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DOWN MEMORY LANE

Of peacock plumes and floral kurtas

Peacocks flaunting their feathers from the balconies of Delhi sounds like a fanciful dream these days, though there was a time when it was a reality. Their feathers, however, still impart some colour to the footpaths of Chandni Chowk and Janpath. These are mostly in the form of fans and fly-whisks. Inquiries reveal there is no large-scale slaughter of the national bird to cater to the trade in feathers. The days when peacock pie was a common delicacy are numbered. The ban on shooting peacocks is rigidly enforced, and despite the allowance for clandestine trade, most of the feathers one comes across in Delhi are from birds that died of natural causes; or they are the ones the peacocks discard seasonally. There are hundreds of people in Rajasthan who collect peacock feathers and make a living through their sale.

However, the changed times have made a big difference: peacock feathers are not so highly prized as they used to be. Especially in India, there are few indeed who care for the bird now given the fact that there are so many other items of decoration available. For that matter, the men who sell the fans and the whisks in front of the Red Fort confess there has been a big fall in their earnings and sometimes they display the same fans for weeks. Having become wiser, they sell other trinkets and these make up for the loss in trade.

There are some who think it is because of women’s liberation that peacock feathers fail to attract the fair sex. It is the male bird after all who contributes them. Which truly liberated female would like to display such evidence of male superiority? Be that as it may, male vanity got a boost some decades ago with Pierre Cardin’s prediction that floral shirts would be in fashion during summers as per the adage that fashion repeats itself. Time was when kurtas embroidered with floral patterns and sherwanis were the craze of the elite in Delhi, Lucknow and Agra. However, with the advent of Western culture, kurtas went out of fashion for a while, though they were still worn at home, away from the public eye. Since the attraction of kurtas got curtailed, the result was the emergence of the plain, drab, white shirt worn with trousers.

True to the French designer’s prediction, floral kurtas were soon in great demand, for besides being basically indigenous, they were certainly more eye catching. It looked as though with the re-emergence of the kurta those days had returned when summer evenings in Oudh resulted with kurtas crinkled by deft fingers in the zenana and even the moon seemed to blush at the delicacy of the wearer. Whether the tailors of the Metiabruz area of Garden Reach — who have been carrying on their profession from Moghul times, through the Nawabi days and the British period to modern time — agree is a moot point, that Moghul tailoring, which began in the days of Babar and Humayun, influenced Agra and later Lucknow, from where it spread to the Nawabi of Bengal. Many of the tailors are continuing their hereditary profession, with some vaguely remembering that their ancestors were attached to the court in the decadent period of the Moghul Empire. That was when the sherwani craze had already begun to spread in preference to traditional angarkha of the old courtier. Tailors began to learn new fashions and by the time of Bahadur Shah Zafar’s downfall the poets of Delhi had begun to parade the streets of Chandni Chowk in their well-cut-sherwanis.

Talking of kurtas, one remembers the Lucknavi one worn by Begum Akhtar, whose golden voice can still be heard every evening at a music shop in Meena Bazar, alive with emotional intensity. Old Delhi was like a second home to this great exponent of Hindustani music, and her admirers are to be found in every lane and gully of the city. And the residents of these areas still wear embroidered kurtas.

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