homosexuality was not unnatural. Ghosh’s
‘coming out’ was important, for he was widely revered and people could
not dismiss him for being ‘gay’. In 2009, a year before the release of
Figure 3.2 Rituparno at Kolkata Fashion Week 2009. Image courtesy of Abhishek Datta.
 RITUPARNO GHOSH, SARTORIAL CODES 79

Arekti Premer Golpo, Ghosh began appearing in public, on television chat

shows, award ceremonies, parties, and other social events, in flamboyant
clothes and silk headgears which sometimes reminded people of the
Bollywood star Rekha. Ghosh, an ardent fan of the legendary actor who
had gradually emerged as a style icon, in fact asked his friends whether he
looked like Rekha and was the happiest when they agreed. He even
walked the ramp for the young fashion designer Abhishek Dutta, after
undergoing abdominoplasty and cosmetic surgery, which gave him a
very petite, feminine appearance. Dutta told us that he had actually
replaced a Bollywood actor with Ghosh, when she failed to turn up for
the show, and Ghosh surprised him by ‘rocking the ramp like a pro’.14
After coming out, Ghosh was seen experimenting with his attire even
more: sometimes he combined a Japanese top with a Burmese lungi;
sometimes other kinds of wrap-around lowers with tops that were tied,
rather than buttoned. Yet, he did not strictly cross-dress. He believed in
inhabiting a liminality in his choice of clothes. He told Bakshi in the same
interview as quoted above:

I know many of my viewers apprehend that I might start wearing the

sari any day. Let me tell you, I shall never wear a sari. I remember
someone asking me whether I shall ever wear the dhoti-kurta?
My answer was I wouldn’t. I’ll not wear any gender-determining
attire . . . neither sari nor dhoti-kurta . . . I shall always go for something
in-between. That’s the best way of celebrating gender fluidity.
(Bakshi 2013: 7)

In Chitrangada: A Crowning Wish, Rudra, the queer choreographer seeking sex

reassignment surgery echoes this: ‘I want to be a woman just on technical
grounds . . . I am neither going to wear a sari nor am I wearing a ghagra’
(Ghosh 2012). While he became a symbol of sexual liberation for many,
many queer men also followed him in their choice of clothes and accessories.
Dutta thinks that Ghosh was a fashion icon in many aspects. He told us:

In India queer fashion is very new; so it hasn’t yet got its distinctive
look. But Rituparno himself started a trend with the kind of clothes
he wore more on neutrals but draped or easy fits. By and large,
queer fashion in India is quite subdued: interesting cuts, textures
80 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Figure 3.3 Rituparno with actress Deepti Naval in Memories in March (2012). Image
courtesy of Shri Venkatesh Films.

and anti-fits defines it all. Definitely, Rituparno influenced my line

since I was more into structure clothing; his presence in that
fashion show helped me create a distinctive line target towards
queer fashion.

Sayak Manna, a Kolkata based gay environmentalist in his mid-twenties,

echoes Dutta to an extent:

Rituparno’s style had a great influence on the queer crowd of

Bengal, mostly the ‘effeminate’ men. The right choice of makeup,
earthen/bold coloured ethnic attires, the choice of jewelleries,
draping of shawls, dupattas, exhibiting exuberant individuality,
femininity and the list goes on.

Darshan Shah, the Founder Trustee of the Weavers’ Studio Centre for
the Arts, and a close friend of Ghosh corroborates this view. Shah who
often supplied clothes, shawls, quilts, etc. for Ghosh’s films from her
studio and sometimes helped style him for award functions, told us that
she had observed how young ‘gay’ men, nowadays, effortlessly don
slightly feminine cuts, wear dupattas, and carry designer bags, following
Ghosh.15 It was Ghosh’s stardom and his social visibility in these kinds
of clothes that attributed to this existing template of fashion as a label of
 RITUPARNO GHOSH, SARTORIAL CODES 81

sexual dissidence and queer non-conformity.16 In fact, those who even

slightly emulated his style ran the risk of inviting derogatory comments
on the streets. As Amoha Das, a 25-year-old Kolkata-based fashion
stylist notes:

As far as Rituparno’s influence on the queer fashion scene, his

style was very unique and therefore, trendsetting. However at the
same time, it was heavily feminine and flamboyant, and therefore
not very practical on a daily basis for the closeted or even the
openly flaming homosexual man, on the go, in the city. So rather
than gay men emulating his style, what I feel it did for the
common masses was that it created a culture of queer
membership that could for the first time be expressed solely
through clothing.

Das’s observation is quite important. On one hand, whilst we argue that

Ghosh was instrumental in creating a discourse on queer fashion
amongst the Bengali youth, it cannot be denied that his clothes and style
were a signature of class status which not everyone identified with, as Das
explained.

CODA: THE DEFIANT BODY

Rituparno Ghosh was not the first ‘queer’ body to trouble the gender
binary of Bengal. There are countless others such as Chapal Bhaduri, also
known as Chapal Rani (Chapal the Queen), Tista Das, Manabi
Bandopadhyay (the first transgender to have assumed the post of a
Principal of a suburban college in West Bengal) and so on but it was
Ghosh who we could not ignore. His flamboyant queer style, bright and
colourful churidars were a powerful and defiant voice for the queer
youth in Kolkata, India. Ghosh was not a queer activist and neither was
he proactively involved with the neoliberal queer politics of the city, yet
his defiant style stood him out and registered as a visual marker of
dissidence (Dasgupta, 2014). Ghosh’s transnational influence which
went beyond Kolkata to Dhaka, London, and North America cemented
his position as a Bengali cultural icon. His gender performance and
82 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

rejection of socially sanctioned gender binary clothes appeared at a time

when Bengali society was still coming to terms with queerness.
Ghosh’s queer style echoes Tarlo’s (1995) thesis of clothes instigating
change in India and the visible defiant queer body. Ghosh contributed
to the visibility politics at a time when mainstream media had only just
started to acknowledge queer identities beyond the pathological narrative.
Whilst we would not go so far as to call Ghosh’s style subcultural; in
similar ways Ghosh was recontextualising and repositioning female
commodities by subverting their conventional use of being a female
adornment/garment (as discussed in Vanita, 2014). In this sense Ghosh’s
style asserts Althusser’s (1968) ‘false obviousness of everyday practice’
(Althusser cited in Hebdige, 1979: 102) opening up his sartorial style to
new and covertly oppositional readings. Even in his death Ghosh’s queer
body and style remains active motivating a new generation of queer youth.

NOTES

1. The authors would like to thank Sumit Dey for his various creative inputs to this
chapter. Some sections of this chapter have appeared in a different form as
‘Opening Closets, Dividing Audiences’ in South Asian Popular Culture (2018). The
authors also dedicate this chapter to the the late South Asian film and cultural
studies scholar, K Moti Gokulsing and the legacy of Rituparno Ghosh, who was
an icon, friend and inspiration.
2. Ghosh played the role of the protagonist and was also the creative consultant for
this film, having sufficient inputs into the screenplay.
3. Ghosh & Company, Episode 10, Star Jalsa India, 16 November 2008, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v¼TkKTM2skj9U (accessed on 10 August 2014).
4. For people like British educated, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of
India, the Indian dress was also a site for nationalist struggle. Whilst he settled
for the kurta, pyjama with a sherwani (now called the famous Gandhi jacket), he
kept all components of the suit, only using the khadi or homespun cloth for the
fabric (Tarlo 1996).
5. For example, see Purab Aur Paschim/East and West (Manoj Kumar, 1970), Biwi No.
1/Wife No. 1 (David Dhawan 1999). Also see Dwyer 2000 and Banerjee and
Miller 2003.
6. Dutta designed clothes for Ghosh as well as other cultural icons such as the
musician Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, sports personality Kapil Dev and painter M.F.
Hussain.
7. For instance, the image of Amjad Khan (who is generally remembered as one of
the stereotypical villain characters of Bombay cinema) as the dandy ruler of
 RITUPARNO GHOSH, SARTORIAL CODES 83

Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah in Satyajit Ray’s Satranj ki Khiladi, flaunting chowbandhis,
chowrah pyjamas, designer cloaks, jewellery, danglers and kohl-lined eyes, or for
that matter the ethnic costume of a male Kathak danseuse like Pandit Birju
Maharaj. Such sartorial practices are familiar as androgynous, and are not
necessarily identified as exclusively female attire. Of course one could accuse us
of conflating attires related to performance and everyday life. But if the person
concerned is Rituparno Ghosh, who considers himself to be a constant
performer then such accusations would not hold ground.
8. This was his last completed feature film.
9. Chapal Bhaduri, who plays a ficto-historical character in the film, is a famous
female impersonator of Bengali folk theatre who had his heyday in mid
twentieth century. Bhaduri, also known as Chapal Rani, returned to public
memory and began receiving serious attention from academicians, filmmakers
and urban playwrights, once he chose to pronounce his sexual preferences in
the much acclaimed documentary Performing the Goddess by Naveen Kishore.
10. We are grateful to Abhishek Dutta, Darshan Shah, Anindya Hazra, Amoha Das
and Sayak Manna for taking the time out to talk to us. We are especially grateful
to Abhishek Dutta for providing us with images of Rituparno Ghosh walking the
ramp in his fashion show.
11. Tollygunje is a place in South Kolkata, West Bengal, where the main studios are
located. Although newer studios have come up in other places over the past few
years, Tollygunje metonymically represents the Bengali film industry. Recently,
the term Tollywood has also come into vogue in the print and visual media.
12. By ‘change’, Das means his abandonment of T-shirts and jeans, his staple wear
on his sets so far, and his shift into more androgynous clothing.
13. Later, when we began frequenting Ghosh’s house, we noticed that the kind of
clothes he wore at home were more radical than the ones in which he appeared
in public. This was important; for the activism Ghosh engaged in publicly as
regards to clothes was not abandoned once he was away from the public gaze.
14. Dutta explained this in an email interview with the authors.
15. However, Ghosh’s style was primarily his own making. As Shah told us, he
barely ever asked for advice and purchased clothes and accessories which caught
his fancy at her store. In fact, Ghosh did not have a regular designer, and the
ensemble of clothes, accessories, headgear and jewellery he donned was usually
his own choice.
16. We also interviewed several cis gendered heterosexual women on their views
about Rituparno. We received a fairly mixed response. Whilst none were
particularly repulsed by his clothing choice and the queerness he embodied, there
was some ambivalency. He was called a ‘trailblazer’ and a ‘voice for the women’.
The heterosexual men we interviewed were much more polarised in their views
calling him ‘rituporno’ in reference to the erotic nature of some of his films. This
was a fairly small sample group of audiences. Also see Dasgupta, Datta and Bakshi
(2016) and Bakshi and Dasgupta (2017) on Bengali film audiences and their
views on feminism and queerness.
84 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

REFERENCES

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S. Datta, K. Bakshi and R.K. Dasgupta (eds), Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender and Art,
London: Routledge, pp. 153 – 169.
Bakshi, K. (2014) ‘Arekti Premer Golpo: The Yesteryear Female Impersonator, the Post-
Liberalization Transvestite, and a “Queer” Stereotype’, Gay Subcultures and Literatures:
The Indian Projections, Sukhbir Singh (ed.), Shimla: IIAS.
——— (2013) ‘“My city can neither handle me nor ignore me”: Rituparno Ghosh
in Conversation with Bakshi, K.’, Silhouette: A Discourse of Cinema 10(3): 1– 12.
Bakshi, K and Dasgupta, R.K. (2017) ‘From Teen Kanya to Arshinagar: Feminist
Politics, Bengali High Culture and the Stardom of Aparna Sen’, South Asian History
and Culture. Online First. Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.
2017.1304084 (accessed 10 September 2017).
Banerjee, M. and Miller, D. (2003) The Sari, Oxford: Berg.
Begum, L. (2012) ‘Lingerie Brand Advertising in India: Through Saidian Logic’, in
R. Lifter (ed.), Working Papers in Fashion Studies 2, London: University of the Arts
London, pp. 33 – 39.
Begum, L. and Dasgupta, R.K. (2015) ‘Contemporary South Asian Youth Cultures
and the Fashion Landscape’, International Journal of Fashion Studies 2(1).
Das, S. (2013) ‘Diva Unfolded’, Prothoma Ekhon 1(1), 15 July: 51– 54.
Dasgupta, R.K. (2014) ‘Articulating Dissident Citizenship, Belonging and Queerness
on Cyberspace,’ South Asian Review 35(3): 203 – 223.
——— (2017) Digital Queer Cultures in India: Politics, Intimacies and Belonging, London:
Routledge.
Dasgupta, R.K. and Banerjee, T. (2016) ‘Exploitation, Victimhood and Gendered
Performance in Rituparno Ghosh’s Bariwali’, Film Quarterly 69(4): 35 – 46.
Dasgupta, R.K. and Gokulsing, K.M. (eds) (2014) Masculinity and its Challenges in India,
Jefferson: Mcfarland.
Dasgupta, R.K., Datta, S. and Bakshi, K. (2016) ‘The World of Rituparno Ghosh: An
Introduction’, in S. Datta, K. Bakshi and R.K. Dasgupta (eds), Rituparno Ghosh:
Cinema, Gender and Art, London: Routledge, pp. 1 – 26.
Dey, N. (1998) ‘Purush Ebar Notun Saje’, Patrika, Kolkata: Ananda Bazar Patrika,
18 April 1998, p. 3.
Dissanayake, W. (2016) ‘Rituparno Ghosh and the Pursuit of Freedom’, in S. Datta,
K. Bakshi, and R.K. Dasgupta (eds), Rituparno Ghosh: Cinema, Gender and Art, London:
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Dwyer, R. (2000) ‘The Erotics of the Wet Sari in Hindi Films’, South Asia: Journal of South
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Dyer, R. (1979) Stars, London: British Film Institute.
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16 November 2008. Translated and transcribed by the authors. Available at
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Gokulsing, K.M. and Dissanayake, W. (eds) (2013) Handbook of Indian Cinemas, London:
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4
IN/VISIBLE SPACE
Reflections on the Realm of Dimensional Affect,
Space and the Queer Racialised Self

Raisa Kabir in conversation with Lipi Begum and

Rohit K. Dasgupta

In/visible Space is a series of photographic essays documenting the use of

dress and self-created queer spaces of six young South Asian Lesbian,
Bisexual, Transgender and Queer1 (LBTQ) self-identified women and
Transgender, non-binary2 persons in Britain, and the transformative
healing processes it produced, experienced as spatial affect. It explores
how South Asian LBTQ persons assert their queer and diasporic identities,
either in public or private spaces, using cross-cultural dress markers to
subvert normative standards of western dress. The project questions how
South Asian LBTQ youth, specifically women and minority genders,
construct their identities through dress in their lives at home, and aims to
counteract the dominant landscape of whiteness, prevalent in mainstream
LGBT and queer culture in the UK.3 Lipi Begum and Rohit K. Dasgupta
met up with the artist Raisa S. Kabir to discuss her practice and
motivations for this project. The conversation has been lightly edited for
clarity.
Lipi and Rohit: Can you tell us a little bit about this project and your
motivation for it.
Raisa: It came out of my need for community and South Asian
queerness. I was 22 and was experiencing isolation whilst finishing
my BA in Textiles at Chelsea College of Art. I felt that specific kinds of
 IN/VISIBLE SPACE 87

queer South Asian identities at the time were really not very visible
in contemporary art practice – I didn't see images of trans, queer,
lesbian, bisexual transgendered non-binary people that didn't focus
on gay men. Through my art practice I began to question what does
a multidimensional queer South Asian identity mean. I felt the
world that I was seeing and feeling at the time was not being reflected,
and this project was a way for me to engage with my own trauma of
being in a predominantly white art institution, being of Bangladeshi
South Asian diaspora, with a disability and identifying as a queer
femme.
The project was initially started as part of my final show. The project
was embedded within a multifaceted textile piece that was a juncture
between sound, textiles and photographic images. I was interested in
components that are laced together and how they speak to each other.
The project started as a particular self-reflection piece, a montage, of
myself, looking through a mirror, at a time when I was thinking about
reflections, mirrors. I first sent a call out to community groups in
London that focused on South Asian lesbian and queer women.
The project asked South Asian queer women and transgender non-
binary persons if there was a space that they could see themselves
as South Asian and LBTQ simultaneously, and if this space was real
and existed or was imagined. We worked together to collate the
details of this space and if it could be recreated. And the photo
shoots were very firmly designed by how they, the participants,
wished to be represented or reflected through their own eyes.
I arranged the images into the narrative photo essays myself, although
some of the participants did also consult on the arrangement.
The photo shoots themselves became a vehicle for them to also
reinterpret their own gaze and question how they embody chosen
spaces; an attempt to reverse this gaze of invisibility, of being seen and
yet unseen. The use of differing cross-cultural dress in relation to the
various spaces was crucial in constructing the narratives seen in the
photo essays.
Lipi and Rohit: Can you tell us a little bit about what the process
involved and how you managed to put the show together for Rich Mix,
the community art centre in East London?
88 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Raisa: The process of putting the show together at the Rich Mix
involved meeting with participants over several months and conducting
interviews. I established a certain level of trust through multiple
conversations about the concept and by exploring what participants
wished to achieve through this collaborative project. I saw myself very
much as an artist who was facilitating each participant's ideas around
their own sense of self and identity in a creative and collaborative way.
My early work included four photo essays, two of which are seen here,
Ungendering Prayer and Sita. As a result of wanting to develop the work
further, I put together a proposal for Rich Mix to run a show a year later.
I went on to explore more participants. It was important for me to
question and find visibility beyond my initial ideas and my own
reflections and agency of gaze. Through the second phase to reach out
further, I mainly found participants through word of mouth as I had
become more involved in South Asian queer women's networks.
I quickly realised, I wanted to work with more people and expand
my understanding of the relationship between space and South Asian
queer identities, and how this was reflected in dress choices. I was
interested in the differences between choosing what to wear at home,
in public, in private, between themselves and their parents. I also
wished to explore how dress choices contributed to a sense of comfort
or dissonance in particular spaces, especially heterosexual, non-South
Asian white gentrified spaces. Did the South Asian queers that I was
working with feel visible, invisible, how did they negotiate and
navigate and mediate their multifaceted identities through dress?
Lipi and Rohit: You mention dress and youth; did you come across
any difficulties, limitations, opportunities, and possibilities with working
with this age group of South Asian queer identities?
Raisa: Whilst living in Britain, white hetero-public space often
dominates the terrain we navigate and there is often visible discomfort in
being a brown body in white space, or a queer body in hetero-public
space. I realised that nobody had ever asked them what it feels like to be
young, South Asian and queer. Dress was a way to dig deeper and unpack
these feelings. The conversations created possibilities to share and
exchange stories, build mutual trust; the project became a safe space
to vocalise experiences and things that had hurt and shaped them.
 IN/VISIBLE SPACE 89

For example Y who is 19, having grown up in the predominantly

working-class Bangladeshi lower south end of Brick Lane found that she
became invisible/was rendered invisible when she passed into the upper
north Shoreditch end of the street – an area that had become gentrified
beyond the markers of the Bangladeshi migrants who had settled there
in the 1950s and 1970s. As elsewhere, this process of gentrification
displaced working-class and minority ethnic, and religious commu-
nities, installing a middle-class white cultural norm that was, in this
instance, mixed with an ‘edgy’ art/fashion vibe and small business
scene. Although Y became invisible, her invisibility also gave her a
sense of freedom and made her less self-conscious of the Bangladeshi
community. You can see this in her dress; she is in the invisiblising
space of the upper Shoreditch end of Brick Lane wearing a hijab, but
holds onto markers of her hybrid visibility by wearing a Ramones punk
T-shirt, jeans and Converse sneakers navigating less-gentrified and
personalised corners of Brick Lane with art and graffiti. These images
show a younger generation of South Asian women and queer identified
persons fluently curating their dress identity in confident ways to
deconstruct predetermined ideas of what is traditionally expected of
them; reassessing both South Asian gender conformity and culturally
queer normativities with their dress politics.
Lipi and Rohit: There is a rich intertextuality in not only your
subjects' identity but the variation of montages you present; how do
your pictures depict different South Asian queer perspectives? Your
participants come from different backgrounds, does that influence some
of their choices?
Raisa: Say, if we look at Y, we get a strong sense of self-policing of
appearance. In real life, the hijab wasn't a fixed garment for Y; she would
sometimes take it off and then put it on. She is mediating her very
religious family and her own individual queerness. Her hybrid dress
choices are partly based on feelings of self-consciousness of the rules and
norms of dressing expected by her community, and from not being out;
and partly her own feelings of both wanting to negotiate cultural
expectations and white dissonance. Y identifies as bisexual, and still lives
with her family around the lower Whitechapel end of Brick Lane as part
of the Bangladeshi community in East London. The nearby district of
90 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Shoreditch became a place where she could be herself, almost

anonymous amongst the vibrant graffiti art that she loves, rather than
the nearby district of Whitechapel where she felt consciously hyper
visible as a Muslim woman within a racialised public space. In the White
hetero-public space of Brick Lane, previously a majority Bangladeshi area,
now heavily whitened and gentrified, she felt relief being able to be
invisible among the crowds. She mentioned feeling out of place in
mainstream queer spaces, where the racism and Islamophobia meant that
as a hijabi queer woman she is visible as Muslim, yet made invisible as
bisexual. The concept of the private space of her friend's car became a safe
place to be with other queer South Asian women to smoke or have a can
of beer and not be made to feel conscious for being Muslim and queer.
This is different to Maryam. Maryam's essay and photo shoot was
based a lot more in performing protest. She is publicly queer, and an
active feminist, and less self-policing and more challenging of dress
choices. You see this in her choice to wear a beanie hat in place of a topi, a
Muslim prayer hat traditionally worn by men, instead of hijab. She mixes
South Asian kurtas with western jeans and regularly wears a very queer
lesbian aesthetic of street-style beanie hats and hoodies with denim
jackets. Religion is a huge part of her identity; this is why she wanted to
be photographed in the mosque as a feminist protest of public prayer.
We chose the first mosque ever to be built in the UK, the Shah Jahan
Mosque in Woking, Surrey – which is a mosque situated within and
frequented mainly by its local Pakistani community. She wanted to see
what would happen if we turned up to the mosque as queer muslim
women, and experienced how it would feel to be in the centre of a
predominantly masculine space of this mosque. Usually in Islam many
women are culturally expected to pray at home, and the act of public
prayer can be a limited option, especially within smaller community
mosques such as this. On this occasion, we found the women's prayer
area full of men when we arrived during Jumma (Friday prayers) to do the
photo-shoot and had to wait until it was empty. More inclusively open
and larger mosques that aren't affiliated with an ethnic community are
known to be more accessible to women for prayer, and there are more
Muslim women that are taking action to take up space in mosques and
religious spaces, which are still so dominated by men.
 IN/VISIBLE SPACE 91

Whilst Y found comfort in performing invisibility, Maryam found

comfort in asserting her visibility. Exploring what it means to be young
and straddling these identities is predicated around the need or desire to
question preconceived ideas, and to continually challenge presumptions
that you must perform your gender and ethnicity in traditional binary
patterns of dress. Many people have become adept at tailoring their dress
and expressing their identities in ways that permit them to navigate
multifaceted terrains, whilst subtly subverting expectations of how their
gender and race fit into certain spaces. It is through this altering of their
dress with nuanced codes to draw queer cultural visibility, or to move
within and beyond binary parameters, that new cultural formations and
use of space are forged. They are creating brown ways of being queer
through their dress. Their use of dress in this way speaks volumes and
demonstrates the flexibility in the languages of queerness that it creates.
Lipi and Rohit: We're interested in the points you make about
brown ways of being. Do you think the diaspora has had a specific
influence on how young queer South Asians dress and how this might be
different from their parents or grandparents when they came as first
generation migrants? I guess we are trying to find out if the diaspora had
a specific role in how some of your participants dressed on top of queer
aesthetics and individualism?4
Raisa: Although you could say subjects are choosing to dress
differently from parental and community expectations of dress, these
images depict a certain freedom of choice and are carefully constructed.
The outfits they chose were significant to each of them both in terms of
how they wanted to be seen and how they wanted to navigate these
spaces. In some images, such as Ungendering Prayer, both the clothing and
the spaces are ‘fictional’, chosen and/or constructed for the purpose of
the photo shoot rather than being an accurate reflection of how my
participant actually dressed in particular spaces. This provided an
opportunity to comment on and temporarily bypass or rework religious
and cultural regulations about gender, dress, space and the body. This
gave the process of planning and taking the photos a personal charge for
both of us – a chance, albeit momentary, to restore the queer and non-
gender binary body to the spaces of South Asian religiosity. This sitter,
who came from a conservative Muslim Indian background, didn't feel
92 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

safe in a mosque; they missed and longed for the memories they held of
visiting the mosque as a child with their father, and wearing looser, less
gendered clothing to pray in when they were younger. They wanted to
recreate a space to experience that sense of belonging. They felt the act of
public prayer in a religious space was restricted for them as a non-binary
gendered person because of the segregation of sexes in Islam and
mandatory gendering in Islamic dress with the hijab.5 They didn't feel
comfortable entering a mosque because they were unable to personally
draw together their gender presentation, queer and Muslim identities in
such a way that was authentic to themselves. We chose to create a private
queer Muslim fictional space where they could be comfortable with
various parts of their identity at once – by not wearing a hijab and
praying in a non-male dominated space. A space where they felt free of
gender policing, free from the constraints of dress conformity and the
expectation that they had to be heterosexual. This project allowed them
to immerse within prayer whilst being a visibly queer non-binary
Muslim in safety. Wearing male South Asian Islamic clothing was a new
healing and restorative process. The project allowed us to document the
moment and the conversations that took place.
Many of the subjects were influenced by their parents' understanding
of moral codes of religious and cultural dressing; yet they also questioned
their parents' ideals of dressing, coming to regard them as partly the
result of diaspora experiences that naturalised regional and cultural dress
conventions as religious practices. Maryam lives with her mum and
comes from a Pakistani background in Nottingham, in the Midlands,
England. Growing up she noticed and absorbed how male members
dominated the cultural Pakistani community; it was only through her
own journey into feminism and establishing her queer identity that she
routinely began to question male authority, and began to see herself and
identify as Muslim first rather than Pakistani. Like many other second,
third and fourth generation young South Asians in the UK, she felt that
dress norms in the Pakistani diaspora community were linked to culture
and not religion. Maryam chose not to wear the flowery gendered
garments or pretty shoes often imposed for attending community
weddings. She chose to navigate her Pakistani and diasporic identity
through the wearing of modest shalwar kameez, Converse sneakers, leather
 IN/VISIBLE SPACE 93

jackets and darker colours, which she calls ‘q-wearing’ – a term we often
talked about together under the hashtag #queeringsouthasiandress in
terms of playing with hetero gendering of clothing and mixing particular
garments
Lipi and Rohit: You say your images are fictional, but the stories
have a sense of realness to them; and like gender binaries, fiction and
reality seem to be blurred. Can you say more about this?
Raisa: Yes. Take Sita, for example. They chose to be photographed at
their local barbers. Sita has been going there for over five years while
living nearby the barbershop. Unlike Ungendering Prayer, Sita chose to
perform their identity within a non-fictional setting. As a South Asian
masculine-of-centre-identifying lesbian, getting a buzz-cut at a
heterosexual, Pakistani, male-dominated space, gave Sita a sense of
familiarity and ‘brown’ solidarity. It was a documentary shot, as she
had her haircut in real time whilst I was taking all of the photographs
during that time, but we chose a place that Sita had a prior relationship
with, where they didn't feel like an outsider – something not out of the
ordinary. The heterosexual male geography adds power to the image;
Sita is safer in the heterosexual brown male barbershop than in white
queer spaces. What comes through is the shared solidarity and
acceptance of being brown, but also dispels the notion that Sita
being visibly queer in a Pakistani Muslim barber's shop wouldn't be
able to take place, and that there would implicitly be a homophobic
interaction, which of course there simply was not.
Nikita, is Gujarati Indian, bisexual femme and openly a sex worker.
The photographs explore the process of Nikita becoming and undoing
the performance of Kiki, the alter ego she uses for work. Kiki is often a
performance of a heterosexual woman acting out fantasies of the
‘sexually repressed Asian housewife’ for male clients. Here Nikita uses
dress to explore her queer and South Asian femme6 identity, without
being fetishised by the white heterosexual male gaze, as is with Kiki, or
erased by the white queer gaze, as is with often whitewashed queer
spaces. Here the private space of her bedroom is at the intersection of
race, sexuality and gender, where she can be who she is.
We also see this with Raju at their local Indian South Asian
supermarket in Stoke Newington, London. Raju chose to reproduce their
94 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Sikh, queer femme identity through creating an assemblage of turban,

draping, shawls, nail varnish, and earrings. They wanted to locate their
trans feminine East African/Indian/Punjabi Sikh identity, but within the
public and racialised setting of their local South Asian supermarket. Like
Sita, there was a sense of solidarity from the familiarity of being a
frequent customer and of sharing a common South Asian identity.
Through Raju and Sita, we see how predominantly heterosexual spaces
like the South Asian supermarket are not spaces of violence, but spaces
where two very visible non-conforming identities can come together.
This disrupts any assumptions that South Asian heterosexual spaces are
spaces of violence for South Asian queers. There is camaraderie with Raju
and the shopkeepers and a bridging of South Asianness. And this is
something that runs through my images, of a larger South Asianness and
mixing of specific ethnicities. Many South Asian queer people, tend to
use the term South Asian as a political stance to resist the ways we have
been divided by ethnicity and religion within colonial violence, although
it is of course important to acknowledge our distinct cultures, languages
and communities, it is also felt imperative to forge political solidarity
through the term South Asian. In this way we can actively resist the
tensions that come with being Diasporic South Asians and our respective
differing ethnic communities, where perhaps our parents might have pit
each community against an other. Instead, younger South Asian queer
people finding each other can be like creating new families, where there
is a desire to celebrate the crossovers of our cultures rather than the
divisions, because that community is so small to begin with.

NOTES

1. Queer, is sometimes used as a catch all of LGBT, but also used as a political identity
that is affiliated with left wing, radical, anti-mainstream commercialisation of
LGBT groups. Queer is also used to mean (and especially in this context) to be
attracted to different genders including your own but a sexual attraction that is not
fixed to binary gendered sexualities, such as Lesbian or Gay, Women or Men but
could include those identities. Queer is also an academic term that takes the
premise of not being fixed in a binary way, such as attraction, but is used in
different academic applications to create or illustrate a multiplicity of theoretical
outcomes, by bringing disparate ideas, objects and subjects together in a way that
queers them. Also see Ahmed 2006; Jagose 1996.
 IN/VISIBLE SPACE 95

2. The gender binary gives options of female or male, to be feminine or masculine,

to present as a woman or man. Non-binary is a gender identity that cannot be
coded in these binary ways and as a result there are many different genders, and
no single gender presentation as an example.
3. For a good discussion on this see Kawale 2003 and Puwar 2004.
4. For example Gayatri Gopinath (2005) argues a queer diasporic framework
challenges the hierarchical construction of nation and diaspora in which the
nation is often seen as superior, and the diaspora is often constructed as an
inadequate recreation or copy.
5. Hijab, the practice of covering the hair with a head scarf or cloth worn by Muslim
women. Also see Lewis 2014.
6. Femme, different from feminine, is used to describe a political feminine/
effeminate presentation of gender and energy associated with queer women, men
and non-binary persons.

REFERENCES

Ahmed, S. (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, Durham: Duke

University Press.
Gopinath, G. (2005) Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, Durham: Duke
University Press.
Jagose, A. (1996) Queer Theory: An Introduction (Reprint edn), New York: New York
University Press.
Kawale, R. (2003) ‘A Kiss is Just a Kiss . . . Or Is It? South Asian Lesbian and Bisexual
Women and the Construction of Space’, in N. Puwar and P. Raghuram (eds),
South Asian Women in the Diaspora, Oxford: Berg.
Lewis, R. (2015) Muslim Fashion: Contemporary Style Cultures, Durham: Duke University
Press.
Puwar, N. (2004) Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place, Oxford: Berg.
5
FACES OF SUBVERSION
Queer Looks of India

Sunil Gupta and Charan Singh

From classical traditions in western and Indian art to the covers of

contemporary fashion magazines, the accessories and style of clothing
depicted in a portrait provide great insight into the time, space and
culture of a person. This essay is a dialogue between two artists Sunil
Gupta (SG) and Charan Singh (CS) discussing their contrasting
approaches towards the photographic depiction of same-sex desire in
India. The term ‘queer’ in India is understood by urban English-speaking
people as anybody who makes non-conforming sexual choices.
Indigenous terms are still in use by non-English speaking people. Both
artists are from urban India and are English-speaking. Here they use
photography to illustrate how queer youth in urban India use Indian
popular culture to codify their appearance.
Mr Malhotra’s Party by Sunil Gupta (2007 – 2012) is a topographical
survey of mostly young middle-class educated queer people in Delhi,
depicting the parts of the city where they study, live and work. This set
of portraits has been constructed to confront the viewer; whilst other
people in the frame are in motion, the portrait subjects are mostly
standing still, gazing directly at the viewer. This is in contrast to an
earlier generation who would have looked away. This moment, after
India’s economic liberalisation in 1994, depicts a sense of gender and
sexual fluidity reflected in global unisex and androgynous styles. Kothis,
Hijras, Giriyas and Others by Charan Singh (2013 – 2014) is a series of
 FACES OF SUBVERSION 97

studio portraits of vulnerable groups including: lower-class effeminate

male youth who take on female gender roles in same-sex relationships
(Kothis), and transsexual/transwomen (Hijras). The sitters report that
they feel vulnerable in public places, because they are a recognisable
subculture in the street. In these portraits sitters were asked to reflect on
their unrequited desires and their gender identities by dressing and
posing like their favourite fictional female characters from Bollywood
and TV serials.
CS: Your photographic series ‘Christopher Street’, (1976– 1977) and
Mr Malhotra’s Party (2007– 2012), have recently been exhibited together in
New York. Both series are almost a generation apart. Why is it that you
have continued making street portraits of young queer men?
SG: I have always made portraits of gay/queer men. With
‘Christopher Street’, I was witness to the aftermath of a defining
moment in and around the bar Stonewall Inn in New York, 1976,
where the modern gay liberation movement was born. This was a
place where there was an overwhelming public display of young gay
men. Here they could safely and freely walk and mingle, dress in
the way that they liked, and publicly express their desires for each
other. In terms of the history of photography, it’s also a time when the
street photograph had been solidly validated as art by the museum
world. The ethos of the time was to go out and shoot on the street,
especially in New York, where the far reaching influence of the ‘New
Documents Show’ had been originated at the Museum of Modern
Art in 1967 with work by Arbus, Winogrand and Freidlander. So it
was something I was doing intuitively without a lot of thought.
Mr Malhotra’s Party, on the other hand, was a very slow, deliberate art
exercise. I wanted to update my work Exiles (1986) and present
portraits of out queers in their own city in public spaces. However,
there is no equivalent in India to a public queer street like Christopher
Street, so it was a case of organising each picture one at a time.
It developed in directions more in tune with contemporary times, as
immediately there were women in it and later trans men and the dress
styles reflected this. In both scenarios people dressed as they wanted.
It was an attempt to present the private queer as more public in India.
A break from the past.
98 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

SG: With Kothis, Hijras, Giriyas and Others what were you trying to show
and why did you get them to pose like that with lighting and studio
backdrops? Are the poses meaningful?
CS: The ideas for these portraits I can trace back to 2009 when I met
you and had seen your work along with that of other gay/queer
photographers including Claude Cahun and George Platt Lynes, whose
work influenced my interest in making posed studies in the photographic
studio. When I looked at the history of Indian photography, I realised
that only the upper-classes, with the exception of some urban working
class, which are not those living in slums or the rural poor living in
bonded labour conditions had the means to commission studio portraits
of themselves. When I came to making photographs, I not only wanted to
make something queer but also challenge nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century stereotypes about studio photography from India. The
main stereotype is the upper middle-class patriarch and his family in a
heteronormative pose and dress, a trope that came to India from
European painting. Any creative challenges by unmarried youth were not
possible due to the cumbersome process of photography and the expense
involved. The situation only changed due to the proliferation of cheaper
high street studios in the mid twentieth century. However, these
remained unaffordable to the underclass. Many of my models have not
had a studio portrait made in their lifetime. Therefore I attempted to
create a studio where people could feel comfortable enough to create
their own styles and poses. The poses and postures they came up with
derive from popular movies and TV serials, as that is the most widely
accessible cultural discourse that we have in India. The young models
have chosen to dress and style themselves with clothes and accessories
and imitate poses of their favourite movie characters in their most
treasured movie moments. For example, Untitled 6, the gesture and henna
painted hands in the picture is a common bridal pose inspired by posters
of several movies and TV stars in India.
CS: I see Mr Malhotra’s Party as an anthology of fashion and how queer
people dress, it’s almost like a version of the Gay Semiotics1 (Fischer 1977)
in an Indian context. Do you think so?
SG: That’s interesting that you should think that. On the whole with
Mr Malhotra’s Party I let people represent themselves so they were free to
 FACES OF SUBVERSION 99

wear any markers they liked. However, I couldn’t discern too many
indicators of sexual role playing preferences as were outlined in the Hal
Fischer study you are referring to. Over and above a more generalised
leaning towards the more masculine or feminine in dress styles, they
were not wearing any indicators of actual sexual role choices regardless
of their gender identification.
SG: In your work, I am interested to know what kind of characters
from TV and cinema are being referred to in each pose and each costume.
And why that appeals to the youth you photographed and what they
might say about desire and their lives in general?
CS: That’s right! The people I was working with are greatly influenced
by Hindi cinema and TV, which is perhaps because they are primarily
Hindi speaking people and their main source of visual reference is
cinema and TV. Art galleries and museums in India are not welcoming to
young people who are not from the middle and upper middle class and
are consequently not frequented by kothis2 and hijras.3 Many had styled
themselves on popular vamps from TV serials. It shows in the way they
use broad eyeliner and Sindoor (red colour powder, a mark of a married
woman in Hinduism) in their hair partition. Others posed the way
famous courtesan characters did in classic Bollywood films like Pakeezah
(Amrohi 1972) and Umrao Jaan (Ali 1981) in the 1970s and 1980s. They
are attracted to how these fictional female characters are never allowed to
obtain the object of their desire, they exist in a continuous state of tragic
un-fulfilment and it is this un-fulfilment which I reflected in the lives of
the people in my series Kothis, Hijras, Giriya . . . I heard them quoting a
famous line from a song in Umrao Jaan ‘Justzu Jiski Thi Usko To Na Paya
Humne’ (I did not attain whom I desired). And so their relation with
cinema and the TV goes a long way. In other words, it is part of
their daily lives. In the 1980s and 1990s growing and colouring one’s
thumb nail was the limit of subversive and ambivalent style amongst
‘regular’ men in South Asia. See the young boy is wearing embroidered
flowery shorts, which is quite a brave fashion statement for the Indian
street, but then this type of look inspired the metrosexual millennium
Bollywood look, which is based on stereotypical styles of
femininity where male stars appeared in bathtubs with beauty soap
and rose petals.
100 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

CS: Sunil, would you say your work (maybe unconsciously) gives a
variety of queer looks? From queer feminists, students, corporate
workers to new age hipsters, you show interest in a wide range of people
and their looks.
SG: That may well be so. Initially when I first started the series I was
working with a very particular group of people who I came to know
though my membership of the cultural activist organisation, Nigah. One
of the things I did, was run a photo workshop around self-portraiture
over a number of weekly sessions. I used individuals from this group
whom I had come to know quite well to pose for the new series,
Mr Malhotra’s Party. The participants of this group, were of course, mostly
under thirty years old, English speaking and had completed at least
one degree. The group originally emerged from Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi, so you could say, they did have a lefty,
intellectual student look about them. The portrait of Anusha, JNU is fairly
typical. Though as the group went in search of a non-student
membership, into the city and outside the campus, a broader range of
people joined. Still young and usually educated in English, but I suppose
the budget and the dress codes shifted to a more urban activist look, a
more up-market and trendy city look. Therefore not the hippy kurtas4 and
jholas5 of an earlier lefty activist NGO look, although some persisted, but
unisex T-shirts and skinny jeans were making inroads for a streamlined
look. As dress became more unisex, it was harder to distinguish what
kind of people and what codes of desire were operating. I don’t know,
perhaps masculine/feminine desire has more purposefully shifted onto
the internet? I believe what the urban educated young are showing with
their dress codes today is the fluidity between their gender and sexual
identities.
SG: My last question for you, then, is whether your subjects, by
appropriating gender specific codes from popular culture, are using their
dress to exhibit very specific women’s traits (mostly tragic fallen women)
as trans men and are therefore perhaps less fluid or more fixed in their
gender and sexuality choices?
CS: I think, there is much more complexity to their gender identities
than it appears at first glance. It is true that they embrace the ‘fallen
women’ (See Untitled 2) etiquettes to lure their lovers and potential sexual
 FACES OF SUBVERSION 101

partners, which may limit their gender choices. But in actuality, gender
performances including the attire they are wearing does not necessarily
comply with their sexual role, it is a fantasy of how they want others to
look at them, or which actress they fantasise to become like. From Hindu
mythology to Bollywood films, gender is so spectacular and performed
in a variety of ways in a variety of scenes in India. It is okay to cross-dress
in one song scene but then play a macho hero in a leather jacket and
denim for the rest of the film. I am still trying to understand the many
ways, how in South Asia, the notions of masculinity/femininity are
suggested by clothes and mannerisms? I am not sure what it means when
they say, ‘act like a man’? Perhaps they mean, ‘dress like a man’.
Sunil Gupta and Charan Singh have produced a photo book investigating how the
human rights of LGBTQ lives in India and are affected by recent changes – Delhi:
Communities of Belonging, The New Press, New York 2016. They also curated
the exhibition, ‘Dissent and Desire’, at the Contemporary Arts Museum,
Houston 2018.

NOTES

1. Gay Semiotics: A Photographic Study of Visual Coding Among Homosexual Men by Hal Fischer
1977, Cherry and Martin.
2. Kothi, in the culture of the Indian subcontinent, is an effeminate man or boy who
takes on a female gender role in same-sex relationships.
3. Hijra is a term used in South Asia – in particular, in India – to refer to an
individual who is transsexual or transwomen.
4. Kurta is a traditional loose shirt falling either just above or somewhere below the
knees of the wearer.
5. Jhola is a cloth bag often carried by writers and activists in India.

REFERENCES

Ali, M. (1981) Umrao Jaan. Integrated Films: India.

Amrohi, K. (1972) Pakeezah. Mahal Pictures Pvt Ltd: India.
6
DESIGNING FOR
‘ZIPPIES’ AND THE
MADNESS OF
BHOOTSAVAAR
On Commercially Inflected Artistic Nationalism
and Branded ‘Subcultures’

Tereza Kuldova

Luxury Indian fashion, or Indian haute couture, has for more than a
decade revelled in tradition and heritage, capitalising on the skills and
creativity of India’s craftspeople. Leading designers, including JJ Valaya,
Tarun Tahiliani, Rohit Bal, Sabyasachi Mukherjee, Ritu Kumar, have
embraced an aesthetics that I have labelled ‘royal chic’ (Kuldova 2013;
Kuldova 2016b). This is an aesthetics that invokes the opulent lifestyles
of the maharajas, princely elites, or Mughals, with all their excesses,
indulgences and taste for refinement and grandeur. Royal chic also
invokes the ideal of a composite culture and (pseudo)-secularism so
often celebrated in the nationalist and patriotic discourses, while
projecting these onto the canvas of contemporary and future India and
its cosmopolitan albeit firmly ‘Indian’ elite. Royal chic delivers an
aesthetic of distinction to the contemporary elite ‘rulers’ served on a
plate of cultural pride, crafting a special elitist space vis-a
-vis other
imaginary global and transnational elites. In other words, elitist Indian
fashion has embraced a very visible and unmistakable form of ‘artistic
 DESIGNING FOR ‘ZIPPIES’ 103

nationalism’ (Ciotti 2012) that revels in heritage luxury and materialises

the doxa of Indianness. Within this aesthetic the craftspeople embroidering
and weaving the lavish attires are at once celebrated as the very
embodiment of India’s tradition and greatness, while at the same time
playing the role of ‘subjects’ to the elites that benevolently patronise
them through the designers, an act that typically reproduces their subjected
and impoverished position of social exclusion rather than elevating
it (Kuldova 2016b). At play here seems to be a logic that amounts to a
social rule, namely, that that which is socially marginal and excluded
becomes symbolically central for any given culture (Stallybrass and White
1986).
JJ Valaya’s Azrak show at the ‘Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week’ of
2012 succinctly materialised this logic. For the show, Valaya decorated
the fashion ramp with fake impoverished street sellers, craftsmen and
embroiderers impersonated by theatre students, while the models walked
the ramp impersonating the phantasmatic neo-royalty. Reproduction of
elitist nationalism with a hint of neo-feudalism is visibly at stake in the
production of India’s top designers. But what about the quirky youth
fashions inspired for instance by steampunk and other western trends
that often appear on the very same ramps following such opulent neo-
aristocratic splendour? Youth brands like to portray themselves precisely
as offering an alternative both to the elitist visions of prestige and to
restrictive middle-class moralities. But are they not merely commodify-
ing an image of a spontaneous lifestyle and capitalising on claiming to
present an alternative and thus selling a symbol of an alternative rather
than an actual alternative? Are they not in reality, despite their
countercultural appearance, the true symbol of ideological co-option
(Heath and Potter 2005)?
In the following, I will try to show that even if the designers of
youth fashion try to convince the general populace in India of both its
subcultural and cosmopolitan feel, still the ‘production of the “global”
occurs through nationalist imagination’, as Leela Fernandes has argued
in her work on media and the middle-class India (Fernandes 2000:
611). ‘Branded subcultures’ tend to correspond to a particular socio-
economic position (urban/metropolitan aspiring middle class and
upper middle class) that is mobilised by and mobilises a nationalist
104 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

narrative, albeit one that places the emphasis elsewhere than the elitist
nationalism of the very top 0.1 per cent. Rather than indulging in the
celebration of cultural heritage as an anchor for a neo-feudal
cosmopolitan identity, youth fashion dreams of the immense potential
of the creative youth plugged into global networks, a youth that bears a
promise of a bright future for India. While in imagination this youth
encompasses hundreds of millions, in reality we may be talking of the
top 2 – 4 per cent of the urban youth (Banaji 2012). The majority of
India’s youth remains impoverished and underprivileged, no matter
how much the nationalist ideologues and media exaggerate the
proportions, capacities and impact of the urban educated youngsters
(De 2008; Das 2000; Mehta 2003; Banaji 2012). A similar situation
can be discerned in other places across South Asia, such as Sri Lanka
(Hewamanne in this volume). What is marginal in terms of numbers
(here, cosmopolitan youth with considerable spending power),
becomes symbolically central. These privileged youngsters are
idealised not only because of their presumed creativity, openness to
the world and cultural capital, but also because they are the perfect
image of consumer-citizens, of citizens who have replaced politics
with consumption that collapses, often becomes one, with their
inward-looking individual identity projects (Banaji and Buckingham
2009). Turning individual consumption into a political tool is an act
only the very privileged can afford. This might be a reason why
consumer citizens (Scammel 2000) become the good model citizens
for contemporary nationalist ideologues – due to their belief in the
power of consumer choice they tend to give up on the idea of ‘politics
as purposive, collective action concerned with altering the distribu-
tional values of social institutions’ (Hoare 2007) and hence pose little
threat to the ruling political and business elites. In order to shed some
light on the quirky fashion for these privileged youngsters, who might
be socially marginal but symbolically dominant in the nationalist
discourses centring on India’s great future (Kuldova 2014), let us now
investigate Nitin Bal Chauhan’s brand Bhootsavaar (‘Possessed’), while
also considering the ‘strategies of capture’ (Lordon 2014) deployed by
the brand to acquire young and loyal followers and produce obedient
consumer-citizens.
 DESIGNING FOR ‘ZIPPIES’ 105

DESIGNED ‘PASSIONATE MADNESS’: BE AUTHENTIC,

BUT ONLY THE WAY I TELL YOU TO

Those few designers creating the Indian ‘Gen-X market’ cater largely to
the upper middle-class urban youth that likes to perceive itself as
rebellious (being privileged enough to break the social rules), creative
and ambitious. Opinions differ about how to refer to this privileged
urban class of Indian youngsters and about who should be included in
the first place. Nitin Bal Chauhan labels this group the Indian Gen X
(‘x’ here stands simply for next) and counts himself as its member. Some
go with the western notion of the Gen Z, which they Indianise (‘zippies’)
(Lukose 2009). Others still reject such labels altogether as misleading
(Banaji 2012). Like all labels, the meaning of these classifications is
situational and relational. The boundaries of those labelled as zippies tend
to expand and contract, exclude and include, depending on the social,
commercial or political purpose. So, for instance, brands like Bhootsavaar
may systematically cultivate the illusion of vast numbers of youngsters
who can potentially aspire to or belong to the urban creative class (they
might even sell them aspirational printed T-shirts for 500INR). So too,
the nationalist ideologues systematically overestimate the power and the
social and economic capital of this imagined grouping. However, in
reality, only few with the right cultural capital can really belong to the
Bhootsavaar ‘family’, as Nitin calls it (by definition, family is about
exclusion and not inclusion), and thus also can wear the custom-made
dresses. Overall, however, all these labels tend to refer to those now
between 15– 30, those who are educated, English-speaking, digitally
connected, have a considerable disposable income, cultural capital
consisting of the knowledge of largely western media and diverse
subcultural trends in addition to Indian pop and sub-cultural
productions, those who are fashionable and who are the exemplary
consumer citizens (and now also increasingly so called ethical/conscious
consumers), eager to buy and display their status. As such, the urban
zippies are the ‘liberalisation’s children’ (Lukose 2009) and grand-
children, those who are ambitious and aspiring, those who demonstrate
an ‘attitude’, like the models on fashion ramps who belong to the
same generation and class. Typically, they are portrayed as rebellious
106 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

taboo-breakers, free-spirited individuals refusing to be constrained by

tradition and so on. Brands like Bhootsavaar cater precisely to this desire of
the privileged youth for appearing rebellious, unique, creative and special,
for belonging to the privileged creative class.
We should not be misled here by their frequent insistence on and
invocation of their own ‘precarity’, especially in light of workers who are
truly living lives of precarity and declassify themselves through aesthetics
precisely as a form of resistance against middle-class moralities
(Hewamanne in this volume). Those in a real precarious position are
the artisans, garment workers and craftspeople across the country, young
and old. It is again telling that as opposed to these educated creative
youngsters, the young craftspeople are not deemed ‘creative’ in the same
way. Their creativity is represented as backward, as a mere repetition of
tradition that is dragging the country down; they are a social nuisance
rather than hope for the future, even if it is precisely their craft, art and
skill that is celebrated as ‘national heritage’ and creates the value of the
elitist royal chic (Kuldova 2016a; Kuldova 2016b).
The creativity of the youth that is celebrated by the national ideologues
is very much dependent on the class position and social, economic and
cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984) of the bearers of this ‘creativity’ rather
than on the creativity as such. This youth marked by an accumulation of
cultural capital has inspired and is meant to emulate Bollywood movies
such as Zindegi Na Milegi Dobara (You won’t get this life again; Akhtar 2011)
or Yeh Jawaani hai Deewani (This youth is crazy; Mukerji 2013). Both movies
portray these relatively wealthy, and on one hand carefree, while on the
other also typically mentally and privately troubled youngsters (privilege
has its own set of psychological troubles). While the privileged ‘zippies’,
or those who buy into Bhootsavaar, might dismiss and mock these movies,
there is little doubt that no matter what they say, in their material
practices they tend to emulate the heroes of these movies – and when it
comes to ideology, it is precisely primarily material practice that matters
(Althusser 1971; Pfaller 2015). Possibly, the more they mock these
movies, the more they actually embrace them and mimic their characters.
Recently, Bhootsavaar, sponsored by the whisky brand Cutty Sark hired
Kalki Koechin to be its showstopper and the face of the brand. Not
accidently, Kalki is the lead actress in both aforementioned youth movies,
 DESIGNING FOR ‘ZIPPIES’ 107

Figure 6.1 Kalki Koechlin for Hello India, 27 May 2015. Image courtesy of Hello India.

a known ‘socially aware activist’ often hailed for her creativity, talent and
for her slightly ‘subversive voice’ in the cinema. This goes well together
with the brand’s own claims to ethical production and sustainability that
feed the imaginary of a ‘conscious and aware consumer’. In this sense,
she is the perfect face of the brand.
108 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

To reiterate, movies and brands like Bhootsavaar are intentionally quirky

and ooze a distinct vision of creativity, while providing the young
customers with both ready-made aesthetics of subversion, ethicality
and a feeling of belonging to the new generation of ‘cosmopolitan
consumers’ (Mazzarella 2006). They also perpetuate a particular version
of the neoliberal mythology and a belief in the future super powerdom of
‘Brand India’ (Kapur 2012; Kuldova 2014) and proliferate ‘discourses
that proclaim India to no longer be struggling at the bottom of the
modernization ladder’ (Lukose 2009: 3). In these narratives, the nation is
re-imagined and the ‘producer patriot’ (Deshpande 2003), the ideal of
the Nehru’s era, is replaced by the consumer citizen. Consumption is
then closely tied to citizenship (Lukose 2009) and consumption is
increasingly becoming the only (permissible) way to become political.
This means that those who are unable to consume are expelled across the
internal borders of ‘society’ (Sassen 2014), expelled from the ‘India
Shining’ (Deshpande 1993). This goes for the vast majority of young
people in India who are burdened by traditional roles, poverty,
aspirational pressures, feelings of lack and inadequacy, structural violence
and so on. Those with real holes in their trousers, and not branded
Bhootsavaar holes, are pushed into invisibility and ‘expelled’ (Sassen 2014)
from the new India of shopping malls, IT industry and utopian multi-
crore projects of futuristic smart cities. (Indeed, sometimes they are
included but only as the victims of the system, who need to be uplifted
for instance through ethical fashion that provides them with a ‘fair wage’
and the buyer with a pleasurable feeling of good conscience.)
Good citizens are no longer those who produce, but those who
consume. As the cliche about the ‘zippies’ goes, compared to the
generation of their parents often concerned with saving money and with
secure governmental jobs, the youngsters are rendered as great wastrels,
defined by their insatiable consumption habits, big dreams and rising
debt – which, in the eyes of the neoliberal ideologues is not such a bad
thing. Popular brands such as Bhootsavaar not only encourage and
normalise wasting – of yourself, your money and so on, but also instil
the idea of the ‘consumer-citizen’ with all its inherent de-politicisation
and privatisation of the public sphere, in the habitus and practice of the
youth. Moreover, they directly feed into the neoliberal nationalist
 DESIGNING FOR ‘ZIPPIES’ 109

narratives of ‘Brand India’ by creating a distinct aesthetic of a whole new

class of privileged young creatives, the aesthetic of the face of the ‘new’
India from which social problems and inequalities are erased or only
mentioned at charity galas. Of course, this is a matter of analysis, and not
something that would be openly endorsed. When asked about the
ideological underpinnings of his brand, Nitin answered:

Bhootsavaar follows a simple ideology of following your heart. To do

that comes from within you. It is about acknowledging something
that comes naturally to you or something that you are drawn to and
aspire to do. Everyone is mad about something and that feeling and
compulsion that comes from within to do that thing is the spark
that one needs to acknowledge and respect. (. . .) It is so much about
lifestyle than anything else. You become one with yourself and the
picture you imagine to be. Time is fleeting and so is our life.
Spontaneity is a key word, you go with the flow and take whatever
comes your way simply because you chose that path to tread on. It is
about making your choices and sticking by them.
(Chauhan 2014)

No matter the talk of spontaneity and following one’s heart, these brands
reveal their own ambition to artificially create something akin to
‘subcultures’ (at least in an aesthetic form). In this case, the designer
becomes the prime leader of this subcultural cult; he himself is the
aspiration for the others and defines the terms of the game.
Being 36 and extremely cool, youthful and accomplished, Nitin is
positioned just a bit above his most devoted consumers and hence presents
a style that they can comfortably embrace, while embracing their
aspiration as well. While we often see designers on the stage, who
resemble in nothing the models on the ramp and who are often very
simply dressed, here we encounter a designer who dresses himself in his
over-the-top creations and is the face of the brand and an inspiration to
others; he is both the producer and exemplary consumer. The case of
Bhootsavaar with its desire to create a Bhootsavaar family reveals more
pressingly the ultimate master-desire of the fashion designers, namely their
fantasy of making others identical to themselves. When asked about their
ambitions, designers typically respond by saying that their true desire is to
110 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Figure 6.2 Nitin Bal Chauhan, New Delhi, 2012. Image courtesy of Arash Taheri.

‘create their own world’. We should take this statement literally here, and
not be deceived by its metaphorical lure. The desire to build a powerful
fashion brand is driven by nothing less than a desire to create a world of
one’s own, where the designer’s subjects passionately and obediently
follow and buy into the dream (indeed, this is a more general dynamics
discernible within fashion industries across the globe). In this sense, the
desire is very similar to that of political ideologues keen to produce
obedient and passionate subjects that embrace their vision of the world,
whatever that may be. As often as the designers speak of creating their own
worlds, or even empires, so often they dream of ‘loyal followers’ who are
‘passionate about the brand’, who embrace the lifestyle and emotionally
invest themselves in the products. If we did not know that they were
speaking of a fashion brand, we might have thought that the talk is of a
religious cult or even an election campaign. Indeed, collective
consumption with the attached branded rituals effectively caters to the
universal desire for collective action, belonging and participation in the
social at large; this is the underlying logic of branded ‘postmodern neo-
tribes’ that according to Maffesoli operate ‘without the rigidity of forms of
organization with which we are familiar’ and refer ‘to a certain ambience,
a state of mind, and is preferably to be expressed through lifestyles that
 DESIGNING FOR ‘ZIPPIES’ 111

favour appearance and form’ (Maffesoli 1996: 98). Neo-tribes typically

inhabit a shared imaginary territory and create an imagined social
collectivity through shared aesthetic, symbols, rituals but often also ethics.
This is how Nitin described his initial motivation for creating his brand:

Bhootsavaar was born out of my desire to cater to the younger lot of

our country. I had taken a 2-year sabbatical to extensively paint in
public spaces especially in cafes which were frequented by people
from all walks of life and especially the youth. I realised there was
not a single designer label from our fashion industry that was
designing for the younger lot. I made up my mind to create an edgy
and affordable brand, which would address the GEN X of our
country. This was also a good way of channelizing my street art skills
to graphic designs for T-shirts and other merchandise. (. . .) The face
of global India and Delhi is a witness to the change that they [Gen X]
are creating. This eclectic mix of professionals lives by their own
rules and never forgets to party hard. They are the generation behind
huge turnouts at the music festivals and an ever-growing night life in
the city. They are the reason why more and more youngsters can
imagine taking a more challenging path to lead their life. Lot of
Bhootsavaar is also bought by teenagers and college students who
aspire to strike a different chord with the world around them.
(Chauhan 2014)

Nitin’s desire to create a movement, a loyal following consisting of

creative young people that live according to their passions (but on his
aesthetic premises), means that he has to find answers to the question of
how to seduce the youngsters to actually buy his brand, or else how to align
their desire with his master-desire (Lordon 2014)? The question is – how to
mobilise the affects of the youth and push them in the direction of the
brand? This is indeed the same question that is posed by politicians across
the world. In this sense also, capitalising on already available and
powerful political myths about the role of the creative youngsters for
India’s future is a viable strategy of capture, even if not one that is ever
rendered explicitly. When it comes to loyal following, the underlying
injunction here is: ‘Be authentic, be spontaneous and desire it yourself,
but only the way I tell you to’ – a shared aesthetics of so called authenticity is at
112 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

stake here. Any social movement consists of people who move together –
but the question here is, to quote Yves Citton, who has provided some
remarks on the matter in relation to populism, ‘What makes them move
together’ (Citton 2010: 63)? Affects understood as unbound energy or
intensity can push us to act, but the question is in what direction are they
pushing us.

IDEOLOGY, AMBIENCE AND RITUAL

Staged rituals are among the most powerful tools of mobilising affects
and directing passions. Theatrical fashion shows, be they during fashion
weeks or staged in nightclubs, are exactly such powerful rituals. Nitin is
an expert at staging such ritualistic shows that make the audience cheer
and desire. However, arousing passions is one thing, another is directing
them and – in the market – capitalising on them. As Citton argues,
affects can become effective only when integrated into a narrative
structure or a story line that can make sense of our experiences and
structure our future paths of action – ‘we feel in and through stories’
(Citton 2010: 64). Here the implicit nationalist narrative about the
exceptionality of the Indian youth and of the creative class comes to the
fore as it is embraced through the material practices during such events.
Ideology is first and foremost a matter of practice and everyday rituals
rather than a matter of discourse (Althusser 1971). Here it takes the
form of branded rituals, in which people passionately participate.
As such, the brand offers the young customers venues that enable them to
participate in this ideology and reproduce it – often even against, or
precisely because of, their better knowledge (Pfaller 2005). The youth
might be cynical about their consumption, about the whole notion of
them being the future of the nation and so on, they might even mock the
whole idea of them being somehow special – but what matters here are
precisely the material practices in which, no matter what they say, they
embrace this ideology. Branded rituals are exceptionally powerful.
As Durkheim pointed out in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life, ritual is
essential in the making and remaking of society as it exercises profound
force and influence over its participants (Durkheim 1965). Lovemarks,
a term introduced by Kevin Roberts, the CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi
 DESIGNING FOR ‘ZIPPIES’ 113

(Roberts 2004), might be more appropriate than a brand here, as

lovemarks mobilise emotions and passionate commitment of consumers.
Lovemarks, like Nitin’s Bhootsavaar, desire a passionate loyal following and
capitalise on the Durkheimian insight that social knowledge and belonging
are born and strengthened in the collective effervescence of ritual
enactments (Durkheim 1965). Fashion brands often attempt to create
ritual venues and provide ready-made myths that can serve as an attractor
for action, or mobilisation both within and outside of a ritual ambient
space. Therefore, vast amounts of social labour go into (1) developing
ambient atmospheres, especially theatrical stage sets for the shows or
stores, (2) creating a mythical narrative framing these environments and
(3) developing ritual practices that take place in these ambient spaces.
Bhootsavaar, as we shall see, clearly capitalises on the prevailing nationalist
framing narrative that places its hopes for a bright future onto the creative
young ‘zippies’. After all, nationalist narratives have a great track record of
making people move together and passionately sacrifice themselves or – in
the case of the market, passionately throw themselves into debt (just a
different form of sacrifice suitable for the consumer citizens). In our case,
collective representations are repetitively strengthened and recharged
precisely through ritualised fashion events performed within ‘sacred’
ambient locations, where these collective representations are enacted and
given material meaning. The brand mythology of Bhootsavaar that is
materialised in such events matches the larger narratives of transformation
in globalised India and the youth as its driving force, while giving an
aesthetic form both to the myths and to the very notions of youth,
creativity and passion. As Nitin says, he creates for people

who constantly push themselves outside their comfort zone, [. . .]

from various walks of life – musicians, DJs, artists, graffiti artists,
social entrepreneurs, graphic designers, tattoo artists, architects,
dancers, theatre artists, PR and communication professionals,
advertising professionals, photographers, stylists, models etc.
(Chauhan 2014)

Nitin is skilled in associating the right brands and collaborating with the
right people. He uses several strategies to make the youth embrace his
brand: (1) engaging audiences through affective ambient environments
114 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

(Anderson 2009; Babin and Attaway 2000) (2) directing these affects
through carefully framed narratives about a distinct emergent class of
young creatives and (3) engaging the audiences in ritualised fashion
events.
In order to achieve maximum impact and in order for his products to
appear as spontaneously embraced, as a true grass-root desire rather than a
brand imposition, he employs ‘regular’ people to walk the ramp for
him, or appear in creative fashion presentations staged in clubs and
bars, documented and disseminated by bloggers, print media and so on,
and shared on social media. The selected individuals that he chooses
belong to the same segment to which he caters, or create the image to
which certain youngsters aspire, they are often his friends and are
recruited from the same creative circles, within fashion, art,
photography, and music; people who meet in the same nightclubs.
In this sense, the designer with his small team author these shows.
As Nitin says,

when common people who have style or are achievers walk the
ramp, I think it creates an aspiration value inside the audience.
The ramp no longer belongs to the well-built and beautiful. In fact,
the ramp becomes a place for the real, unabashed and talented
people. It becomes fashionable to be gifted, passionate and endowed
with abilities to believe in oneself and one’s expression. This is the
future of fashion and this is the way Bhootsavaar is trying to build a
community around it. Due to this reason even our shows at the
fashion weeks follow the same format. (. . .) Collaborating with
creative people is core to Bhootsavaar and it is an on-going process.
These people are the true brand ambassadors and through their work
and lifestyle they constantly inspire us to create and reach out to a
larger number of people. We want to tell their stories to the common
man [note: he refers to the designer and his core team]. The
Bhootsavaar family keeps growing as we speak! (. . .) We have tie-ups
with popular clubs and cafes where we invite people to come and be
a part of our presentations. There is a theme for each night and that
could be either the concept of our fresh collection that we would
launch that night or else it is based upon another event in history.
Popular dates like Halloween, Friday the 13th, Valentine’s Day are
 DESIGNING FOR ‘ZIPPIES’ 115

Figure 6.3 Rishi Raj, a stylist, Bhootsaavar, 2013, Crescent Mall. Image courtesy of Nitin
Bal Chauhan.

always good to work around the event. A regular night would have a
fashion presentation, choreographed in an unusual way, photo
booths would be set-up for people to come and interact with, live
bands and electronic music along with dancers who sporadically
lighten up the evening with impromptu acts. We also set up
make-up booths and provide different props to people to add to the
vibe. As mentioned above Bhootsavaar attracts people from different
116 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

walks of life. Most of the people who come are a talented lot and
expect to meet like-minded individuals at these events.
(Chauhan)

The ‘zippies’ are as much driven by desire for distinction and class
belonging as the elite. The only difference lies in the aesthetics,
mythology and economic status of this distinction and belonging. Much
like the elite spaces, so the spaces for the ‘zippies’ are gated (Brosius
2009) and carefully separated from the outside world of the not so
privileged youth on the streets. It is also worth noting here that the
marketing strategies are discernibly ‘global’, events like this can be found
today across the world’s high-end fashion industries. They have their
origin in American and European fashion marketing, which is
systematically taught at fashion institutes across India – it is also
precisely this form of marketing that often clearly distinguishes
vernacular markets from ‘globalised’ markets within the same market so
to speak. Another notable matter here is the systematic appropriation of
the hip and cool western ‘traditions’, from Valentine’s to Halloween,
accompanied by disregard for local festivals, which are normally the time
to shop for new clothes and so on. This embracing of the western
‘traditions’ thus serves to distinguish their clientele from that of the
bazaar or vernacular economy on the one hand, which is also centred
around festivals, only this time they are Diwali, Holi, the wedding
season, Eid and so on, and on the other hand, from the very elitist
high fashion, which again is also centred around the Indian festivals.
In this sense, the selection of western events and tastes, often slightly
indigenised, adding additional cool without turning into ethnic
spectacle, becomes a form of class-cum-generational (and thus often
temporal and transitory) separation from both those lower and those
above (typically when older, the once young and cool become co-opted
into the logic of the very high-end fashion outlined at the beginning of
this chapter). The question is again one of who is included and who is
excluded from belonging. Nitin collaborates actively with a whole army
of taste and style makers, from designers, artists to musicians, and with
party and event venues such as the bar Turquoise Cottage in Vasant Vihar,
known for its underground and yet elitist invite-only parties. As Nitin
says, the ‘Bhootsavaar family keeps growing’ – as of today, it comprises
 DESIGNING FOR ‘ZIPPIES’ 117

brand endorsers such as music bands like Menwhopause, Reggae Rajahs, Indigo
Children, Featherheads, Drop, Minute of Decay, Fuzz Culture, Mob Marley, Totara Jack,
Kern Dalton Collective, Tritha Sinha and Pink Noise, Eshaan Chabra, Jazz Bastards,
Advaita, Crystal Vision, Shantanu, DJ Augustine Shimray and so on, as well as
break dancers and hip hoppers from the Brooklyn Academy of Dance &
Arts (BADA) in New Delhi, or the graffiti artist Harsh Raman Paul,

Figure 6.4 Ritika Singh, a singer, Bhootsavaar, 2013, Crescent Mall. Image courtesy of
Nitin Bal Chauhan.
118 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

photographer Rahul Lal, or textile designer Shruti Raj Kirti. Furthermore,

Nitin makes almost weekly interviews to circulate online with
‘Bhootsavaars’, i.e. passionate youngsters working in creative industries,
who share their life stories enhancing the larger brand narrative about the
rise of contemporary hip, young and wild creative class that lives on its
own terms, unburdened by tradition – to reiterate, again the very same
narrative that is so often taken for granted and reproduced both in media
and pop-academic production on the rise of the globalised India to
superpower (Das 2000; Kamdar 2007). Within the echo-chamber of the
Bhootsavaar family or the hip and cool ‘zippies’, the youth desperately
wants to be what they are told by the ideologues that they already are.
The populist right wing political myths are smoothly incorporated into
the ‘simple brand ideologies’, feeding of each other and enforcing each
other. They effectively direct affects of large segments of society, while
planting dreams in the rest, capturing in the process the hearts and guts
of all, and with it also their power to act. It is precisely here that we see
ideology operating at the level of enjoyment that leads to passionate
participation, driven by collective libidinal investment. Perhaps not even
paradoxically, there is a great emphasis placed on the appearance of
authenticity and spontaneity of such a collective movement.
Bhootsavaar’s strategies such as using the ‘common people’ are grounded
in a drive towards deliberate authentication, one that outsources the
promotional/brand message to creatively disinterested individuals, ‘anti-
establishment’ or alternative settings, and ‘democratically viral’
customer-generated content. The goal is to convince the customer that
their desire is authentic and spontaneous, that the desire was there before
the brand rather than the other way round.

GOOD CONSUMER CITIZENS PASSIONATELY EMBRACE

THE INJUNCTION: ‘WASTE!’

To conclude, Bhootsavaar is just one case among many in the world of

contemporary fashion brands that indulges in a form of artistic and
commercially inflected nationalism while attempting to create a clearly
distinct ‘aesthetic subculture’ (one that cares more for form than for
content), or a niche defined by a distinct aesthetics. And yet, we should
 DESIGNING FOR ‘ZIPPIES’ 119

not let ourselves be deceived here by the particularity of this case

pertaining to a very specific segment of Indian urban youth. Beyond the
particular and the local, such as the capitalisation on the celebration of
Indian creative youth in nationalistic discourses, there is another
message, inherent to worldwide consumer capitalism (for the global
privileged classes) that is very visibly – and materially reproduced here.
Namely, the core injunction of consumer citizenship – ‘waste!’ Or more
precisely, ‘waste, while believing that your wasting can be politically
effective and change the world into a better place’. While the position
endorsed increasingly by contemporary business elites might be summed
up as: ‘greed is good and our corporate greed will save the world through
our philanthropy and benevolence’, or else a position of philanthroca-
pitalism (Bishop and Green 2008; Kuldova 2014; McGoey 2012;
Kuldova 2017), the good consumer-citizens are similarly meant to
perceive their wasting as beneficial to economy and society at large.
Morality is being re-inserted into the market here, and as it appears
increasingly only those with enough economic and cultural capital can,
within the hegemonic capitalist discourses, claim the moral high-ground
and at the same time seek redemption from the baneful capitalist system
 zek 2009; Nickel and Eikenberry 2009). Even Bhootsavaar occasionally
(Zi
produces in villages in Himachal Pradesh, and claims to empower local
workers, thus creating an added ethical value to its products. Those
critical of the capitalist system and neoliberal ideology have been long
pointing out that ‘ethical capitalism’ or ‘moral capitalism’ is practically an
impossibility, and that there is no amount of reform of the current system
that could effectively turn around the widespread human suffering and
environmental destruction (Harvey 2000; Harvey 2001; Harvey 2003;
Harvey 2016; Graeber 2012).
Being young and being a consumer-citizen in the Indian context is, as
we have seen, a matter of privilege, as is belonging to a ‘generation of
global youth’. The majority of global youngsters are excluded from
participation. Purchasing material symbols of rebellion, subversion, and
creativity is increasingly also a matter of privilege on the one hand and on
the other, for those who can see through the staged rebellion, a sign of co-
option within the ruling system. Those who might be truly subversive and
really using aesthetics to challenge middle-class moralities (Hewamanne in
120 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

this volume) are nowhere as cool as their up-cycled fashion versions that
sublimate the real dirty and ripped jeans, or prostitute-like bold fashions
into a temporary fashion statement. Gated fashion events and parties in the
Indian urban metropolises are to a large degree spaces where such privilege
is reproduced together with all the relevant cultural capital (in case of the
upper middle class and aspiring middle class for instance the knowledge of
western and Indian punk or retro-futuristic fashion trends and so on). The
aesthetic of subversion and creativity that brands like Bhootsavaar sell is
clearly not aimed at being subversive; rather, precisely through appearing
subversive it most effectively reproduces the status quo. Hence, the
enclosed spaces of fashion events for privileged urban youth are also spaces
where first-rate citizens, the good model consumer-citizens, are shaped.
This is also where political or rather apolitical subjects are brought into
being – subjects who prefer to buy ethical fashion to change the world
(a discourse that increasingly permeates the fashion industry with all its
‘sustainability’, ‘best practice’, ‘ethical business’ and CSR (corporate social
responsibility) campaigns aimed at creating added value), rather than to
take collective political action.
Commercial rituals are the most effective tools for embedding such
messages into material practices and ambient environments. Only events
like these are capable of creating those most desired ‘loyal followers’.
‘Ambient governance’, that Michael Serazio conceptualised as a kind of
Foucauldian mode of power (Serazio 2013) is at work in most of these
fashion events and ritual spectacles. One of its crucial features is the
deliberate self-effacement of its own persuasive intent. The message is
implicit everywhere, but nowhere is it stated explicitly. Moreover, it
capitalises on the agency of consumers and exploits the power of
seemingly ‘disinterested’ cultural spaces and ‘authenticated’ individuals.
Ambient governance that attempts to induce and direct affects and thus
capture the collective power to act has become the currently hegemonic
paradigm for harnessing social power and profit.
When combined with the nationalist mythology of the good
consumer citizen, something more is inscribed into the ambient
environments – namely the neoliberal injunction to waste and to indebt
one’s future self. All of these spaces are marked by shared allusions to
waste. Fashion events often resemble an excessive potlatch, where
 DESIGNING FOR ‘ZIPPIES’ 121

enormous amounts of labour and investment go into preparation and

then are wasted in a matter of a few hours. The repetitive symbolism of
death and waste (sculls, blood, Kali etc.) and (creative) destruction in
Nitin’s fashion is not coincidental. If money is to be wasted, it seems, it
should be wasted on waste (or at least its symbols) (Crosthwaite 2011).
The fashion environments thus seem to capitalise on a deep-seated desire
for sheer annihilation of capital, while the ambiences keep at the same
time screaming ‘waste!’ The parents of the ‘zippies’ might have a point
after all, when they call their sons and daughters ‘great wastrels’ that
passionately and joyfully fall into debt while purchasing clothes that are
themselves symbolic of that very annihilation. The good consumer-
citizens are precisely such great wastrels that keep the economy as well as
the imaginary of achievement and enjoyment running. Fashion events
not only interpellate us to waste, but are in themselves collective rituals of
purification. This effect seems to be maximised when money is wasted
on things that themselves represent waste. Fashion drives the desire of
people for their own dispossession and annihilation, and thus perfectly
co-opts them into a system built precisely upon these premises. In short,
there is nothing revolutionary, rebellious or ethical about these wasteful
excesses, the opposite is the case. Buying symbols of rebellion is the very
opposite of actually acting out rebellion (Heath and Potter 2005). Buying
those Marx teacups, Occupy Wall Street caps and ‘<3 Nasty Woman’
T-shirts just won’t cut it.

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7
TROUSER WEARING
WOMEN
Changing Landscape of Fashion among Free
Trade Zone Factory Workers and Contemporary
Political Tensions in Sri Lanka

Sandya Hewamanne

Enduring the catcalls men directed at me was one of the most difficult
experiences I faced when I began doing fieldwork around the Katunayake
Free Trade Zone (FTZ) workers’ boarding houses, bazaar and night
market in 2000. Most of the catcalling was directed at my wearing jeans
and trousers. Typical calls included, ‘Is your elder brother home?’
(suggesting I was wearing his trousers), ‘Hello, how are you, gentleman?’,
or ‘Have you come from England?’ The catcallers were working-class men,
three-wheeler drivers, stall keepers or market vendors, and unemployed
youth. Apparently, at least among these working-class youth, trousers still
remained mostly a man’s dress that aroused anxieties about insidious
westernisation when worn by a woman. The fact that very few FTZ women
garment factory workers wore trousers indicated the strength of the social
ostracisation.
I was usually with groups of garment workers and as they dealt with
catcalls with good humour and clever ripostes I survived my initial days
around the FTZ without incident. The first time I had to pass the market
area alone and was subjected to the same catcalls, I made a rookie
fieldworker mistake by confronting some of the catcallers. I passed the
 TROUSER WEARING WOMEN 125

last stall, turned around, went over to the catcallers who were preparing
their trading table and said: ‘However much you ridicule women you
will not be able to stop them wearing trousers.’ Several others came near
the table and pacified me saying, ‘They are just joking, so don’t mind
them miss.’ Yet as soon as I started on my way, most of the men who
heard my protestation started hooting, with some using obscenities, in
what appeared to be a unified male punishment for a ‘trouser wearing’
woman who probably was devoid of any ‘shame-fear’. This connection
of trouser wearing to losing shame-fear (lajja-baya) is a crucial point that
signifies some of the anxieties associated with rural young women
migrating to urban FTZs for work. Shame-fear – being ashamed to break
internalised social behavioural norms and fearing the social ridicule that
results in breaking such norms – is considered a vital characteristic of
good Sinhala Buddhist rural women (Obeyesekere 1984; Hewamanne
2016). Although mid-length dresses that are considered acceptable are
also not indigenous to Sri Lanka, trousers, when worn by particular
groups of women and in certain areas, are a trigger point because they
symbolise women’s westernisation, which is considered the major cause
for ‘authentic’ Sinhala values and customs being undermined. Therefore,
it was not surprising that there was resistance to women wearing
trousers, and deviating from what is considered to be ‘respectable’ attire
for young women.
I use the term trousers as a direct translation for the Sinhala word kalisan.
The word also refers to jeans, but in 2000 it was extremely rare for a
woman FTZ worker to wear jeans. Thus when used at the time it referred
to cotton or khaki trousers and cropped pants that were much looser fitting
than jeans. By 2014 people were using the word kalisan as a catch-all to refer
to jeans, trousers and cropped pants. The word almost never referred to
salwar kameez, which was considered a modest and an appropriate dress for
young women. People in 2000 noted that the sari was the best dress for
women but said it was completely fine for FTZ workers to wear modest
knee length dresses with full or half sleeves or salwar kameez.
As noted above, in 2000 very few FTZ workers, who are generally
between 17– 24 in age, wore trousers even when they were engaging in
leisure time activities. In 2014, however, many workers wore jeans to
work and in their everyday lives. This chapter focuses on this changing
126 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

landscape of working-class fashion in the context of the contemporary

political climate and its implications on subaltern identity politics by
analysing fashions among global assembly line workers at Sri Lanka’s
Katunayake FTZ. The chapter starts with a discussion on how Sri Lanka’s
global factory workers use clothes and styles to negotiate an identity as a
group of migrant industrial workers who are different from non-migrant
workers, men and middle-class women. This is an important aspect of
community building and developing a working-class consciousness that
leads toward transformative politics. Although this engagement with
fashion as an expressive practice entraps them in the new consumer
culture created around the FTZ, it allows them to transgress norms of
middle-class ‘respectability’ as part of their attempt to create a differential
identity. Dress and styles also have a significant role in how workers play
with the multiple cultural discourses they straddle as both unmarried
daughters of patriarchal villages and industrial wageworkers. The chapter
demonstrates how they perform transgressions as well as social
conformity via fashion and the lack thereof and how this play is
significant in opening up limited social, economic and political spaces for
former FTZ workers. The chapter ends by discussing recent concerns
among Sinhalese Buddhists over Muslim women increasingly wearing
the abaya and how such feelings rooted in Islamophobia appear to have,
paradoxically, contributed towards a more relaxed attitude towards
Sinhalese Buddhist women wearing trousers. The irony here lies in how
the island’s contemporary ethno-religious tensions appear to have
magnified anxiety over the conservative yet alien abaya while minimising
concerns over FTZ workers getting westernised and corrupted due to
western fashions. This discussion and analysis is based on long-term
ethnographic research conducted from 2000 to 2018.

THIRD CLASS IS MY CLASS

‘They say our fashions are third class. Well, third class is my class
and that is just fine with me.’

A FTZ factory worker, Niluka, declared the above while explaining how
difficult it is for women like her to achieve middle-class respectability
 TROUSER WEARING WOMEN 127

even if they tried. Many Sri Lankans use the term ‘third class’ (in English)
when referring to working-class tastes and in general try to dissociate
themselves from such tastes in public. As a group, FTZ workers celebrated
this stigmatised identity by unhesitatingly claiming stigmatised tastes and
engaging in counter hegemonic cultural practices. Women were keenly
aware of their subordination along class lines and consequently
developed their own tastes, cultural practices and spaces to contest such
subordination. These new tastes, practices and spaces contained many
elements of what middle-class people consider disrespectable (Hewa-
manne 2003, 2008).
As Willis (1993: 206) states, the symbolic creativity of young people
in endowing their immediate life spaces and social practices with
meaning and their selective use of subcultural styles are crucial to
creating and sustaining individual and group identities. FTZ women
workers collectively expressed their difference from the dominant classes
and males and articulated their identities as a gendered group of migrant
industrial workers by cultivating new tastes with regard to clothes, make-
up, accessories and hair styles. By performing subcultural styles that are
subversive critiques of dominant values in public spaces, they posed a
conscious challenge to the continued economic, social and cultural
domination they endured. The conscious oppositional character of the
workers’ emergent class and cultural contestatory narrative became
evident in the journal notes they wrote about me. In several journal
entries they criticised my tastes in clothing and termed my preferences
middle-class (i.e., hi-fi (upper class), western). In their boarding house
conversations they also attempted to construct a difference between their
own styles and those of urban working-class youth by pointing to the
latter’s desire to follow middle-class trends when they could afford to do
so. The workers frequently pointed out that their bright coloured party
dresses are more expensive than the pastel coloured, simple dresses that
were considered more respectable and said they just did not want to
follow the fashion rules of ‘arrogant, big people’ who would not respect
them even if they wore ‘respectable’ dresses. Not all workers I talked to
were able to recognise or articulate the critical potential of their choices.
Yet, a significant number, in various ways, made clear that their
preferences when it came to dress and style were mediated through and
128 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

against middle-class expectations. It is this critique that allows me to

assert that their creation of subcultural styles is a challenge to the
continued economic, social and cultural domination they endure.
My focus on unique styles also situates their dress styles as gender
critiques in that the workers refused to perform the ideals of
respectability sanctioned for women by middle-class men. In claiming
that FTZ workers’ performances of their recently developed preferences
in the realm of aesthetics was central to creating both working-class and
gendered identities, my argument resonates with Dorinne Kondo’s
notion that ‘the world of aesthetics is a site of struggle, where identities
are created, where subjects are interpellated, where hegemonies can be
challenged’ (1997: 4). Kondo’s study is one among several works that
demonstrate the role played by dress and style in constituting identity
(Tarlo 1996; Hansen 2004; Bahl 2005; Archer et al. 2007).
My earlier research among internally displaced Muslim women
showed how middle-class Muslim women used a more strict form of
veiling to express an identity that is in keeping with the local NGO
understanding of Muslim women as oppressed and backward so that they
could benefit from NGO financial and supportive services (Hewamanne
2010 and 2015). Both Krishnan (this volume) and Motsemme (2003)
note how urban young women (in India and the USA, respectively)
develop new dress styles to resist and critique oppressive social forces.
Likewise, in a fascinating study of women’s burial societies in Botswana,
Ngwenya (2002) highlighted how women adapted a particular dress
code (enrobing), to assign more meaning and dramatic edge to social
action in AIDS related deaths which also allowed them to redefine gender
relations and ritual practices.
Several scholars have noted how global assembly line workers use
clothing to negotiate male-dominated work cultures and leisure
activities. Amin (2006) and Lindquist (2008) demonstrate how
women used the veil to create better work environments within the
factories for themselves. According to Ong (1987), Malay FTZ workers
used veiling together with an ascetic Islamic persona to counter the
extant image of FTZ workers being westernised and pleasure seeking
(186). Several other studies show how global assembly line workers
change their dress and styles as part of becoming modern women and
 TROUSER WEARING WOMEN 129

how that was an integral part of their changing senses of selves (Freeman
2000; Pun 2005; Lynch 2007; Hewamanne 2008).
Krishnan’s work on female college students in Chennai (this volume)
proposes a thesis similar to Lukose’s work on male youth in Kerala
(2009). They both note that these young people seek social power by
‘faking it’ or inscribing global culture on their bodies through
consumption of counterfeit global brands. Sri Lankan FTZ workers did
not aspire to such global cultural identities as their middle-class South
Asian counterparts, and in fact were somewhat divorced from global
flows (especially in 2000) given their extreme lack of access to
technology. What they instead created and performed in the FTZ area was
a combination of rural, urban and Indian traditional fashion; one that is
not rural or urban and definitely not middle-class. FTZ workers’
insistence on such unique tastes and their play with established categories
of style subverted middle-class values and tastes and enabled them to
register distinctive identities as migrant working women who are
different to non-migrant industrial workers, men and middle-class
women. This was a more empowering form of identity politics that
critiqued the oppressive dominant cultural demands that were super-
imposed on their lives.

BODY ADORNMENT AND ‘GARMENT GIRL TASTES’

Kathy Peiss, writing about working-class women of turn of the century

New York, notes that ‘dress was a particularly potent way to display and
play with notions of respectability, allure, independence, and status and
to assert a distinctive identity and presence’ (1986: 63). Similarly, the
colourful dresses and other accessories FTZ workers habitually chose to
wear on special occasions registered for them a distinctive identity as
garment factory workers. They wore bright coloured shalwars and gagra
cholis that were embroidered with gold or silver beads, in combination
with dark red lipstick, nail polish, and heavy make-up. They also wore
high heels (even when on trips to beaches) and frequently wore multi
coloured dots ( pottu) on their foreheads. Such choices loudly proclaimed
a difference from other women and made it easier for people to recognise
them even if they were hundreds of miles away from the FTZ
130 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

(Hewamanne 2006, 2008). Their dresses could be loosely divided into

two types: work clothes and party clothes. Their everyday work clothes
were of different styles because they wore their old party dresses to work.
This habit also ensured that they were easily recognised no matter where
they went. These dresses included a flowing skirt (called a flared skirt),
with puffed sleeves and round necklines, and skirts and blouses in several
different lengths and patterns. Most of their work clothes suggested
popular urban fashions, modified with elements from favoured rural
fashions. Their party dresses, however, were a combination of several
Indian-inspired, middle-class fashions and their own colour preferences.
Haney writes that the creation of a hybrid style called fantasia by female
performers in Mexican American tent shows asserted Mexican American
identity while marking the performers’ entry into ‘newly public female
roles’ (1999: 437). The hybrid styles among the FTZ workers similarly
marked their newly acquired public role as urban factory workers who
are different from middle-class or rural women as well as other urban
factory workers.
In 2000, while hanging out at several boarding houses, I often
observed workers bringing their newly made work dresses from the
nearby seamstresses. One by one they acquired so-called ‘Titanic dresses’,
a long dress with a cross-laced back and tight waist, which was inspired
by the period dresses the female lead wore in the film Titanic and which
quickly turned into a fashion craze among them. While in the film the
dresses were made of light colours, the FTZ workers preferred bright and
dark colours. They especially favoured yellow, maroon, magenta, dark
green, purple and black. This choice of colours was especially significant
when considering that Anagarika Dharmapala, a writer and nationalist
who campaigned for reviving Sinhalese Buddhist culture, considered the
white saree the optimal dress for respectable ladies, since this signalled
their chastity and purity (De Alwis 1997: 98 –99). Incidentally, many
FTZ workers liked to match black skirts with bright yellow or bright pink
blouses even though middle-class people associated such colour
combinations with sex workers. The workers’ choice to sport these
stigmatised colours as well as other marked fashions could not be
attributed simply to an ignorance of middle-class dos and don’ts since
they watched TV and read fashion pages of magazines. As noted above,
 TROUSER WEARING WOMEN 131

these colourful dresses were sometimes more expensive than ‘simple,

accepted fashions’, ruling out affordability as the only reason. This play
with the sex worker image seems a particular mediation of culture and
style by women who have found themselves in between the categories of
‘respectable’ and ‘promiscuous’. This play pushed them further towards
the ‘whore’ category, but workers as a group did not seem particularly
concerned about it. However, they did care about the effects on their
individual reputations, leading them to assume different styles when they
visited their villages.
Neighbours as well as factory officials talked about workers wearing
excessive gold jewellery to work. Some women wore up to four rings to
work and sported thick gold chains with pendants. During my research
in 2000 many women wore a plastic hair band that featured letters from
the English alphabet, which was not in vogue in 2014. Their favourite
hairstyles necessitated the use of braids, bands and pins and the workers
experimented by combining different coloured or patterned hair
accessories. There were other accessories like cheap handbags, sandals
and fake brand name watches that they bought at the FTZ bazaar that also
contributed to their visual group identity.
FTZ workers could easily buy or make pastel coloured dresses of the
kind that were fashionable among female students attending Colombo’s
higher educational institutions. By doing so they could have passed for
belonging among those who congregated at ‘respectable public spaces’,
but they showed no interest in this. When I visited some seamstresses
near Saman’s boarding house, where I stayed with several women during
my initial research at the FTZ, I noticed that they mainly made ‘Titanic
dresses’ and a two-piece dress that most urban women tried to stay away
from due to its association with FTZ workers.
I attended four parties at different factories and attended several
wedding receptions at workers’ homes. On these special occasions
women proudly displayed FTZ party clothes and jewellery. They also
wore make-up, perfume, bright lipstick and nail polish. They took many
photographs at these parties in all their finery, especially while posing
with their superiors. Women showed photographs from past annual
parties, and it was easy to see that their fascination with brightly
decorated shalwar and gagra choli as a party dress had been present for at least
132 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

five years. In photos taken in 2014 too, the same kind of dresses, which
now go by the name lenga, dominated, showing the workers’ continuing
fascination with Indian-inspired party dresses. Those photographs
presented an ongoing story whereby a workers’ clothes evolved over the
years from pink and blue ‘flower girl dresses’ (bigger version of poufy
dresses worn by flower girls at weddings) to colourful shalwars, cholis or
lengas, and the gradual addition of other accessories, including gold
jewellery. This material change coincided with another transformation –
wide-eyed young girls to self-assured, lively women posing for
photographs holding beer cans while seated on men’s laps.
FTZ workers used make-up when they went out on trips or attended
special functions. Refusing to follow the barrage of middle-class advice
about beauty they were subjected to in the media, they almost always
chose bright red lipstick. Although they never acknowledged it, the
workers also craved fairer skin through ways that made sense to them.
While this preoccupation with fairness is partly rooted in racist British
colonial-era ideologies, it is elitist to condemn this obsession on senseless
prejudices alone. As Kondo (1997: 15) writes, it is only the dominant
and unmarked sections of society that can afford to be unconcerned about
appearance. She also warns that it is a mistake to think that being
unconcerned about appearance is a politically innocent position since this
apparent lack of concern itself is a preoccupation with appearance.
Interestingly, FTZ workers who wrote journal entries about me opined
that my own relatively unconcerned attitude towards appearance was the
very mechanism through which I registered my difference from them.
New workers who came directly from their villages learned the
appropriate attire, fashions, and behaviour within the FTZ through an
intense socialisation process at the factories as well as in their boarding
houses. After a few months of FTZ life, workers acquired dresses and
accessories that conveyed their membership in the community. Many
workers confided that they were determined to uphold their ruralness
when they first came to the FTZ. But they reported that the strength and
happiness derived from following other workers and the gentle prodding
from senior workers soon made them change their minds. According to
Lynch, village garment factory workers spoke disparagingly of the way
rural workers first came to work with ‘dirt dripping from their clothes’
 TROUSER WEARING WOMEN 133

(2000: 234) and celebrated the newcomers’ gradual transformation in

hygiene levels and style as a mark of modernity. Marking the difference
between the two groups, FTZ workers did not talk disparagingly about
new workers or the way they slowly acquired the styles and habits of the
FTZ. They all came to the FTZ as rural women and had to collectively
suffer the stigma of being ‘backward, ignorant and tasteless rural
women’. This instilled an ‘us’ against ‘them’ mentality that focused on
whether a woman wanted to be identified as a FTZ worker, as opposed to
what her appearance or conduct was when she first arrived in the FTZ.

COMMUNITY BUILDING

The clothing, make-up and accessories that workers chose to wear

indicated their willingness to be identified and treated as a FTZ garment
worker. This identification sometimes resulted in painful experiences,
such as snide remarks and even virulent outbursts about being ‘whores’
who have forgotten where they came from. Still when they were in a
group, women workers seemed to derive pleasure from this group
identity. Especially in the context of the FTZ where unionisation is
prohibited, such seemingly minor ways of belonging to a group of
workers bode well for working-class politics. The importance of fashion
as a way of building a community and a signifier of belonging was
emphasised by how workers created systems of vigilance, critique and
punishments for those who did not follow the ‘proper’ dress and styles
unique to FTZ workers.
Once on a trip to Unawatuna beach, Suishin factory workers sent a
strong message to Amila, their colleague from the assembly line C, who
kept refusing to embrace FTZ fashions. It was close to noon when we got
to the beach and the gold and silver beads on the women’s shalwars and
gagra cholis glittered in the sunlight. The purple, orange and green silk
material swished upward in the strong sea breeze giving way to fits of
loud laughter as women struggled to balance themselves on high-heeled
sandals. Holding hands in groups of three to four we walked to the far
corner of the popular beach passing men in swimming gear and women
in shorts and T-shirts. While men laughed and catcalled, the middle-class
women curled their lips in disapproval.
134 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Amila liked to insist that she worked only because she was bored at
home and this combined with her eschewing FTZ fashion made clear that
she wanted to be considered different from the rest of the workers.
By constantly pointing out that she came to work from her family home,
which was located close to the FTZ, she also emphasised the fact that she
was not a migrant worker from a rural area. For the trip to the beach,
Amila wore tight black jeans with a black checked shirt and little
jewellery. She used make-up sparingly and applied a soft pink lipstick; in
stark contrast to the bright shades of reds the others wore. Perhaps the
biggest difference in attire was her simple pair of beach sandals, which
were popular among Colombo youth. But with many workers wearing
bright coloured party dresses, we attracted much interest from the
numerous male vacationers present at the beach. The indirect, group
flirtations between men and the workers climaxed when a group of men
surrounded the women and dragged them to the sea in all their finery.
As women ran back from the sea, men tossed sand on their wet clothes.
When the men started to drag the women to the sea, Amila, myself
and two other women managed to run away and hide. After about half an
hour of play the group prepared for picnic lunches on the beach. When
we finally joined them, the other women had taken showers and were
opening their lunch packets. When Amila sat down with her lunch, a
conspiratorial air enveloped the excited group. Sanka and Nuwan (Line C
supervisor and quality controller), who accompanied us on this trip,
grabbed Amila by her arms and dragged her to the sea. With all her
clothes soaked with salty water, Amila came out cursing everybody only
to be dragged back to the ocean. After dipping her three times, the men
allowed her to pay Rs.10 and take a shower. As soon as she finished the
shower they again dragged her to the sea. The workers, obviously
enjoying the scene, encouraged the men by clapping and whistling. They
looked on with glee while commenting how they had all gone through
the forced drenching and that Amila ought to suffer the same experience.
But I was puzzled as to their focus on Amila, since there were at least
three other women who managed to escape the drenching.
‘Look, my nice blouse has shrunk in size because of the sea water’,
Amila loudly complained when she came back to eat. Ever ready with a
combative rejoinder, Mangala answered, ‘Our clothes are nice clothes
 TROUSER WEARING WOMEN 135

too.’ Although she motioned to Mangala not to aggravate Amila further,

Vasanthi whispered, ‘whatever we wear we all are garment workers’.
The punishment meted out to Amila for refusing to identify with her
fellow FTZ workers demonstrated the workers’ sense of collective
identity and the role clothing and style play in expressing this identity.
The incident showed that workers consider adopting FTZ fashion to be a
necessary step in community identification and solidarity. The abuse that
Amila was subjected to was directly connected to her refusal to identify
with the workers’ narratives and their clothing and fashions. The choice
of clothing not only signalled a woman’s willingness to be identified as a
FTZ worker but also signalled her membership in a stigmatised women’s
group that led to ‘humiliating’ incidents at the hands of men. Workers,
however, refused to acknowledge the incident as humiliating or as an act
of violence against them, opting instead to recognise it as a mutually
pleasurable game. In this way they not only refused to be victims but
embraced the consequences of being identified as FTZ workers – in other
words, as women who transgressed.

SAMPLE GARMENTS AND HOME CLOTHES:

VILLAGE PERFORMANCES

Furthermore, women workers loved to go out in groups wearing the

same colour or same patterned dresses that got sold from their own
factories to the bazaar because they were slightly damaged. When they
went out in those garments and proudly displayed allegiance to their
group, men in bus stops and shops called after them saying, ‘Ah, sample,
where are you going?’ Women expressed pride in being recognised as
garment workers – the garments they produced being a ‘sample’ of who
they were. However, when they visited their villages they left behind
these ‘slightly damaged’ garments in their boarding houses and put on
clothes they typically wore in their villages.
If expressing group identity via fashionable clothing was important,
so was reverting to home styles once back in their villages. I once visited
my factory friends Mala and Karuna’s village home in Pollonnaruwa on a
four-day vacation. Although we had much fun with returning soldiers on
the night train, Mala and Karuna quite abruptly changed their clothes and
136 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

behaviour no sooner than we approached their village. They put on what

they called ‘home clothes,’ which were old, faded, knee length dresses in
pastel colours, and also put their hair up in knots or plated into braids.
Without any make-up and in this village-friendly attire they transformed
themselves into looking like any other young woman in the village.
At the same time, they seemed to put me on display as a counterpoint that
magnified their performed rural sensibilities.
In deference to rural sentiments, I had brought long skirts and tops to
wear in the village, instead of my usual jeans and T-shirts. Mala and Karuna
were not happy with this and earnestly asked me not to wear skirts when
going around the village. Feeling pressured, I wore the same pair of jeans
I started out with for most of my stay in Polonnaruwa. Both of them,
however, chose to wear long faded skirts. Walking with them among the
paddy fields and small houses I felt considerably ill at ease in my jeans.
It aroused much interest among the villagers and Mala and Karuna explained
in different ways that I was an important person at the factory and that I was
a ‘miss from America’. My presence contributed to a positive identity in the
village for Mala and Karuna; for not only were they associating with a ‘miss’
who came from America, they also managed to maintain their ‘ruralness’
and village traditions in a space where they were constantly exposed to
‘dangerous’ people such as the ‘miss’ from America. Their insistence on my
wearing clothes associated with the western world sharpened the contrast
they projected by wearing home clothes. The difference in clothes and
mannerisms not only signified differences in taste but also other associated
binaries such as westernised/traditional, urban/rural, bad/good women.
I have also seen workers busying themselves by covering up their
glittery FTZ clothes with old shirts when village relatives visited boarding
houses without giving prior notice. Why was it so important for workers
to project an image that was quite different from what they had become
through their FTZ experience? Occupying an awkward position, as
temporary migrants, FTZ workers did not have the luxury of shaking off
all that was associated with their village lives. They would be forced to
leave their employment and retreat into the village sooner or later. It was
in this context that their village performances took meaning and became
an important process geared towards repairing the damaged identity
brought about by associating with a stigmatised space.
 TROUSER WEARING WOMEN 137

I have since 2005 been visiting former FTZ workers in their homes to
study how they renegotiate identities within more surveillance-oriented
and patriarchally organised villages. Almost all of them exchanged their
FTZ fashionable clothes and hair styles for acceptable village styles that
symbolise innocence, purity, serenity and modesty. This was a crucial
change for many who wanted to get into arranged marriages. Even
within love marriages it was important for former workers to perform
the non-corrupted, industrious former worker role by changing clothes,
styles and mannerisms. The first few years among affinal kin is a test for
many newly married Sri Lankan rural women who move to their
husband’s villages. For former FTZ workers, who have spent a number of
years at a stigmatised, urban space, this trial period is even more intense.
Almost all former workers I visited continued to wear pastel coloured,
modest village dresses while performing extreme forms of social
conformity by suppressing many aspects of the new selves they
developed during their FTZ stint. Although I found this bemusing in the
beginning, as my field work seasons continued I realised that most of
these former workers engage in this show of social conformity as a
conscious way to build a supportive female network within the
community so as to facilitate their entry into entrepreneurship and village
social leadership (Hewamanne Forthcoming). Thus most former FTZ
workers are engaged in a process of changing existing gender norms
with regard to what young married women and mothers can do in local
public domains. The nuanced situational play with fashions is important
for former workers to manage the stigma of FTZ work; just as it is
important for current former workers to transgress some forms of
patriarchal control through dress and style. Both are about communicat-
ing with their immediate communities, and form part of their repertoire
of tools with which they embody protest, critique and conformity.

TROUSER WEARING WOMEN AND ABAYA

WEARING WOMEN

I earlier noted that, in 2000, only a few workers dared to wear trousers or
jeans, and those who did so were subjected to ridicule. I also noted how
Mala and Karuna used the jeans-wearing miss from America (myself) as a
138 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

way to enhance their reputations within the village as ‘good girls’ who
had not changed and become ‘mod’ like the miss from America. Fast-
forward to 2014 and one sees many current FTZ workers wearing jeans
to work, to the store, on pleasure trips and other journeys. Only senior
workers remembered the days when men shouted, ‘Is your elder brother
home?’ to ridicule those wearing trousers. Many workers said that jeans/
trousers are freely and cheaply available in Katunayake shops and no one
ridiculed them for wearing trousers. As an eight-year veteran worker,
Nelum, noted: ‘women kept wearing trousers despite catcalls and men
got tired of trying to dissuade us’. It appears that my prediction at the
marketplace has come true.
I first began noticing this change from around 2010 and the trend
seems to follow a general pattern of change in acceptable womanly attire
within Colombo and its suburbs. An explosion of ready-made garment
outlets in these areas also contributed to a form of homogenisation across
class boundaries. Although catcalls on Katunayake streets persisted, none
seemed to be aimed at women wearing trousers. This prompted me to
interview working-class men around the FTZ area and explore their
thoughts on this particular clothing issue. My very first focus group
discussion at the three-wheeler parking stand of the Averiwatthe junction
was revelatory. I was talking to four young men and an elderly man about
the changing attitude toward women wearing trousers. The first man to
speak, Chaminda, set the tone of the discussion by agitatedly saying,
‘With what is happening to the Sinhala people these days, girls wearing
jeans is nothing. Haven’t you seen the goni billo (a Sinhala term usually
used to refer to a bogeyman with a sack and in this case used derogatorily
towards Muslim women wearing the abaya) in Colombo. Okay miss, you
yourself tell me how many you saw in 2005 and how many you are
seeing this time.’ All four joined the conversation echoing Chaminda’s
anxieties about Muslim women’s attire. According to another man, ‘Most
of those women are Sinhalese who have been converted to Muslim
religion (Islam). They are forced to wear the goni billa suit so that their
families cannot find them. Otherwise, why this sudden increase in goni
billo.’ This comment led to more accusations about how rich Muslim
traders forcibly convert their female Sinhalese employees. The trick,
according to these men, was to hire only Muslim men and only Sinhala
 TROUSER WEARING WOMEN 139

women and then let the inevitable love relationships and marriages
happen. These anxiety-filled tirades against Muslim men echo the fears of
love jihad expressed in India and the UK (Gupta 2009; Mallet 2014;
Naqvi 2014). The accusations made against Muslims here echo those
made by the extremist Buddhist group Bodu Bala Sena (Buddhist Power
Force), which beginning in mid 2012 began resorting to anti-Muslim
agitprop and is mostly responsible for fanning Islamophobia in the island
(DeVotta 2016a, 2016b; Silva 2016).
When, during the same focus group meeting, I mentioned that there
is a turn toward a rigid interpretation of Islam and that Muslim women,
accordingly, may be expressing their new religious fervour, several
angrily noted that it had nothing to do with religiosity, but had to do
with attempts to change the demographics of the country by getting
Sinhala women to have Muslim children. Deciding to not pursue the clear
connotations of how nations are built and fought over women’s bodies,
I brought the conversation back to fashions and asked whether they
catcalled the women in abayas as they did women who wore trousers. This
question took them by surprise, leading to hesitation and some joking
about how they would not dare catcall as they are not sure whether it is a
woman or a man ‘inside that thing’, and how they could not have fun by
catcalling women who look like fat mothers (ammandiyo) due to ‘that
black sack’.
I have had three more focus group discussions, including one with six
army soldiers, and conducted ten in-depth interviews with men who
worked at bag centres, record bars, jewellery shops and at the market,
together with three FTZ factory executives. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the
most reserved of them all were the six soldiers who claimed they have
never ridiculed women for wearing trousers and they would protect
abaya-wearing women if anyone harassed them. The others, at varying
intensity, expressed deep anxieties about a Muslim takeover of the
country and how Sinhala women are the unwitting catalyst in this
political agenda. This revealed prevailing patriarchal ideas of how
women were unwilling victims of men’s agendas and how love and
sexual desire are not emotions that women experience but are imposed
upon them by men. Many have noted how trousers are a modest dress
that cover more than they reveal and that just because a woman is
140 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

wearing trousers does not mean that she has forgotten her culture or is
trying to be like men. Three young men in fact noted that trousers are
more modest than saris, as long as the top is long and loose.
During these times, I mentioned that the abaya that they now reviled is
also a very modest dress that covered the entire body. While all agreed
that it is modest, they, in varied ways, expressed their fear of the
‘unknown’ – the blackness of the dress, the hidden identity of the person
wearing the robe, etc. Showing how ethnic, religious and gender
concerns intersect in interesting ways, some of the discussants and
interviewees noted that it pained them to see women so restricted,
uncomfortable and unfree. Lila Abu-Lughod’s classic work asks a vital
question ‘Do Muslim Women Need Saving?’ (2013). Similar to
simplistic western discourses on ‘saving Muslim women’, that led to
Abu-Lughod’s response, these men’s concerns about women’s lack of
choice were expressed as a justification for Islamaphobia.
The January 2015 defeat of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, whose
brother supported the extremist Bodhu Bala Sena, regenerated hopes of
peace and good governance. Yet, my interviews in the FTZ area
evidenced that the distrust has hardly waned. While working-class men I
talked to in July 2015 agreed that communal violence was not the way to
respond, they reiterated their uneasiness with abaya-wearing women,
claiming that they are being forced by rich Arabian countries to dress in
an alien dress. Chaminda again asked me to consider the numerous
shops that have recently cropped up exclusively selling black abayas. They
highly praised the Muslim Council of Sri Lanka’s initiative to exchange
black abayas for coloured abayas to minimise the alienation from the
majority community, noting that Muslim people in Sri Lanka are peace
loving and it is the terrorists in the middle eastern countries who are
trying to get good Muslim women to look like ‘terrorists’. Nandana, the
older three-wheeler driver, was adamant that he is not against good Sri
Lankan Muslims. He brought up the names of Kabeer Hashim and his
father, who were members of parliament and at times government
ministers, and said, ‘Those are the (good) people. They did not try to
convert people. In fact, Mr Kabeer helped me get my first three-
wheeler. People like Mr Kabeer are also mad about what Arabs are doing.’
Such differentiation has not prevented rising anti-Muslim sentiments
 TROUSER WEARING WOMEN 141

(Stewart 2014; Sarjoon et al. 2016). Together with the fears fanned by
Bodu Bala Sena and other new Sinhalese Buddhist extremist groups,
nationalist anxieties have manifested once more over women’s bodies;
this time on too much covering of Muslim women’s bodies.
While these new concerns with women’s clothing rage together with
anti-Muslim sentiments, working-class women in Katunayake now
clearly get away with wearing trousers, which is a marked contrast to
what their predecessors faced. Female trouser-wearing seems to have
become normalised due to concerns over the rising number of Muslim
women taking to the abaya. Of course, women’s persistence, their deeper
entrenchment in neoliberal regimes, and new local garment market
patterns have all contributed to this normalisation at varying levels. It is
also interesting to note that several ready-made garment outlet chains
owned by Muslim businessmen were partly responsible for the deluge of
easily affordable jeans in Sri Lanka. One of the rumours that contributed
to Islamaphobia and attacks against the Aluthgama Muslim community
in 2014 and in Kandy and Ampara in 2018, was that the underwear and
jeans sold by these Muslim establishments were sprayed with an
infertility-inducing chemical in an effort to reduce the population
growth rate among the Sinhala community (DeVotta 2016b; Haniffa
2016; Taub and Fisher 2018).
While it is a welcome change that a woman can wear trousers or jeans
in the FTZ area without being ridiculed, I doubt this represents a political
victory. Building community identity through FTZ fashions has been a
vital aspect of the subaltern political world that FTZ workers created around
the Katunayake area (Hewamanne 2008). In this sense, dressing like any
other middle-class young woman zaps the critical potential of creating her
own fashions and tastes. Thankfully, the women workers still mark their
bodies in other ways that conspicuously express their particular working-
class identity: that of a gendered group of migrant industrial workers who
are different from men, middle-class women and non-migrant workers.

CONCLUSION: SUBVERSIONS THAT MATTERED

Huisman and Hondagneu-Sotelo (2005) note that dress is a discursive

daily practice of gender and that the hair, make-up and dress practices
142 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

among Bosnian Muslim refugee women living in Vermont are rooted in

relational processes that occur at the macrostructural level of history and
nation, and at the micro world of social interaction. The FTZ workers
gendered dress and style practices are also mediated through their macro
and micro interactional worlds and are shaped within changing social,
political, or economic processes.
I have explicated elsewhere that the FTZ workers are becoming
neoliberal subjects and have adapted neoliberal ways of thinking,
aspiring and self-investment (Hewamanne 2017). Other studies have
also shown that global factory workers adopt new dress, style and make-
up practices as part of claiming modernity (Mills 1997, 1999; Freeman
2000; Lynch 2007; Prentice 2015). However, unlike in most other such
contexts Sri Lankan FTZ workers insisted that they did not want to follow
the middle classes but expressed considerable pride in being able to
follow fashions and tastes that were their own. They were happy in the
knowledge that their clothes irked the middle classes. Their performances
of FTZ garment worker identities at public places, through fashion
deemed disrespectable, represented a critique of middle-class and male
enforced cultural hegemony.
Eighteen years after I first carried out long term research in the FTZ,
women workers still love colourful, glittery party clothes and combine
unusual colours that the middle classes associate with sex workers. They
still love gold jewellery, high heels and thick make-up. The prominent
change from 2000, however, is the high number of workers who wear
jeans without attracting much male attention. As explained in the last
section, new ethnic and religious anxieties appear to have over-shadowed
gendered concerns that were important a decade ago.
Having the freedom to wear jeans may threaten their unique identity,
yet for the most part these workers retain other styles that still make them
a part of a gendered working-class community. Although their
contestatory practices contain levels of opposition and complicity, they
still subvert dominant cultural norms. These subversions form an
important part of their daily cultural struggles and have the potential to
reconfigure the terms of dominant discourses. Yet, none of the workers I
talked to in 2014 were able to connect the anxieties over abaya-wearing
women to the ridicule their predecessors suffered for wearing trousers.
 TROUSER WEARING WOMEN 143

Evidencing how gendered concerns are dwarfed by the contemporary Sri

Lankan ethno-religious milieu, many workers themselves expressed
anxieties over abaya-wearing women by resorting to nationalist rhetoric
that claimed foreign attire like the abaya were bound to infuse cultural
changes unsuited for Sri Lanka.
In an interesting twist, the influx of Tamil workers from the formerly
war torn North and Eastern provinces to the FTZ has provided another
measuring tool for the eager audiences. Many young Sinhala men in the
area, including some of the men who criticised abaya-wearing women,
praised the new Tamil workers for dressing modestly in loose skirts and
blouses with hair in plaits and pottu (traditional dot) on the forehead
(Hewamanne 2016). Neoliberalism, modernity and global cultural flows
aside, female dress and style practices are still measured, debated and
responded to within nationalist and patriarchal contours. Add to that the
global trend in Islamaphobia and women of marginalised communities
still have little space to subvert. Therein lies the cruciality of the
subversions in styles that FTZ factory workers develop and enact in the
FTZ area against the agents and institutions that seek to make women
conform.

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8
CHANGING FASHIONS
OF BHUTANESE YOUTH
Impacts on Cultural and Individual Identity

Paul Strickland

THE BHUTANESE NATIONAL ATTIRE

There has been very little available scholarship on Bhutanese style

cultures and fashion even though Bhutan has a long history of textile
production dating back four centuries (Adams 1984). Mythology dating
back 2000 years (Kumar 2005; Little Bhutan 2014) is entrenched in
Bhutanese historiography and is evident in its textile design as perceived
through costumes depicting Buddhist mythological figures such as
Garuda, the Snow-Lion, the Tiger, the Elephant and the Horse. This has
become part of the attraction for international tourists (Pek-Dorji 2007).
In this chapter, using a qualitative approach based on focus groups
conducted with young people, I describe how Bhutanese youth relate to
contemporary fashion and dress cultures.
Bhutan opened its borders to westerners in the 1970s, prior to which
the kingdom limited the impact of other non-Bhutanese cultures for
centuries (Singh 2010). As a response to this, a strict dress code was
imposed in 1989, requiring all Bhutanese to wear the national dress of
Bhutan; a kira for females and a gho for men at certain occasions, times of
the day and in certain occupations (Ritchie 2008). Women wear the kira,
a full-length dress, secured by a chain at the shoulder (komo) and a belt
 CHANGING FASHIONS OF BHUTANESE YOUTH 147

at the waist (kera). A blouse (wonju) is worn underneath the kira and a
cropped jacket called a toego is worn over the top. The kira is usually made
of bright coloured, fine woven fabric with traditional patterns (Strickland
2013). Men wear the gho, a long robe hoisted to the knee and held in
place by a belt known as the ‘kera’ (Strickland 2013). The large pouch at
the front is used as a carrying aid. Ceremonial kiras and ghos are hand
woven in traditional patterns and are highly prized. In addition, scarves
must be added by women as a mark of respect when entering Dzongs
(fortresses) and monasteries (Ritchie 2008). There was a transition to a
democratic constitutional monarchy in 2007, however traditional
Bhutanese cultural codes were retained (Lo et al. 2016). This can be
attributed to Driglam Namzha, the formal cultural code for Bhutan and its
citizens outlining dress code and rules of etiquette (Kuensel 2015; Lo
et al. 2016). Research suggests that Bhutanese people see their costume as
an essence of their national identity and wear it with pride (Choden
2012). This, indeed, is reported by my respondents who find in national
dress a sense of belonging. The encouragement of national dress in the
making of national identities is also supported by a policy of supporting
national songs and dance (Pek-Dorji 2007). However, like all regional,
‘national’, or ethnic dress cultures, in Bhutan this as Lo et al. demonstrate,
‘it does not mean that these traditional garments have remained
unchanged’ (2016: 308). The introduction of television in 1994
followed closely by the proliferation of Internet and mobile technologies
has seen a significant shift in attitudes towards clothing and fashion
amongst Bhutanese youth. This increased exposure to global media
influences and encourages favourable attitudes towards western fashion.
One of the country’s most popular blogs on Facebook and Instagram, the
Bhutan Street Fashion Project (started in 2010) regularly showcases how
contact with the outside world, combined with nostalgia for vintage
looks, has created a hybrid street style. Begum and Dasgupta (2015),
Kuldova (2013a) and Sandhu (2014) among others have highlighted
that street style can be interpreted in a number of different ways and is not
limited by dichotomous analysis such as East versus West or traditional
versus modern in Asian countries. However, these street styles have also
been met with some forms of resistance by some sections of the populace
promoting traditional attire.
148 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

NON-BHUTANESE CLOTHING IN BHUTAN

The government has raised concerns that global cultural imperialism is

threatening the national identity of Bhutanese nationals. Lo et al. (2016)
argue that young people are discarding the traditional gho and kira and
replacing them with western style jeans and T-shirts instead. Customs
and protocols such as the Driglam Namzha are still referenced to combat
these concerns of cultural imperialism. Another concern raised is with
regard to affordability as Bhutanese traditional dress is expensive
compared to western clothing (Strickland 2013). However ethnic
minorities such as Chinese and Nepalese citizens maintaining Bhutanese
roads are not expected to wear traditional Bhutanese clothing (see
Figure 8.1).1 This also applies to teachers, health workers, lawyers and
aid-workers from foreign countries who are residing in Bhutan (Choden
2004). These workers have little impact on the homogeneity of
traditional Bhutanese dress as foreign worker numbers are low
(compared to the overall estimated population of Bhutan).

Figure 8.1 Foreign road workers in Bhutan, 2016. Image courtesy of Paul Strickland.
 CHANGING FASHIONS OF BHUTANESE YOUTH 149

Since 2011, it was mandated that members of the national

assembly, which includes about 30 per cent of the population, also
wear the national dress during office hours (Tourism Council of
Bhutan 2014). The adoption of national dress has received mixed
response due to its impractical nature for some professions such as
those working in agriculture (Aris 1994). There have been some
forms of ‘mix and match’ for example; heavy western jackets worn for
warmth in winter on top of traditional clothing such as the kira (see
Figure 8.2).2 These attitudes or depictions often appear in Bhutanese
youth fashion blogs, where images are frequently posted of traditional
dress worn with western fashion influences such as in Bhutanese Youth
and Fashion Magazine.3
The resistance to national dress codes is indicative of the changes
and influence of modernity in Bhutan. Karma Wangchuk, the founder
of the Bhutanese Street Fashion Project, explains that Bhutanese youth
take a balanced view of western fashion that is indicative of changing
generational attitudes. Wangchuk explains that the leniency in dress
codes has also helped Bhutanese youth realise the significance of
traditional dress (Newbold 2016). Wangchuk, in an interview with
the Telegraph explains that ‘in a homogeneous world where we are all
getting McDonald-ised by cheap, fast fashion; it’s nice to stick to our
roots and have an identity’. Wangchuk further notes that ‘when our
country is squashed between two giants, like India and China, it’s so
easy to lose our identity’ (Newbold 2016). Wangchuk reinforces
the view that modernisation, as a process, helps to maintain cultural
difference; that cannot be reduced to unambiguous cultural
homogenisation or equating it with western capitalism. The changing
fashion in Bhutan by the youth is complicated and a contested process
of disjuncture, creating both cultural similarities and difference that
go beyond cultural imperialism and are capable of producing agency
(Appadurai 1996). Royal weddings in Bhutan are a good example of
this. The 2011 Royal wedding instigated an increase in local
manufacturing of over fifty traditional clothing styles dating back to
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Strickland 2013). Many
Bhutanese nationals ordered traditional clothing from local companies
to celebrate the wedding – as part of the celebration Bhutanese people
150 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Figure 8.2 Western influence on youth fashion: dressed for going out at the weekend,
2016. Image courtesy of Paul Strickland.

lined the streets in their newly purchased traditional clothing as the

royals walked past. According to Strickland (2013), it sensitised,
inspired and inculcated a sense of pride, empathy and appreciation for
Bhutanese textiles among the Bhutanese. It also highlighted emerging
Bhutanese youth fashion trends that included a resurgence of national
attire with an adoption of western and modern influence. This
includes wearing American shoes and western underwear under
the gho or a western jacket over the kira. The Duchess of Cambridge,
Kate Middleton, on a visit to Bhutan in 2016 wore a traditional
embroidered wool cape by French designer Paul & Joe with a kira-style
skirt by an undisclosed designer but made from traditional local
Bhutanese fabric that represented modern fashion blended with
tradition (Spedding 2016). The global media attention to the Duchess’s
dress choice drew popular attention to the richness of traditional
Bhutanese textiles, embedded within an emerging contemporary
fashion context influenced by western fashion media.
 CHANGING FASHIONS OF BHUTANESE YOUTH 151

MODERN AND WESTERN INFLUENCES ON ATTIRE

The first western influences in Bhutan date back to 1744 and before the
appointment of the first king, the ruling spiritual leader signed a Treaty of
Peace agreement with the British East India Company that effectively
allowed trade with merchants of London. However, for the next century,
boundary disputes, threats of foreign invasion and failed peace missions
from Britain saw little real progress in trade including trade with textiles
and fabrics. It was not until the instalment of the Wangchuck Dynasty in
1907 that these tensions began to cease and allowed Bhutan to be
exposed to external influences and cultures including trade in textiles
with Britain, India and China (Chakravarti 1979). A century later, the
introduction of cheap western clothing and iconic American symbols
such as Mickey Mouse and Levis Jeans manufactured from neighbouring
countries (mainly India and Bangladesh) emerged and is currently
available in local stores and clothing markets (Zelinsky 2004).
Since the mid 1970s, the impact of tourism has created a new industry
aimed at foreign tourists shifting traditional occupations from agriculture
to working in the tourism and hospitality sector mainly in the larger
cities (Strickland 2012). This has also influenced the choice of clothing
for these workers. Today, shops and clothing markets are able to supply
items such as jeans, baseball caps and designer shoes although of a lesser
quality. Since 1999, fashion items are now available to be purchased via
the Internet (Giovannetti and Sigloch 2015). Tourists are also known to
gift items of clothing to local Bhutanese youth when they leave the
country. Even the King has succumbed to western style and is often
fondly referred to by western media such as Vanity Fair as the ‘Asian Elvis’
because of his western hairstyle though he continues to dress in
traditional attire (Harris 2011; France-Presse 2011). It should be noted
that His Majesty continued his tertiary studies in America and England;
that may also contribute to his international approach to fashion.
The government has tried hard to legislate that Bhutanese heritage and
culture must be upheld. This includes legislation regarding religion, art,
crafts, textiles, architecture, the natural environment and languages
among others, but this has been difficult to monitor (Uddin et al. 2007).
Unsurprisingly, Bhutan’s youth have embraced the acceptance and
152 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Figure 8.3 His Majesty Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck and Queen Jetsun Pema,
2011. Image Courtesy of Yeewong Magazine.

availability of foreign clothing, fabrics and jewellery and have

inadvertently become more fashion focused (Yeewong 2014) which is
similar to what is happening in other South Asian countries such as India
(Kuldova 2013b). Decisions based on modesty are also considered
especially by women, but generally limited to what is worn in public
(Kuldova 2012).

CURRENT BHUTANESE YOUTH STATISTICS

It is very difficult to establish reliable statistics regarding the youth

population of Bhutan for a variety of reasons. Firstly, prior to the
1960s, there was no actual data collected on the population. Secondly,
Bhutan has many remote areas that are hard to access with many
communities living in isolation and not frequenting larger towns and
villages. Thirdly, education was poor and hard to access. Many people
could not read or write and almost half the population still cannot
(Index Mundi 2013). Statistics that the government provides suggest
 CHANGING FASHIONS OF BHUTANESE YOUTH 153

there is an even spread of men and women with the majority being
between 25 and 54 years of age in Bhutan. As the life expectancy of
Bhutanese nationals is currently 66, the number of people dramatically
declines after this age. Therefore, for discussing youth in this chapter,
the age range I have chosen is 15 to 24 years representing 27.8 per cent
of the population, which equates to approximately 146,000 people
(Tourism Council of Bhutan 2013).
In 1994, the average Bhutanese citizen earned US$330 annually,
which is less than one dollar per day. A decade later, the average yearly
income was US$1,160.70. In the last census (2012), the figure was
US$2,449.15. In economic terms, this is a significant increase in
individual income and wealth, which has had a profound effect on
purchasing power. Spending money on fashionable clothes is one of
those increasing trends as reported by the Bhutanese women’s magazine
Yeewong (2011). Yeewong is the only Bhutanese fashion magazine for
women that states: ‘This magazine is Bhutan’s first and only women’s
magazine which celebrates every aspect of womanhood that makes us
special and unique with a special focus on the women of Bhutan’ (Yeewong
2014: 1). Additionally they say ‘we celebrate the beauty and splendour of
Bhutanese women in a whole new never-before-seen fashion’ (Yeewong
2014: 2). Although the magazine is a women’s magazine, images of
Bhutanese men are often displayed in the three issues printed annually.
Slogans used in the magazine include ‘youth and sex’, ‘fill up your
wardrobe with BURAY kiras this winter’, ‘they’re stylish and affordable’.
Some articles depict more traditional Bhutanese attire focusing on
different colours and textile techniques whilst others highlight fashion
from other cultures.
Textiles have always been a vital industry for Bhutan and more recently
for tourism. For example, 67 per cent of international tourists named
‘culture’ as the number one reason for visiting Bhutan with 42.8 per cent
of international tourists reporting they had visited textiles/weaving
facilities (Tourism Council of Bhutan 2013). In the most recent royal
wedding that was broadcast internationally, the world saw the image of a
youthful King and Queen in traditional gho and kira attire. However, the
media reported that some of the Queen’s outfit was manufactured in New
York and Hong Kong by well-established, internationally renowned
154 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

designers (Yeewong 2011). The Queen is revered as an influential fashion

icon amongst female youth in particular (Strickland 2013). The Queen
Jetsun Pema was educated in a variety of schools in Bhutan and India then
completed a degree in English and International Relations from the Regents
College in London. This exposure to international culture and as a result
fashions may assist in her choice of clothing that is capable of being
internationally and locally reputed.
This ‘mixing and matching’ of modern and tradition can be further
seen in women’s beauty magazines and online fashion blogs.
International magazines such as Elle and Marie Claire have undertaken
fashion photo shoots in Bhutan and are increasingly using Bhutanese
models.4 This may have both positive and negative connotations;
colourful native backgrounds are not always celebrated and this depends
on the choice of models and their nationality or ethnic background
(Cheang 2008). The Bhutan Street Fashion Project has also become a resource
that communicates Bhutanese youth fashions through its Facebook and
Instagram pages. This site describes itself as, ‘the fashion on the street.
We show you like it is, no pretensions, no wannabe Mother Teresa
promises, no HIDDEN agenda, no moral policing. Everyday lifestyle and
FASHION on the street’ (Bhutan Street Fashion 2015). Volunteer
photographers representing the project take photos of people that are on
the streets of Bhutan, visually documenting what locals and visitors to
Bhutan wear in public. Written comments include ‘what a well-dressed
street vendor’, ‘the beautiful ladies of Jaipur, elegant, traditional yet very
urban’ and ‘spanish intern at a NGO in Jaipur, dressed for the place,
comfort over style’ accompany the photographs (Bhutan Street Fashion
2015). Webpages such as these suggest a changing attitude towards
fashion but also celebrate traditional attire. As Misener (2011: 5) argues,
‘interest in Bhutanese fashion is growing in a nation with a historically
isolated culture’.

BHUTANESE YOUTHS’ PERCEPTION OF FASHION

This study used focus groups representing Bhutanese youth to try to

understand their perceptions of fashion. Representative comments from
some groups included ‘We are very proud of our heritage and culture’,
 CHANGING FASHIONS OF BHUTANESE YOUTH 155

‘We have always worn the national clothing’ and ‘It is something that
will always be with us’. It seemed apparent that collectively, the
Bhutanese youth like their national dress. It ‘makes us proud’ said
fifteen year old Sonam. Their statements also gave a sense of loyalty to
their country. ‘No other country has a dress code like ours’, ‘it makes
everyone equal’ and ‘I know what to wear every day’ were mentioned.
After visiting Bhutan on many occasions, this positivity towards the
Bhutanese culture and clothing became apparent among the many
Bhutanese youth I interacted with.
When questioned about the monarchy and fashion, a surge of
excitement seemed to take over all three focus groups. ‘We love the royal
family’, ‘The King and Queen look so good together’ and ‘The Queen is a
fashion goddess’ were three separate responses. The Queen in particular
appears in many images that inspire younger women through the
Internet and official portraits that are very popular amongst the youth.
The admiration for the royal family by the Bhutanese youth is genuine.
The succession of coronation, marriage and birth of their first child
within a few years has cemented the affection of the people for the
current royal family.
A discussion regarding the status of the royal family was initiated.
The participants did not overtly communicate any concerns about the
royal family or how high status Bhutanese officials have access to
greater wealth and therefore are more likely to wear expensive clothing.
It was presumed, as Dorji stated: ‘They are respected and have high-
level jobs. Of course they should be paid more and spend it on whatever
they want.’ A shy Penam commented ‘There is a class system here and
everyone knows their place. It is just how it is.’ This emphasis on class
demonstrates the complexity of social hierarchies often present within
Asian cultures. Material wealth such as clothing often acts as symbolic
means to communicating individual status. Except for highly regarded
practising monks, for whom clothing can also symbolise wealth that is
not material (Pye and Pye 2009). These perceptions of spirituality and
of material status offered by the Bhutanese youth reinforce that
hierarchies of class, occupation and status in Bhutan are complicated,
non-binary and closely intertwined with spirituality, respect and
collective thinking.
156 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

ASIAN INFLUENCES ON BHUTANESE FASHION

Participants were asked their thoughts regarding Asian fashion. The

answers varied depending on the specific country. Some participants
vocalised that Bhutan does not have a particular fashion sense. ‘Most of
our clothing manufactured here is traditional and not fashionable’
remarked Norbu. Similarly, ‘I wouldn’t say Nepal has a fashion scene or
India because of national dress, unless you have money’, stated Sonam.
China on the other hand received differing comments: ‘China’s clothes
are amazing’, ‘We have to buy from somewhere cheap like China so
that’s why we follow their fashion’, ‘China’s fashion sense is the best in
Asia’ and ‘the Chinese in cities dress so much better that those in rural
areas’. The fixation for Chinese fashion can be attributed to its relative
newness and novelty factor in the marketplace, as clothing from India has
been available in Bhutan for some time. Participants who placed
importance on affordability of clothing said their actual level of choice
was determined by the fact that purchasing Asian clothing is cheaper than
purchasing western clothing in Bhutan (Gereffi 1999).
Practicality is also important for some Bhutanese youth. Asian
countries that are perceived as too progressive or avant-garde were
dismissed for being unpractical or for looking ridiculous. Hong Kong,
Shanghai, Beijing and Japan were given as examples of fashionable
locations that the participants did not aspire to wearing clothes from. Ruy
articulated:

Japan and large cities of China have a totally different fashion sense
to other places. They take risks and sometimes look ridiculous.
I don’t think it’s fashion when you look at what they are wearing
and think, that looks terrible or I would never wear that or even
worse, laugh. Those types of clothes don’t last long, so I wouldn’t
wear them. To me, it’s a fad, not fashion.

These comments were partly made in reference to Japan’s Harajuku

fashion (Slade 2009) and designer brands such as Daydream Nation (by
Hong Kong designer Kay Jing Wong) and Rose Studio (by Beijing
designer Guo Pei) (Peirson-Smith 2013) who are renowned for pushing
the boundaries of fashion. However, not all responses echoed the
 CHANGING FASHIONS OF BHUTANESE YOUTH 157

same sentiments. The majority felt that Asian fashion is fun, exciting and
trendy. Often Asian fashion is viewed as cutting edge and desirable; this
supports Tsui’s (2013) findings. Comments such as ‘Asians know how to
dress’, ‘We are Asian therefore the designs are for Asians, not westerners’
and ‘There is so much choice in new clothes from Asia that whatever you
choose is fashionable’ were said.

WESTERN INFLUENCES ON BHUTANESE FASHION

It appears that not knowing exactly where clothing was originally

designed had a strong influence of what is considered western. For
example, the majority of respondents stated that most of the jeans they
purchased were manufactured in Asia and therefore considered Asian.
Furthermore, Dorji mentioned ‘Lots of people wear jeans and they are
made everywhere. I don’t think it is just trendy in western cultures
anymore’, highlighting the acceptance of jeans in Bhutan.
An interesting comment was made by Tshering: ‘I see the images of
foreigners [western females] in their clothes. If I don’t have anything like
it, I would say it is western. But it is most likely the colour of the skin
[based on the image of a person] that I assume they are western and so
are their clothes.’ Identifying fashion through ethnicity, culture or skin
colour is prevalent with all participants assuming that all Caucasians are
westerners.
It can be said that Bhutanese youth mostly assume that western
branded clothing is more expensive. Western clothes made by famous
designers are perceived to be more resilient than locally manufactured
clothes from Asia. Tashi stated that ‘the clothes from India don’t last
long. This man [visiting tourist from Germany] gave me his sweatshirt
and it has lasted for years’. He described the stitching was threaded
closer with more cotton being used, indicating a greater quality and
hence lasting longer. When asked if western clothing is more
fashionable than Bhutanese clothing, the responses were over-
whelmingly ‘yes’. Pema articulated a common view by stating the
following: ‘Wearing our national dress is fairly restrictive. It must be
a certain cut and worn a certain way. We really only have choice of
colour and type of fabric.’ Additionally, ‘western clothes can be any cut,
158 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

any style and any fashion. The choices available change all the time and
you can wear almost any jewellery you want. You do not have to
conform so it [western clothing] is definitely more fashionable’.
Thinley’s perspective was:

I really like my gho and what our King is trying to achieve but it is
not really fashionable. I see fashion as something that people look
at and like, and then want to buy. Heaps of tourists visit Bhutan but
very few actually buy our national dress. And if they did, would
they wear in their own country? I can’t see an American man
wearing a gho in New York. So, it can’t be fashionable if no-one but
Bhutanese are going to wear it I think.

It is interesting to hear comments that Bhutanese national dress is not

considered fashion if only Bhutanese wear the clothing. The female
respondents appear to value national dress as fashionable if it has modern
colours or is made by a well-known designer. The men’s perceptions
indicate that fashion is a current trend and not necessarily reflected by
tradition. They tended to question the authenticity of fashion if only a
certain ethnic group wear the clothing. These comments highlight some
of the concerns and understanding of clothing and fashion cultures of
Bhutanese youth.

FASHION IMPLICATIONS TO CONSIDER FOR

BHUTANESE YOUTH

When discussing what the youth can actually wear, the Bhutanese people
are in a situation that national dress must be worn at certain times, in
certain areas and in specific occupations. The youth must wear national
dress to school and also if they have a job working for the government,
the monarchy, tourism enterprises, hospitality businesses, local shops,
official monuments, festivals, Dzongs and other cultural sites among
others. Monks are also restricted to red robes at all times in the
monasteries and in public. This is to ensure the continuance of their
textile, traditional and cultural heritage. This can be seen also in some
countries like the United Arab Emirates and Turkey which strongly
 CHANGING FASHIONS OF BHUTANESE YOUTH 159

encourage traditional dress codes in schools and government, although

this is not always compulsory (Schvaneveldt et al. 2005). Conversely,
some countries often discourage ‘non-citizens’ from wearing certain
clothing based mainly on religious grounds (Akou 2007).
These restrictions are not always practical. As Thinley states: ‘I have on
underwear because traditionally, nothing should be worn [under a gho]’.
Penjor said whilst laughing, ‘I wear a bra underneath and none of my
mothers do’ [includes grandmothers and aunts]. The choice of footwear
has also been adapted to suit their current lifestyle. For example, more
practical and comfortable shoes may be worn to and from school if long
distances are required compared to traditional footwear. It was also noted
that jackets and waterproof coats are acceptable in varying weather
conditions which were previously not available. ‘Winter gets so cold here
and it can snow, so you need a jacket. My gho is too cold otherwise’ a
twenty-three year old male stated.
The word ‘comfort’ was also mentioned as a reason for choosing non-
traditional clothing. Yebar says, ‘I love feeling soft clothes’. Karma also
says, ‘Having comfortable clothes is important’. When asked: ‘ What are
the most comfortable clothes?’ and ‘Where do they come from?’ answers
were specific: ‘The most comfortable clothes are made from quality
fabric’ said Ugen who then proceeded to list America, France, Australia
and Europe as places that produce quality fabric. ‘I have really
comfortable shoes from America’ said Sonam. From these responses, it
should be noted that all participants viewed western clothing as being of
higher quality than Asian produced clothes. Elson (1994) commented
that countries such as Japan produce some of the best quality textiles, but
this is not representative of all Asian countries.
The male participants were conscious of ‘looking good’ but not as
forthright as the female participants. ‘I like being in comfortable clothes
that are trendy but usually just wear the same stuff I have’ remarked
Tshewang, a male. Additionally, ‘Guys don’t share their clothes for
fashion’, said 20-year old Kinley. He continued ‘We’d only wear each
other’s clothes if we were cold or something.’ This differs for my female
respondents who often swapped clothes on weekends, shown by
statements such as ‘We have dress-up parties where we go to a friend’s
house and try on all their clothes’ and ‘Girls share clothes all the time’.
160 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

The females justified sharing clothes between friends as ‘something to

do’ and a way to wear different clothing without having to purchase new
items. All participants showed a preference for western style clothing
based on concerns of affordability, perceived quality, modesty and
accessibility.

CONCLUSION

There are many considerations that need to be examined before an overall

conclusion regarding Bhutanese youth and fashion can be drawn. As my
respondents have demonstrated, sartorial identity is complicated and
interconnected with power relations along the lines of national and
colonial identity, regional and local identity, gender, as well as religious
and social hierarchies. Bhutanese citizens are bound by the government’s
decision to enforce national dress. This restricts individual choice to dress
in certain ways, but also attempts to inculcate pride in national attire.
Currently, the Bhutanese textile industry is undergoing resurgence,
especially with the most recent royal wedding, which reinforced the
need for stability in heritage through national dress. The Queen was able
to showcase the Bhutanese national dress to the world in a way that made
a strong contemporary fashion statement. The Queen was viewed as a
very modern monarch and extremely fashionable through the wearing of
traditional clothes with a modern twist.
Alongside this resurgence of fashionable traditional textiles, the
majority of the youth of Bhutan view westernised clothing as more
fashionable than Asian clothing. The influence of western fashion in
Bhutan is shaped by the imagery of cinema, television, Internet, visiting
tourists and the wider dominance of western fashion. Although leading
fashion blogs promote the mixing and matching of eastern and western
styles, this interplay is a lot more complex and cannot be taken at surface
value. Bhutanese youth showed favourability to western clothing over
Asian clothing, demonstrating similar views by youth in other Asian
countries such as India and Japan (Niessen et al. 2003; Sandhu 2014).
Additionally Buddhist values of sharing are very much instilled into
the Bhutanese young people. Therefore it is not uncommon for friends to
share and borrow clothing to overcome issues of affordability. The gap in
 CHANGING FASHIONS OF BHUTANESE YOUTH 161

what fashion Bhutanese youth have access to and what they desire,
demonstrates the potential growth opportunity for youth fashion in
Bhutan. With greater access and exposure to fashion media, technology
and international tourists, Bhutanese youth are constantly engaging with
various forms and influences of fashion. For young Bhutanese women,
fashion is also perceived to be a legitimate reason to ‘hang out’ with
friends outside of the domestic environment. This is similar to the
argument made by Sneha Krishnan in this volume about style cultures of
young women in South India.
The challenge for the Bhutanese youth as this study suggests is to
strive for a balance between retaining a sense of pride for the national
attire and the influence of western and other Asian style clothing. Scope
exists for Bhutanese fashion designers to create strong designs for the
youth that could be used to market the Bhutanese fashion sector on the
world stage, thus allowing another side of Bhutan’s creative industry to
emerge.

NOTES

1. The mother is wearing a thick, wool, white headscarf with a yellow silk blouse
and a check-patterned cotton dress secured with a traditional silver chain fastening
across the shoulders and a fabric belt at the waist that covers cotton trousers and
sturdy shoes made of leather. The father is wearing a branded grey knitted beanie
hat, white cotton T-shirt, traditional patterned cotton overalls attached with
orange straps and a western-style zipped jacket. Below the waist he has jeans and
leather boots. The young boy in front is wearing a collared tennis T-shirt with a
Buddhist prayer thread around his neck, which he wears with a western-style
sportswear jacket, jeans and open sandals, resembling the clothes of the other
young persons in the background.
2. On the left, the mother is wearing denim jeans and a light green western style
knitted top over white undergarments. Her daughter is wearing western-style
brown cotton T-shirt and a denim jacket with a fake-fur lining over a traditional
kira dress with no shoes. The backdrop is a typical youth bedroom with a
traditional Buddhist-inspired wall hanging, and bedding-styles in bright red,
yellow and blue colours.
3. See https://www.facebook.com/bhutanyouth 2017; also see Chari 2014. Accessed
20th April 2018.
4. See https://www.marieclaire.com/fashion/advice/g209/fashionbhutan. Accessed
20th April 2018.
162 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

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9
MATCHING CLOTHES
AND MATCHING
COUPLES
The Role of Dress in Arranged Marriages in
Kathmandu

Sarah Shepherd-Manandhar

Young women in Kathmandu, Nepal, find themselves on the cusp of

several important life transitions. For many, their families are
beginning to consider marriage proposals, signifying potential changes
in young women’s homes, family structure, mobility, independence
and class status. In this context, clothing and adornment become
important means by which young women can attempt to dictate and
control their own futures.
Clothing tells us many things. It can tell us an individual’s gender
(Shukla 2008; Hopkins 2007; Lynch 1999), class (O’Dougherty 2002;
Tarlo 1996), aspirations (Liechty 2003; Freeman 2000), professional
associations (Costello 2004) and political leanings (Tarlo 1996; Cohn
1989). It can provide nuanced, material evidence of inter-personal
relationships and even serve as a measure of day-to-day mood changes
(Hansen 2004; Schneider & Weiner 1986; Schneider 1987). Clothing
creates embodied identities, even as it inhibits and restricts us (Comaroff
& Comaroff 1992; Keane 2005). Further, dress is used by youth to signal
shifting membership in a range of subcultures, in addition to its use, as
166 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

described here, as a site for intergenerational negotiation (Perullo 2012;

Sweet 2010). Clothing does all of these things through its pliable nature.
Here, I discuss how dress is used as a means for power negotiations
across generations in the context of family arranged marriages in
Kathmandu, Nepal. I show how young women deploy locally defined
‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ garments (both terms in English) to gain
access to their desired futures through arranged marriages. The
information they convey through dress becomes crucial in forming
familial alliances and making major life decisions. In this process, dress
performance effectively determines and restricts young women’s life
chances. This chapter looks at the ways in which emerging fashion trends
alongside traditional forms of dress and adornment are mobilised by
young women, both to evaluate potential marriage partners and to make
active claims to particular types of futures. I will explore the connections
between the discourses of modernity and tradition, the use of clothing to
signify acceptance or rejection of these discourses and the effects both
discourses and dressing practices have on young women’s ‘possible
lives’, in Appadurai’s sense (Appadurai 1996: 53).
This chapter is drawn from ethnographic fieldwork conducted from
September 2008 to November 2010 in Kathmandu, with follow-up
fieldwork conducted in the summers of 2011 and 2013. In addition,
I conducted a series of interviews with ten young middle-class 19 –25-
year-old Nepali women. The participants were all unmarried at the time
of our first interviews, but were in the process of having marriages
arranged for them. By the time of my final field visit in 2013, all but two
of the women had married. My informants all considered themselves to
be middle-class. Finally, the young women’s marriage outcomes spanned
the full range of possibilities in Kathmandu; with one young woman
living abroad with her new husband, one young woman having a love
marriage, and two young women (including the young woman living
abroad) living in small, nuclear family arrangements.

DRESS IN KATHMANDU

Following Nepal’s entry into global markets in the late 1950s, clothing
from all over the world has accompanied a wide range of consumer
 MATCHING CLOTHES AND MATCHING COUPLES 167

goods into Nepali markets and homes (Liechty 2003; Rankin 2004;
Whelpton 2005). These goods, ranging from Japanese saris to German
Shepherd puppies, have brought new moral economies and an increased
emphasis on the importance of class. The middle class has grown
significantly since this period as a result of increased labour migrations
and a growing remittance economy (Seddon et al. 2002; Thieme & Wyss
2005). Dressing practices have also changed throughout this period, as
styles originating all over the world have become increasingly common.
For example, Hindman and Oppenheim (2014) have documented the
increasing popularity of Korean fashions among Kathmandu youth.
In their interviews, Nepalis explained that they find the ‘Mongol look’,
a reference to Korean fashion trends, more suitable for Nepalis.
Though there has always been fashion in Nepal, Liechty documents
the introduction of the word ‘fashion’ (in English) into Nepali middle-
class discourse in the late 1990s with the emergence of a new aesthetic
and consumptive regime (Liechty 2003). Within this regime, dress
became a key signifier of class belonging and the associated moral
economy of each class. Liechty found that many women enjoyed ‘doing
fashion’ but at the same time experienced the expectation to be
fashionable as an intense social pressure. For these women, ‘fashion’ was
as much of a responsibility as it was an avenue of personal expression and
they tied their performances of fashionability to familial notions of ijat
(honour) (Liechty 2003). The literature regarding aesthetic and
emotional labour, particularly in Entwistle’s (2002; Entwistle and
Wissinger 2006) work, has shown that both providing care and keeping
up appearance, tasks often demanded of young women in Kathmandu by
their families, entail a type of labour and represent an additional stress for
many women. The labour involved in maintaining appearances and
preserving family honour adds to the burdens that women face in their
homes and posits fashion as an ambivalent social practice.
Finally, Bourdieu’s notion of ‘distinction’ is useful here (Bourdieu
1998). Bourdieu’s understanding of the way in which class marking
behaviours shape, and are shaped by, the broader social milieu of the
habitus is important for thinking through how young women
understand and mobilise dress in daily life. Bourdieu refers to these
specific behaviours as ‘dispositions’; tendencies, preferences, and habits
168 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

which appear to be individual idiosyncrasies, but which are generally

reflective of each individual’s complex social environment. These
dispositions are not entirely socially determined, but they do reflect, with
remarkable accuracy, an individual’s upbringing, class belonging,
education, gender, home location, and much more. Of the many
dispositions that exist and could be considered, this paper focuses largely
on dispositions that are communicative of class belonging, as they are
most relevant to the Nepali dressing practices I observed.
In his analysis, Bourdieu’s primary concern is with marking
‘relational’ categories such as class, education, or honour, but what is
lost in this analysis is the communicative aspect of an individual’s
‘position taking’ (Bourdieu 1998: 6). ‘Position taking’ in Bourdieu’s
sense, refers to actions individuals engage in to signal, claim, or
substantiate their relative position within society. In the research
described here, ‘position taking’ can be seen in the way that young
people and their families actively seek to communicate (and effectively,
create) their class belonging. When an individual or a family has
successfully ‘taken’ a class position, they are then able to assert that their
favoured marriage arrangement is socially acceptable, and the other
family signals their acceptance of this fact by pursuing the match further.
This kind of ‘position taking’ is well explored in literature that is
concerned with performances, and Goffman’s foundational work on the
topic begins with this discussion (Goffman 1959). In this work,
Goffman describes how many human characteristics are not only made
evident by behaviour which displays or ‘performs’ particular ways of
being, but that these characteristics are, in fact, brought into being by
these actions. His work shows that behaving ‘as if’ one had a particular
characteristic or trait transforms us in to being that way. Today, thanks to
the insight of Judith Butler, the most well-known example of the power
of performance to bring ways of being to life is Butler’s discussion about
how gender is not a biological fact, but a result of continuous gender
performances that reflect, and recreate, the societal expectations of men,
women, and increasingly, multiple other gender roles as well (Butler
1990a; Butler 1990b).
Performance literature has its own blind spot in that aspiration is
noted, but rarely functionally described. Yet, understanding how
 MATCHING CLOTHES AND MATCHING COUPLES 169

aspiration results in attempts, both failed and successful, to use

performance to realise one’s aspirations is crucial to understanding how
individuals behave when they find themselves in liminal positions, like
the vital conjunctures, described by Johnson-Hanks (2002). Johnson-
Hanks explains that there are points in each person’s life that require a
drastic re-envisioning of the self; moments where we come of age or are
understood in a new way according to societally determined ‘coming of
age’ events. This includes traditional rites of passage like the marriages in
negotiation in my study. For young women in Kathmandu, marriage is a
vital conjuncture, because it requires that young women use performative
behaviours to make strong claims about who they are, who they hope to
be, and who their future spouses and in-laws hope to shape them to be.
Investigating this vital conjuncture elucidates the way that young women
use dress to communicate their suitability for marriage into an upper-class
family, and through successful claims, to effect significant material changes
in their lives. The observations of Nepali dressing practices discussed here
show how all three aspects – distinction in Bourdieu’s sense,
performativity, and aspiration – function to create class mobility for
some young women. Through their choices of what to wear, young
women, and to some extent young men, communicate with each other
about the kind of future they hope to have and are thus able to make
decisions that enable those hopes. Further, families are also able to use the
specific dispositions of young women, as evidenced by their clothing
choices, to make decisions about potential daughter-in-laws and the ability
of these young women to behave in a way that re-enforces class divides,
performs appropriate gender expectations, and, with the expected birth of
children, quite literally reproduces the current class hierarchy.
Kathmandu’s visual and moral landscape therefore, presents women
with a wide variety of styles and moral demands. Shops that specialise in
French saris neighbour ready-made garment shops selling T-shirts and
jeans based on designs popular in Korea, the USA and India. Yet, the free
mixing of garments in the marketplace is not mirrored in the fashions
worn by many shoppers. Despite a general easing of the expectation that
married women wear saris at all times, clothing remains a clear index to
one’s age, class, and position within one’s family. The oldest generation
of women continue to wear saris at all times. Younger, married women,
170 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

often with children and more household responsibilities, reserve saris for
parties, choosing to wear kurta surawel when out of the home. Young girls,
attending primary school and below and when not in their school
uniform are often seen in imported dresses with full skirts and an
abundance of bows. Among these various styles, saris and kurta surawel are
considered to be traditional garments, whereas T-shirts, jeans, skirts and
blouses are described as modern garments. Yet despite the attribution of
tradition and modernity to different types of dress, social expectations for
young girls and older women allow few opportunities to choose between
the two types of clothing. It is only in the short period between
childhood and marriage, in a state of liminality, where young women
can choose between modern and traditional dress.
Compared to other women, young unmarried women are given the
most leniency, being free to choose between saris, kurta surawel, T-shirts,
jeans, and skirts as it suits them. Leniency is given because these young
women are still ‘puchiharu’ (cute, little girls). As one informant put it,
‘They are just children! No one cares if they look good’, the implication
being that young unmarried women are still below the age of serious
censure. Her family members may be involved by providing shopping
money, giving gifts or through comments they make about the
acceptability (or lack thereof) of her dress, but by and large a young
woman makes these decisions for herself. As many of the streets of
Kathmandu have become home to a wide variety of garments shops,
socialising with friends and the commute to and from school provide
young women with ample time for shopping.
Parents are of course, concerned that their daughters should be modest
and well behaved, but there is also a general sense that young women
should be given as much freedom as possible in these last few years
before their marriage. The understanding is that because they will
sacrifice so much after marriage, unmarried women should be allowed to
dress as they choose. This is not to say of course that dressing practices in
Kathmandu are not guided by strict notions of appropriate dress, but
rather that these norms are enforced by the community at large, even at
the level of what is made available in stores.
There are additional external factors that are considered by young
women when choosing what to wear. Attention to the ways in which
 MATCHING CLOTHES AND MATCHING COUPLES 171

particular types of dress restrict or enable movement plays an important

role in young women’s choices about what to wear. Motorcycles and
scooters are another signifier of middle-class belonging and even young
women without one will spend considerable time on the vehicles of their
friends. The ease of travel provided by jeans and kurta surawel, make one of
the two of these garments the primary choice of middle-class young
women. Finally, all garments are not available at the same cost. Party saris
are the most expensive garment that most young women will own,
followed by jeans and finally by kurta surawel sets. For young women on
the cusp of middle-class-ness who need to be cost conscious, kurta surawel
are the most immediately affordable garment, though, as we will see, this
choice entails hidden costs elsewhere.

DRESS AND GENDER ROLES IN KATHMANDU

In Nepal, as elsewhere, the increasing pace of globalisation and its

assimilation of formerly isolated markets has produced conditions in
which traditional gender roles are confronted by an influx of new modern
conceptions of the self (Appadurai 1996; Breckenridge 1995; Crawford
et al. 2008; Heiman et al. 2012; Liechty 2003; Rankin 2004). The newly
imagined ‘possible lives’ available in Kathmandu are predicated on an
influx of consumer goods which present new class dynamics and
aspirations (Heiman et al. 2012; Schielke 2012) and the ‘developmental
goals’ centred around the ‘rights of women’ that are voiced most forcefully
by NGOs involved in Nepali political and civil life (Ahearn 2001;
Colekessian 2009; Crawford et al. 2008; Shtrii Shakti 2010; Yami 2010).
For young women in the liminal state between childhood and marriage,
most of their attention is focused on imagining and pursuing the possible
lives available to them via different marriage outcomes.
In current discourse, the terms modern and traditional signify a way
of being and a set of normative gender expectations. To be clear, here I
refer to the use of these English loan words by Nepali families in
Kathmandu and not to the meaning that these terms hold for scholars.
Traditional young women are expected to be self-sacrificing, hard-
working and highly skilled in domestic tasks, whereas modern young
women are thought to be more independent and more focused on
172 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

personal fulfilment. These contrasting roles are both appealing and

problematic as young Nepali women recognise both the opportunities
inherent in and the difficulties of each role. Additionally, the discourses
around each of these roles provide a template for how women should
behave within their new families after marriage, as well as what
treatment they should expect in return.
Within these discourses, the new economy of fashion has led to new
sartorial knowledge practices. Prior to the recent flood of foreign
clothing, clothing options reflected women’s status within their family
(married, unmarried, widowed) but were not believed to communicate
about personality or preferences. Though dress has always been used as a
marker of expendable income, the recent expansion of global markets
means it is also considered a reliable witness to the character of the
individual wearer (Liechty 2003). In the context of marriage
arrangements, where it is vital to know who someone is, dress
becomes a key piece of information. In this context, young women
actively use fashions to support their claims to be modern or traditional
and thus to entitlement to the lifestyles those positions entail.
The contrasting gender roles of modern and traditional are not only
presented to young women as a choice they must express through their
clothing, they also represent the choice that families looking for brides
are considering. Because of the continued prevalence of joint family
arrangements and arranged marriages, for most young women marriage
is a rupture from their previous lives after which they embark on a new
one within a new kin network. Marriage is not only a time of shifting
from one family to another, but a particularly salient moment for self-
making as the bride must define herself and her position within her
husband’s home and family. This makes marriage an opportune moment
for giving shape to and expressing a host of aspirations and life goals.

LIFE BEFORE MARRIAGE

In their natal homes, most young women are accustomed to sharing in

daily domestic labour, but the majority of such work falls upon their
mothers and their sister-in-laws. In Kathmandu, where school attendance
is relatively high for Nepal, even through college (Shtrii Shakti 2010),
 MATCHING CLOTHES AND MATCHING COUPLES 173

young women are also accustomed to spending time away from home, at
classes or with friends. Their parents expect to know where their
daughters are, who they are with and that they will be home before dark,
but beyond these restrictions they are trusted to behave appropriately
without additional supervision. Because Kathmandu has only a few major
centralised shopping areas, combined with the expansive extent of Nepali
kinship networks, it is highly likely that a young woman out in public
would be seen by adults who could report back on her behaviour to her
parents. Therefore, while parental supervision may be relatively thin
outside of the home, young women are still mindful of the gaze of others
and the potential consequences of unseemly behaviour.
While young women are out enjoying themselves, relatives of both
families will be observing the young people around them with an eye to
potential marriage arrangements. Before the subject of marriage has been
broached with the parents of either the bride or the groom, other relatives
may begin a series of inquiries and friendly visits to try to evaluate whether
the couple could be a good match. These visits may at first be
indistinguishable from any other social visit except to the match-making
relative and it may be some time before more relatives and eventually the
bride and groom themselves are made aware of what is already at work.
In order to spare the feelings of their children and the families, early
informal arranging is never acknowledged, so that a rejection of the match
by either the bride or the groom causes as little damage to feelings and ijat
(honour) as possible. Therefore, the bulk of the process of arranging a
marriage is only separated from normal day-to-day social life in the past
tense, after the marriage has been agreed formally. In this sense, young
women between their late teens and early twenties are never really off the
marriage market until their marriage has been formally arranged, and their
dress and behaviour at all times is subject to scrutiny and evaluation.
As mentioned above, young women are well aware of this fact, and it is in
this context that their dress choices become so powerful.

ARRANGING MARRIAGES: TRANSACTIONS OF IJAT

Another layer of importance is added to this process when one considers

the Nepali concept of ijat. The ijat economy described extensively by
174 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Liechty (2003) and more recently commented on by Rankin (2004)

serves as the defining structure within the arrangements of marriages.
In the case of arranged marriages this concept takes on new dimensions
as family honour and the future happiness of one’s children become
inextricably linked. Arranging a marriage is not simply about
maintaining or enhancing the family honour but about leveraging ijat
to secure the most desirable future life possible for one’s children. It is
key to recall that material wealth including dress and the class belonging
it entails are made visible to other less well-known families in order to
ensure that one’s child continues to live within the same class, and
continues to enjoy the material benefits of that class belonging (Kondos
1991). The family’s ijat is therefore a primary resource that young
women can draw on through their dress to further their own marriage
goals. By dressing in a modern or traditional way and by wearing clothes
that signal class belonging (through visible branding or higher quality
fabrics), young women strategically present their natal family’s ijat to
potential matchmakers.

FROM NEIGHBOURLY VISITS TO WEDDING

PREPARATIONS

Miller’s description of the marriage arrangement process remains

essentially accurate, despite a significant decrease in the use of lami
(professional matchmakers) since her fieldwork (Miller 1992). The
process of arranging a marriage rarely has a definitive starting point and
usually begins with a few casual observances by family members that the
young woman is old enough to be married. On the part of young
women, these observations may not be acted upon at all until a young
man’s family has initiated marriage arrangements, though in some cases,
either the young woman’s own interest in marriage, or the marriage of
a sibling may initiate more of an active search for a groom. In the
marriages of my informants, however, there was only one case in which
the young woman’s side could really be said to have initiated the
arrangements and this was in response to the initiation of serious
marriage arrangements for her younger sister. In Nepal, the initiation of
arranged marriages by the bride or groom remain rare, though love
 MATCHING CLOTHES AND MATCHING COUPLES 175

marriages and arranged love marriages are often the result of initiation on
the part of the children but according to Netting (2010) and Sharangpani
(2010) this seems to occur more often in India.
The importance of a young woman’s choice in how to dress is often
compounded by the fact that family may not be forthcoming about the
reason for certain social visits. Miller (1992) discusses the need for this
lack of transparency in match making as an important part of saving face.
In some instances, the groom’s family may choose to surprise the bride,
showing up unannounced. The earliest visits are usually by extended kin
who visit on other pretexts so that neither the bride nor her family can
prepare. Finally, though private picture exchanges are increasingly less
common, photos from a whole range of social events and social media
may be used as information for both families.
As an example, in one potential match, the daily dressing practices of
the groom, as portrayed by his Facebook page definitively foreclosed a
possible marriage. One of my informants had been introduced to a man
that her parents were eager to conclude a marriage with. After the
meeting, the young woman was adamantly opposed to the match, but
her parents were persistent. Within a few days, the young woman
had reached out to other relatives for support. For her relatives, however,
this produced a difficult situation. They wanted to support the young
woman in her choice, but it was difficult without having met the man to
marshal arguments against his suitability. Without any other means of
evaluating the potential match, one of her relatives turned to Facebook.
After a few minutes of scrolling through smiling photos of a young man
surrounded by friends, the relative exclaimed, ‘He doesn’t ever wear
jeans!’ With that observation, the relative considered the matter settled,
agreeing entirely with the young woman that this suitor was clearly
too old fashioned and thus not a good match. This example highlights
the fact that a young woman’s day-to-day dressing practices, despite
appearing to have little to do with the marriage arrangement process are
instead the primary means by which young women make their desires
and aspirations known to the families of potential grooms and martial
evidence of their own modernity.
As Miller (1992) also noted, arranged marriages are a considerable
risk for both families involved. Family members must balance a host of
176 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

factors: their children’s attraction to a potential spouse, how their child

will fit in with a new family, the level of consumption their child is
accustomed to, the amount of work a young bride will be expected to do
in the married home and family honour, all in a single match. Families
who are experiencing economic or labour insecurities tend to favour
‘traditional’ young women, who are believed to be self-sacrificing and
willing to contribute domestic labour or unpaid labour in a family
business. Yet these economic incentives come with the cost of an
additional mouth to feed, an expensive wedding, and a small loss in a
family’s ijat, as their economic instability is made visible through their
choice of a traditional bride. Alternatively, families who feel that their
economic situation and their social standing are stable or improving tend
to favour ‘modern’ young women, as such young women will increase
the famly’s ijat by allowing for a display of wealth at the wedding and
increasing the household’s consumption of goods and domestic services.
A family’s perception of their own social position, their beliefs about
what will best ensure their son’s happiness and their own preferences for
gender roles all jointly determine whether a family will be looking for a
modern or traditional daughter-in-law. Yet, knowing the qualities of a
potential bride in the intense uncertainty that surrounds arranged
marriages makes it difficult to know how a young woman will behave in
her married home. It is here that dress begins to take on new importance.

DRESSING FOR THE FUTURE: WHAT IS AT STAKE

IN WHAT TO WEAR

After marriage there is growing pressure on young women to embody

the positive aspects of both modern and traditional gender roles,
however families in search of a bride tend to conceive of their search as
being for one type of young woman or the other. Each role is believed
to offer both positive and negative characteristic traits to a woman’s
married family. But regardless of whether a family desires a modern or
traditional bride, they must try to find a daughter-in-law who is willing
to fulfil the role assigned to her, and it is in this respect that dress comes
to play such a crucial role in marriage arrangements. Through their
choice of dress, young women signal their desire or willingness to be
 MATCHING CLOTHES AND MATCHING COUPLES 177

construed in one way or the other and make claims to certain lifestyles
after marriage.
For young women in Kathmandu, modernity often translates into the
freedom (or expectation) to work outside the home after marriage,
higher levels of consumption, immigration opportunities, and more
flexibility about living within or apart from larger joint families. At the
same time, the appearance of being too ‘modern’ can be construed as
immodesty or selfishness in comparison to traditional young women
(Liechty 2003). The perception of having these negative personality traits
can cause strained relationships within joint families (Ahearn 2001;
McHugh 2001). Additionally, young women who eschew appearing to
be too traditional often sacrifice the support provided by living within
larger joint families and experience more pressure to do the aesthetic
labour of keeping up appearances outside of the home. The process of
arranging a marriage, then, becomes a careful balancing act on the part of
women’s self-presentation.
Because marriage also serves to integrate the young women into a new
family, another stake in the marriage arrangements is whether she will
join her husband’s joint family or live separately with her husband.
It is often stated that modern young women will be better suited to
surviving the isolation and struggles of living outside of Nepal and
so embracing modernity can also be a path to migration as an
accompanying spouse. For some young women, the idea of living with
only their husband is enticing because it can mean greater freedom and
less domestic labour to attend to. For other women, living outside of a
joint family seems isolating and difficult, particularly if the young
woman hopes to have children in the near future. For example, when
another of my informants had finally decided to marry a young man that
she was originally very unsure of, she explained, ‘I have been friends
with his sisters for a long time. It will be easy to live with them.’ For her,
the groom’s family was one of his main attractive qualities and the
comfort of living with women she already knew overshadowed any
doubts she had about the groom himself. In other cases, the reputation of
a family member can be an impediment to marriage, for example, if a
woman has a reputation as being particularly harsh, it may be difficult to
find a bride for her son.
178 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Young women are acutely aware that they are being scrutinised as
potential young brides at this stage in their lives, a point further brought
home as more of their school friends and young relatives marry.
Therefore, they are well aware of the importance of what they choose to
wear at this particular time. For example, in response to family pressure
to marry, one informant, Ritu, was engaged in a complicated exchange of
seeing and being seen by prospective grooms. When I asked how the
meetings were going, she replied, ‘There was one boy I liked, but his
mother and sisters were all wearing saris at home. Look at what I wear’ she
said, pointing to her jeans and sweater. ‘I could never live in a traditional
family like that.’ Ritu was not only confident that she knew exactly what
type of life she would live with this family, but her statement also
definitively dismissed a potential arranged marriage that her family
viewed as perfectly legitimate. In this example, both Ritu’s dress and the
dress of her potential spouse’s kin were viewed not simply as aesthetic
choices but as indicators of personal values and ways of life.
Though Ritu was more circumspect in her discussions, dress is also an
important means of communicating expectations about consumption
patterns. In another instance that I witnessed, after an arranged marriage,
a young man was dismayed to find that the jeans and trendy clothing his
fiance had been wearing before their marriage were cheaper imitations of
branded items. Now as husband and wife, he was frustrated that his
spouse was not interested in the consumption patterns he felt were
appropriate to their class standing. In this case, though happy with his
wife in other respects, he felt betrayed and disappointed. More to the
point, his mother and sister-in-laws who made up a large extended
family were pleasantly surprised by the young bride. I learned that they
had all worn saris and kurta surawel when first meeting the young woman
and that she had taken their dress as a signal of the fact that maintaining
modern fashionability would not be a requirement in her new home.
This example is particularly interesting, because it echoes Liechty’s
(2003) findings that for many Nepali women the new consumption
patterns are as much of a burden as they are an opportunity.
Interestingly, despite the apparent focus on clothing, this decision is
often less about the particular garments at hand and more about the way
such garments will be interpreted by other Nepalis, at home and out in
 MATCHING CLOTHES AND MATCHING COUPLES 179

public, and the extent to which they accurately express the aspirations of
young women to these viewers. This was made particularly clear to me in
one shopping trip when I examined several different T-shirt choices with
one of my informants. I commented that the T-shirt she was examining
was very pretty, but that I didn’t like the large buttons attached to one
side. My informant laughed and explained to me that details like the
buttons were unimportant, what mattered was whether the shirt as a
whole looked fashionable. Another familiar example of these kinds of
choices can be seen in the continued popularity of T-shirts with
misspelled or nonsensical English words on them. In Kathmandu, most
middle-class young women have enough knowledge of English to
recognise that what is written on the shirt has no meaning in English,
but these are again classified as unimportant details. Rather than
linguistically communicating, the English characters on these T-shirts
more powerfully reiterate a connection between the T-shirt as a ‘modern,
western’ garment, and its wearer as a ‘modern, consuming individual’.
Importantly, because of Nepal’s close proximity to India and China: two
places where inexpensive clothing production and export to Nepal is
common, the English characters, as opposed to Hindi or Chinese
characters, also signal some connection, tenuous though it may be, to
imagined, western consumers. These imagined fellow consumers can be
envisioned as consuming the same product, and perhaps, possessing
similar dispositions. The irony, of course, is that the lack of linguistic
meaning on the T-shirts is likely to prevent them from ever being
exported to the West, because it is the linguistic content, and not just the
indexicality of the characters, that will have meaning for the consumers
there. The use of written words as design is a common phenomenon, but
it only makes sense in this particular context if we understand that dress is
being used indexically in a way that makes the garment’s overall
categorisation far more important than its specific design elements.

CONCLUSION

Weddings have always been a core topic in anthropology, but the ‘vital
conjuncture’ presented to young people in the process of arranging
marriages has received considerably less attention (Johnson-Hanks 2002).
180 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Yet, this conjuncture is among the most crucial of young women’s lives.
It determines not only who they spend their lives with but where and
how that life is lived as well. In Kathmandu, arranging marriages is
considered a tenuous and stressful process, where both families take big
risks involving their families’ honour, social status, and for the bride and
groom their whole lives. The proliferation of an incredible amount of
styles and fashions has further complicated this liminal phase by
introducing a variety of new gender roles, expectations and possible
dispositions. Yet in Kathmandu, by reducing this diversity to a binary
between modern and traditional, young women have been able to
harness dress as a reliable medium for expressing their expectations and
desires about the lives available to them after marriage. Young women
contest, co-opt, and strategically adopt these dominant discourses by
translating them into Bourdieuan dispositions, in part, through dress
performances that materialise their personal preferences and their
family’s ijat. They do not passively accept the gender roles presented to
them, instead they mobilise these roles by using their relative freedom
from restrictions in what they wear. By choosing to wear kurta surawel or
jeans in their daily lives, young women put their preferences on display
to perform locally recognised ways of being, which signal to themselves,
their families and their communities, their own expectations after
marriage. Careful attention to these seemingly mundane decisions allows
us to better understand the more subtle and relational ways by which
young women bring their aspirations about class, consumption and a
variety of ‘possible lives’ into being.

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10
‘OF COURSE IT’S
BEAUTIFUL, BUT
I CAN’T WEAR IT!’
Constructions of Hindu Style among Young
Hindustani Women in Amsterdam

Priya Swamy

INTRODUCTION

This chapter explores the ways in which fashion choices among young
Hindustani women in Amsterdam are negotiated and constructed as
embodiments of their Hindu identity. In the Dutch context, Hindustani
colloquially refers to people identifying and identifed as descendants of
British Indians who migrated to Suriname beginning in 1873 to work as
plantation labourers. ‘Hindustani’ is therefore an ethnic marker that is
used within the community itself, rather than a religious or class based
identification. Religiously, the Hindustani community breaks down as
80 per cent Hindu, 15 per cent Muslim and 5 per cent Christian (Verstappen
and Rutten 2007: 216). Hindustanis see themselves as culturally distinct
from direct-migrant Indians because of their ancestors’ migration to
Suriname.1 Throughout this paper, the Hindustanis whom I discuss are of a
Hindu background.2
This chapter is based on ethnographic fieldwork3 carried out between
2012–2013 in Amsterdam among Hindustani women between 18–40
184 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

years old. The first section briefly contextualises the history of Hindus in
both Suriname and Amsterdam, highlighting the indentured labour
experience and the postcolonial migration of Hindus into urban areas in
the Netherlands. The second section provides a theoretical orientation, that
focuses on three categories: diaspora, Hindu identity, and aesthetics.
Rather than provide readers with a historical contextualisation of these
terms, I focus on their current usages in the fields of diaspora studies,
media and religious studies, and anthropology. By looking at diaspora as
an identity that is mobilised and consciously constructed (So€ kefeld 2006)
through media, I argue that my respondents are agents of their diasporic
identity and that their agency is well illustrated through their unique
construction of embodied practices that they imbue with value (Mankekar
2002), such as styles of dress. The third section presents four fieldwork
narratives. These narratives demonstrate how young Hindustani women in
Amsterdam consciously construct their own Hindu identity from within
their imaginings of what is ‘Indian’, imaginings that are not only heavily
mediatised, but influenced by their position as diasporic subjects.
Hindustani forms of Hindu worship predominate in the Dutch public
sphere. Although there is a steadily growing population of direct Indian
middle-class migrants, temple spaces, cultural and religious organis-
ations, and public festivals are most often organised and run by members
of the Hindustani community. Throughout my fieldwork, direct migrant
Indians who had settled in Amsterdam at around the same time that
Hindustanis had begun to settle in large numbers in the Netherlands, said
that they felt comfortable having Hindustanis run organisations and set
up temples because they had strong Dutch language skills and more
experience with navigating Dutch customs and manners.
For my female Hindustani respondents, embodied practices of dress
and style play a central role in the construction of Hindu identities. While
Indian fashion is considered beautiful, traditional, and an authenticating
measure of Hindu identity, the young women I interviewed and observed
are involved in dynamic processes of negotiating their own ‘Indianised’
style that expresses their experience as diasporic subjects: accessorising,
home-made fan T-shirts, and even the rejection of popular Indian fashion
trends and grooming they see in Bollywood films and Internet-based
media, are all ways in which young women authenticate their own
 ‘OF COURSE IT’S BEAUTIFUL, BUT I CAN’T WEAR IT!’ 185

Hindu identity. What is more, ‘traditional Indian clothing’– the outfits

they see in glossy magazines, on the Internet, and in Bollywood films, are
ideals – young women rarely feel the need to emulate perfectly the styles
they see in order to ‘authentically’ perform their Hindu identity through
fashion choices.
Earlier scholarship has contested that the consumption of Bollywood
films can be linked to the ways that young diasporic Hindus ‘connect’ with
India, as ‘India’ is a mediatised construction of various images and ideas
(Verstappen and Rutten 2007; Verstappen 2005). However, research has
continued to perpetuate the idea that young Hindustanis use ‘Bollywood
culture’ as a way to connect themselves to their Indian ancestry (Choenni
2011; Gowricharn 2009). I argue here that researchers should move
beyond the framework of ‘Bollywood culture’ to ask how aesthetic
practices, such as dress habits, operate not only within the framework of
Bollywood but invert, reinvent and even reject what is presented to them
in media through ways of dress. I suggest here that it may be more fruitful
to speak of ‘mediatised Indianised culture’ as this lays emphasis on various
forms of media, Bollywood and beyond. This includes images and styles
circulating on Indian fashion websites, on the pages of glossy magazines,
and in religiously themed television series.

HINDUS IN SURINAME

Suriname is a former Dutch colony in South America, bordering on

Guyana, French Guiana, and Brazil. It became a major sugar plantation
economy chiefly run by the labour of migrants from Java and India.
In 1870, the British government signed a treaty with the Dutch
government known as the ‘Recruitment Treaty’, and in 1872, under
much duress, the British allowed the Dutch to recruit its first workers
from British India (Choenni 2011: 5). This system of recruiting labour
from British India lasted until 1916 (Choenni 2011; Hoefte 1998), with
a period of brief suspension in 1877, eventually resuming in 1879.
Religious and cultural practices underwent significant changes as soon
as labourers entered onto the boats at docks in Calcutta, awaiting their
journey to Suriname. The rigid divisions of caste and jati (birth
communities), embodied through dining and social interactions were
186 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

impossible to uphold, resulting in greater contact not only between

castes but also between people of different religious backgrounds. These
communities were from different regions and performed their religion
quite differently which meant that regional or highly parochial forms of
Hindu practice were eventually replaced by a broader syncretic tradition
that embraced the major gods and goddesses (Vertovec 1994: 130).
The years leading up to Suriname’s independence in 1975 were
politically tumultuous. Due to political unrest and an unstable economy,
mass migration into the Netherlands began in the 1970s. Most
Hindustanis have settled around the Hague, with significant populations
also settling around cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Major cities
also have many speciality Indian and Hindustani shops, selling clothing,
jewellery, ritual substances, iconography, food and media.

THE HINDU DIASPORA: CONSTRUCTIONS,

MEDIATIONS, IMAGININGS

As Rogers Brubaker (2005) outlines, there are three general principles

that most scholars of diaspora use to determine whether or not a
community qualifies as a diaspora: dispersion into space, an orientation
towards a homeland that holds authoritative value, and a maintenance of
boundaries that are set up between a diaspora and their ‘host’ society
(Brubaker 2005: 6). These three criteria have continued to frame the
experiences of Hindustanis in the Netherlands, although the significance
of these elements, along with the way they have been interpreted have
shifted over time (Brubaker 2005: 6).
For my young female respondents, it is becoming increasingly
important to establish an Indian cultural heritage. Many of my
respondents feel that Suriname did not represent their culture, but the
‘African [Creole] culture’ of the majority population. Instead, India,
especially because of its many temples and religious sites, is revered as a
spiritual and cultural homeland (Vertovec 2000). Such a gendered
response to ‘Indianness’ among second-generation Indo-Caribbean
youth has been noted earlier (Warikoo 2005), where ideal womanhood
according to Indo-Caribbean cultural norms that are policed by family
members and perpetuated in the media are associated with embracing
 ‘OF COURSE IT’S BEAUTIFUL, BUT I CAN’T WEAR IT!’ 187

one’s Indian roots. The connection between womanhood and

Indianness, Warikoo argues, is strictly tied to ideas of maintaining and
purveying tradition – an idea that has been widely observed across
contexts, such as in Hindu-Trinidadian communities (Verma 2000; Khan
1995) and middle-class American Hindu families (Kurien 2007; Maira
2002).
For example, I spoke to two Hindustani women in their early thirties
about their relationship to Suriname and to India. One respondent told
me that: ‘In India, temples are everywhere . . . It’s easier to be a Hindu
there.’ She lamented that the culture in Suriname was ‘more of a party
culture’ and said that ‘India was the place for spirituality’. As a spiritual
person who took her religion seriously, she felt much more attached to
India. Similarly, another woman told me that she felt Indians ‘show more
devotion’ by ‘falling at the feet’ of gods and goddesses, while Hindustani
people sit quietly in rows of chairs when they attend temples.
In turn, the young women I spoke to expressed shock and
disappointment at seeing or hearing of young people (especially other
women), ‘acting modern’ by dressing provocatively, eating meat, and
drinking alcohol. It is clear that the India they refer to and relate to as a
spiritual homeland is not a reified social fact (Appadurai 1996;
Verstappen 2005), but a set of romantic and spiritual imaginings that are
constructed. As Mankekar notes, ‘India’ in the diaspora is a construction
of contested images, discourses and institutions (Mankekar 2002: 76),
and these constructions take on an overwhelmingly spiritual focus
among my young respondents. As India has become increasingly visible
in popular culture and the international stage, Hindustani youth have
been more vocal about their connection to India. This is especially
relevant for Hindustanis who see India as the ‘birthplace’ of Hinduism
(Vertovec 2000; Choenni 2015).
These sorts of romantic constructions have been previously linked to
the consumption of Bollywood films. As Gowricharn (2009) has pointed
out in the framework of mediascapes (Appadurai 1996), second
generation Hindustani youth tend to exhibit a greater affinity for India
than Suriname because of the ways in which Bollywood cinema acts as a
‘commercial advertisement of Indian culture’ (Gowricharn 2009: 1627).
However, the India that is advertised is not ‘real’, but is a strategic
188 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

representation of India as the centre of the world and its diaspora on the
periphery (Verstappen and Rutten 2007: 214). Such an interest in
Bollywood films does not necessarily mean my respondents are
interested in the daily political or social life of India, much less its history.
What is more, my respondents do not uncritically accept that what they
see in films reflects what actually happens in India.

AGENCY AND REGIMES OF VALUE IN SURINAMESE

HINDU DIASPORAS

In order to re-establish a position on a second generation diaspora

community that places my young female respondents at the centre,
I adopt So€ kefeld’s (2006) approach where diasporas are constructed
through specific mobilisation strategies, actions, and institutionalisations
(So€ kefeld 2006: 267) that happen at group and individual levels. I focus
on the strategic choices my respondents make through an engagement
and selection of media beyond Bollywood films (particularly Indian
television shows and Indian Hindu diaspora Internet sites) that are
directly related to their style of dress. As I will demonstrate, it is not a
simple case of borrowing styles from different films or even keeping up
with the latest fashion: A Hindu way of dress is negotiated personally
across various forms of media and reflects the aspects of Hindu life that
my respondents think are relevant and appropriate in a given situation.
Often, this means engaging with styles that are expressly ‘Indian’ (see
below), but not necessarily popular, and looking at television, film, epic
stories and soap operas to gain inspiration.
These independent constructions of Hindu identity through Internet
based media involve shifting ‘regimes of value’ (Mankekar 2002: 76)
that are placed upon various practices, styles, media and goods in the
diaspora. As goods, styles and media come into the diaspora via
transnational networks, my respondents attach value to them and set out
to incorporate them into their daily lives. While regimes of value may
change on the whole within a community, regimes of value among my
respondents are largely self-constructed through their own sense of what
is appropriate, beautiful and traditional from within their own
imaginings of what it means to be a Hindu. As one of my respondents
 ‘OF COURSE IT’S BEAUTIFUL, BUT I CAN’T WEAR IT!’ 189

succinctly put it: ‘Youtube is my Guru!’, consulted when in need of

information about weddings, funerals, specific fasts and celebrations.
In turn, she found that she could discern style trends from the videos she
watched, regardless of their subject matter.

INDIAN HINDU IDENTITY: RELIGION AS CULTURE

AMONG HINDUSTANIS IN AMSTERDAM

My respondents use the term ‘Hindu’ to encompass a variety of cultural

and religious practices. The emphasis on aesthetics among my
respondents points to a conscious conflation of the two, where ‘Indian’
has become an ethnoreligious category.4
The Radha Krishna temple (RK temple) in Osdorp, Amsterdam sets
itself apart from the other Hindu temples in the city by hosting days
specifically aimed at youth. I attended ‘Youth Day’ in 2013 that dealt
with the theme of marriage, where young people between the ages of
12– 17 were broken into three groups and asked to examine a series of
pictures related to the ritual of marriage and determine whether or not
they were ‘religious’ or ‘cultural’.
As a second-generation South Indian who had grown up in Canada,
I was familiar with many (but not all) of the images that were presented.
I had told the participants at Youth Day that my parents were born and
raised in India, and that I had visited India many times throughout my
life. After telling them this, I was struck by how often young people
would turn to ask me whether or not I recognised a picture, and
immediately assumed that if I did, based on my ‘Indian’ background, it
must be something that is expressly ‘religious’ rather than cultural.
Young people also often asked amongst each other if they had seen the
images in Indian films or on Indian television programmes before.
If someone said they had recognised the image from Indian media, it was
considered religious rather than cultural.
In particular, young people across all three groups opted to categorise
images of traditional Indian5 clothing, as opposed to Surinamese
clothing, as religious rather than cultural. My observations echo David
Pocock’s 1976 article, where the Bochasan Shri Ashkar Purushottam
Sanstha branch of the Swaminarayan movement in Britain venerates
190 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

aspects of Gujarati culture, such as language, diet, and marriage networks

as religious factors that contribute to the fulfilment of religious duty
(Vertovec 2000: 15). Similarly, young Hindustanis are taking aspects of
lifestyle that are Indian and imbuing them with religious value.

AESTHETICS: EMBODIED PRACTICE AND SENSORIAL

EXPERIENCE AMONG YOUNG HINDUSTANI WOMEN

Caribbean Hinduism is an ‘ethnic religion’ (Vertovec and Van der Veer

1992: 149) which blurs the boundaries of culture, religion and ethnicity to
form a Hindu identity that can be contextualised within current theories of
aesthetics. For example, Meyer and Verrips (2008: 21) move away from the
Kantian notion of aesthetics as ‘disinterested beauty’ and attempt to realign
contemporary ‘aesthetics’ with the Aristotlean concept aisthesis (Meyer and
Verrips 2008: 21; Meyer 2009: 6), which has most significantly been
developed by Merleau-Ponty (1964). As Meyer and Verrips (2008) argue,
aisthesis should be understood as a discussion of the issues in Aristotle’s
De Anima: ‘Our corporeal capability on the basis of a power given in our
psyche to perceive objects in the world via our five different sensorial
modes, thus in a kind of analytical way, and at the same time as a specific
constellation of sensations as a whole’ (Meyer and Verrips 2008: 21).
This has in turn inspired a specific theorisation of ‘diaspora aesthetics’.
Werbner and Fumanti (2013) define diaspora aesthetics as: ‘the sensual
and performative medium through which diasporeans enact their felt
autonomy while laying claims to “ownership” of the places and nations in
which they settle’ (Werbner and Fumanti 2013: 149). Diaspora aesthetics
point out that authenticity and truth are ever-fluid concepts, so we cannot
point to one ‘original’ source (Werbner and Fumanti 2013: 151).
Diaspora aesthetics are transnational and point to processes more
complex than simple mimesis or nostalgia. The appropriation and re-
construction of sartorial styles, literary and artistic objects, foods, and
media are transformative processes that bring about shifting contexts and
meanings, new objects and styles that are hybrid and in-between
(Werbner and Fumanti 2013: 151; Bhabha 1994).
‘My mom doesn’t care about wearing saris, but I want to [wear
them]’, a young respondent wistfully told me. This difference of opinion
 ‘OF COURSE IT’S BEAUTIFUL, BUT I CAN’T WEAR IT!’ 191

within a family unit is not uncommon. I found that many of my

respondents were interested in Indian cooking, visiting temples, keeping
a vegetarian diet and developing an Indianised style of dress without any
pressure from their parents. What is more, my respondents were often
the only members of the family who engaged in these embodied
practices.
As one young woman told me, she is ‘basically just a Dutch girl’ in
relation to the way she thinks about her daily life and her social
interactions, but her religion is ‘Indian’. Rather than separating the two,
or viewing them as conflicting, my young respondents easily reconcile
their religious practices and everyday life in the Netherlands. They are
also quick to point out what is ‘practical’ or ‘impossible’ to do in the
Netherlands and easily justify abandoning such practices (such as visiting
the temple more than once a week, or speaking fluent Hindi) while still
recognising that these are ideal and valuable practices for Hindus in
principle. At the same time, many of my respondents are quick to
emphasise that certain embodied practices that are easily integrated in
their daily life such as food and dress habits are ‘more important that
rituals’.
These categories of diaspora, newly emerging Hindu-Indian identity
and aesthetics are the three main frameworks my respondents use when
embodying their Hindu identity through ways of dress and style. Below,
I lay out four ethnographic narratives that contextualise these categories
and demonstrate how young Hindustani women use clothing and dress
to embody an Indianised Hindu identity.

ETHNOGRAPHIC NARRATIVES

Saskia6 is a 23-year-old who lives in the Netherlands close to Utrecht, but

who travels to Amsterdam to attend the RK mandir in Osdorp. She
approached me as I sat observing the Tuesday night prayers in the temple
one evening. When I told her that both of my parents came from South
India, she was quick to say ‘We [Surinamers] also come from India.’
One day she asked to visit an Indian clothing store in the east of
Amsterdam, as she was ‘curious’ about what they sold. She was
particularly interested in the items that I found beautiful, often asking me
192 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

‘Would you wear this to your wedding’? Again, it was interesting to see
how she trusted my judgement on Indian clothing because I had
mentioned to her that I have Indian parents and have visited India many
times. The clothing sold in the shop we visited was very different from
the traditional South Indian styles that I was brought up with and despite
telling her so, she was still insistent that I give my opinion on the
clothing she chose.
Saskia also spoke about the importance of Indian clothing in relation to
her wedding. Like many young Surinamese Hindu women, Saskia
expressed the view that marriage is a time where ‘tradition’ reigns:
Indian clothing, Indian food, and a Hindu ceremony are all non-
negotiable factors that contribute to an ‘authentic’ Indian wedding. She
had searched various websites about how a traditional bride should be
dressed and told me she was determined to wear ‘all the items’ that make
for a traditional bridal ensemble in a Hindu wedding. Rather than consult
Hindustani websites, which she said were difficult to find in the first
place, she said she ‘trusted’ Indian websites when it came to matters of
dress. Saskia attended a few weddings and social functions over the
course of our interviews. When I asked her what she planned to wear,
she would always say ‘Western clothing’, as she maintained that, even
though beautiful, ‘Indian clothing does not sit [feel] comfortable’ on her.
Although she felt more comfortable in western clothing, she took care to
wear Indian accessories, such as bindis, churia (thin bangles), and other
pieces of Indian jewellery to compliment her outfits at weddings and
social occasions to give her outfit an ‘Indian’ look. While she had been to
weddings where the bride and groom had worn ‘Western’ clothing, she
firmly asserted that she would never do such a thing at her own wedding,
although she did maintain that the concept was ‘interesting’. However,
she said that these weddings were ‘not traditional’.
Saskia negotiated between her ideals about wearing Indian clothing
and the practicality of certain styles. Her approach to Indian clothing at
weddings was not unlike what I saw and heard from many of my young
female respondents: Indian clothing is absolutely necessary if you are the
bride or someone close to her, but for practical reasons when not closely
related to the bride they opted to wear dresses and skirts to such events.
However, accessorising becomes the way in which these young women
 ‘OF COURSE IT’S BEAUTIFUL, BUT I CAN’T WEAR IT!’ 193

add an ‘Indian flavour’ to their outfits, therefore making them

‘appropriate’ for a religious occasion such as a wedding. What is
more, the accessories become as important as the outfit itself, as they
represent the ‘traditional’ elements of dress that should be worn during a
religious ceremony or occasion.
Although Saskia watched Bollywood films and was exposed to Indian
TV, she did not expressly model her style upon what she saw in those
films. She found websites about traditional modes of dress to be helpful,
but always integrated those styles within her own personal take on
‘dressing Indian’. While she knew the way she dressed at weddings and
her visits to the temple was not the way Indians in India may dress, she
felt that it represented her own style as a ‘Dutch Hindu girl’. Saskia, like
many other young women I have spoken to, negotiate their clothing
choices carefully, vacillating between practicality and tradition – in
Saskia’s case, the two are not mutually exclusive. While she idealises
Indian clothing as the ‘traditional’ way to dress during a wedding or
temple service, she rejects the need to always wear Indian clothing as
impractical and instead accessorises in order to mobilise her Indian
Hindu identity. While she is preoccupied with Indian ways of dressing,
especially when it comes to weddings, she is also firmly rooted in a
diasporic style that neither mimics nor rejects, but constructs a sense of
style that is Indianised, traditional, and diasporic in its aesthetics.

‘I DON’T CARE WHAT I WEAR’: REETU AND

‘ANTI-STYLE’

I first met Reetu, a 20-year-old woman living in Osdorp, Amsterdam, in

the RK temple on a Tuesday evening. She stood out not only because she
was one of the younger people there, but she dressed very casually and
simply compared to other young women, wearing a pair of pants and a
T-shirt, sporting an unkempt hairstyle that caught my attention as soon as
I came into the temple. Over the course of our meetings, she spoke to me
often of meditation, renunciation and spiritual aspects of life. Unlike
most of the young women that I spoke to, Reetu was much more
interested in spirituality. However, much like the other young women I
spoke to, she used media, particularly the Internet, to seek out episodes of
194 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

the popular Indian television drama Devon Ke Dev . . . Mahadev (‘The Lord of
All Lords . . . Mahadev [Shiva]’), based on the mythology of Shiva.
Although she spoke intently of the messages and the stories that she
gleaned from each episode, it became apparent that she also paid close
attention to the aesthetics and habits of Lord Shiva as depicted in the
series, and sought to emulate them in her own life. She mentioned
repeatedly that ‘she didn’t comb her hair’ because she wanted to
resemble Lord Shiva who is notorious for being unkempt, with a head of
dreadlocks. Although she also apologised to me for ‘not caring about her
hair’, she also seemed to be very proud of the fact that she was
unembarrassed to leave her hair uncombed.
She was much less enthusiastic about fancy Indian clothing than other
girls her age, showing little interest in the latest fashions she saw in
Bollywood films or on the Internet. When I asked her if she liked wearing
Indian clothes, she immediately cut me off and said that she wished she
could ‘wear a simple white shirt and white pants’, as she was more
concerned with ‘giving away material things’ and ‘living like Shiv bhagwan
[Lord Shiva]’. She also mentioned that the idea of abandoning fashion
and material things was originally ‘Indian’, and she was suspicious of
Hindustani gurus or renunciants because they ‘are driven by money’. For
Reetu, the lifestyle of renunciation is not only Hindu, but Indian. She was
concerned that it was ‘too difficult’ to be a Hindu in the Netherlands
because of the European ‘lifestyle’, which not only included eating meat,
but it encouraged one to pay too much attention to physical appearance
and fashion, which ‘went against’ the teachings of Shiva. ‘[Real] Hindus
are not concerned with how they look’, she told me. On the one hand,
Reetu told me she was uninterested in fashion and wished she could wear
simple white clothing for the rest of her life. On the other hand, she told
me that she ‘always wore her Indian cricket shirt’ so that people ‘knew
where she comes from’ when she was at the gym. She equated both her
commitment to the spiritual pursuit of Hinduism as well as her Indian
identity with the way she dressed and styled herself.
Reetu’s engagement with ‘Indian’ fashion is unique among my female
respondents, but her reasons for constructing and mobilising an ‘Indian-
Hindu’ way of dressing is strikingly similar to Saskia’s. Much like Saskia,
Reetu relies on images circulated through the Internet in order to
 ‘OF COURSE IT’S BEAUTIFUL, BUT I CAN’T WEAR IT!’ 195

construct her own, idealised way of dressing that mobilises an Indian-

Hindu identity. She, much like Saskia, does not go to lengths to perfectly
mimic Lord Shiva’s dress, but appropriates aspects of his mediated image
as her own distinct Hindu-Indian style. Furthermore, she saw the
renunciant’s way of dressing in simple white cloth as an ideal to aspire to,
representing an authentic and traditional way of Hindu dress, but instead
was satisfied mobilising an Indian and Hindu identity through a style that
was readily accessible – such as simple jeans and T-shirts at the temple,
and uncombed hair.

‘KEEP CALM AND LOVE DEEPIKA’: BOLLYWOOD

FANDOM STYLE

I also carried out fieldwork in a small temple established in 2011 in the

southeast of Amsterdam. The temple is known for elaborate celebrations
during Hindu festivals, which are rich, aesthetic performances that involve
a diverse Hindu community. During an anniversary celebration of its
opening, I observed Hindus of Afghan, Surinamese, Punjabi, Gujarati and
South Indian backgrounds, as well as a few members of the Hare Krishna
community come together to perform worship, share communal meals
and participate in a lively singing and dance competition.
While the temple usually attracts a mix of backgrounds, most often
people are distinguished as either ‘Hindustani’ or ‘Indian’: it is relatively
easy to make the distinction between the two based on the way young
women are dressed. Indian (mostly Punjabi Hindu) young women wear
full salwar kameez or anarkali suits, and very rarely an older woman will
come dressed in a sari. The Hindustani women usually come in pants and
long shirts that resemble kurtha tops, long skirts and shirts, or some
variation of modest clothing such as a long shirt with a round collar
(resembling a kurtha) over leggings.
At the anniversary celebration I observed a young Hindustani woman
named Reshmi who earlier was wearing a pair of jeans with a cream
coloured kurtha top over them. As people piled into the temple and the
temperature rose, she pulled off her kurtha to reveal a T-shirt that had a
picture of Bollywood superstar Deepika Padukone. The back of the shirt
read: ‘KEEP CALM AND LOVE DEEPIKA’.
196 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

I already knew that Reshmi had a strong attachment to Bollywood

culture – her mother told me she insisted on visiting Mumbai to ‘see
Bollywood’, and that she often took her daughter to hear playback singers
in concert in the Netherlands. Reshmi had proudly shown me pictures
she had taken with playback singer stars as well as the background
pictures on her phone of Deepika and other Bollywood celebrities. For
Reshmi, not only films, plot lines and fashions were significant: she was
wholly caught up in a fan-culture which venerated actors, actresses and
singers as measures of Indian culture themselves. However, Reshmi’s
attachment to Bollywood culture was embodied much differently than
the other young women I had interviewed. Rather than appropriate
aspects of a style she observed in films, she constructed an embodied
practice out of her devotion to a particular Bollywood personality. Rather
than dress according to styles she had consumed in media, she created
her own way to dress that represented her highly personalised
attachment to Deepika Padukone. Her own admiration for Deepika did
not manifest itself as it does for many other Hindustani girls her age –
those who ask for Indian outfits that look like something the starlet had
worn to an event or in a film. Unlike other instances of queer fandom that
are outlined in this volume (see Chapter 3), the desire to be Deepika
struck me as less important to Reshmi than showing to others at the
temple how her simple Deepika t-shirt was part of her Hindu style. It may
therefore be useful to think through the ‘Deepika shirt’ as a material
object of fandom. While scholars have noted that the aspects of
collecting, replicating and commodifying ‘things’ of fandom is often
reduced to a commerical material practice (Hills 2014), the affective and
nonmaterial aspects of such material culture should not be under-
estimated (Hills 2014; Rehak 2012). I see Reshmi’s T-shirt as a creative
and highly personalised form of mimesis that negotiates and rejects the
desire to ‘be Deepika’ with (and ultimately in favour of) the desire to
publicly ‘admire Deepika’. It forms a sharp contrast to the reductive
observations that consuming Bollywood culture among young
Hindustanis is to mimic what is seen on screen: Reshmi’s love for
Deepika demonstrates that the films and stars she sees are part of an
elaborate, aestheticised world that she would rather celebrate than
directly emulate in terms of style. As a consumer and fan of Bollywood
 ‘OF COURSE IT’S BEAUTIFUL, BUT I CAN’T WEAR IT!’ 197

cinema, she negotiates her own style that can express her love for
Bollywood and stars like Deepika. What is more, she can extend and
perform her personal take on ‘Bollywood culture’ alongside more
mimetic or other performative forms of fandom in the Hindu diaspora in
the Netherlands.
Reshmi had worn her T-shirt on a day where Indian culture was
being celebrated alongside a milestone for the Hindu community
in Amsterdam: many young children chose to perform Bollywood
inspired dances to popular songs. The judges of the dance competition,
visibly irritated by the overwhelming amount of Bollywood as opposed
to ‘classical’ Indian dances, gave a stern lecture that stated Bollywood
stars ‘trained first as Classical dancers’. Although her faded T-shirt was a
far cry from the more elaborate outfits at the anniversary celebrations, it
fitted comfortably within the event that vacillated between lively
devotion to the gods and goddesses of the temple and devotion and
celebration of Indianised, Bollywood culture as it was embodied
through song and dance.

ADOPTING TRADITIONS, ADAPTING STYLE:

DRESSING FOR KARVA CHAUTH

Karva Chauth, taking place in the Autumn season, is one of the major
celebrations in one of the temples in the southeast of Amsterdam because
of the large Punjabi Hindu community that attends regularly. Although
many of my respondents had not heard of the festival as it is not
traditionally practised in Suriname, I was surprised to hear that there was
a growing number of Hindustani women beginning to organise Karva
Chauth celebrations themselves. At the temple, the emphasis on Hindu
Punjabi festivals and forms of worship meant that the celebration was
elaborate and well-attended, attracting many Punjabi but also quite a few
young Hindustani women.
Women who participate in Karva Chauth do more than simply fast; a key
component is dressing up in elaborate, formal clothing, jewellery and
make-up. At the temple, reminders of the festival were circulated through
social media, directed to the ‘beautiful ladies’, who were asked to appear
dressed in their finery on the day of the festival. I observed that the
198 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

majority of women attending Karva Chauth wear anarkali or salwar kameez suits
with mirror work and heavy stitching in bright colours. However,
among the few Hindustani women there, very few were dressed like the
Punjabi women who attended. Many came in the outfits that they wear to
other festivals and celebrations in the temple – such as long skirts and
shirts and leggings and long kurtha tops. Only one or two older women
who sat at the sides of the temple observing the fast were actually
wearing saris. It appeared that the popular style was to wear salwar kameez
or anarkali suits. I saw a woman wearing a long summer dress with her
shoulders covered by a shawl to create an Indianised outfit resembling
a lengha or sari. Women were dressed formally and beautifully, with
jewellery and make-up to accompany their outfits.
The young woman and her Indianised outfit represents how newly
emerging traditions and rituals are appropriated according to one’s own
styles and tastes. Rather than treat the festival as ‘Punjabi’, this young
woman, and others who were dressed similarly, chose to negotiate the
aesthetics of the fast (especially sartorial style) according to their own
constructions of how an ‘Indian’ festival with ‘Indian’ clothing should be
embodied, rather than look to the Punjabi women as measures of
‘authentic’ style for Karva Chauth.

CONCLUSION

For my respondents, Hindu identity in their diasporic context is something

they actively construct. The young women I interviewed and observed
view India as a ‘spiritual homeland’, and set out to embody a Hindu
identity that is Indianised, a trend that has been previously addressed in
scholarship on Indo-Caribbean and Hindu diaspora communities. Yet, the
cases of the young women that I present here offer us more than the well-
rehearsed narratives of diasporic mimesis or romanticisation: they all
require a rethinking of how style aesthetic may be creatively adapted and
personally designed to fit in the particular experiences of a diasporic
subject. While I do not deny that regimes of value that circulate across
Hindu diasporic communities have a role in how these styles are, in the
first place, consumed and performed, they demonstrate how young
women in the diaspora play with the relationship that is drawn between
 ‘OF COURSE IT’S BEAUTIFUL, BUT I CAN’T WEAR IT!’ 199

ideal womanhood and expressions of Indianness as they strive to style

themselves as Surinamese Hindus in Amsterdam. The relationship between
Indianness and Hinduness may not be reduced to a singular reading of
Hindu interests or frameworks: the way that Indianised culture is
invoked across these cases through style and media means that we must
look at different angles to frame this relationship in the case of these
ethnographic vignettes. My ethnographic narratives seek to capture an
emerging attitude towards clothing and Hindu identity not only to
demonstrate the diversity in styles that are ‘Hindu’ but also to point to
the greater trend of using fashion strategically as a way to mobilise
Hindu identity in the Netherlands. Such mobilisations also include
paying attention to Dutch or ‘European’ aesthetic values and qualities
such as comfort in order to develop a style that is diasporic. By focusing
on narratives that bring in media other than Bollywood films, this study
also attempts to problematise the reductive notion that Hindustanis
embody a ‘Bollywood culture’, and highlights the various mediatised
fashions and styles that often conflict with or undermine styles seen in
popular films.
The theoretical implications of my study urge researchers to continue
to explore how diaspora identity is strategically mobilised by individuals
and groups, rather than something that involves mere repetition of rituals
and styles. By paying attention to fashion as a part of the larger discussion
of diaspora aesthetics, researchers can develop insights into how
diasporic youth actively engage and embody a religious and cultural
identity that may differ radically from previous generations.

NOTES

1. For a thorough discussion of the relationship between Indians and Hindustanis in

the Netherlands, see Lynnebakke 2007.
2. As this chapter stemmed out of a larger project on Hindu identity in the
Netherlands, my contact with Christian and Muslim Hindustanis has been limited.
Future research that explores the category of Indianness vis-a-vis styles and
fashions among these other Hindustani religious groups would open up the
observations made here to rich points of comparison.
3. This includes extensive and immersive participant observation at various temples
in Amsterdam as well as extensive semi-structured interviews and informal
conversations.
200 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

4. While the conflation of ‘Indianness’ and ‘Hinduness’ has often been described in
the language of Hindu nationalism and Hindutva discourse, I argue that this is not
strictly the case here. There is more of an indirect reference, in some cases, to grey
literature on the Internet that reinforces this relationship between Hinduism and
India through frameworks of Hindutva revisionist histories (cf. Thapar 1992).
In most cases, and certainly among all the respondents whose voices are
represented in this chapter, there is no mention or acknowledgement of Hindu
nationalist groups as influential. Indeed, traditionally strong diasporic Hindutva
organisations such as the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) or Rashtriya Swayamsevak
Sangh (RSS) are only minimally active in the Netherlands, and respondents have
told me that since the mid 1990s these groups have seen a large drop in active
membership. However, because many of my respondents rely on websites and
web searches to find their information on Hinduism, there are no doubt some
instances where Hindu nationalist views trickle into the information they
consume and then actively transmit.
5. One particular image was of a North Indian-style wedding ensemble for males.
It is interesting to note that ‘Indian’ or ‘India’ is usually constructed as a
homogenous, North Indian identity, as members of the Surinamese Hindu
diaspora are largely unaware of the sharp cultural and religious distinctions
regionally.
6. All the names of my respondents have been changed.

REFERENCES

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Bhabha, H. (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.
Brubaker, R. (2005) ‘The “Diaspora” Diaspora’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 28(1): 1– 19.
Choenni, C. (2011) Integration Hindostani Style? On the Migration, History and Diaspora of
Hindustanis, Amsterdam: VU Amsterdam.
——— (2015) Hindostaanse Surinamers in Nederland 1973 – 2003 [Hindustani Surinamers
in the Netherlands 1973 –2003], Arnhem: LM Publishers.
Gowricharn, R. (2009) ‘Changing Forms of Transnationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies,
32(9): 1619 – 1638.
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Kurien, P. (2007) A Place at the Multicultural Table: The Development of an American Hinduism,
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Lynnebakke, B. (2007) ‘Contested Equality: Social Relations Between Indian and
Surinamese Hindus in Amsterdam’, in G. Oonk (ed.), Global Indian Diasporas:
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Exploring the Trajectories of Migration and Theory, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University

Press, pp. 235 – 263.
Maira, S. (2002) Desis in the House. Indian American Youth Culture in New York City,
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Appropriation’, Ethnos 78(2): 149 – 174.
11
BRAS ARE NOT FOR
BURNING
The Bra and Young Urban Women in Delhi
and Bombay

Lipi Begum

INTRODUCTION

Within studies of Indian dress, the closest thing to a bra is usually the choli
(sari blouse) (Fabri 1960; Kumar 2005). Bras, generally classified as
western,1 are rarely included. When the bra does appear in studies of
Indian women’s dress, it is incorporated into wider discussions of the
general growth of women’s western clothes and underwear retailing in
India (Agarwal 2013; Sharma 2009; Technopak 2013). Scholars of Indian
cinema (Banaji 2006; Dwyer 2001; Wilkinson-Weber 2014) have
analysed the meanings of western outer-clothes worn by women in India,
however these studies seldom discuss the semi-hidden bra. Whereas the
panty through the Pink Chaddis campaign appeared in public as a symbolic
tool of female power and protest, the relationship between power and the
bra in India remains ambiguous.
This chapter focuses on the significance of the bra in India in relation
to its proximity to the Indian woman’s body. I focus on the ambiguity of
the bra to investigate the tensions of the sexualised female body and
changing ideals of Indian femininity (Fields 2007; Sukumar 2007). The
bra is hidden under clothes, but has effects on the dressed female body
 BRAS ARE NOT FOR BURNING 203

that are publicly viewed, highlighting issues that western outer garments
cannot always reveal. It is the inherently western and sexualised
connotations of the bra that set the backdrop in which the power
meanings of the bra for young (18 –24) urban Indian women living in
Delhi and Bombay2 are to be explored.
I discuss how the bra lends insight into the paradoxical battleground
between emerging bi-cultural identities and the increase in moral
policing of young urban Indian women’s sartorial behaviour in public
spaces, as India begins to rapidly urbanise. I discuss how the tensions
surrounding western dress in India re-circulate patriarchal and
nationalistic anxieties concerning western modernity dating back to the
Indian independence movement. And, through a Foucauldian analysis of
power, I reveal how the bra is a technology of the young urban Indian
woman’s self and an embodiment of her ambivalent identity – one
which evolves with the city and oscillates between practices of
domination and practices of resistance.
The findings in this chapter are taken from a wider study that applied a
qualitative research methodology. Primary research was undertaken from
2011– 2014 and consisted of semi-structured surveys, interviews and
focus groups conducted in shopping malls with the highest target
consumers of underwear3 in Delhi and Bombay. A sample size of
approximately thirty women from each city was surveyed including ten
in-depth interviews and two focus groups (one in Delhi and one in
Bombay). Due to limited research on the bra in India, a multi-stage
research approach was undertaken. This included further stages of
research utilising online surveys and textual analysis of bra and lingerie
representation in magazine advertising and in Indian cinema.
To contextualise the study and add to the limited body of academic
research on the bra in India, meanings of western dress in India, market
growth factors of the bra, as well as existing studies of the bra and
lingerie4 are discussed in the remaining sections.

SELF-STYLISATION, THE BRA AND POWER

There is no such thing as a subject outside of the social discursive and

political framework. And there is nothing outside the web of power
204 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

(Foucault 1978: 93). Central to Foucauldian power is the relationship

between power and knowledge, where techniques of domination
depend on the knowledge that classifies individuals and the power that
the knowledge is derived from. Foucault’s work did not look at fashion.
However previous studies (Amy-Chinn 2006; Fields 2007; Jantzen et al.
2006) of the bra and lingerie have drawn on the contributions of
Foucault’s works (1977, 1978, 1988) to conceptualise the ways in
which historical power relations and disciplinary regimes of surveillance
shape and control our body and sexuality.
Applying Foucault’s later works on the ‘Technologies of the Self’
(1988), I emphasise that instead of viewing biopower solely as a
constraining force it should also be looked at in the light of its productive
sides; how it produces knowledge and pleasure, where practices of
domination go hand in hand with practices of self-production or of
taking care of the self (Foucault 1988). A basis to understand the bra as a
technology is to emphasise the role of bra as a power dressing tool useful
for conducting the body in certain ways that both discipline the body and
pleasure the flesh (Entwistle 2000) and a tool to construct inter-
psychological (public identity based on an external world of shared
values and symbols which direct identity construction) and intra-
psychological (private identity, directed towards an internal world of
longings, feelings and bodily representations) identity (Jantzen et al.
2006). In these respects, in the Foucauldian sense, the bra serves as a
technology of the self.
A Foucauldian analysis acknowledges the gendered, social and
political dimensions embodied within bra wearing practices and how the
overarching relationship to power and undergarments is an oscillation
between seizing control and being controlled (Jantzen et al. 2006: 179).
Yet previous discussions that have applied this analysis, like the Danish
study by Jantzen et al. (2006), can usefully be extended to consider the
meanings of underwear in the context of globalised fashion consumption
and mediation in India. The Indian context complicates previous
applications of Foucauldian power and brings into view additional social
and political power relationships of colonial, postcolonial and national
struggles. The Hindu nationalist narrative of modernisation in India
which equates western capitalism (increase in western fashions like
 BRAS ARE NOT FOR BURNING 205

the bra) with the perceived inadequacy of western moral values, such
as a lack of sexual constraint and hyper-sexualised female identities,
complicates the study by Jantzen et al. (2006) of the inter- and intra-
psychological meanings of the bra along the lines of East/West power
relations. This ambiguity calls for the questioning of the meanings of the
bra in urban India from a postcolonial perspective. A postcolonial view
allows me to address the ways in which meanings of the bra for women
in India are not static, but are linked to meanings of western dress socially
and culturally produced through a web of power connected to colonial
and nationalist views of modernity.
This complex relationship of multiple modernisms that creates room
for self-reflexivity and self-stylisation capable of challenging the
dichotomies of ruler and ruled, oppressors and oppressed, East and
West. This chapter focuses on the findings which revealed a mixture of
both implicit and explicit personal views of the participants who
challenged popular understandings of modernity, that modern does not
equate to western and traditional to Indian. It explores the ambivalent
space where a garment can move through space and time and has the
potential to shift from one category to another, where positive meanings
emerge out of the processes of appropriation, adaptation and
transformation (Appadurai 1996; Ashcroft 2009; Bhabha 1997; Phillips
and Steiner 1999). In order to understand this ambivalent space, the
following section discusses the colonial and national tensions which give
rise to the self-reflexive power meanings attached to the bra in urban
India.

ANXIETIES SURROUNDING WESTERN DRESS IN INDIA

The anxiety surrounding western clothing in India coalesced as a political

focus during the Indian independence movement. During the Swadesi
(liberation) movement (1920– 1947) (Tarlo 1996; Trivedi 2007),
Gandhi formed essentialist views of the West arguing that western
secular rational enquiry encouraged anarchist individualistic bohemian
lifestyles with a lack of sexual inhibition (Hardiman 2003: 21).
In contrast, Gandhi demanded puritanical ideals of restraint of mental and
physical sexual desires for both Indian men and women. This included
206 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

dress and adornment. Indian men and women were asked to boycott
foreign British goods such as western clothing. These types of foreign
goods were seen as symbolic of material desires and believed to be
affecting the livelihood of Indian businesses and Indian cultural identities
(Cohn 1996: 109). According to Gandhi, modernity was inseparable from
western capitalism and colonialism and he sought liberation from both.
Gandhi’s views on western modernity made a big impact, but also
faced opposition. For example the influential Indian poet Rabindranath
Tagore shared Gandhi’s anxieties about globalisation and its universalising
effects (Hardiman 2003), but challenged Gandhi’s idea of nationalism
and was supportive of globalisation. Unlike Gandhi’s essentialist and
conservative views about identity, Tagore was cosmopolitan and
progressive (Bhushan and Garfield 2014). For Tagore, national growth
required transnational integration; he advocated neither total insulation
from nor a complete adoption of foreign western culture. However, in
the strong pursuit for Indian independence from the British, Tagore’s
cosmopolitan views were dominated by Gandhi’s nationalistic views.
Certain strands of Hindu nationalism today deploy their own version of
what they present as a Gandhian view, in their attempts to govern
and shape mainstream public attitudes towards women’s wearing of
western clothing.
For Indian women, essentialist views about western modernity were
complicated by patriarchal attitudes that positioned women as the
guardians of traditional culture and chastity, so that whilst men widely
adopted western dress after independence, women were slower to adopt
western dress (Tarlo 1996; Banerjee and Miller 2003). These patriarchal
moral attitudes also heightened the shamelessness and eroticisation
popularly associated with western clothing. This is seen in the Indian
cinema of Bollywood pre- and post-independence, where female
characters of low repute wore gaudy western styles and revealed their
bras (Wilkinson-Weber 2014), whilst virtuous wives and heroines wore
Indian styles (Tarlo 1996). This trend still dominates Bollywood today.
Actresses wearing western clothes are often associated with moral
failings, seen as vices of western modernity, sexual promiscuity,
shamelessness and sexual violence, whilst actresses wearing Indian dress
are mostly associated with tradition, safety and chastity (Banaji 2006;
 BRAS ARE NOT FOR BURNING 207

Banerjee and Miller 2003; Begum and Dasgupta 2015; Dwyer 2001;
Wilkinson-Weber 2014). These attitudes have also re-surfaced outside of
cinema and into mainstream political media through incidents like the
Mangalore attacks, Miss India protests and anti-rape protests across India.
In 1998 Miss India pageants were met with hostility by far right
Hindu groups who protested that western clothing like lingerie and
swimsuits are symbols of western lifestyles and a threat to national
identities (Dewey 2008; Oza 2001). In February 2009 a string of violent
attacks against women in Mangalore5 pubs took place. Forty male
activists from the Hindu right wing group Sri Rama Sena (SRS) barged
into a pub in Mangalore, South India, and dragged out and beat up a
group of young women, claiming that the women were violating Indian
traditional values by shamefully displaying romantic affection in public
spaces, smoking, drinking alcohol and wearing western clothes. This was
linked to populist Hindu right views that western modernity is a
contaminating force against Indian traditions.
Such incidents have led to an increase in women’s campaigns and
protests across India and widespread media frenzy. Media coverage has
ranged from patriarchal and nationalistic far right Hindu views against
Indian women wearing western clothing to far leftist feminist views
supporting the right to choose what to wear, including western clothing
in public. Since then western clothing including undergarments
have gained attention as symbolic tools of protest against patriarchal
and nationalistic views that restrict Indian women’s sexual identity to
bearers of chastity and tradition (Oza 2001; Thapan 2004). Particularly
in response to the 2009 Mangalore attacks, underwear has been
appropriated to coin the name for the women’s rights campaign Pink
Chaddis (pink panties). A group of women came together through the
Facebook consortium named ‘Pub-Going, Loose and Forward Women’
and urged women across India to send their pink panties through
the letter boxes of SRS activists in time for Valentine’s Day. Over five
hundred panties were said to have been couriered, making it a landmark
protest against moral codes of shame, sexism and Hindu conservatism in
India (thepinkchaddicampaign.blogspot 2009). Furthermore, in 2011
the first western style SlutWalk format, named Besharmi Morcha (without
shame), took place in New Delhi, India (The Hindu 2011). Unlike western
208 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

iterations, the Indian Besharmi Morcha did not include provocative clothing
such as bras as markers of protest (Valenti 2011), and was somewhat
different to the historical context6 of the SlutWalk movements where the
bra was famously associated with the term ‘bra burning’7 to symbolise
the rejection of objects of male oppression (Valenti 2011).
In India the symbolic meaning of the bra is ambiguous. Bras have not
been specifically discussed as symbolic markers of female empowerment
like chaddis, nor directly as objects of male sexual oppression as in the
West. Yet they have been consistently referenced in relation to themes of
postcoloniality, shame and the evolving identity of an Indian woman and
her body (Bannerji 2001; Cohn 1996; Sukumar 2007). However, these
themes have not been fully explored in relation to the meanings of
specifically western clothing in the contemporary context, nor the
rapidly changing liberalised global economic context within which
the increasing consumption of bras are taking place. This is discussed in
the following section.

THE CITY LIFE OF BRAS

Rapid urbanisation visible in the form of standardised8 fashion retailing

and greater entrance of Indian women into urbanised public spaces
provides insight into the power meanings of the bra. Since the first
standardised shopping mall opened in Delhi in 2003, British brand Marks
and Spencer (M&S) and French brand Enamor (Keys 2003) increased
their entry into the Indian underwear market. For the first time, these
brands became available through retail concessions in department stores
such as Shoppers’ Stop, Lifestyle, Pantaloons, Westside, Globus, Piramyd
and Globus (Franchiseindia.com 2008; Images F&R research 2007; Peer
2014) across big cities like Delhi and Bombay.
These standardised underwear retailers began to capitalise on changes
in the lifestyle of urban Indian women. Increasing visibility outside of
the home and in public spaces, such as the workplace, public transport to
work, bars, clubs and shopping malls, paradoxically demanded that
women signal success through clothing and increased the need for
privacy within rapidly industrialising and uncertain public spaces.
Retailers therefore targeted the increasing number of professional
 BRAS ARE NOT FOR BURNING 209

women entering the workforce9 with higher disposable incomes

employed within the secondary and tertiary sectors of India’s tier one
cities.10 These retail spaces empowered Indian women who traditionally
purchased their bra and lingerie in un-organised fragmented stores with
male attendants (Keys 2003). Being able to purchase bras at their own
ease and discretion allowed them to sidestep the disorder of rapid
urbanisation which can give rise to patriarchal threats to intimacy in
public places (Wilson 2011) such as the male-gaze and eve teasing11
(Sukumar 2007). This need for ease and discretion however varies
amongst age groups and it is these age differentials that provide further
insight into the meanings of the bra in India.
While older women (24– 35 year olds) are perceived to look for
discretion and status in their bra wearing and shopping practices,
younger women (18– 24 year olds) are perceived to be less influenced
by discretion and status. Young urban Indian women are understood to
be more concerned with affordable and fashionable styles (Jadhav and
Pati 2012). These younger urban women are from the post-liberalisation
generation.12 The liberalisation of the economy exposed greater numbers
of Indians to global consumer goods including western fashion brands
and global fashion media. Young urban women faced a greater choice of
western fashion retailers and began to frequently mix and match
traditional Indian styles with western styles (sari and salwar kameez with
western jeans and T-shirts). This is seen amongst young urban Indian
women who are increasingly adapting their bra to a growing number of
sartorial choices (T-shirt bras for tight fitting salwar kameez and western-
style tops and choli bras). Thus, underwear retailers aside from capitalising
on the need for ease and discretion when bra shopping, also offered
various styles and colours of underwear to capture retail growth.13
This cosmopolitan approach to fashion amongst Indian youth is
increasingly reflected in Bollywood films. Unlike the meanings of
western dress frequently potrayed in earlier mainstream Bollywood
films, western styles in films post-liberalisation are more fluid and less
restricted to women of low repute. Revealing bra straps, lingerie and
bikini styles are increasingly worn by heroines on screen and young
college girls off screen14 (Dwyer 2001; Wilkinson-Weber 2014). Post-
liberalisation films feature heroes and heroines similarly associated with
210 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

western dress. For example, film characters depicted living abroad are
shown mediating their Indian identities in the West by embracing
traditional family arrangements and actively encouraging a youthful
‘bicultural identity . . . one rooted in global culture and one rooted in
local culture’ (Ghadially 2007: 29). Western dress situated within a bi-
cultural identity is not always gender specific, neither anti-western nor
condemning of Bollywood’s portrayals of women in scantily clad and
tight fitting clothes (Banaji 2006; Wilkinson-Weber 2014). Instead
western clothes can also provide a fantasy space which epitomises the
escapist nature of Bollywood, neither negative nor positive and
potentially empowering and liberatory (Banaji 2006: 168).
This filmic embrace of a bi-cultural identity is also reflected in the
choice of celebrity ambassadors for global bra brands in India. In May
2014, youth fashion icon and ex MTV ‘Rock On’ VJ and model-turned-
Bollywood-actress Lisa Haydon unveiled M&S’s first stand-alone store in
Bombay; as of 2018, twenty stores are now open. (Fashionunited.in
2014). Haydon in her films is mostly situated within a bi-cultural identity
through the wearing of Indian and western fashions. Although Haydon’s
onscreen Indian identity is not always free from cultural stereotypes, the
roles she plays in her films are often neither hypersexualised (prostitute or
vamp) nor desexualised and are firmly associated with unashamed sexiness,
fantasy, independence and a working identity (Queen, dir: Bahl 2014). She is
portrayed as emblematic of the post-liberalisation generation; typical of an
aspirational, educated, middle-class, bi-cultural youth and fashion identity
(Aisha, dir: Ojha 2010). Similar to Tagore’s sceptical yet optimistic view of
globalisation, bi-cultural identities created for and cultivated by stars like
Haydon are not free from the nationalistic tensions surrounding western
modernity, rather they demonstrate a critical engagement with multiple
possibilities both of freedom and resistance. Notably, this tension between
freedom and resistance is complicated by the fantasy space within which bi-
cultural identities operate. This is seen in the Bollywood film Fashion (dir:
Bhandarkar 2008) where the bra is symbolic of both the allure and the
threat of western modernity.
In Fashion, wearing western lingerie is instrumental to the protagonist
Meghna’s career as a successful international supermodel and is symbolic
of her self-determination, fulfilling friendships, romantic relationships.
 BRAS ARE NOT FOR BURNING 211

On the other hand, the dangers of modernity are allegorised by the trials
undergone by Meghna as a result of her being too modern (western).
This is seen in scenes where her career as a western lingerie model leads
her down the individualistic path of cultural rejection (by family),
hedonism (excessive alcohol consumption, smoking, drugs), lack of
sexual restraint (relationship break-ups, one-night stands) and an
emotional breakdown (despair of her career in the fashion industry). Yet
it is the empowering potential of fantasy, situated within her bi-cultural
identity that rejects the nationalistic view of western modernity for
Indian women as a moral problem. These meanings of fantasy and
pleasure heighten the paradox of fashion during periods of urbanisation
(Wilson 2011).
The variety of choice attached to clothing styles and the variation in
desired body image/size across age groups, regions and marital status
(from goddess-like curves to fitness bodies) makes self-power
ambiguous within a pluralistic, multi-lingual and multi-ethnic country
made up of 42 cities. In the context of bra consumption in India, the
increase in standardised bra retailers is as much about avoiding eve
teasing at traditional outdoor public vendors, as it is about aesthetic and
pragmatic choice, empowering and changing means of expression. This
ambiguity of power is discussed through the findings of the study in the
following section.

FINDINGS: BESHARMI15 BRAS

Younger (18– 24-year-old) urban Indian women living in the cities of

Delhi and Bombay differed in their attitudes to older urban Indian
women (25 years and over). Where older working women purchased
bras to generate a sense of freedom and control in the private space of
their bedrooms with their partners, younger working women purchased
bras to generate a sense of sexual freedom and control in public spaces.
This was revealed in both the purchasing behaviour of younger women
and the discussions that took place during the interviews and focus
groups.
During the fieldwork, Malika (24 years old) wore a T-shirt and jeans
and talked to me in a Delhi food court. Malika told me that ‘women in
212 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

India are more confident about speaking up about lingerie’, whilst in the
‘earlier days they were too shy or concerned’. She also said that ‘rape is a
big thing in India’, and that ‘every girl is always cautious’ which is why
women do not talk about their bras. However, Malika went on to say that
this mindset is changing amongst younger women and that they are a
‘new generation’ who ‘speak about these things’. I asked her whom she
was referring to as this ‘new generation’ and she stated the ‘college girls’.
College girl is a term that Malika gave to unmarried women who engaged
with women’s rights campaigns while studying at university or shortly
after graduating from university. College girls in her opinion were also
not shy about openly shopping for the latest bras in ‘Chinese stalls’ with
their friends. In my study, younger urban women such as Malika
expressed opinions about themselves and other young urban women
who mostly shopped at unlicensed vendors which they called ‘Chinese
markets’ – vendors who sold fake designer bras at significantly lower
prices than the original retailers. Although this was linked to lower
income levels of younger women in the study, a closer analysis revealed
that young educated urban women were also patronising the Chinese
market. Having acquired greater intellectual freedom through better
education, young urban women through their shopping practices at
unlicensed vendors were breaking down and resisting patriarchal and
populist Hindu national codes of shame. Young urban Indian women
studied were not ashamed of openly talking about their bras and their
bodies. These liberal attitudes towards sexuality were supported by their
responses to the growth of bra consumption in India. The younger and
older urban women I studied all attributed the growth in bra and
lingerie consumption to growing liberal attitudes amongst the younger
generation and namely the college girls.
It became apparent through our discussions that my study was
creating an opportunity for participants to privately and openly discuss
their feelings and resistance towards the policing of female sexuality in
India. In my interview with Surma (24 years old) in Bombay, the
conversation about her bra led to a discussion on codes of shame in bra
and other fashion advertising, recalling the controversial advert from
1995 in India for ‘Tuff Shoes’. The advert created controversy amongst
Hindu women’s groups for the depiction of real life couple Madhu Sapre
 BRAS ARE NOT FOR BURNING 213

and Milind Somand naked, save for their Tuff shoes, with a python
around their neck. Whilst women’s groups protested against the advert
for its obscene and shameful depiction of Indian femininity and
degradation to Indian moral values, she herself liked it for the good-
looking models and its ‘boldness’, the ability to ‘not be ashamed of
expressing yourself and your body freely’ and to ‘dare to dream’. She
went on to explain that the attitude towards female sexuality is ‘slowly
beginning to change in India’; whilst there was controversy in the 1990s
about Indian models advertising underwear, she believes ‘now there is
less shame’. Currently there is ‘greater visibility of Indian women in bra
advertising, because of an increase in liberal sexual attitudes and increase
in the level of body awareness, body fitness and health-education’
amongst Indian youth.
Due to the sexualised nature of discussing the bra in India, it became
clear that references to health-education were a code for sexual-health
education. According to my respondents, improved health-education
(sexual-health) was an important reason for the increase in consumption
of bras. For Surma, in the Jantzen et al. (2006) sense discussed earlier,
her inter-psychological identity related to health and body awareness was
linked to her intra-psychological identity related to feelings of boldness
and confidence. Here meanings of health and comfort attached to the bra
broke down Hindu nationalist opinions that western clothing causes
cultural shame and hyper-sexualises Indian women. During a focus
group Sameera (23 years old) in Delhi commented:

Women want to feel good from inside out. Women are also
becoming more aware of their own bodies and realise that it needs
some pampering. The majority of women do not look into the
mirror to see their boobs or sexual organs, they just have no
connection to those parts of their body. Ask them to name different
parts of their genitals and they will only come out with words that
are commonly used as abuse.
(Sameera, focus group)

Through codes of health it can be seen that Sameera’s construction of

her identity was directed by her intra-psychological identity (Jantzen
et al. 2006), her longing to practice better self-care and self-esteem.
214 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

For Sameera the bra signified better attitudes towards sexual health and
the breaking down of codes of shame and taboos attached to female
sexuality.
It is clear from Sushma, Malika and Sameera’s response and other
responses obtained from the wider field research that the bra in urban India
is mostly associated with sexual choice and freedom and not with male
oppression. In a country where public display of affection and discussing
sex in public are considered taboo, growth in the consumption of bras for
these urban women became a symbolic marker of a young generation of
Indian women negotiating power through greater practices of self-care
and self-stylisation. This was revealed in the form of increased body
awareness: less shame of their bodies meant that they could openly discuss
and purchase bras in public. Despite the desire to discuss and display
sexuality in public, the bra still remained a discreet topic of conversation
because the perceived risk of sexual harassment and shaming from
displaying bra straps in public spaces continued to be a real concern.
According to the respondents this shaming is perpetuated by the public
discourse surrounding female sexual identity in India, specifically the way
in which underwear is advertised in public spaces of India.
Both younger and older respondents openly challenged Hindu national
attitudes towards western garments (bra) through their response to bra
advertising in India. Patriarchal codes of shame were perpetuated by bra
brand advertising message strategies in India. Underwear advertising
frequently represented both Indian and white western models as hyper-
sexualised and objects of male pleasure. Beena (36 years old) commented
that bra adverts in India are mostly ‘vulgar, pornographic and for male
pleasure’. However, there was an understanding between younger women
compared to the older women surveyed that this was not the case for
editorial fashion shoots in international or up-to-date fashion magazines.
Ambika (19 years old) commented that ‘in the past only desperate and B
grade actresses and models would appear in adverts, now younger women
are more confident with their bodies and appearing in bra, swimwear and
lingerie adverts’.
There was a consensus among younger women surveyed that bra
adverts in local fashion magazines (e.g. Femina India) in contrast to
international fashion magazines (e.g. Vogue India) focused more on depicting
 BRAS ARE NOT FOR BURNING 215

female pleasure for the sake of male pleasure. They commented that this is
frequently seen through the use of hyper-sexualised poses for white models
and the absence of Indian women models. Indian models were often absent
from lingerie advertising in Femina India, as they were culturally expected to
retain their chastity by keeping their bodies away from the public gaze.
According to Ambika, local Indian bra advertising, similar to western
studies of lingerie advertising (Amy-Chinn 2006), was perceived to be
‘lagging behind lingerie fashion shoots and editorials as seen in Vogue India
and similar’ because these magazines, unlike local bra advertising, placed
female pleasure and fantasy at the centre of the message strategy. Among
younger respondents there was an oppositional gaze evident, where
younger respondents were able to interrogate and question the male gaze;
and in doing so, by cultivating awareness, opened up the possibility to
resist and assert agency (Hooks 1992).
These western-style magazine adverts for global brand lingerie did not
always avoid recirculating orientalist legacies, mostly promoting western
fashion aesthetics. However, they moved away from Hindu patriarchal
national stereotypes of the hyper-sexualised white woman and the chaste
Indian woman, by placing both Indian and white models in poses that
were deemed to be not hypersexual. These poses were within both
western and eastern fantasy holiday locations, and the models in these
shoots were seen wearing a mix of local and global-western underwear
brands, therefore blurring the hierarchy between global-western and
local brands. Here then we see an increasing shift towards transnational
representations of female identity in underwear advertising, neither a
rejection nor a complete adoption of westernisation. Additionally, we see
ways opening up in which younger respondents are capable of self-
producing agency and pleasure through their own female gaze and ideas
of sexuality and shame, agency that abandons patriarchal and
nationalistic representations of sexuality and shame.

OSCILLATING IDENTITIES

In conclusion, the bra in India for young urban professional working

women is a technology of the self (Foucault 1988), instrumental to
generating a sense of power through inter- and intra-psychological
216 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

comfort (Jantzen et al. 2006). In the Indian context, this sense of comfort is
also an embodied desire to control and resist patriarchal Hindu nationalist
forces of power caught up within the tensions of western colonialism.
In the Foucauldian sense, although young urban Indian women were not
always conscious of these forces of power shaping their sartorial identity, it
was clear that young women through their bra wearing practices were
entangled within networks of power, which they were both controlled by
and in control of. It is within these inescapable meanings of being in
control and being controlled that the bra embodies Indian women’s
ambivalent identity, one that is both oscillating and evolving. On the one
hand, this is seen in the naming of the Pink Chaddis campaign, The word
Chaddi which literally translates to shorts was used rather than panty, which
‘simultaneously desexualised and un-gendered the garment’ (Menon
2012), providing an example of how young urban Indian women remain
entangled within controlling forces of power. Furthermore, the organiser
of the Besharmi Morcha16 requested participants to avoid ‘sexualised clothing’,
mindful of the moral judgement that they would face from conservative
groups. On the other hand, the young women studied were capable of
negotiating a sense of agency. For them, the bra also became a technology
of the self (Foucault 1988), instrumental to generating a sense of freedom
and power whilst moving through private and public spaces. The bra can be
seen as a garment capable of producing pleasure and practicing self-care
without shame. It was clear through meanings of the bra that younger
urban women in Delhi and Bombay are becoming increasingly comfortable
with a bi-cultural identity and expressing liberal sexual attitudes, even if
they do not always have the freedom to do so openly and in public.
The wider study also revealed that these meanings were complicated
by historical and pre-colonial British feminine identities and orientalist
fashion legacies. Female sexuality through moral codes of shame linked
to the covering and un-covering of breasts has been scrutinised
throughout Indian history, marking Indian womanhood as ambivalent.
In the pre-colonial era, women went bare-chested and upper-class
Brahmin women were often seen wearing saris without a blouse as a sign
of purity and status (Bannerji 2001; Fabri 1960). The slow eroticisation
and covering of the breasts in India began when the Moghuls introduced
modest Islamic dress codes, and when the middle-class Anglo-Christian
 BRAS ARE NOT FOR BURNING 217

missionaries introduced virtuous dress codes.17 This is seen in the

fragmented documentation of various changes in sartorial identity related
to the dressing of the breasts, such as covering of the bare chest (Fabri
1960); low-cut cleavage enhancing cholis of the Hindu dancers; long-
sleeved Victorian inspired sari blouses worn by middle-class Bengali
women; T-shirt bras that enhance the shape of the breasts; and the visible
rise in global brand lingerie consumption.
What is evident from the study is the ways in which ideals surrounding
Indian women’s sexuality, its shape and form, signified through fashions is
changing. Yet what is constant is the ambivalence of Indian womanhood,
the ways in which these ideals keep oscillating from open (pre-colonial) to
closed (colonial) and back to open (liberalised consumer).

NOTES

1. It is the widespread mass manufacturing of the bra in the West and later across
the world by western companies and popularisation by Hollywood (Fields
2007) that lends to the perceived inherently western connotations of the bra
across the world and in India. The bra appeared as an alternative to the
uncomfortable corset in the 1900s and first patented by Mary Phelps Jacobs in
New York 1914 under the name Caresse Crosby calling her invention ‘the
backless brassiere’. Mary sold her rights to the Warner Brothers Corset Company
who went on to sell the most popular brassiere in the next 30 years (Fields
2007). India’s oldest lingerie brand Groversons Paris Beauty (since 1953) began
mass manufacturing bras for Indian women who aspired to western fashions
(hence the naming Paris) and were used to getting them imported from the
West or tailored (Groversons India 2013). Nowadays, the bra is associated with
the rise in western clothing and western fashion retailing in India.
2. The city of Bombay was officially renamed Mumbai in November 1995 by the
BJP-Shiv Sena coalition government (a political right and far right Hindu group
coalition) (Mehta 2005; Prakash 2011). I use Bombay instead of Mumbai
to dissociate from far right Hindu claims to the city. Others still use Bombay
instead of Mumbai to honour the imagination and hopes associated with a
cosmopolitan Bombay, a ‘maximum city’ (Mehta 2005), a ‘jigsaw puzzle of
distinct neighbourhoods marked by community, language, religion, dress and
cuisine’ (Prakash 2011: 11).
3. Select City Walk (Delhi); Inorbit Mall (Bombay); DLF Emporium (Delhi); High
Street Phoenix Mall (Bombay); Atria the Millennium Mall (Bombay); La Senza
(Delhi and Bombay) and M&S (Delhi and Bombay).
4. ‘Bra’ and ‘lingerie’ are used interchangeably by my respondents. The terms both
refer to an intimate piece of apparel which signifies the sexualised female body
218 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

and changing ideals of Indian femininity (Fields 2007; Jantzen et al. 2006).
Furthermore, during the field research respondents used both terms
interchangeably. A precise definition of what constitutes lingerie or the bra is
subjective to the wearer – underwear that one woman considers to be lingerie
may be conceived as an everyday bra by another women (Begum 2012).
5. Mangalore is India’s eighth largest port city, an urban and industrial city and
considered a growing metro city with an airport and in close proximity to
Bangalore, India’s third largest metropolitan city.
6. The SlutWalk movement draws inspiration from the ‘second wave’ of the
feminist movement and anti-rape movements of the 1960s and 1970s (mostly
taking place in the USA, eventually spreading throughout the West and the rest
of the world) (Carr 2013).
7. Bras were thrown (not actually burnt) into the trash can alongside other beauty
products.
8. Organised and standardised refers to licensed retailing formats such as branded
malls, hypermarkets and global retail outlets that are large privately-owned
businesses. Unorganised retail sector refers to fragmented un-licensed stores,
market stalls, cart vendors and family owned general stores.
9. The labour market situation is mixed in India. It is predicted to remain the same
or less between 2015 and 2018 for men and the youth population, while the
overall employment rate for women is predicted to increase from 30.7 million
in 2015 to 31 million in 2018 (International Labour Organisation 2014: 60).
10. Urbanised metropolitan cities of Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Chennai and
Kolkata.
11. Eve teasing is the term for unwanted sexual remarks, indecent molestations and
sexual harassment in public spaces in India.
12. Post-liberalisation refers to the historic decision made in 2002 to permit foreign
direct investment in the media (Prasad 2008), a period which allowed greater
room for the promotion of global consumer culture and exposed middle-class
urban Indian youth to global media.
13. In 2009 lingerie growth rate was predicted at 45 per cent yearly and one of the
biggest areas alongside women’s western clothing, going from a market worth
Rs. 870 crores (£119 million) to almost double that at Rs. 1,645 crores (£225
million) by 2010 (Sharma 2009). Since 2009, there has been an explosion of
media interest indicating the growing number of both offline and online
lingerie retailers in India.
14. An overtly modern middle-class girl who has university education (Wilkinson-
Weber 2014: 115) and is often at the forefront of student politics, women’s
rights campaigns and protests.
15. Without shame, shameless or nothing to be ashamed of.
16. Debates on restricting provocative western clothes took place during the Besharmi
Morchas. The outcome was defined as a ‘modest affair’ (Hindu 2011) by many
and bloggers and newspapers commented that this was to avoid backlash from
conservative groups (thealternativein 2011).
 BRAS ARE NOT FOR BURNING 219

17. During the Channar Revolt lower class women in Travancore, South India
protested against being denied breast cloths. They were made to go bare-chested
to retain their marker of respect to upper-class women who had newly converted
to Christianity, and therefore were allowed to wear breast cloths as a symbol of
virtuosity (Cohn 1996).

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INDEX

abayas, 126, 138, 139 – 41, 142 – 3 Bakshi, Kaustav, 18, 77

Abu-Lughod, Lila, 140 Bal, Rohit, 102
accessories, 38 Bandopadhyay, Manabi, 81
advertising, 212 –15 bands, music, 117
affordability, of clothes, 141, Bangladesh, 16 –17
148, 151 Bangladeshi communities, 89
agricultural workers, 149 bangles (churia), 192
Althusser, Louis, 82 banyans, 43
American Hindu families, 187 beanie hats, 90
Amila (FTZ worker), 134 –5 Begum, Lipi, 16, 18 – 19, 69,
Amin, S., 128 86 – 95
Amsterdam, Hindustani women, belts, 146, 147
183 –99 Bengal, 65 –82
anarkali suits, 195 Berry, J., 46
androgynous style, 65 Besharmi Morcha, 207 –8, 216
androgyny, 70 Bhaduri, Chapal, 81
anklets, 30, 43 Bhootsavaar (brand), 105, 106,
Anusha, JNU (Singh), Pl.10, 100 108 – 9, 111, 113, 115 – 18
Appadurai, A., 166 Bhutan
Arekti Premer Golpo/Just Another Love Story national attire, 146 – 7, 149, 155,
(film), 67, 70, 71, 73 – 4 158 –60
Aristotle, De Anima, 190 Bhutan Street Fashion Project, 13, 147,
arranged marriages, Kathmandu, 149, 154
20 – 1, 165 – 80 Bhutanese Youth and Fashion Magazine,
artistic nationalism, 102 – 5 149
Asian influences, 156 – 7 bindis, 192
Azrak show (Valaya), 103 bisexuality, Pl.4, Pl.8, 89 – 90, 93
224 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

blogs, 16, 32, 37, 149 Chennai, 49 –63

See also Manou, wearabout (blogger) Chinese fashion, 156, 179
blouses, 130, 143, 147, 202, 217 Chitrangada: A Crowning Wish (film),
Bodu Bala Sena (Buddhist Power 73, 74, 79
Force), 139, 140, 141 Chokher Bali/A Passion Play (film),
Bollywood culture, 184 – 5, 195 –7 67, 72 –3
Bollywood films, 13 – 14, 106, cholis, 30, 43, 129, 202
187 – 8, 193, 206, 209 –11 ‘Christopher Street’ (Sunil), 97
See also individual films churia (bangles), 192
Bombay, 202 – 17 cinema, Indian, 69, 71,
Bosnian Muslim refugee women, 99, 106
142 Citton, Yves, 112
Botswana, 128 CK Jeans, 44
Bourdieu, P., 167 –8 class system, 7 – 8, 155
Brahmin women, 216 ‘distinction’, 167 – 8
‘Brand India’, 108 – 9, 110 ‘position taking’, 168
brands, global, 16, 25, 33, 129, coats, 159
208, 215 code-switching, 9 –10, 15, 20
bras, urban women and, 202 –17 college, and fashion, 50 –3
Brick Lane, London, 89 college culture, 51 –2, 54
British Asian Fashion Network, 17 ‘college girls’, 212
‘brown’ ways of being, 91, 93 colonialism, 40, 68 – 70
Brubaker, Rogers, 186 colours, in fashion, 71, 93, 133
Buddhism, 125, 146, 160 comfort, importance of, 159
Butler, Judith, 168 communities
Bangladeshi, 89
Cahun, Claude, 98 building, 133 –4
Cambridge, Duchess of, 150 India, 38
camel traders, 39 Pakistani, 90, 92
capes, 150 Punjabi Hindu, 195, 197 – 8
capitalist systems, 119 tribal communities, 40
castes, 7, 60, 61 –2, 62, 185 – 6 community building, 133 – 4
catcallers, 124 – 5, 133, 138 – 9 consumer-citizens, 104, 108, 119,
c
eri, 61 – 2 121, 208 – 11
chaddis, 208, 216 Converse sneakers, 92
chappals, 30 corporate social responsibility
chastity, 55 (CSR), 120
Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and costumes, film, 71
its Fragments, 3 – 4 counterfeit goods, 50, 129, 131,
Chauhan, Nitin Bal, 105, 109, 110, 212
111, 113, 118 creativity, 106, 108, 127
 INDEX 225

cropped pants, 125 Durkheim, E., Elementary Forms of

cross-dressing, 77 Religious Life, 113
Dutta, Sharbari, 65, 70, 76,
Dalit settlements, India, 61 79 – 80
Das, Amoha, 81 Dyer, Richard, 68, 71
Das, Sabarni, 76
Das, Tista, 81 East India Company, 151
Dasgupta, Rohit K., 18, 69, Ebong Rituparno (talk show), 75 – 6
86 – 95 Edensor, T., 43, 45 – 6
Datta, Kallol, 31 elite class, 33 – 4, 58, 59, 102 – 3
Delhi, 30 –1, 202 – 17 Elson, D., 160
Delphi, 96 Enamor, 208
department stores, 208 Entwistle, J., 167
derogatory terms, 77, 138 ethical values, 16, 119, 120
desi street style, 32 – 7 ethnic minorities, 148
designers, 15, 105, 109 –10, 156 ethnic style, 58, 76
Devon Ke Dev . . . Mahadev (Indian TV ‘eve teasing’, 59 –62
drama), 194 Exiles (Gupta), 97
Dharmapala, Anagarika, 130
Dhee (lesbian comic strip), 12 Fabindia, 44, 58
dhotis, 43, 69 Facebook, 147, 154, 175, 207
diaspora, Hindu, 186 – 9 factory workers, Sri Lanka,
digital platforms, 15, 24 124 – 43
directions, future, 23 –5 fantasy, 50, 101
disposable income, 105, 209 fashion
Dissanayake, Wimal, 67 capitals, 32, 36, 37
‘distinction’ (class system), 167 – 8 crazes, 130
‘doing style’, 8, 53 –6 fusion, 43
Dorji, S.S. Pek-, 155 implications, 158 –60
dress codes, 13, 128, 146 – 7, perception of, 154 – 5
165 –80, 197 –8, 216 retail, 34, 208 –11
dress practices, 8 –9, 20, 38, 42, Fashion (film), 210 – 11
141, 142 fashion shows, 38, 112 – 13,
dresses 120 – 1
length, 125, 146 fashion weeks, 12 –13, 30 – 1,
style, 31, 127, 129 – 32, 44, 78
132, 136 Femina India (magazine), 214 –15
work, 130 femininity, 59, 68, 69, 71, 99
Driglam Namzha (Bhutan cultural feminism, 90, 207, 212 – 13
code), 147, 148 Fernandes, Leela, 35, 103
dupattas, 75, 76 festivals, Indian, 116
226 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

films, 49, 67, 70 –4, 79, 80, 99, Gujarati culture, 190
210 – 11 Gujarati Indians, 93
See also Bollywood films Gupta, Sunil (SG), 18, 96 –101
Fischer, Hal, 98 –9
fla^ neur, 45 – 6 hairstyles, 131, 136, 143, 193
flirtation, 56, 59, 60, 134 handbags, 31, 50, 131
footwear, 159 Haney, P., 130
sandals, 58, 131, 134 ‘hanging around’, 9, 22, 54 – 5, 59
shoes, 31, 129, 150, 212 – 13 Hashim, Kabeer, 140
sneakers, 92 hats, beanie, 90
Forever 21, 33 haute couture, 50, 102 –3
Foucault, Michel, 204, 216 Hauz Khas, Delhi, 57 – 8
Free Trade Zone (FTZ) factory Haydon, Lisa, 210
workers, Sri Lanka, 20, Hazra, Anindya, 76, 77
124 – 43 Hewamanne, Sandya, 20
Fumanti, M., 190 hijabs, Pl.4, Pl.8, 89
fusion, fashion, 43 hijras, 97, 99
Hijras, Giriyas and Others (Singh), 96 – 7
gamchas, 43 Hindman, H., 167
Gandhi, Mahatma, 9, 69, 205 –6 Hindu cultures, 69, 187, 190
Gay Semiotics (Fischer), 98 –9 Hindu mythology, 69, 73, 101,
Gen-X market, 105, 111 194 – 5
Gen Z (‘zippies’), 105, 106, Hindu Punjabi festivals, 197 –8
113, 116 Hindustani women, Amsterdam,
gender, and style, 53 – 7, 127 –8 183 – 99
gender roles, 97, 168, 171 –2, Hiphop Tamizha (band), 55
176, 180 Holliday, Ruth, 72
ghaghras, 30, 38 ‘home clothes’, 136 – 7
gagra cholis, 129, 131, 133 homosexuality, 75
Ghare Baire (film), 70 Hondagneu-Sotelo, P., 141 – 2
ghos, 146, 147, 150, 158, 159 Hong Kong fashion, 156
Ghosh & Company (talk show), 67 honour (ijat), 9, 55, 167,
Ghosh, Rituparno, 18, 65 –8, 173 – 4, 176
70– 82, 74, 78, 80 hoodies, 90
Girl in Hijab (Kabir), Pl.4, Pl.8 Huisman, K, 141 – 2
global nationalism, 51 hybrid dressing, 89
globalisation, 41 – 2
Goffman, E., 168 identity, constructing, 86 – 95
goni billa, 138 identity politics, 66, 126, 129
Gopinath, Gayatri, 70 immigrants, 89, 148, 148, 183 – 99
Gowricharn, R., 187 implications, fashion, 158 – 60
 INDEX 227

In/visible Space (Kabir), Pl.1 – 9, 86 –95 Kabir, Raisa S., 19, 86 – 95

India Kabra, Anand, 44
communities in, 38 Kalaiselvi (athlete), 61
cultural heritage, 186 –7 kalisan, 125
financial reforms, 34 Kant, Rajni, 59
independence, 9, 205 Kapur, R., 55, 60
Indian fashion, 156, 179, 191 – 2 ‘Karma’ (Bhutan), 159
Indian-Hindu identity, 194 – 5 Karva Chauth celebrations, 197 – 8
‘Indianised’ style, 184 Kathmandu, 165 – 80
indigenous people, 40 Kaye, John William, 40
inequality, wealth, 45, 153 kedia tops, 31
Instagram, 147, 154 Kerala, 129
International Fashion Showcase, keras, 147
London, 12 khadis, 69
Islamic cultures, 69 Kiki (sex worker), 93
Islamophobia, 90, 126, 140 – 1 ‘Kinley’ (Bhutan), 159
kiras, 146, 147, 149
jackets, 92, 147, 149, 150, 159 Koechin, Kalki, 106 – 7, 107
Jantzen, C., 204 – 5, 213 kolhapuri sandals, 58
Japanese fashion, 156 komos, 146
Jawaharlal Nehru University, Kondo, Dorinne, 41, 128, 132
New Delhi, 57, 100 kothis, 97, 99
jeans Kothis, Hijras, Giriyas and Others (Singh),
affordable, 141 Pl.13 – 16, 98, 99
Asian, 57, 58, 157, 170 Krishnan, Sneha, 128, 129
designer, 44 Kuldova, Tereza, 5, 23
FTZ workers, 125, 134, 137 –8, Kumar, Ritu, 41, 102
142 kurta surawels, 170 – 1, 178
western, 90, 136 kurt(h)as, 57, 75, 90, 195, 198
Jetsun Pema, Queen, 152, 154, 155,
160 labouring class, 32, 37
jewellery, 70, 192 LBTQ youth, South Asian, 11 – 12,
anklets, 30, 43 86 – 95
gold, 73, 131 leggings, 50, 195, 198
Hindu male gods, 69 lengas, 132
tribal, 31 lesbians, 12, 87, 90, 93
jholas, 75 Leshkowich, A.M., 41
jodhpurs, 31 Lewis, Reina, 17
Johnson-Hanks, J., 169 liberalisation, economic, 13, 45,
Jones, C., 41 66, 96, 209
journalists, fashion, 32 – 3 Liechty, M., 167, 174
228 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Lindquist, J., 128 masculinity, 69

lingerie see bras, urban women and; matchmakers, marriage, 174
underwear material practices, 112
literacy, 152 material wealth, 155
Lo, J., 147 Mazarella, W., 7, 25
Louis Vuitton bags, 31 media, influence of, 98, 99
‘Lovemarks’, 112 –13 Memories in March (film) 80
lower class, 32 men, young, 53, 65– 82, 69, 97
lower middle-class, 9, 50, 57, 58, Merleau-Ponty, M., 190
59, 60 metrosexual look, 99
Lukose, R., 129 Meyer, B., 190
Lulla, Neeta, 15 middle class, 34, 35, 120
lungis, 43 South Asian, 51, 66, 129,
Lynes, George Platt, 98 142, 167
status, 7 – 8, 59, 127 – 8, 171
Maffesoli, M., 110 – 11 migrants, 126, 129, 136
magazines, fashion, 32, Miller, S., 174 – 6
36, 154 Misener, J., 154
Bhutanese Youth and Fashion Magazine, Misra, Santu, devil wore
149 (blogger), 32
Femina India, 214 –15 Miss India pageants (1998), 207
Vogue India, 15, 214 – 15 mobile phones, 7, 13, 14, 15
Yeewong, 152, 153 models, 213, 215
Mahabharata, 69 modernity, 25, 69, 170, 177 – 9
makeup, 71, 99, 129, 131, 134 monks, 155
Malaysia, 128 moral codes, 92, 119, 169, 202,
Malhotra, Manish, 15 206, 216
‘Malika’ (Delhi), 211 –12 mosques, 90 – 1
Mangalore attacks (2009), 207 Motsemme, N., 128
Mankekar, P., 51, 187 Mr Malhotra’s Party (Gupta), Pl.9 –12,
Manna, Sayak, 80 96, 98 –9, 100
Manou, wearabout (blogger), 32, Mukherjee, Sabyasachi, 41, 102
38– 40, 39, 42, 44, 46 multimedia, 68, 147, 188,
marketing, fashion, 24 –5, 116 193 – 4, 207
Marks and Spencer (M&S), 208 Mumbai, 34, 37
marriages, arranged, Nepal, music culture, 14, 50, 111, 117
165 – 80 Muslim consumers, 24 –5
Maryam (gay woman), 90 – 3 Muslim Council of Sri Lanka, 140
Maryam (Kabir), Pl.3 Muslim men, 138 – 9
masculine-of-centre-identifying Muslim women, 90 –1, 128,
lesbian, 93 138 – 9, 142
 INDEX 229

Nakassis, C.V., 52, 53 – 4, 57 Pakistani communities, 90, 92

national attire, Bhutan, 146 –7, pants, 125, 193
149, 155, 158 –60 parental influence, 92
national identity, 3, 68, 147, 148, Paul & Joe (designers), 150
207 payals, 30
nationalism, 3, 51, 102 – 5, 113, Peiss, Kathy, 129
143, 204 – 7 Pek-Dorji, S.S., 155
Naval, Deepti, 80 ‘Pema’ (Bhutan), 157 – 8
neoliberalism, 5 ‘Penam’ (Bhutan), 155
Nepalese fashion, 13, 156, The People of India (Watson and Kaye),
165 –80 40
Nepali women, 171 –2 Pe ro (brand), 31
Netherlands, 184, 186 Phadke, S., 54
Netting, N.S., 175 phones, mobile, 7, 13, 14, 15
New Delhi, 34, 37 photographic
‘New Documents Show’ essays, Pl.1 – 9, 86– 95
(MoMA), 97 shoots, 87, 90
Nigah (organisation), 100 photography, 18, 40, 97, 98
Nikita, Pl.5, 93 Pink Chaddis campaign, 202, 207
Nisbett, N., 7 Pinney, C., 40
non-Bhutanese clothing, Bhutan, Pocock, David, 189
148 –50 ‘position taking’ (class system), 168
non-binary persons, 92 postcolonialism, 205
non-traditional clothing, 159 pottu, 129, 143
Nor Black Nor White (NBNW), 15 Pragati Maidan, New Delhi, 30
‘Norbu’ (Bhutan), 156 pre-colonial dressing, 69 –70, 216
nose rings, 43 Prohibition of Eve Teasing Act (1998), 60
nostalgia, Indian, 41 –3 Punjabi Hindu community, 195,
197 – 8
off-the-street display, 34, 36 pyjamas, 57, 75
O’Neill, A., 33
Ong, A., 128 ‘q-wearing’, 92 – 3
Oor sutharathu, 53 queer looks, of India, 96 – 101
Oppenheim, R., 167 queer spaces, 86 –94
Osella, C., 8, 54, 56, 60
Osella, F., 8, 54, 56, 60 Radha Krishna temple, Amsterdam,
Oxford shoes, 31 189, 191, 193
Raj, Rishi, 115
Padukone, Deepika, 195 – 6 Rajasthani, India, 37
Pakeezah (film), 99 Raju (Kabir), Pl.6 –7, 93 – 4
Pakistan, 17 Ramani, Bina, 57 –8
230 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Ramayana, 69 Secret Closet (online brand), 15

Rankin, K.N., 174 self-identified women, 86
re-orientalism, Indian, 41 –3 self-orientalisation, 41 – 3
rebellion, symbols of, 105 –6, 121, Serazio, Michael, 120
134 – 5 sex workers, 93, 130 – 1
‘Reetu’ (Amsterdam), 193 – 5 sexual harassment, 59, 60
Rekha (actress), 79 sexual-health education, 213 – 14
religion, 6 – 7, 90, 126, 159, sexualisation, of female body, 54,
189 – 91, 195 60, 202, 213
‘Reshmi’ (Amsterdam), 195 –7 sexuality, female, 15, 212 – 15, 216
retail, fashion, 34, 208 – 11 Shah, Darshan, 80
Rich Mix (community art centre), Shah Jahan Mosque, Surrey, 90
London, 87 – 8 Shahni, Parmesh, 72
ritual practices, 128 shalwar kameez, 92
rituals, staged, 112 –13 shalwars, 129, 131, 133
Roberts, Kevin, 112 shame-fear, 9, 125, 207, 214
robes, 147 Shantiniketani men’s style, 75
Rocamora, A., 33 Sharangpani, M., 175
Rogers, M., 59 sharing clothes, 159 – 60
royal chic, 102 – 3 Shepherd-Manandhar, Sarah, 20 – 1
royal fashion, 151, 155 shirts, 134
royal weddings, 149 – 50, 153, 160 Shivan and Naresh (designers), 15
rural villagers, 37, 54 shoes, 31, 129, 150, 212 – 13
rural women, 125, 132 –3, 136 – 7 shopping malls, 108, 203, 208
‘Ruy’ (Bhutan), 156 Shoreditch, London, 90
shringar, 73
salwar kameez, 125, 195, 198 sight adikkarathu, 57, 61
same-sex relationships, 97 Singh, Charan (CS), 96 – 101
‘Sameera’ (Delhi), 213 – 14 Singh, Ritika, 18, 117
sandals, 58, 131, 134 Sinhalese Buddhists, 126, 130, 141
Sandhu, Arti, 22 Sinhalese women, 138 –9
Sapre, Madhu, 212 – 13 Sita (Kabir), Pl.1, 88, 93
saris, 31, 38, 169 – 70, 178 skin colour, 132
sartorial codes, 65 – 82 skirts, 130, 143, 170
‘Saskia’ (Amsterdam), 191 – 3 skirts, male, 31
satchels, 31 skorts, 31
scarves, 31, 147 ‘slightly damaged’ garments, 135
scene podarathu, 58 –9 SlutWalk movements, 207 – 8
Schuman, Scott, Sartorialist social media, 14 – 16, 55, 147, 189,
(blogger), 32 197, 207
seamstresses, 130, 131 Sökefeld, M., 188
 INDEX 231

Somand, Milind, 213 ‘Tashi’ (Bhutan), 157

‘Sonam’ (Bhutan), 155, 156, 159 temples, Hindu, 189, 191,
South Asia, region of, 2 –4 193, 195
South Asians, UK, 89 –93 textile industry, 16, 146, 153, 160
Spivak, G., 3 ‘Thinley’ (Bhutan), 158, 159
Sri Chaitanya, 70 third class, 126 –9
Sri Lanka, 124 – 43 ‘Titanic dresses’, 130
Sri Rama Sena (SRS), 207 toegos, 147
Sri Ramakrishna, 70 topi, 90
steampunk, 103 Topman, 44
stockings, 31 tourism, 151, 153, 157
Stonewall Inn, New York, 97 tradition, 165 –80
straight-up shots, 33 transgender non-binary persons, 86
Strain, E., 40 transport, 171
street photography, 97 transsexual/transwomen, 97
street styles, 32 – 7, 147, 154 transvestism, 71
Strickland, Paul, 21, 150 tribal communities, 40
studio photography, 98 tribal dress, 37, 38
styles, 37 –41, 50, 53 –7, 62 – 3 trips, factory worker, 133 – 4
subcultures, 10, 103 –4, 109, trousers, 124 –6, 125, 139 –41
119, 127 ‘Tshering’ (Bhutan), 157
subversion, 96 –101, 119 –20 ‘Tshewang’ (Bhutan), 159
suits, 195, 198 Tsui, C., 157
Suriname, 183, 186 –7 Tuff shoes, 212 –13
‘Surma’ (Bombay), 212, 213 tunics, 50, 58
sustainability, 16 – 17, 24, 107, 120 turbans, 37
Swadesi movement, 9, 205 Turkish fashion, 158 – 9
Swaminarayan movement, Britain, Turquoise Cottage (Vasant Vihar bar),
189 –90 116
Swamy, Priya, 19 TV, influence of, 98, 99, 188

T-shirts ‘Ugen’ (Bhutan), 159

bras, 209 Umrao Jaan (film), 99
choice of, 170, 179, 193 underwear, 15, 150, 159, 202 –17
as fandom, 195, 196 – 7 Ungendering Prayer (Kabir), Pl.2, 88, 91
unisex, 100 uniforms, 57, 170
Tagore, Rabindranath, Chokher Bali/, unique styles, 128, 129
65, 70, 73, 75, 206 unisex styles, 96, 100
Tahiliani, Tarun, 102 United Arab Emirates fashion,
Tamil workers, 143 158 – 9
Tarlo, Emma, 4, 57 –8, 82 Untitled, 2 (Singh), 100
232 STYLING SOUTH ASIAN YOUTH CULTURES

Untitled, 6 (Singh), 98 weddings, 149 –50, 153, 160, 192

upper-middle class Werbner, P., 190
photography, 98 western clothing, anxieties
style, 33, 34 surrounding, 205 – 8
youth, 57, 58 – 9, 105, 120 western culture, 36, 42, 114, 116,
urban classes, 34, 35, 41, 105, 136, 148
202 – 17 influence of, 150, 151 –2,
See also Free Trade Zone (FTZ) 157 – 8, 159, 203
factory workers, Sri Lanka Willis, P., 127
uttariyas, 69, 70, 75, 76 Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week
(WLIFW), 30 – 1, 38, 103
Valaya, JJ, 41, 102 women, young, 9
Vanita, Ruth, Masculinity and its wonjus, 147
Challenges in India, 69 working-class fashion, 124 – 43
Varghese, M., 5 workwear, 30, 37, 124 – 43,
Vathikutchi (film), 49 130, 149
veils, 128
Verrips, J., 190 ‘Y’ (bisexual woman), Pl.4, Pl.8,
visual media, 34 –5 89 –90
Vogue India (magazine), 15, 214 –15 ‘Yebar’ (Bhutan), 159
Yeewong (magazine), 152, 153
Wangchuck Dynasty, 151, 152 youth population, Bhutan, 152 – 4
Wangchuck, Jigme Khesar youth, views of, 154 – 60
Namgyel, 151, 152, 155 YouTube, 55, 189
Wangchuk, Karma, 149
Warikoo, N., 187 Zara (brand), 31, 33
watches, 131 zippies (Gen Z), 105, 106, 113,
Watson, John Forbes, 40 116
Plate 1 Sita, Raisa Kabir, 2014. 35mm film, type C prints, paper montage, 64 cm £ 45 cm, from the series (In)visible Space. Courtesy of Raisa Kabir.
Plate 2 Ungendering Prayer, Raisa Kabir, 2014. 35mm film, type C prints, paper montage, 64 cm £ 45 cm, from the series (In)visible Space. Courtesy of Raisa
Kabir.
Plate 3 Maryam, Raisa Kabir, 2014. 35mm film, type C prints, paper montage, 64 cm £ 45 cm, from the series (In)visible Space. Courtesy of Raisa Kabir.
Plate 4 Girl in Hijab, Raisa Kabir, 2014. 35mm film, type C prints, paper montage, 64 cm £ 45 cm, from the series (In)visible Space. Courtesy of Raisa Kabir.
Plate 5 Nikita, Raisa Kabir, 2014. 35mm film, type C prints, paper montage, 64 cm £ 45 cm, from the series (In)visible Space. Courtesy of Raisa Kabir.
Plate 6 Raju, Raisa Kabir, 2014. 35mm film, type C prints, paper montage, 64 cm £ 45 cm, from the series (In)visible Space. Courtesy of Raisa Kabir.
Plate 7 Raju detail, Raisa Kabir, 2014. 35mm film, type C prints, paper montage, 64 cm £
45 cm, from the series (In)visible Space. Courtesy of Raisa Kabir.
Plate 8 Yasmin/Girl with Hijab detail, Raisa Kabir, 2014. 35mm film, type C prints, paper
montage, 64 cm £ 45 cm, from the series (In)visible Space. Courtesy of Raisa Kabir.
Plate 9 Arti, Greater Kailash, M-Block Market, from the series Mr Malhotra’s Party, Sunil
Gupta, 2007–2012. Courtesy of the artist and SepiaEye.
Plate 10 Anusha, Jawaharlal Nehru University, from the series Mr Malhotra’s Party, Sunil
Gupta, 2007–2012. Courtesy of the artist and SepiaEye.
Plate 11 Mario, Golf View Apartments, from the series Mr Malhotra’s Party, Sunil Gupta,
2007–2012. Courtesy of the artist and SepiaEye.
Plate 12 Sonal, Yusuf Sarai, from the series Mr Malhotra’s Party, Sunil Gupta, 2007–2012.
Courtesy of the artist and SepiaEye.
Plate 13 Untitled #5, from the series Kothis, Hijras, Giriyas and Others, Charan Singh,
2013–2014. Courtesy of the artist and SepiaEye.
Plate 14 Untitled #6, from the series Kothis, Hijras, Giriyas and Others, Charan Singh,
2013– 2014. Courtesy of the artist and SepiaEye.
Plate 15 Untitled #1, from the series Kothis, Hijras, Giriyas and Others, Charan Singh,
2013–2014. Courtesy of the artist and SepiaEye.
Plate 16 Untitled #2, from the series Kothis, Hijras, Giriyas and Others, Charan Singh,
2013– 2014. Courtesy of the artist and SepiaEye.