Indian blouse: a journey from colonizer's closet to Indian household
Like the British took away Kohinoor and now wear it as if it never belonged to Indians, India has made the ‘Victorian era’ blouse so culturally ingrained as if it is indigenous to this very country. With the ‘Indian blouse’ came a new set of codes and conducts for Indian women that were never their own in the first place.
Tracing back to the earliest signs of minimalistic clothing, sculptures from the Maurya and Sunga periods (about 300 BC) show men and women wearing rectangular pieces of fabric, on the lower part of the body and one on the upper part. Similarly dressing in the Gupta period (about the 7th or 8th Century) comprised of stitched upper garments along with a breast band or ‘stanapatta’, mention of which can also be found in ancient Sanskrit texts, as well as a lower garment.
Clothes had little to do with modesty and more to do with the hot climate of the country. Apart from the convenience of clothing, regional and cultural factors played a certain part too. In southern and eastern India, even in colonial times, the practice of wearing a saree with nothing underneath was quite common. This practice still continues to be in practice with indigenous tribes like Halakki in Karnataka and Kunduli in Orrisa.
Apart from the regional variations, community-based dress codes also played a role. In pre-modern Kerala, Hindus forbade their woman from covering their chest as its association was seen with the Muslim and Christian community, for whom wearing blouses were mandatory. All this changed with the stepping in of the Britishers on the Indian subcontinent.
The evolution of the blouse in England was a signifier of social change. The woman could ditch the tightly fitted corsets and bodices for more comfortable clothing. Hence, in a way, the blouse became a symbol of convenience and liberation for women. However, in India, it came to impose new standards of morality. While biblical moral codes consider nudity a sin, statues, and sculptures from ancient India show Indian culture’s perspective to be quite the opposite.
Even though women still continued to remain bare chest even in colonial times, the British did manage to seep their code of morality into Indian culture, which is still present in full force. It is believed that Jnanadanandini Debi, the wife of Satyendranath Tagore - brother of the famous Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore is the one who popularized the blouses, jackets, and chemises and the modern style of the sari as we know it today. This happened after she was refused to enter a club under the British Raj as she wore a saree bare chest.
Today blouse resembles Indian culture and is indistinguishable from other pieces of traditional clothing. But we do need to learn a lesson from the whole blouse situation. That the standards keep changing and that this set of codes society keeps applying to its woman is hypocritical, to say the least. High time to address the real issue than blaming a woman’s midriff for the wrongs this society commits against her.
