LIFESTYLE
Colours of modernity
AARTI KAWLRAAARTI KAWLRA
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`Its canvas is contemporary India — painted in the warm colours of self-conscious womanhood against the textured backdrop of popular culture and democracy in the Indian nation.'
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THE Sari (with no sub title) is an ambitious book. It is an account of the sari in its most private sense as a "lived garment" on the one hand and, on the other, a reflection of the experience of "modern life" in India. Its canvas is contemporary India — painted in the warm colours of self-conscious womanhood against the textured backdrop of popular culture and democracy in the Indian nation. Within a single stroke one is urged to intimately view the sari in a Bengali village, in the software capital of Bangalore and in the public wardrobes of professional politicians and Bollywood and TV stars. Delhi Haat and the capital's urban domestics further complement the brushwork with the hues of middle class aspirations and lifestyles.
It is the evocative experience of "wearing" the sari that is uppermost, for, the authors, Banerjee and Miller, are clear that The Sari does not intend to be an objective documentation of the various draping styles prevalent in India. Nor is it concerned with the techniques, designs and colours of handloom saris found in the different regions of the country. The authors state their departure from the aims of the textile specialist and, instead, focus on the popular mass-produced synthetic saris worn in the urban nivi style of draping, in an approach that highlights the private experience of modernity in contemporary India.
This private "lived" reality of the sari (in its "tactile, sensual, emotional, intimate" sense) is both handwritten, in diary format, and as a biography, complete with rites de passage marking the life-cycle of its wearer, in chapters entitled "The Intimate Sari", "The Youthful Sari", "The Married Sari", "The Working Sari" and "Growing Old Together". The voice is that of Mina, a young muse, upon whose body the authors view the sari in its experiential quality:
The first time I wore a sari was for a school `farewell'... . The next time was at my own wedding... . I now sleep in a sari... . I haven't really changed the way I wear a sari with my changing shape... . I always change my sari when I get home... . For me the main thing about work saris is whether I am comfortable in the bus... .
Mina's body is the "Roadmap" upon which is driven (draped), what the authors believe to be, the cloth of simultaneous allure and modesty, individual expression and cultural constriction:
It exaggerates her vivacity as she turns around... her flirtatiousness as it slowly threatens to slide off her shoulder, her authority and dexterity as she controls its folds. Meanwhile, though we may not realise it, the sari is also scratching her with its home made rice starch, and scaring her with its constant threats to lose its shape. She remains anxious about whether it really matches the blouse...
The Sari's sartorial analysis is in the tradition of western costume history that linked the tight-fitting corsets of the European past, and their eventual renunciation, to the cultural constriction and liberation respectively, of western women. Banerjee and Miller stress the "creative and dynamic use of ambiguity" in the cultural etiquette associated with the sari and point out that "wearing a sari well depends upon creating something more like a partnership between person and cloth", quite unlike what they believe to be the rigid formality of the Japanese kimono. And so for them, Mina's sari could be the sari of any woman in India today who cannot strictly be seen as belonging to a specific class, region or attitude. And it is this individual woman, inhabiting contemporary hybrid times, whose sari that is being referred to in this book.
The national experience of the sari at the micro level of "feeling", say the authors, is only a tool for the understanding of the larger more analytical question of globalisation and modernity in India. The varied resilience of the sari is attributed to it being an "unstitched" and draped body cloth and to the pan-Indian adoption of the nivi wearing style — "Inhabiting a sari properly means transforming the sari into that which is appropriate for the individual, whereas inhabiting the kimono completely subsumes the individual within that which is represented by the clothing." Indeed, the vivid descriptions and colour photographs of the personal experience of wearing the sari makes The Sari a very insightful travel theme book on destination India.
Finally, the authors' planned denial of the sari as a cultural product of material techniques, design and continuing craft, context of production conforms to the largely prevalent view of the sari (and the kimono) as a cloth with a specific fashion silhouette — `fitted', `structured' or `draped' in the garment tradition of the West. Here the cloth is mere yardage until it comes "alive" upon the body of its wearer. Such an approach disregards the distinctive textile quality of the sari whose visual elements mark it as a structured textile, woven as a garment ready for wearing. Surely the non-western sari deserves to be seen first as a garment belonging to a culture with a strong craft-based textile tradition. Moreover, it is only within the wider context of the aesthetic of modernity, that not only includes art, design and technology but also, the body in art, design and technology, can one really even begin to attempt to address the issue of sari fashion in India.
The Sari, Mukulika Banerjee and Daniel Miller, Roli Books, p. 279, Rs. 1250.
Aarti Kawlra is with the National Institute of Fashion Technology, Chennai.
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