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The Contradiction of National Clothing
I think about my ancestors a lot. I think about them when I am cooking, when I am showering, when I am alone in my bed, and when I get dressed. Parts of them are weaved into my regular style but even more materially when I wear my Punjabi clothes with different motifs of the land mimicking plows and crops. Through the messages in these clothes, my ancestors’ struggles and pasts inform my decisions and views- I feel their sentiments. For many, different parts of dress transport them to distinctive epochs and their related political events, signifying their deep connection to history. This connection lights a fire in me, and this fire is a strong tool for liberation.
Aware of this power that clothing has, activists and political figures alike use clothing to achieve their political ends. Today, we see this in the keffiyeh which is used as a form of protest and embodiment by the masses. During the process of nation building in India, politicians used this power of clothing under the name of “national dress.” In material fashion, national dress is an ensemble of garments or jewelry that is often identifiable with a common history and culture. In theoretical fashion studies, national dress is a vehicle in identity making that elicits a shared consciousness. Other thinkers such as Frantz Fanon assert that clothing gives rise to identifying cultural groups because it is the first thing people see. Because of this it is often employed by governments in order to unite people or signify a message. For example, an embroidery research institute was employed in China in the 50s in order to revive old techniques and encourage new generations of needle workers in an effort to amplify Chinese culture. Additionally, during Bengali partition, the government commissioned a school in order to reinstill particular Muslim-Bengali weavings, known as jamdanis.
However, as historians, Henry Chiwaura and Salachi Naidoo note, this cultural heritage is often appropriated by the state- namely the elite- as it benefits them, and omits certain heritages that they deem as unpleasant or non-advantageous. In the case of India, this appropriation of cultural heritage was seen during the Independence movement when trying to build a national community. This took shape in the dhoti and Nivi style sari using khadi material. Indeed, these plain white garments were chosen as national costumes. I argue that this method of unity is actually corrosive to resistance movements.
While the idea of national costume, especially when used as a form of resistance, sounds convincing, ascribing a national fashion qualifies the diverse colours and textures of different regions into a homogenized form and subjects the concept of national fashion to a permanent state of colonization steeped with embedded hierarchies. This way of using fashion, as national clothing, is not a comprehensive or efficient way of uniting people or fighting colonialism because it ideologically mimics the colonial nation-state by ignoring local particularities and the masses. In this way, national dress was and still is corrosive to indigenous liberation and not indicative of true liberation.
Background of Nationalist Fashion
Ideologically, the Nivi sari and the dhoti were institutions of national dress that were co-opted by the elite during independence, intending to be used as a tool to mobilize against British rule and unite the people of India. While this is not to say the Indian elite had evil intentions, their actions were very much a consequence of a coercive global order and the pervasiveness of British culture during colonization. Among this global politics was the League of Nations which created a new order in 1920, ordaining that to hold sovereignty, territories had to identify as a nation-state and form a suitable government (which was inevitably Western-modeled). Coined as the “intelligentsia,” the urban elite leaders of independence movements or nation-building were educated by their colonizers and ultimately “copied, adapted, and improved upon [Western government] models,” propagating their own state. Thus, the Indian elite chose to employ a fierce sense of nationalism to gain unity, which can be seen in the movies, music, and fashion that characterize India’s independence movement from 1857 to 1947.