Getting back to parliamentary humor, V. Ramachandran of Kancheepuram offered me a line whose author he could not recall. During a debate on the Indian automobile industry, an opposition member declared, “The only part of an Indian car which does not make a noise is the horn.” Full marks for wit but not, I believe (given the deafening klaxons that were always an integral part of Indian traffic jams) for accuracy.
As for the Indian equivalents of the great political wisecracks of other democracies, Mr. Leelakrishnan again offered me the only example worth citing. When Panampilly Govinda Menon was chief minister of Travancore-Kochi (the forerunner of Kerala state) in the early 1950s, he pointed to the chief minister's chair in the assembly and told the ambitious leader of the opposition, T. V. Thomas, “For you to sit in this chair you will have to be reborn as a bug.”
And for Indians to laugh about the sense of humor of their political leaders, they will need to be reborn as hyenas.
18. The Sari Saga
EARLY IN 2007 I FOUND MYSELF unwittingly caught up in a row over sexism (mine) and feminism (others’). It all began with a casual observation in one of my columns, prompted by my last few visits to my homeland: Whatever became of the sari?
For centuries, if not millennia, the alluring garment, all five or six or nine yards of it, has been the defining drape of Indian womanhood. Cotton or silk, Banarasi or Pochampalli, shimmering Kanjeevaram or multicolored bandhani, with the pallav draped front to back over the left shoulder or in the Gujarati style, back to front over the right, the sari has stood the test of time, climate, and body shape. Of all the garments yet invented by man (or, not to be too sexist about it, mankind) the sari did most to flatter the wearer. Unlike every other female dress on the planet, the sari could be worn with elegance by women of any age, size, or shape; you could never be too fat, too short, or too ungainly to look good in a sari. Indeed, if you were stout, or bowlegged, or thick-waisted, nothing concealed those handicaps of nature better than the sari. Women looked good in a sari who could never have got away with appearing in public in a skirt.
So why has this masterpiece of feminine attire begun fading from our streets? On recent visits home to India I have noticed fewer and fewer saris in our public places, and practically none in the workplace. The salwar kameez, the trouser, and even the Western dress suit have begun to supplant it everywhere. And this is not just a northern phenomenon, the result of the increasing dominance of our culture by Punjabi-ized folk who think nothing of giving masculine names to their daughters. At a recent press conference I addressed in Trivandrum, the state capital of Kerala, there were perhaps a dozen women journalists present. Only one was wearing a sari; the rest, all Keralites without exception, were in salwar kameezes. And when I was crass enough to ask why none of the “young ladies” present wore saris, the one who did modestly suggested that she was no longer very young.
Youth clearly has something to do with it; very few of today's under-thirty women seem to have the patience for draping a sari, and few of them seem to think it suitable for the speed with which they scurry through their lives. (“Try rushing to catch a bus in a sari,” one young lady pointedly remarked, “and you'll switch to jeans the next day.”) But there's also something less utilitarian about their rejection of the sari for daily wear. Today's younger generation of Indian women seem to associate the garment with an earlier era, a more traditional time when women did not compete on equal terms in a man's world. Putting on pants, or a Western woman's suit, or even desi leggings in the form of a salwar, strikes them as more modern. Freeing their legs to move more briskly than the sari permits is, it seems, a form of liberation; it removes a self-imposed handicap, releasing the wearer from all the cultural assumptions associated with the traditional attire.
I think this is actually a great pity. One of the remarkable aspects of Indian modernity has always been its unwillingness to disown the past; from our nationalists and reformers onward, we have always asserted that Indians can be modern in ancient garb. Political ideas derived from nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers have been articulated by men in mundus and dhotis that have not essentially changed since they were first worn two or three thousand years ago. (Statuary from the days of the Indus Valley Civilization more than four thousand years ago show men draped in waistcloths that Mr. Karunanidhi would still be happy to don.) Gandhiji demonstrated that one did not have to put on a Western suit to challenge the British Empire. Where a Kemal Ataturk in Turkey banned his menfolk's traditional fez as a symbol of backwardness and insisted that his compatriots don Western hats, India's nationalist leaders not only retained their customary headgear, they added the defiantly desi “Gandhi cap” (oddly named, since Gandhiji himself never wore one). Our clothing has always been part of our sense of authenticity.
I remember being struck, on my first visit to Japan some fifteen years ago, by the ubiquitousness of Western clothing in that Asian country. Every Japanese man and woman in the street, on the subway, or in the offices I visited wore suits and skirts and dresses; the kimono and its male equivalent were preserved at home, and brought out only for ceremonial occasions. An Asian ambassador told me that envoys were expected to present their credentials to the emperor in a top hat and tails. This thoroughgoing Westernization was the result of a conscious choice by the modernizing Meiji Emperor in 1868. One sees something similar in China today; though the transformation is not nearly as complete as in Japan, the streets of Beijing and Shanghai are more and more thronged with Chinese people in Western clothes. In both Japan and China, I allowed myself to feel a perverse pride that we in India were different: we had entered the twenty-first century in clothes that our ancestors had sported for much of the preceding twenty.
Today, I wonder if I've been too complacent. What will happen once the generation of women who grew up routinely wearing a sari every day dies out? The warning signs are all around us now. It would be sad indeed if, like the Japanese kimono, the sari becomes a rare and exotic garment in its own land, worn only to temples and weddings.
Saying which, I went on to appeal to the women of India to save the sari from a sorry fate.
Feedback is, of course, the lifeblood of the writer, but sometimes you get so much feedback it amounts to a transfusion. Practically every woman in India with access to a keyboard rose up to deliver the equivalent of a smack across the face with the wet end of a pallu. E-mails flooded in to all my known addresses, including to my publishers and agents; the blogosphere erupted with catcalls, many of which were duly forwarded to me by well-meaning friends. Having digested as many of them as I could take, the only fashion statement I was left in a condition to make would have been to don sackcloth and ashes.
So where did I go wrong? It seems my innocent expression of concern at the dwindling appearance of the sari on Indian streets and offices was offensively patriarchal. It reflected the male gaze, demanding of the female half of the population that they dress in order to be alluring to the masculine eye. Worse, by speaking of the declining preference for the sari among today's young women in terms of a loss for the nation, it placed upon women alone the burden of transmitting our society's culture to the next generation. And this was unacceptably sexist: after all, I had only called for the sari's survival, never demanding that Indian men preserve the dhoti or mundu. These arguments were made, with varying degrees of emphasis, by a variety of critics, most notably in a lengthy e-mail from Vinutha Mallya and in an “Open Letter” addressed to me by a blogger who signed herself Emma.