I
More than my mother’s hands, I’ve held the edge of her dupatta.[1]
On some rare occasions, my mother would let me accompany her to crowded bazaars. In order to bargain well, she needed to walk fast. I, a child with my little legs, would struggle to keep pace. To make sure I wouldn’t get lost, she would knot the edge of the dupatta with my index finger. However, one day, inevitably, the knot came undone and I found myself abandoned in the middle of a boisterous street. Thankfully, her camaraderie with the shopkeepers in the area meant that even with my howling, someone recognized me. Information about my whereabouts was then passed on from one shop to another, and I was reunited with my mother. Apparently, in what followed, I threw a fit and screamed at my mother’s dupatta while the entire market watched with amusement.
My mother has often narrated this story to me with fondness. This time, as she narrated this story, she confessed to me how tedious it was to wear the dupatta. At the same time though, she shares a precarious attachment with them. She can never dispose them off. Over the years, she has turned them into curtains, into cushion covers and passed on her favorite ones to me. With the ubiquitous shadow of the dupatta always around me, I have often wondered about the lives of different dupattas. As a child, I was told it was alright if I did not wear the dupatta with my salwar kameez.[2] However, as I began to enter puberty, it was my family’s preference that I wear the dupatta. Instead of directly establishing how it was a veil, I was told, “But it’s so gorgeous! You will look so graceful!” And the truth is, it was indeed gorgeous. Some dupattas with weaves of ikkat[3] or phulkari[4] embroidery took months to make. However, did its beauty mean that I could divorce it from the regressive meanings it was embroiled within? Was there a way to re-imagine the dupatta? To find these answers, I turned to the women around me.
II
In the living room, Meena Kumari[5] dances inside the television settee. Soaked in her magenta anarkali[6], her georgette dupatta flutters along with her body. The music sways, “Inhi logon ne le liya dupatta mera”/ “These are the people who have taken my dupatta”. Along with it, Meena Kumari flies the dupatta around her head, sometimes handing out its edge to a potential suitor. In the background, the bazaar glows with life. This is a scene from Pakeezah[7], the story of a bazaaru[8]woman – a sex worker. The dupatta is a metaphor for her virginity. She is pointing at the very people who have taken away her virginity. Twelve-year old Nandini’s head tilts and bobs and turns. She is a puppet wrapped in Meena Kumari’s fingers. Thinking back to the moment, Nandini says, “I saw Meena Kumari dancing, grabbed my mother’s dupatta and put on the darkest lipstick I found. I danced and danced, till my parents saw me. They made me sit down and I was asked to never sing this song again. When I asked why, they said a dupatta is a woman’s laaj[9]. This was the first time I ever actually thought about the dupatta.”
For any woman who has grown up in India, the dupatta has somehow cast its shadow over her life. Known by different words across cultures, it is referred to as ghoonghat, chunarri, odhni, etc. While there are myriad ways that a dupatta is draped, it serves the universal purpose of protecting a woman’s modesty. It veils and protects.
It is, like Nandini’s parents said, a woman’s laaj. Anthropologist Emma Tarlo, in her seminal work, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India writes about veiling and argues, “That veiling is associated with a sense of shame and modesty is evident from the fact that women use the word laj[10] to refer to it.” Pointing out how women are expected to have sharam[11] and drape the dupatta, she further says, “A woman is expected to show more sharam than a man and failure to do so risks damaging the honor of herself, her family and her caste.”
It was no surprise then that Nandini’s parents were offended with her dual attack on their honor. In dancing like Meena Kumari, not only was she enacting out a sex worker, she was also giving away her very honor or virginity by giving away her dupatta to whomever imaginary people. In many ways, she was challenging the prohibition of the dupatta. The dupatta no longer confined Nandini’s body to the realm of modesty. For Nandini, this prohibition imposed by the dupatta had metamorphosed into an invitation to desire. Where Meena Kumari was teasing and charming men with the dupatta, Nandini was busy imagining a prince-charming. She was not alone in it. Many women in India will testify to imagining the edge of their dupatta getting stuck in a boy’s kurta – all thanks to scenes from various Bollywood[12] movies. The dupatta, in this sense, is then the site of a rather interesting paradox – of prohibiting and inviting all the same. Within this context, what meaning does the dupatta acquire? Like its flutter, are the meanings of the dupatta also in constant motion?
III
Living in India means moving through many epochs. With its perpetuity of time, India is at once entangled within tradition and modernity. In its fashion choices, an urban, upper middle-class India would think of itself as progressive, the torchbearer of the modern. That India would have itself believe that the dupatta makes more of a “fashion” statement, and less of a comment on shame and modesty. However, every now and then, this same upper middle class holds women responsible for “getting” raped. They give public declarations dictating women to wear clothes that cover them. Either these statutory warnings come from the loud mouths of politicians, or from an extended uncle at the dinner table. In the year 2016, a politician said young girls should wear a salwar, kameez and dupatta to school. This patriarchy is a knowing bed-fellow of puritanical values towards desire. Over the years, with the rise of the Hindu right wing, India has seen attacks against the celebration of valentine’s day, calling the occasion a “western import”. In the same moment, India continues to be the land of the Kamasutra[13] – the world’s guide to having pleasurable sex. It is home to Hindu mythology, where we worship the penis – the Shivalinga[14]. The walls of Khaujuraho[15] are adorned with sculptures of anal sex, bestiality, threesomes and orgies. It is the grave of the Sufis[16], the land where Khusrau[17] longs for Nizamuddin Auliya[18], one man’s desire for another.
With these messy boundaries of time, what remains traditional and what exactly is modern? How is one to make sense of meandering through this historic legacy of sexuality to a contemporary disdain for it? While one can blame the Victorian British sensibilities, this conflict is not so easily pigeonholed. Madhavi Menon, in her book Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India, writes, “But despite the seeming rupture in the fabric of India’s desires, the historical lines between an era of permissiveness and an era of repression cannot be drawn quite so neatly…The notion of ritual and sexual purity long predated the arrival of British. What the British managed to do in their deadly political ploy was to tilt the balance away from permissiveness and towards purity.” In addition to this, she argues, “…the sexually explicit Kamasutra sat alongside the punitive Manusmriti[19]; Sufism whirled around prohibition against homosexuality; fluidity tiptoed on the heels of rigidity.”
India, then has always been a site of paradoxes, of oppositions sitting next to each other. The dupatta, then, is a symptom of the nation. It is torn between the forces of permissiveness and repressiveness of desire.
IV
Writing about veils, Emma Tarlo states, “The cloth is in almost constant motion being drawn, adjusted, redrawn and withdrawn in such a variety of ways that it seems almost like a part of the female body…It becomes in short an extension of the female space and a portable means of maintaining the possibility of shifting from the public to the private sphere at any moment.” When women in India drape the dupatta, they do so to control the way they are viewed, to move effortlessly between the public and the private. They wear the dupatta to avoid attracting any unnecessary attention towards themselves. Over the years, however, the dupatta has become a piece of clothing that has transcended its original utility. It continues to be a part of the female body and an extension of the female space, however, with its evolving context, both the body and the space become imbued with a desire for multiple meanings.
I say evolving context because in my conversations with women, they told me how the dupatta in being a part of themselves, reflected how they were changing too. Sushmita, Priyanka and Kareena (names changed to the names of Bollywood heroines at their request) told me their relationship with the dupatta twisted and turned. Where they continued to use the dupatta as a veil, they also sometimes used it as a blindfold in bed, sometimes to tie the arms of their lovers, and sometimes a string of dupattas is used as a rope to climb down from balconies. Their dupatta had a social life larger than it was originally expected to.
Sushmita
Sushmita’s relationship with the dupatta began when she was in school. When she entered 9th standard, it became a compulsory part of her school uniform. She recalls a conversation where all the girls from Class 9 to 12 were gathered for a meeting, and the Principal (a woman in this case) addressed them – “I remember she gave us a long lecture about entering puberty. It was about how women should be “poised”. We were told to use face wash, given a lesson about how to maintain our acne. When she spoke about the dupatta, she kept on talking about how important it was to hide ourselves from the boys in school, or even from male teachers for that matter. Given it was a conversation about puberty, she also told us what color of bra we should wear so that it blends with our school uniform, and well, how we could use the dupatta to hide ‘that area’ properly. All in all it was “that talk” that sitcoms now show parents having with their children, but it was very conservative.”
In Sushmita’s story, the dupatta is then used as a veil. It hides the breasts from the male gaze. As we have seen before, it is a marker of modesty and shame. In doing so, it is also an attempt to desexualize the breasts, and to remove the female body from the imagination of desire. It represses.
Sigmund Freud, while talking about “sexual repression” notes how human beings unconsciously repress sexual urges in order to function as a part of civilized society. The dupatta, with its attempts to veil, serves as an instrument of repression. However, as it often is with what is forbidden, instead of veiling the breasts from public view, the dupatta, in fact, ends up drawing even more attention towards itself. It hides and advertises at the same time. Instead of desexualising, it hyper-sexualises the female body. Similarly, what is repressed, suddenly becomes too visible. With this visibility, the dupatta does the opposite of what it is intended to do.
Priyanka
In her dance classes, Priyanka twisted and turned on her toes. Her dupatta flew along with her, but only until her teacher came along. “We would hear our teacher’s footsteps, and tie the dupatta around our waist, with the cloth completely shielding our chest. The fear was real!”, Priyanka recalls. She says their teacher had instructed all of them to be good, chaste girls. Speaking more about her teacher, Priyanka adds, “She was very particular about everything. At first, we thought the drape of the dupatta was just another eccentric ritual of traditional dance forms. However, over time we realized it was to hide our jiggling boobs while dancing.” To Priyanka’s mind, the practice made little sense considering it was only a gathering full of women. “It also made it difficult to breathe!”, she complains. Coyly, she then moves on to narrating a memory that followed her dance class – “I remember I went to meet my boyfriend after the dance class. Things got heated up and the dupatta came in really handy!” Priyanka had used the dupatta as a blindfold in bed. As her relationship furthered, she even used it to tie up the arms of her partner. “It wasn’t really intentional, I think it was just a matter of convenience. It was somehow the closest thing I could grasp”, Priyanka says.
It is fascinating to think how Priyanka’s body’s interaction with the dupatta led to it being used as a blindfold in bed, or to tie the arms of her lover. In so doing, the dupatta not only becomes a sexualized object, but also a medium of control. Many anthropologists who have studied the dupatta have argued how it is used by the patriarch to control women, and render them “socially invisible.” In bed, with the use of the blindfold, the invisibility assumes a new meaning. Where invisibility robbed women of all control in public, in private, it gave them the power to control. This control extended not only to men, but also put them in-charge of their own desires. Very literally, the hands of men are tied and women are free to do whatever they may want. In the prescriptive Kamasutra, Vatsyayana writes, “Passion knows no order.” It is interesting that a text laying out instructions for sexuality establishes that there’s a certain lawlessness to desire. With the dupatta, this lawlessness is at odds with the laws of the patriarchal world. In Priyanka’s story, the dupatta is then a metonym for this lawlessness, fluttering in the air and breaking itself free from societal hierarchies.
Kareena
Delhi University's [20] campus was brimming with fervor. A group, or rather a movement referred to as “Pinjra Tod” [21], translating to “break the cages”, was re-gaining momentum. Kareena was one of the people at the forefront. She said, “I remember Delhi University hostels used to shut their entry for women as early as 7 p.m. in the evening. But boys were allowed till 11 p.m. It was outright obnoxious! The same system was followed in other modes of accommodation. We wanted to challenge this idea.” Pinjra Tod called for a night for women to occupy the streets, and literally break free from the hostel locks. Where Kareena lived, she and her friends made a rope from 4-5 dupattas, and escaped from the balcony. Later, her parents were called. “I think the saddest part was the realization that my own parents wanted the system to be that way. They wanted us to be safe, protected and locked inside by 7 p.m.”, Kareena confesses. Giggling, she carries on, “In any case, we were all very amused with the reaction of the authorities. They were scandalized that we escaped with something as innocent as the dupatta!”
This was not the first time a dupatta had been re-conceptualized. In the year 2018, four minor girls in Bihar used the dupatta to escape from a government funded shelter home. This escape took place at a time when reports of women being raped inside shelter homes were at an all-time high. While there were no reports of sexual violence from this particular shelter home, moves to “rescue” and “protect” women have rightly been questioned. The assumption that women need to be “rescued” from the lives they are leading robs them of their own agency. It infantilizes them and implies that they are not capable of making their own decisions. This politics is very similar to the politics of the dupatta – of the need to protect women from the gaze of men. The rules of the shelter homes, and the hostels were based on the same assumption of protection. However, when this same dupatta is used to escape, it becomes an instrument of women regaining access to their own will. It makes them partners in their own lives. This seemingly innocent piece of clothing becomes for them a force of power. The surprise the use of the dupatta yields owing to the subversion of its meanings is as cathartic as it is refreshing.
With these instances of the re-imagination of the dupatta, it is fascinating to think of clothing as something more than a garment worn out of modesty. Knowing that it is a garment that allows women to move between the public and the private, it also gives us a peek inside the private lives of both men and women. In this private space, its connotations, like the dupatta itself, fold, double up, bend and collapse. As the dupatta flutters around in public spaces, for those who are aware, it carries the charge of secrecy. Thus in many ways, even with all its chastity, the dupatta disseminates sexuality into public spaces. The thought I initially began with, that split me between the beauty of the dupatta and its regressive connotations, stands challenged. With the stories of these women, the connotation of the dupatta is that of feminine camaraderie. Through the dupatta, they share a big, dirty secret.
V
Roland Barthes in his book The Language of Fashion creates a distinction between the semiology of clothing, and the sociology of clothing. Borrowing from Saussure, Barthes looks at the language of clothing through the dialectics between the signifier and the signified. As a concept, the signifier is the object itself, whereas the signified, is the meaning that object implies. To Barthes, in case of clothing, the signifier is a piece of cloth, whereas the signified is the social life of that piece of cloth, the many meanings it acquires in society. In that sense then, the dupatta as a signifier is merely a cloth of modesty. However, sociologically, it signifies the many imaginative ways in which women might use the dupatta. The sociology of the dupatta then transcends its semiology.
This distinction becomes particularly useful when we think of the dupatta as a symptom of the nation. At the level of semiology, what does India as a nation represent? Under the current political dispensation, India is a nation of prude partitions. It is a country on its way to go back to traditions of becoming a “pure” country. Under the guise of tradition, India is turning more conservative. I have already argued how the Indian middle class, thinking of itself as modern, continues on its age-old misogynistic dictums. At the level of sociology, however, India is a country of convoluted realities. The “idea” of India transcends what any ruling party would like it to denote. It evades their control. As they emphasize purity, India remains a country of mixtures – where lines between tradition and modernity can never be untangled. In this nation of prude partitions, we have already seen how permissiveness sits next to repressed desires. And no matter how brutally one tries to control it, this sociology will always transcend the semiology. In the manner of the dupatta, India carries on being a fluttering aporia.
To hold an edge of the dupatta then, is to hold a piece of India itself.
Footnotes
[1] A long loose garment, worn with traditional attire to cover the breasts from the public eye.
[2] A traditional attire with a long shirt, and loose bottoms which collect at the ankle.
[3] A weaving technique in which warp or weft threads, or both, are tie-dyed before weaving, ikkat weaves usually take 9 months to complete.
[4] A form of dense embroidery from Punjab in India where silk flowers or gardens are woven into the fabric.
[5] A Bollywood actress, popularly known as The Tragedy Queen. Meena Kumari passed away just a month after the release of this movie.
[6] Translating literally to “bud of the pomegranate flower”, an anarkali suit is a long-styled garment with frock like features.
[7] Pakeezah is a musical drama film released in the year 1972.
[8] A woman who leads her life in the public sphere, often looked down upon because of her promiscuous activities.
[9] The manner in which a woman carries her shame.
[10] Same as Laaj, the manner in which a woman carries her shame.
[11] The feeling of shame
[12] The Indian film industry.
[13] An ancient Indian text written by Vatsyayana, with its name literally translating to “Teachings on Desire”.
[14] Rooted in Hindu mythology, the Shivalinga is an abstract representation of Lord Shiva’s penis.
[15] A temple located in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, known for its architectural prowess and erotic sculptures.
[16] A person who preaches Sufism. Sufism is a branch of Islam that focuses on mysticism and tries to move away from orthodox Islam. The ultimate aim of Sufism is to become one with God.
[17] Amir Khusrau was an Indo-Persian Sufi poet, singer and a devoted disciple of the Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya.
[18] Nizamuddin Auliya or Hazrat Nizamuddin was one of the most renowned Sufi saints from India.
[19] Manusmriti is an authoritative Hindu religious text that lays down the code of conduct for Hindus, particularly rules for how people belonging to caste groups should behave, or how women should behave.
[20] A premier university for the arts and the sciences located in the capital of India.
[21] A women led movement on college campuses across India that urges women to take over their right to walk on the streets.