MODESTY IN A GLOBAL AGE: WOMEN’S SARTORIAL PRACTICES AS MARKERS OF INDIA’S MODERNITY AND TRADITION

A Thesis

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School Of Cornell University

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts

by Jennifer Lynn Koester

May 2015

 

Copyright © 2015 Jennifer Lynn Koester

 

ABSTRACT This thesis explores modesty as an index of modernity and tradition, and globalization

and nationalism in North India and how modesty complicates these dichotomies. It begins by examining the changes that the definition of modesty underwent during the Indian national period under British colonial rule. The focus then shifts to the legacy of these changes and the further changes produced by the current era of neoliberal policies, religious nationalism, and the expansion of globalization into Indian cultural, economic, and political life and discourse. To explore the way the definition of what is modest has undergone transformation in these different periods and the cultural and political significances of these shifts, I consider women’s sartorial practices. The second half of the thesis investigates the links between women’s sartorial practices, definitions of national and Western values, practices, and identities by North Indian actors, women’s symbolic representation through dress (and other behaviors and practices signified by dress) of these particular understandings of the Indian nation and the West. The thesis concludes by considering the explicit connections that women establish between modest apparel and personal security in public spaces with respect to their roles as representatives of the nation. Finally, I explore how different spaces, like the NGO space, produce different discourses for appropriate sartorial practices and modest dressing that allow for some experimentation, while also reinforcing neoliberal conceptions of appropriate sartorial practice.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Jennifer L. Koester is an M.A. Candidate in Asian Studies at Cornell University. After

completing the M.A. in Asian Studies Spring 2015, she will pursue a PhD in Anthropology at Boston University. She received a B.A. in Anthropology with High Honors and a B.A. Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from Dartmouth College in 2012.

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For Aaron

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the Einaudi Center and the South Asia Program at Cornell

University for funding my language study in the Summer of 2014 through a Fellowship for Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS). By their doing so, I had the opportunity to further formulate my ideas and gain additional insights and experience, some of which is included directly in this thesis. I am also very grateful to the American Institute of India Studies, for accepting me as a student and teaching me Hindi, which made the experience possible and valuable.

I would also like to thank the Claire Garber Goodman Fund through the Dartmouth Anthropology Department and the Raynolds International Expedition Grant through the Dean of Faculty at Dartmouth College for their financial support of my undergraduate research. That research provided me with the experience and research that raised many of the questions I begin to explore here and provided a wealth of research from which to directly draw in this thesis. I am appreciative of the support from the NGO, in Summer 2011, that I worked with as an undergraduate. The staff, volunteers (both from India and abroad), and clients of the NGO were all very supportive of my research, which would not have been possible without their help.

I am also very grateful for the support, interest, and valuable feedback I have received from my committee members, Daniel Gold and Kathryn March, at Cornell University. I have learned a great deal from my opportunity to work with them during my time at Cornell. I am further thankful for the South Asia Program’s funding of my two years at Cornell University through the FLAS fellowship and which made my completion of a M.A. in Asian Studies possible.

Finally, many, many thanks to my family and friends for encouraging and supporting my academic and personal goals. I am lucky to have had such wonderful people supporting me.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL  SKETCH  ...................................................................................................................  iii  

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  ..........................................................................................................................  v  Chapter  1:  Women  as  Representative  of  the  Nation:  National,  Pre-­‐Independence  Era  1  

Chapter  2:  Women  as  Representative  of  the  Nation:  Modern  Era  .......................................  8  

Chapter  3:  Changing  Conceptions  of  Modesty  ..........................................................................  19  Chapter  4:  Gender-­‐Based  Violence  in  the  Public  Sphere  ......................................................  28  

Chapter  5:  Dressing  for  Safety  .......................................................................................................  44  Conclusion:  Experimentation  .........................................................................................................  57  

APPENDIX:  ............................................................................................................................................  65  

WORKS  CITED  ......................................................................................................................................  75    

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Chapter 1: Women as Representative of the Nation: National, Pre-Independence Era

Introduction

Women and the dress they wear are often tied directly to nation and the values of the

nation (Walsh 2004:43): “Chapkis (1988) says that women’s bodies are often the repository for

“tradition”; when “traditional” dress is worn by women, it can be seen as an attempt to preserve

or recreate a real or imagined past” (Bridgwood 1995:30). The creating of traditional, national

dress was particularly salient for colonial nations: “In parts of Asia (such as India)…nationalists

rejected Western dress as a symbol of foreign political and cultural domination and fashioned, in

opposition to it, neo-traditional dress to express the moral dignity and cultural soul of the

oppressed nation” (Peleggi 2007:66). In India women and women’s dress demonstrated that soul.

Producing and editing Indian dress qualifies as one of the “occasions when people become

conscious of citizenship as such [that] remain associated with symbols and semi-ritual practices

(for instance, elections), most of which are historically novel and largely invented: flags, images,

ceremonies and music” (Hobsbawm 1983:12). By delineating a national dress, early nationalists

created a consciousness of being Indian.

In colonial India, elite women were often called on to represent a traditional and

authentic notion of Indian identity despite the huge changes wrought on Indian daily life by

colonization (Chatterjee 1995; Chatterjee 1990). During the colonial period, elite women’s

behavior and representation of femininity were very significant for the nascent national

movement: “concepts of femininity in the context of colonial India became inseparable from a

politics of cultural authenticity, preservation, and Indian identity itself” (Handa 2003:67).

Women were the representatives of the spiritual core of the particularly Indian nation and they

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had to represent the nation’s spiritual purity through clothing1 that protected and preserved that

purity while also demonstrating adherence to a particular conception of Indian identity.

Women wearing dress that is considered modest, respectable, and appropriate by their

observers legitimates the communities they come from, one of which is the national community.

The wearing of such dress demonstrates to members and potential members the values the

community upholds. The British, like Indians, thought that a woman’s status and behavior

reflected directly on the moral character of the nation (Chatterjee 1995). The British judged

Indian culture by the status of women in India. The British decried numerous practices, most

particularly sati, as oppressive of women. These types of practices and subsequent British

allegations that Indian women were downtrodden contributed to the British imperialist

conclusion that women in India and by extension, Indian society needed to be reformed

(Chatterjee 1995). Women, by performing a respectable and modest Indian identity, sartorially

testified to India’s civilized nature.

Women’s clothing was made even more significant because of the status of men and

men’s clothing. Walsh writes:

Partha Chatterjee and Tanika Sarkar have both suggested, in different contexts, that it was precisely because Westernized Bengali men had already yielded so much of their cultural autonomy to the structures and demands of life in British India that they were so desperate to preserve the integrity of indigenous home and family life. Women would maintain, Chatterjee argues, their Hindu identity in matters of religion and dress precisely because men had been unable to do so (Walsh 2004:45).

Walsh (2004) concludes that men’s adoption of British clothing and “foreign habits of daily

dress [w]as a signifier for humiliation and degradation” (Walsh 2004:35). Some men had to wear

British clothing in many workplaces and social contexts. They could not represent the emerging

                                                                                                               1  In this use of clothing, I am referring to more than a single item of dress.

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Indian nation or the home (Walsh; Chatterjee 1995; Chatterjee 1990).2 Walsh (2004) responds to

Chatterjee and Sarkar: “It is not that I disagree with their point that women are sometimes made

to preserve what men have already ceded, but I prefer to frame the issue as a continuing

argument over “to what degree,” as a repeating process in which previously unconsciously held

habits, practices, and beliefs are constantly forced into consciousness and debate” (Walsh

2004:45). Walsh’s stance (2004) provides a nuanced perspective from which to consider the

evolutions of female dress in India, particularly because the construction of dress at times

included the incorporation of Western styles, items, and values.

Purdah in the Outer Sphere

Elite women had to be not only authentically Indian, but appropriately modest and

traditional in the public space. Purdah does not only refer to the seclusion of women in their

homes or certain spaces, but the requirement that a woman practice appropriate upper class

modesty in public, including in her dress and behavior (Papanek 1973). Through their sartorial

choices, women would preserve Indian values and practices in the private and public spheres

(Chatterjee 1995; Chatterjee 1990). Partha Chatterjee (1990) found that elite Bengali women

could go outside their home as long as they behaved and dressed in certain ways: “spirituality [of

women] did not, as we have seen, impede the chances of the woman moving out of the physical

confines of the home; on the contrary, it facilitated it, making it possible for her to go out into the

world under conditions that would not threaten her femininity (Chatterjee 1990:249).” Vinay

Bahl (2005) has made a similar argument for Bengali colonial apparel:

                                                                                                               2  The discussion here concerns certain men, contexts, jobs, practices, and choices. I do not explore in this thesis what pressures different classes, castes, and groups of men faced under colonial rule or post-Independence, however these pressures or lack of pressures would affect the extent to which these arguments hold true for the women in these groups. I particularly draw on Walsh’s following contention in exploring these topics and will do so in future.    

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The issue of clothing middle class Bengali women thus became important because now they were also participating in the public life outside their homes. Therefore, the effort was to create a dress for middle class Bengali women that would distinguish them from prostitutes and laboring women, at the same time that dress would not resemble European male attire (Bahl 2005:101).

Clothing is about visual and ideological boundaries. Clothing delineates the boundaries between

one body and another. It also illustrates the boundaries between groups. In the colonial period, a

particular woman’s dress could visually and physically separate her from colonists and members

of other classes in a way that few other visual markers could. Later chapters will explore the

implications of the physical delineation of space and identity performed by clothing.

Purdah in the Inner Sphere

Just as upper class women were called on to be authentically and modestly Indian in the

public sphere, they were also required to do so in the private space. Clothing visually delineates

spaces. Wearing Indian, and only Indian, clothes in the home sanctifies the home space, a model

of the nation (Tarlo 1996). Women’s roles and the space of the home were used by nationalists to

define the Indian nation:

The integration of global domesticity into Bengali home practices in The Duties of Women demonstrates how central daily life and its intimate habits and practices were to issues of social and cultural change in nineteenth-century Bengal and India….Daily life, domestic life, lay at the heart of the cultural contestations of the nineteenth-century worlds, nowhere mores than in Bengal and India (Walsh 1994:138).

As Partha Chatterjee (1990) argues, women were the protectors and keepers of the spiritual core

of the nascent Indian nation and the family, which was centered in the home (Chatterjee 1990).

National Dress, National Unity

The use and deployment of “modesty” in Indian colonial and contemporary history will

be addressed in Chapter 3, therefore here I will consider the way dress was used in the national

period under colonial rule to define a national culture and spirit. The dress of the elite “would

help in maintaining the Indian national unity” (Bahl 2005:101). India is a very large and highly

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diverse nation and as such has had to contend with the diversity of traditions, styles and daily

practices of women’s clothing that existed and continue to exist in establishing national dress. In

the history of modern Indian national dress, some regional items, styles or forms of apparel have

been privileged, others have been adapted, and others have been marginalized only to be brought

back into popularity later, like the salwar kameez (Tarlo 1996). However, during the national

period the sari (explicitly the modified sari) became the national dress for the national

movement. Although it is a common form of dress across India, not every woman in India wore

the sari, nor did it come to be worn by every woman. Even among women who wore saris, not all

women wore the same style. There are regional differences in the length, tying, patterns, and

clothing of saris. The sari can be worn in a multitude of ways and be made out of different

fabrics (Tarlo 1996). The national movement privileged an elite style of dress, called the

brahmika sari, to reflect the elite nature of the national movement in India (Chatterjee 1995;

Chatterjee 1990).3

Khadi—The Tension Between National Cloth and Style

For Gandhi and some in the nationalist movement the style of dress was less important

than the materials used for both men and women’s dress (Tarlo 1996). Gandhi wanted and

pushed for Indian clothes made of Indian spun cloth, khadi (Tarlo 1996). The cotton industry

was a significant industry in India that the British tried to and (to an extent) did replace with

British machine spun cotton to the great protest of Gandhi, who organized boycotts and

campaigns against British spun cotton and in favor of khadi. Gandhi and some other nationalists

saw foreign spun cloth as an economic and cultural threat and clashed with those who wanted to

use foreign cloth for Indian dress. Gandhi was willing to accept that many wearers of khadi

                                                                                                               3  To see illustrations of various styles of saris, including the brahmika sari, see the Appendix.    

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wanted to style it into Western styles: “But although such a solution was more acceptable to

Gandhi than the reverse solution of making foreign cloth into Indian styles, it was not accepted

by the Indian public, who retained the old idea that the style of dress was the most important

criterion of patriotism” (Tarlo 1996:120). Dress, especially recognizing aspects of dress, whether

style or cloth, is significant because of its identification with Indian culture. Here the cloth,

khadi, is also economically significant.

Roces and Edwards (2007) suggests that Gandhi’s privileging of a national attire was

done to purposely elide differences based on region, ethnicity, and caste: “Mahatma Gandhi’s

many experiments with Indian dress in the quest for the fashion apparel that would most

represent the “Indian” by obscuring caste and regional differences” (Roces and Edwards 2007:5).

In Gandhi’s push for the adoption of khadi, he told a woman who was worried about affording

the nine yards of material required for her sari to wear a shorter sari, despite her region’s

traditions. Gandhi privileged fabric over style in creating his national traditions:

The desire of the Maharashtran elders to preserve local traditions stood directly in the way of national unity. When Gandhi harped back to India’s mythical past when all had worn khadi, he failed to consider the extraordinarily diverse clothing traditions that had always coexisted among different social, religious and ethnic groups in India. For khadi was in danger of blanking out local Indian traditions just as much as it sought to stamp out British influences (Tarlo 1996:115).

In inventing the Indian tradition of khadi wearing, other traditions not coded as national and

Indian were demoted. Whether or not the suppression of local clothing and styles was purposeful

or not, Gandhi had a difficult time convincing everyone to wear khadi and even when people did

they fashioned many different styles of clothing from it, including Western clothing (Tarlo

1996). Khadi, while an important part of the national movement’s experiments with sartorial

practices and more successful economic protests, did not gain traction in the same way particular

types of modesty did. It could be the case that the visual unity provided by particular styles and

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conceptions of modesty (covering the back, for example) were clearer and more easily identified

signifiers than the fabric of which clothes were made.

Conclusion In the colonial era, dress performance was part of a larger discussion of who and what

was coded Indian. This conversation was part of the larger project to create the Indian nation

through visual markers of belonging to the emerging nation. Indian styles were privileged over

local styles. A conception of India as a cohesive whole began to develop through dress. Women

were the focus in creating a national sartorial identity, because of their connections to

conceptions of tradition and spirituality. Women maintained this emerging Indian identity

through their practices. At the same time, by adopting British conceptions of appropriate dress

and standards of modesty, members of the national movement could also use women’s bodies to

answer charges that women were oppressed in colonial India and needed to be saved by the

British. Women’s adoption of new items of clothing and standards of modesty demonstrated

visually in the private and public sphere that Indian women the equals of Western women, and

by extension Indian culture and British culture. Women’s modesty was a key way that the

emerging Indian nation positioned itself in the world.

   

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Chapter 2: Women as Representative of the Nation: Modern Era

Introduction

Two decades ago, India opened its doors to globalization and liberalized the national

economy. This led to an influx of foreign businesses and products in India. The increase in

Western presence and perceived influence has prompted a backlash against Westernization by

some groups in favor of Indian traditions. Nira Yuval-Davis (1997), in her global research on

gender and nationalism, has found that “The reification and essentialization of identities…have

also been presented as a defensive reaction to the processes of globalization….The myth of

common origin and a fixed immutable, ahistorical and homogeneous construction of the

collectivity’s culture is used in a similar way to that of religious fundamentalism” (Yuval-Davis

1997:63). This essentialization of identities affects women the most as they are the

representatives of this fixed cultural identity. Yuval-Davis (1997) found that: “women are

constructed in the role of the ‘carriers of tradition’…women’s following of these traditions [is]

the safeguard of the national cultural essence” (Yuval-Davis 1997:61). In Handa’s exploration

(2003) of South Asian immigrants in Canada, she found “Women are associated with the

memory of all that is seen to be good from pre-modern times” (Handa 2003:55). This is also true

of Indians living in a post-liberal India. This gender bias possibly stems from the “more general

view that women are 'more traditional' and less apt to change than men, and more likely to

observe religious ritual faithfully” (Papanek 1973:323), as described by Papanek (1973) in her

research on South Asia.

Women, Indian Culture, and Globalization

For India particularly, Smita Mathur and Gowri Parameswaran (2007) found that the

Indian government, in order to combat the perceived loss of identity from globalization, “ha[s]

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had to resort to the myth of an ancient common origin for the Indian people” (Mathur and

Parameswaran 2007:171). These myths of commonality perpetuate a shared conviction that

Indian culture is an essential, homogeneous, and unchanging entity. Nira Yuval-Davis (1997)

notes that is governmental response is a response to a reconfigured global political system:

Given the rise of global capitalism and the growing sense of disempowerment in the a political world system in which political autonomy and sovereignty seem to mean less and less, more and more people feel the need for what Stuart Hall calls a symbolic retreat to the past in order to face the future (Yuval-Davis 1997:63).

As more women enter the workforce and are more visible, they are public representatives of a

common Indian culture—often one with ties to the past and the traditional. In Smitha

Radhakrishnan’s fieldwork (2009) with office workers in the information technology sector, she

found women in the workforce are required to constantly perform “respectable Indian

femininity” (Radhakrishnan 2009:200). I found this to be true also of NGO workers in rural

Rajasthan. These workers construe proper female behavior as essential to Indian values. Women

perform “respectable Indian femininity” (Radhakrishnan 2009:200) and reinforce Indian culture

through modest clothing, eating properly, not smoking or drinking, and maintaining and teaching

these values.4 Like their colonial-era counterparts, women’s dress continues to be a salient

marker of Indian identity for many. One of Steve Derne’s (2000) interlocutors in Dehra Dun in

the early 1990s, a male college student, discussed “a strong connection to Indian tradition

because of subservient, sari-wearing women in the home” (Derne 2000:248). For these men,

traditional dress, whether the salwar kameez or the sari5, correspond to traditional notions of

women as keepers of the home, and therefore Indian identity. Yet, working and socializing

outside the home requires women to perform their gender and nationality publicly. Particularly in

                                                                                                               4 I use Indian, Indian culture and Indian identity, Indian women, and women as close as possible to the ways in which my interlocutors have used these terms, as referents to ideas and constructs, rather than as reified categories that are themselves homogeneous and uniform. 5  Illustration of various styles of salwar kameez and sari are in the Appendix.    

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the office, “Women, in their ‘proper’ behavior, their ‘proper’ clothing, embody the line which

signifies the collectivity’s boundaries” (Yuval-Davis 1997:46), which Western influence cannot

infiltrate. Women embodying the ideal Indian identity in the public sphere can even reinforce

notions of ideal Indian identity in public spaces.

Western Influence and “Modern” Clothing

During the national period, dress, style, and cloth was used to represent a sense of Indian

identity and an internationally recognized morality evidenced by women’s modesty. In the post-

liberalization era, women not only have been called upon to demonstrate India’s cultural

uniqueness and morality, but its modernity. Bahl (2005) writes that “the struggle to look

‘‘modern’’ and ‘‘progressive’’ is also increasing with two opposite styles: denim jeans, the

American style, and salwar kameez6, also widely worn in Islamic countries” (Bahl 2005:88-9).

These types of outfits are much more common for middle class, unmarried women than saris are

(Jasmeet, interview 2011; Bahl 2005; Tarlo 1996). Yet, the sari has also been adapted for a

modern audience and customer: “in the 1990s once again the sari is emerging as an erotic wrap

for some upper class, trendy women; the blouse is being discarded (in some cases), and the sari

itself is changing in size, altering its form and being tied in a variety of new ways” (Bahl

2005:104).

The notion of what is modern, as demonstrated by the reference to denim jeans above, is

often tied to Western styles and types of clothing. During the period after liberalization and

before the global recession the huge growth in commodity availability and popular visual media

touting wealth and “modernization,” and larger notions of modernity tied to consumption

behaviors, often produced a more Westernized notion of (middle class) Indian womanhood

                                                                                                               6  See figure 10 in the Appendix for illustration.  

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(Kapur, J. 2009; Lukose 2009; Mathur and Parameswaran 2007; Mazzarella 2003; O’Reilly

2006; and Oza 2001). Instead of looking at this group or period as a beacon of future widespread

trends, I suggest that this emphasis on Western clothing and styles has not dominated the Indian

fashion and sartorial identity in the contemporary era. One of the particular reasons could be

found in the ideal of womanhood it produced and held up. Before the recession Subhadra Channa

(2004) writes:

In an urban middle class household, a wife is needed to…accompany her husband to “parties,” act as a symbol of his “modernity” by dressing up and looking western and fashionable, all roles that were totally absent in the traditional set up….It is not possible to find a woman who could double for both acts, a traditional daughter-in-law and a modern wife (although such fantasies are often depicted on the screen) (Channa 2004:53).

Women faced the pressure to fulfill two roles, at times two conflicting roles.

Hybrid Fashion

Instead, I argue that hybrid fashions are a way that women navigate these conflicting

pressures going forward. Especially for urban and middle and upper class women, there has been

a growing embrace of hybrid (Western and Indian) styles, from high fashion to the everyday.

These “Indo-Western” fashions are popular on South Asian clothing websites, like

www.kalkifashion.com and www.ustavfashion.com,7  see Figure 11 in the Appendix for

illustration. Younger women especially wear kurti8 tops or kameez with jeans (as referenced

above) and illustrated and described in the Appendix in Figure 9. In India today it is common to

see Indian young women wearing kurti tops with jeans, churidar leggings, or salwars, illustrated

and described in the Appendix in Figures 8, 9, and 10. Many of these groups of women are

                                                                                                               7 www.kalkifashion.com appears to define Indo-Western as a combination of lehengas (long skirts) and gowns; www.ustavfashion.com offers a wide variety Western-Indian hybrids, from types of kurtis to Western style skirts made with similar fabric to their South Asian specific clothing. 8  I use “kurti” to reference these types of tops, because it denotes that these are women’s tops. “Kurta” refers often to men’s tops, but many people do often use “kurta” to describe women’s tops as well and can be used interchangeably with “kurti.” I use “kurti” in this work for consistency and clarity.

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firmly middle class, and the middle class9 is often the vanguard of new forms of behavior and

consumption.

Indian National, Regional, and Local Trends

At the same time that many Indians are navigating discourses and conceptions of

modernity through sartorial practices, the discourse of Indian cultural exceptionalism is growing.

In my fieldwork, upper class university student Jasmeet reiterates a belief that India is resistant to

Westernization and Western cultural influences, “India can never ever be completely

Westernized ever because our culture is completely different…never—so even if the entire West

comes to India we will make them Indian rather than making us Westerners” (Jasmeet, interview

2011). Many scholars have demonstrated that globalization has not led to a widespread

homogenization or Westernization. William Mazzarella (2004) working in India found instead of

global cultural homogenization, there is a “revalorization of the local” (Mazzarella 2004:352).

Ronald Inglehart and Wayne Baker (2000) document the possibility of difference amidst

globalization: “While it is obvious that young people around the world are wearing jeans and

listening to U.S. pop music, the persistence of underlying value differences is less apparent”

(Inglehart and Baker 2000:23). Although denim jeans are popular, they have not replaced other

types of clothing that are described as Indian, especially for non-urban and non-upper class

groups. Indian clothes can also be modern.

Yet, there is also a tension between the local or regional and the national. Even as the

national is privileged, certain local or regional markers lose their salience as symbols of these

                                                                                                               9 The middle class in India has and has had great symbolic power and weight in India currently and during the nationalist movement (Radhakrishnan 2009; Chatterjee 1995). A great deal of the work done on gender, nationalism, and Indian economic liberalization focuses on the urban, middle class (Netting 2010; Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase 2009). As discussed above, much of the discourse on ideal Indian womanhood implicitly or explicitly privileges a middle class version of Indian womanhood. However, the term ‘middle class’ can be misleading, because many elite and upper class Indians refer to themselves as middle class, part of a tradition of warding off other’s envy (Mustafi 2013).

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traditions. Like the efforts to homogenize clothing through khadi10, there are widespread ongoing

efforts to make regional or local items or styles national:

In the last decade or so, within Indian society, the meaning of so-called ‘‘authentic’’ Indian dress has also drastically changed. For example, one regional dress called salwar kameez11 has acquired a national status….This North Indian dress is considered as ‘‘progressive’’ and modern, whereas, other regional dresses are seen as ‘‘backward’’ or ‘‘exotic’’(Bahl 2005:88).

Mathur and Parameswaran (2007) note that “thus most middle-class Indians have learned to de-

emphasize the importance of ethnic markers to their sense of identity that they feel as Indians”

(Mathur and Parameswaran 2007:171).

The conceptions of appropriate dress and which body parts should be covered continue to

vary between groups, classes, ethnicities and regions, as I will explore in greater depth in

Chapter 2 (Papanek 1973). Over the last century Victorian conceptions of modesty have reached

further into rural areas. Emma Tarlo’s fieldwork (1996) in villages in Gujarat in the 1980s

revealed that Western notions of modesty (especially older notions of Western modesty) had

taken hold by the 1980s in some rural areas:

Some groups in Jalia, such as the Bharwads (shepherds), continue to expose their backs and cover their faces in this way, but they are considered the most deshi and least educated people in the village. The new model of female behavior and appearance that is promoted among the local educated urban elite calls for precisely the opposite cannon of modesty and exposure. Influenced by a Western and, more specifically, Victorian tradition, it requires that the back should be covered but the head and face exposed (Tarlo 1996:195).12

What is modern or modest in one area or era is not other areas or eras, despite attempts to define

and represent modern, modest, or even Indian clothing. Dress is a multivalent symbol. A dress

can also represent different values and identities to different people. Multiple forms and styles of

                                                                                                               10  Referenced in Chapter 1.    11  See Appendix, Figure 10.    12  The style of wearing sari that Tarlo describes for the Bharwards can be seen in the Appendix, in Figure 1. An example covering the head with the end of the sari can be viewed in Figure 7. Figure 2 demonstrates one of the ways of wearing a sari influenced by the Victorian tradition in the national era. Saris with greater coverage of the body, but not the face can be seen in Figure 6.  

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dress can represent the Indian nation. In Noliwe Rooks’ work (1996) on African American hair,

she found that: “Contemporary writers and poets were interested in discussing the politics of hair

straightening in terms of a bonding ritual in which women could come together to touch, nourish,

and sustain themselves, whereas others declared their blackness by not straightening their hair”

(Rooks 1996:10). Both ways of styling one’s hair was a way of associating oneself with a

community. Neither was more authentic. For a hugely diverse nation such as India, multiple

forms of association with the nation through dress are necessary to encompass more of the

nation. Not all forms of dress in India are considered national Indian dress, but multiple forms of

national dress can and do coexist.

Changing Roles, Changing Dress

Particular items of dress are not only preferred by or associated with particular classes,

castes, regions or religious groups (or eras), but their preferential status by members of these

groups can change based on a woman’s stage in life. This is particularly salient for women’s

experience of transforming from an unmarried girl to a wife and mother. Emma Tarlo (1996)

found in rural Gujarat:

While men’s dress, with the exception of the Bharwads, has become fairly standardized, women’s dress remains important in the differentiation process. It is suggested that village women are conservative because for them clothes are also important in defining their position in the life-cycle and differentiating the roles of daughter, wife and widow (Tarlo 1996:166-7).

She concludes (and my own fieldwork supports her conclusion) that the salwar kameez are more

acceptable as national dress for unmarried women, while saris are the accepted national dress for

married women (Tarlo 1996). In a study of fashion in Mumbai researchers found that national

clothing styles are based on the changes from one stage in the life cycle to another for women:

“in a group of retired participants, one of whom noted: ‘‘before my marriage I was wearing

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western outfits and salwaar kameez13, but after marriage my in-laws said you have to wear a

sari’’” (Jackson et al 2007:916). These researchers also draw on earlier research that found a

similar emphasis on the shift in clothing styles with the shift in marital status: “As Banerjee and

Miller (2003) illustrate for many women in India the wearing of a sari marked a transition from

youth to adulthood or from the freedoms of adolescence to the responsibilities of married life”

(Jackson et al 2007:916). However, they also note that this tradition is experiencing changes:

“Indeed the shift towards women commonly wearing a salwaar kameez in place of a sari (even

after marriage) was widely commented on as one of the key changes in women’s clothing

practices” (Jackson et al 2007:916) in the contemporary, post-economic liberalization period.

The salwar kameez is becoming more widely applicable for all women. It is reasonable to

expect that this wider acceptability will facilitate the salwar kameez’s association with the nation

to the possible detriment of the sari. Indeed there is a sense that the sari is declining in popularity

and needs saving despite its privileged place in the national imaginary, “in recent years, Indian

women have been buying fewer saris. Instead, they wear jeans and business suits, even nighties”

(Roy, S. 2014a). Quotes like this one suggest competition between salwar kameez and sari with

Western clothes. However, as globalization has not meant a replacement of either Indian with

Western or a complete return to perceived historical and traditional Indian clothing; clothing,

style, and cloth continues to provide a nuanced approach to the negotiation of modern and

traditional, and Indian and Western, “Indian designers are remembering that saris don’t have to

be boring and grandmotherly. The design duo Dev r Nil showcases them with pop art prints:

sunglasses, taxis, Che Guevara, butterflies, roses” (Roy, S. 2014a). As I demonstrated above in

the section, Hybrid Fashion, many more companies are offering hybrid interpretations of Indian                                                                                                                13    I have kept the transliteration of salwar as “salwaar” here, although I use the more commonly used “salwar” throughout the thesis, using “salwaar” only in direct quotes. Salwar can also be written as “shalwar” in transliteration.  

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and Western styles. For these companies, designers, and the women who wear their clothing,

they do not need to pick between traditional and Indian, modern and traditional, but can

incorporate these various threads in new cosmopolitan ways, as citizens of an India connected to

the local and global.

Variations in Cloth and Style of Dress

In contemporary India, as in colonial times, not only are there new styles and items of

dress, but many new types of fabrics are available to Indian clothing producers (Bhachu 2004).

Those like the ones above that have new patterns and reflect contemporary themes, but also new

types of fabric. Malavika Banerjee, the manager of Byloom Boutique in Calcutta, “and other

retailers are trying to breathe new life into saris. Byloom updates traditional handwoven fabric.

“We’ve tried to make it lighter, we’ve played around with color palettes,” she says”” (Roy, S.

2014a). The Byloom Boutique is part of a larger movement of Indian women experimenting with

new types of fabric. Bhachu writes about the modern popularity of synthetic cloth and its

incorporation into Indian styles (Bhachu 2004). Some machine-stitched fabrics have replaced

hand-sewn fabrics in villages (Tarlo 1996). Tarlo (1996) explains that for village women in

Gujarat “By the 1980s, most Kanbi women had stopped embroidering ghaghros altogether and

were buying synthetic saris from the city which they wore over blouses and petticoats made from

poplin, polyester, or teri cotton stitched by local tailors” (Tarlo 1996:218). In Palestine, women

have incorporated a flexible notion of the traditional into their adoption of the village wedding

dress. These women can adopt this dress because “as long as an object contains certain

determined elements it may still be considered as “traditional” (Seng and Wass 1995:230). These

women do not feel constrained into reproducing the dress exactly from the same materials that

notions of tradition dictate it was originally made. Nor do contemporary Indian women who use

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synthetic or machine stitched cloth. These hybrid creations are traditional and modern. They

straddle these categories to produce new ones.

In addition to different types of cloth, there are many different styles in which a particular

type of dress can be worn. Emma Tarlo found that in rural Gujarat the women mainly wore their

saris tied the Gujarati way. Many of these women found the Bengali way of tying the sari more

fashionable, but also less modest, and therefore less available to them (Tarlo 1996). An

illustration of the Gujarati and Bengali styles of wearing a sari can be found in the Appendix, in

Figures 5 and 6. Bandana Tewari, the fashion features director of Vogue India in 2013 stated that

sari has many iterations available for her to choose from and play with:

I think it [the sari] is a more versatile garment than the rest of the world sees….we have much more fun adapting our saris to a modern lifestyle, blending our own aesthetic with western influences. I wear a little black sari in Italian chiffon with a bikini blouse and Louboutin heels, in the same way that western women wear a little black dress (Kay 2013).

Despite the sari’s association with matronly respectability, tradition, and the efforts to make it

more modest, the sari can also be a symbol re-inscribed for modernity. Roy, S., for NPR, writes

“Lady Gaga shredded a sari to reveal a bodysuit, fishnet stockings and boots. Boutique-owner

Malavika Banerjee rolls her eyes. “What Lady Gaga did doesn’t hold a candle to some of the

sculptures we have in our temples were the sari has been worn in the most provocative and sexy

manner possible,” she says” (Roy, S. 2014a). Tradition has written the sari as modest, but

reaching into other styles, traditions, narratives, and discourses can demonstrate different values

and constructions.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have demonstrated that the picture of modern Indian sartorial practices

is one of hybridity. Women and designers draw on traditional clothing forms to demonstrate sex

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appeal and modesty, or they design new patterns and styles using existing forms to demonstrate

the impression they wish to curate—one that can incorporate modern and traditional forms. The

performance of identity continues to be complicated by the new clothing forms and styles

coming from without and within India. Much of this nuance is flattened in discourses on ideal

Indian femininity. In future chapters I will explore the discourses on current clothing practices,

especially the dichotomies that are constantly used and created by religious leaders, politicians,

and cultural groups—dichotomies like national and global, local and national, traditional and

Western, and good and bad.

   

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Chapter 3: Changing Conceptions of Modesty

Introduction

Women must demonstrate their adherence to accepted standards of modesty in order to

represent the nation. Julie Mostov (2000) describes women’s status in the former Yugoslavia:

“women are at once crucial to the continuance of the household (nation), but always suspect

(potentially disloyal) –[which] figures as an important aspect of the ambiguous relationship

among gender, nation and sexuality. This ambiguity appears to be a common fate of women in

the politics of national identity” (Mostov 2000: 98). Mostov (2000) explains that the former

Yugoslavia “limit[ed] the proper behavior of ‘our’ women in motherhood and defense of

national culture and values” (Mostov 2000:92). Modest clothing visualizes these roles.

Contemporary Liberian women are at risk for losing their status as civilized if they wear clothes

that are read as “uncivilized:” “A woman loses her status as civilized….This shift in status is

signaled by a change in clothing from the Western-style dress, worn only by civilized women, to

the wrap-around cloths or lappas (which may be worn by a woman in any social category, but is

especially associated with “native” women)” (Moran 2000:121). Women must constantly and

consistently work to perform the correct representations of modesty the nation requires to hold

onto their status.

In India, women’s dress in particular has been symbolically significant to the Indian

nation in the pre- and post-colonial periods. Although the definitions of modest have changed

over time, the requirement that women’s dress be modest has not. Women are the representatives

of the spiritual core of the Indian nation and they must represent this spiritual purity through

clothing that protects and preserves that purity. In India, women gain respect as the upholders of

the nation and household, but can lose it if they are not dressed accordingly (Ganguly-Scrase and

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Scrase 2009). Emma Tarlo (1996) notes, drawing on Bernard Cohn that “Dress codes are often at

the center of a number of wider issues concerning modesty, honor and respect, and that clash

between different styles of clothing is often symbolic of a winder conflict between different

cultural and social values and norms (Cohn 1989)” (Tarlo 1996:13). Bridgwood (1995) describes

honor-shame societies, a distinction which could also be applied to Indian societies:14

In the Mediterranean and in Islamic societies (often denoted as “honor-shame” societies), anthropologists have interpreted cultural insistence on modest female dress as part of the “shame” syndrome (Campbell 1964; Jeffery 1979; Sabbah 1984)….Modest dress enhances the reputation of a woman’s father, brothers, or husband because it can be seen that she is under the control of the menfolk of her household (Bridgewood 1995:29-30).

I argue that for many Indian citizens “modest dress” enhances the reputation of the nation and its

citizenry in a similar manner.

The Colonial Period

As discussed in Chapter One, members of the national movement during the colonial

period responded to British criticisms that Indian women were oppressed by modifying elite

Bengali women’s existing dress. By demonstrating that the elite women were properly and

modestly attired according to British standards, they demonstrated that Indian culture was not

“backward” (Chatterjee 1995). Figure 2, in the Appendix, is an example of modest Bengali attire

of the time period.

To make the customary dress of the upper class woman during the colonial period, the

sari, respectable and modest according to British standards, additions were made to the dress.

The British considered that the naked stomach, shoulders, back, and chest were inappropriate.

Therefore, Indian nationalists added a British style blouse and petticoats to the sari to cover these

areas (Chatterjee 1990). Partha Chatterjee (1990) notes that “the dress of the bhadramahila, for

                                                                                                               14  See chapter on shame, Chapter 4.

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instance, went through a whole phase of experimentation before what was known as the

brahmika sari (a form of wearing the sari in combination with blouse, petticoat and shoes made

fashionable in Brahmo households) became accepted as standard for middle class women,”

(Chatterjee 1990:248).

This production is a type of “invented tradition” as that described by Eric Hobsbawm

(1983). The creators of this dress made “use of ancient materials to construct invented traditions

of a novel type for quite novel purposes. A large store of such materials is accumulated in the

past of any society, and an elaborate language of symbolic practice and communication is always

available” (Hobsbawm 1983:6). In this case, nationalists modified the sari to create a look that

became widespread and indigenized over the last one hundred years. The new type of sari

blouse, that covers the back, is now a common article of clothing for most middle and upper

class women and it is considered fully Indian, not an import. It has evolved over time, often the

blouse is short sleeved instead of long sleeved. Many do not cover the stomach completely. Like

the sari, it also has continued to undergo modifications into the current era to fit new needs and

standards (Tarlo 1996). Not only did styles of dress change and adapt, but under British rule,

ideas about what is modest in women’s dress began to change as well. People in India began to

adopt the idea that revealing parts of the upper body was immodest, while at the same time

discarding the idea that modest women must cover their head and face.15

Stitched Clothing

Emma Tarlo writes that in India stitched and unstitched clothing have had religious

significance. Yet “there is no clear evidence of an ancient Hindu injunction against stitched

clothes, and it therefore seems likely that certain Hindus used religious arguments as a means of

                                                                                                               15  Many women in India still cover their head and face, but the notion that that was modest began to change under the British for many different groups in India (Tarlo 1996).

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preserving their favored dress” (Tarlo 1996:29). By the late nineteenth century the religious

significance was demoted in favor of possibilities for greater modesty provided by stitched

clothing. Many educated Hindus preferred stitched clothes because they are less revealing and at

the same time, they carried the cachet of sophistication, reinforced by the influx of British

stitched clothing (Tarlo 1996). Modest could also be cosmopolitan and refined.

Controversy

However, the adoption of a hybrid style of dress was not without tension. Many particular

behaviors and personality traits were labeled as belong to a particular nation, “the habits of

regularity and punctuality which mark an Englishman” (Walsh 2004:43). Dress was no different.

There were members of the nationalist movement in Bengal “who saw the denationalization of

women in silverware and petticoats” (Walsh 2004:45). Adopting or foreswearing a nation’s dress

was fraught with the baggage of the whole nation. Preserving the (invented or modified) clothing

of the nation was a way to convey that nation and its values. Adapting Indian women’s clothing

to incorporate Western articles of clothing was fraught. Women’s dress was and could be

adapted to fit the perceived needs of the nation, in this case proving that the nascent Indian

nation was a civilized one.

The Modern Period16

Despite originations of certain standards of modesty in British conceptions of female

modesty, in contemporary India modest dressing is frequently tied to the corresponding values

that certain groups understand as Indian and non-Western. Tarlo (1996) writes: “Today, village

women…now wear full-length synthetic saris in a variety of thin materials with blouses (cholis)

and petticoats (ghagrhis) underneath. They have entirely rejected their old bodices, which they

                                                                                                               16  Post-Independence, but primarily post economic liberalization.  

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now regard as embarrassing and immodest owing to the complete exposure of the back” (Tarlo

1996:145). Figure 4 and 5, in the Appendix, show popular blouses worn today that cover varying

amounts of the back. Figure 6 shows blouses that cover the chest more fully. Figure 1

demonstrates the way a sari without a blouse is and was worn. In this case, exposure to outside

values prompted a reformulation of what it means to be modest in India that quickly became very

widespread (Bahl 2005; Tarlo 1996).17 Despite shifts in the idea of what is modest, modesty is

still a very important aspect of what is appropriate national dress.

In Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase’s research (2009) on women in the media in contemporary

India, they found that women continue to represent Indian culture, traditions and honor. To see

an inappropriately dressed women, especially one who was acting as a wife and mother, on

television was appalling for male viewers because it called into question the values of Indian

culture for which modest women, wives and mothers stand: “Older men, too, contended that the

way women are portrayed on television is shameful and degrading to all Indian women”

(Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase 2009:168). Gokulsing and Dissanayake (2009) argue that in

contemporary times “Indian men would decide…how much tradition had to be preserved (or

invented) in terms of women’s dress and behavior” (Gokulsing and Dissanayake 2009:7). Steve

Derne (2000) also found in his fieldwork on male cinema goers in the early 1990s that men

preferred women on screen who wore Indian style clothing modestly: “men continue to

emphasize the importance of women’s adherence to traditional cultural norms as a way of

bolstering their own sense of Indian identity—even as men themselves embrace important

aspects of Western culture” (Derne 2000:245). These men “valorize” “modest Indian women”

who represent “traditionally Indian modesty,” so they do not have to do so in their own daily

                                                                                                               17  It is possible that exposure to other value systems through globalization may have similar effects or will be rejected.  

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practices (Derne 2000:247). 18 On the other end of the spectrum of opinion: “although there is a

greater representation of women on television, their images are bounded by national as well as

patriarchal considerations” (Gokulsing and Dissanayake 2009:10). Women are relegated to

certain roles and representations.

Demarcating Social Class: Who is Modern?

At the same time as elite Indians in the national period19 were demonstrating Indian

culture’s civilized nature, they were reproducing class hierarchies and inequalities through new

conceptions of modesty: “middle class women’s clothing now needed….the blouse and petticoat

which reinforced the class status of middle class women. Peasant and tribal women….continued

to wear the thick cotton sari shorter in length and narrower in breadth, as they always had” (Bahl

2005:101). Certain women were marked out as representing ideal Indian culture and spirituality

through standards of modesty. Only certain women fulfilled this new standard of modesty. Other

women were excluded from this new construction of the nation. This exclusion parallels the

exclusion of many Indians from the construction of the new nation and the struggles of the new

nation in constructing the citizen (Chatterjee 1993).

Emma Tarlo’s fieldwork (1996) in villages in Gujarat in the 1980s revealed that

Victorian Western notions of modesty had taken hold by the 1980s in some rural areas and those

who did not follow these standards were again left out of the modern nation:

Some groups in Jalia, such as the Bharwads (shepherds), continue to expose their backs and cover their faces in this way, but they are considered the most deshi and least educated people in the village. The new model of female behavior and

                                                                                                               18  The hypothesis that post-Independence men want women to be traditional while they participate in Western behaviors, reflects colonial-era hypotheses that women needed to wear Indian clothes and protect Indian values and spirituality, because men could (or would) not. However, these hypotheses do not interrogate directly which men must dress in non-Indian ways or not, in which contexts, and how these clothing rules were formalized or understood for which groups. Male agency, choices, and practices needs to be further explored, especially for non upper class men, who may feel different pressures for how to dress.    19  By national period, I refer to the period of colonial rule from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries.    

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appearance that is promoted among the local educated urban elite calls for precisely the opposite cannon of modesty and exposure. Influenced by a Western and, more specifically, Victorian tradition, it requires that the back should be covered but the head and face exposed (Tarlo 1996:195).

Even though those groups were following a traditional way of dressing, because that tradition is

not privileged, they are not part of the contemporary national imaginary. One can see an example

of a sari without blouse in Figure 1 and an example of covering the head with the end of the sari

in Figure 7 in the Appendix.

Although these examples illustrate a conception of modesty that is constructed as modern

and another that is not modern, there is a great deal of variation in how standards of modesty are

adopted or retained in various communities. The notions of appropriate dress and which body

parts should be covered can vary between groups, classes, ethnicities and regions. Papanek

writes in the 1970s that a group studying modesty in Post-Partition Pakistan found that in: “six

sample villages in Lahore district state that every woman is expected to cover her head and

breasts [with a dupatta worn over tunic and trousers] to show herself modest and respect worthy.

Only about twenty of the wives own burqas” (Papanek 1973:10). These women straddle various

standards of modesty and appropriate apparel.

Rooks and Gaskins (2001) explored African American women’s self-representation in

contemporary America and found: “That the body, while open to creative interpretations and in

some respects willful self-creation, has “historically constituted both implicit and explicit

contracts within our legal, political, and cultural systems” (Holloway 41)”” (Rooks and Gaskins

2001:282). These systems are national and regional. Regional variations of modesty persist and

hold sway in many communities. Gujarati women, who favor the Bengali style of tying the sari,

wear the Gujarati style because the Gujarati style is more modest and respected in their

community (Tarlo 1996). In the Appendix, Figure 5 illustrates the Bengali style of sari and

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Figure 6 illustrates the Gujarati style of wearing the sari. Kamala Visweswaran’s research in

South India in the 1990s reveals: “Unlike other parts of India, women in the South did not, as a

rule, cover their heads with their saris...Even the women I recognized as Muslim (by the long

black garment they might wear over a sari) often left heads uncovered, and were never veiled”

(Visweswaran 1994:175).20 Here regional variations elide differences between religious

conceptions of modesty in other areas. Additionally, that which is modest in one area, is not

modest in another. In fact it can be the opposite: In Madras…“Although they had not yet learned

the arts of flirting and wicked whispering behind dupattas or chunnis, it now seemed that the

college-going women of Madras wore the ready-made suits so popular in cities of the North”

(Visweswaran 1994:177). The dupatta can signal modesty in North India and scandal in South

India. Figures 8 through 10 in the Appendix illustrate the suits popular in North Indian cities.

Figures 8 and 10 include a dupatta, which can be used to wrap around the head or face for

modest and practical reasons, like protecting the face from dust in the back of a rickshaw,

motorbike, or scooter. Although notions of modesty are used to signify the nation and its place in

the global system, modesty is not yet a singular, hegemonic concept. It changes and varies with

time and space.

Conclusion

Standards of modesty are situated in particular histories. In India, they have continually

changed since colonial times.21 These changes have been naturalized and normalized as timeless

and hegemonic: a facet of traditional, authentic Indian culture. However, standards of modesty

vary greatly, even in contemporary times across spaces. Certain practices of modesty denote

modernity, while others mark a group as non-modern. Pre-and post-Independence nationalists                                                                                                                20  The images in the Appendix  illustrate a variety of Indian fashions without head coverings, including wearing of the sari without covering the head with the end of the sari.    21  Changes in modesty standards prior to the colonial era are not within the scope of this thesis.

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and leaders in India have deployed conceptions and illustrations of modesty often and

significantly to denote Indian modernity and inviolability. Modesty applies to women in their

roles as representative of the nation and protector of its spirituality. Modesty is also a way to

protect women and their bodies. By policing women’s dress as modest or not modest, the

nation’s morality is policed and protected in the eyes of others and against them as will be

explored further in Chapters Four and Five.

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Chapter 4: Gender-Based Violence in the Public Sphere

Introduction

In this chapter I explore discourses in the media from politicians, religious leaders, and

police officers that connect attacks against women and the guilt of the woman in those attacks to

what a woman wears and discount the aggressor’s culpability. One of the reasons for this moral

policing, I will suggest, is the “rupture in a narrative of a global modernity in India” (Krishnan

2014:20). The rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the national Hindutva party, is illustrative

of an India that is attached to a certain idea of what it means to be a specifically Indian subject,

but which also strives to be a modern, economic force. The tension between multiple versions of

India is so extreme that Shoma Chaudhury of The Tehelka writes “Mohan Bhagwat is not alone

when he asserts more rapes happen in ‘India’ than ‘Bharat’ — the first a synecdoche for

promiscuous modernity; the latter for a more pious and traditional order where women live

within boundaries prescribed by men” (Chaudhury 2013). This strain between a traditional India

and a modern India is often illustrated in the moral policing of women’s bodies and the response

to such policing. I will explore this tension discursively—through the words of religious and

political leaders and officials, lay enforcement officers, and lay supporters to understand these

discourses in part as a response to globalization and foreign influence in Indian lives. Many of

the leaders and officials I reference advocate for replacing skirts with salwar kameez or other

Indian specific types of clothing. They blame skirts and other revealing clothes on Western

influence and advocate for Indian clothing. Clothing in these discourses act as a metonym for

larger Indian and Western cultures.

Moral Policing

Rupture in the Narrative of Indian Modernity

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Moral policing is a common response to the upheaval in Indian society produced by the

entry into the global economic system. The BJP was created in the early 1980s and took off in

the early 1990s, around the same time that the Government of India passed sweeping economic

neoliberal reforms to open the Indian economy to foreign investment and industry. The influx of

foreign interaction with Indian cultures and commodity landscapes has also introduced new and

modified ways of being in the world—and being Indian. Indian women especially have found

new opportunities for work and public visibility, and as a result, Krishnan writes that “A growing

scholarship also observes that the empowered female subject has gradually been co-opted by

neoliberal discourse” (Krishnan 2014:20) and “Gender, has, in the past 20 years, come to be a

buzzword indexing modernity and development” (Krishnan 2014:20). This female subject is

proof of the nation’s development and modernity, which is directly correlated with the nation’s

economic strength—an important measure for the Government, especially the current BJP and

Narendra Modi run Government of India. Modi and the BJP ran on a platform to increase the

economy’s growth after its slump in the 2008 Global Recession. Krishnan writes that after the

2012 Delhi rape “the protests in Delhi also expressed anger at a rupture in a narrative of a global

modernity in India and demands for harsh punishment appeared to seek to repair this

irregularity” (Krishnan 2014:20). Not only was India’s narrative of itself as a growing economic

power coming into its own called into question by this incident, but by the high rates of gender-

based violence all over India (Mitta 2012).

Counter-Narratives to India’s Embrace of Foreign Influence

Contemporaneously, as a result of these rapid changes, some individuals and groups see

not a rupture in India’s continuous ascension to modernity and full development as an economic

power in the world, but a degradation of Indian society and culture. For these individuals and

Koester 30

groups, behavior that is coded as Western and Western originated goods signify that degradation

and the danger to Indian society and culture. For these individuals and groups, women also

signify this degradation and danger through their behavior and apparel. There is a growing

perceived need to reassert Indian religious and cultural traditions and values in direct opposition

to Western cultural practices (Roy, N. 2012a; Radhakrishnan 2009; Mathur and Parameswaran

2007; Yuval-Davis 1997). However constructed, as a moment in time or as a larger process of

global regional and local pushback against globalization, this reassertion finds its locus in

women’s bodies. Women’s role as the symbolic representation of the nation requires that, like

the boundaries of the nation, women’s sexuality is also policed and kept sanctified. Chaudhury

writes that India is suffering “a fear and abhorrence of women who display autonomy over their

own bodies and sexuality. Women’s clothes, you would imagine, are the ‘greatest internal

security threat in this country’” (Chaudhury 2013). For those who perceive this threat, the need

to police women’s bodies and remind them of their responsibilities as women of the nation is

urgent.

Gender Violence as Symbolic Threat to Nation

Political groups at various scales of government, religious leaders, police officers, and lay

people view rape and gender-based violence within the prism of Indian culture and values,

because “Given the symbolic place of women’s sexuality within cultural nationalist myths

(Ramaswamy 1992; Sarkar 2002), rape holds diverse affective currencies” (Krishnan 2014:19-

20). Violating the borders of women’s bodies, translates as well to transgressions of the

community and nation’s borders; “Hindu nationalist women are taught to see themselves as

embodiments of symbolic boundaries in the national iconography, as “symbols of the fecundity

of the nation…vessels for its reproduction…and territorial markers” (Mostov 1995, 515)”

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(Sehgal 2015:60). Therefore, because women’s bodies and sexualities have symbolic and

ideological potency for nationalist and religious leaders, groups, and supporters (of the

nation/community), their responses reveal conflicts between blaming men and women for

straying from Indian cultural and religious practices and traditions, and condemning gender-

based violence that threatens the nation’s imaginary. Often when gender violence is committed

against women who have strayed from appropriate behavior, it is framed as a way to remind

them of their place.22 Ultimately, “the cultural implication underpinning this [the need to guard

the female body from the male gaze, particularly if it is Muslim or lower caste] is the belief that

any violation of the female body is the woman’s fault, as she failed to guard her body (and

mutatis mutandis, the body of the nation) adequately” (Sehgal 2015:70). The Samiti (female

Hindu nationalist group) also explain the oppression of women by men of their community as the

result of being “polluted by the westernized, anti-Indian (read anti-Hindu) women’s movement”

(Sehgal 2015:88). Most of the male leaders and individuals that I quote focus on women’s

Westernization (and inappropriate, non Indian, non religious behavior) as a trigger for boundary

enforcing behavior (i.e. sexual violence and gender-based violence).23

Intracommunal Moral Policing

I found few instances of sexual violence consciously perpetuated by members of one

religious community against members of another religious community.24 There are rumors of

violence against female members of one religious community by another (Menon 2012). Hindu

                                                                                                               22  There is additional subtext that as degraded women (for wearing skirts, drinking, etc), they are already violated and subsequent violation is not negative or problematic—it can even be a way to remind them of their roles as Indian women.    23  Whether they can politically afford to support it publicly or not.    24  In this account, I am addressing the contemporary era, which I am marking as post 1991 (when the neoliberal reforms were enacted). I am not discussing Partition and the violence against women that happened during Partition.  I also focus solely on religious communities in this section. Caste, class, and region produce other interactions and relations.  

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nationalist groups especially find such rumors compelling and share them—feeding into their

fear that they will be overrun numerically by Muslims in India (Sehgal 2015:66-7; Kapur, R.

2014; Menon 2012). Yet, these rumors, like the ones that helped to provoke the 2002 Gujarati

attacks against Muslims, were proven false (Sehgal 2015). It is difficult to find real accounts of

such violence despite their popularity and emotional power. I found suggestion that there were

rapes of Muslim women during the actual riots in Gujarat, but as women did not come forward

they are unverified (Robinson 2009).25

Discourses created by Hindu nationalist women not only marginalize Muslim men, but

also Hindu women, who are blamed for their own oppression and victimization. Sehgal found

that women Hindu nationalists, the Samiti, created a belief that “public sphere violence against

women was framed as being caused by Muslim men, while private sphere violence was

constructed as being caused by Hindu women themselves” (Sehgal 2015:75) Furthermore, the

Samiti “blames women’s own provocative behavior and style of dressing for the sexual

harassment of women. This allows for the existence of Hindu male harassment, and the blame,

rather than falling on Hindu men, fell on Hindu women themselves” (Sehgal 2015:76-7)26. These

discourses converge with the discourses of gender-based violence created and supported by men

in the outer sphere, as I will explore in the next sections when I consider political and religious

actors’ discourses on gender-based violence.

In India, many Muslims also identify women’s bodies with the community. Like Hindu

leaders, “a concern such as domestic violence against Muslim women is one that Muslim

religious leaders certainly would rather was not addressed” (Robinson 2009: 210). Additionally,                                                                                                                25  A major problem in understanding gender-based violence anywhere. It is additionally difficult, because gender-based violence against marginalized groups is a very large problem, but often invisible in India. Work done on caste and class sexual violence would probably inform accounts of violence against Muslims. 26  Sehgal (2015) makes an interesting point that, although the Samiti teach self defense, this defense for the purposes of defending oneself against Muslims, not domestic abusers or other Hindu actors.

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Robinson found that the threat of communal violence and the actual instances of recent

communal violence, like the Gujarat riots “always has negative impacts on women: in its wake

the community male elders seek to regulate women’s mobility, their dress, their behavior and the

like” (Robinson 2009: 210). The need to police the borders of the community results in the need

to police women’s bodies.

Intracommunal Violence

Instead of accounts of intercommunal violence, I found well-publicized accounts of

individuals and groups policing women who they identified as members of their own religious

group. Recently, the “Bollywood actress and model Gauhar Khan was slapped during the

shooting of a reality show by a member of the audience…they quoted the man [who attacked

her] as telling Khan that “being a Muslim woman, she should not have worn such a short dress””

(BBC Correspondent 2014). Firstpost reports that the attacker labeled her skirts as ““unIslamic””

(Roy, S. 2014b) and a women’s right activist responded by protesting against the “disgusting

notion that communities can decide what ‘their’ women wear” (Roy, S. 2014b). Yet this belief is

common.

Other prominent public female figures are also criticized for their inappropriate clothing.

The Indian Muslim tennis star, Sania Mirza, was allegedly threatened by the Bengal Jamiat-

ulema-e-Hind, Muslim fundamentalism group, because of her clothes (Bhaumik 2005). Although

they denied the claims, they did stipulate that ““Though it is true that the kind of dress Sania

wears offends us—we don’t expect a Muslim girl to wear such skimpy clothes in public””

(Bhaumik 2005). As she is a Muslim, Muslim groups feel free to comment on her clothing and

behavior. She is a prominent symbol of Indian Muslim womanhood, not just an Indian Muslim

woman. She troubles the association of woman and the larger communities she is a member of,

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because she does not fulfill the requirements these communities have for their public

representatives. Her position as an Indian Muslim woman put her at risk of a “fatwa—in effect, a

demand that she cover up—…issued by a senior cleric of the Sunni Ulema Board [because] “the

dress she wears on the tennis courts…leaves nothing to the imagination,” [as told by] Haseeb-ul-

hasan Siddiqui [to] The Hindustan Times” (Foster 2005). He continued that “She will

undoubtedly be a corrupting influence” (Foster 2005). Women in public spaces pose greater

risks,27 because of their symbolic power and greater visibility. They challenge that women must

behave in only certain ways to be Indian and religious women.

Dress Codes

One of the ways that members of communities police their community legally or

formally is through dress codes. These codes require members to uphold a certain way of

representing their community. In Mumbai, a law school recently produced an edict that women

wear “sleeves…no less than four inches long and her top [must be] at least seven inches below

her waist” (NDTV Correspondent 2014), and students cannot wear jeans and t-shirts, because

they look like gangsters or thugs (NDTV Correspondent 2014). The school is producing a certain

type of Indian woman and man that is traditional and modest. The students likened the new rules

to the Taliban (NDTV Correspondent 2014). This is a frequent phrase used by those who protest

harsh rules, especially those that are explicitly pro Indian and anti-Western. By doing so, they are

also rhetorically contending that such rules are fundamentalist and anti-secular—despite India’s

historical emphasis on its government and rule as a secular one. Dress codes are also used to

protect their community members from gender-based violence or moral policing.

Political Leaders On Moral Policing

                                                                                                               27  Which is a greater concern because of more women in general in the public sphere as a result of economic reforms and cultural shifts that produce more female students and workers.    

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The implementation of religious-cultural rules and laws or simply political support for

religious-cultural behaviors has mushroomed as the BJP has grown in strength and influence in

the last few decades, “the right-wing Hindu parties in India blamed the entire problem of sexual

violence on evil Western influences and called for the restoration of women to the place of

respect that they once enjoyed in some long-lost ancient Hindu past” (Kapur, R. 2014:11).

Religiously and culturally focused discourses like these call for traditional behavior by men and

women in order to prevent violence. These beliefs become part of the contestation for elections

and vote. Many politicians and supporters, although not all members of any party, believe that

rape and gender-based violence is tied to flouting religious rules and taboos in favor of Western

behavioral practices and seek political ways to limit Western behavioral practices.

Congress, the BJP, Affiliates, and Branches

The two main parties, Congress and BJP, are often made to represent opposite poles in

this discussion, because the Congress Party has long been touted as the secular party, which

promotes a secular India created by the constitution’s guarantees of religious freedom. They have

usually protested the BJP and like-minded group’s emphasis on Hinduism as a basis for Indian

culture and government. This was especially true of the last elections in the spring of 2014. The

BJP must balance their support of economic growth (and neoliberalism and foreign investment)

with their support for a restoration of an imaginary traditional Hindu India. However, these

political parties’ desire for re-election and diverse ideological backgrounds has not meant that

either party has successfully produced a unified response within the party and with their affiliates

and supporters on the causes of gender-based violence and how to successfully respond to and

prevent gender-based violence.

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Previous to the last election, in which the BJP won the majority of seats and the Prime

Ministership, the Congress Party tried to protest some of the BJP’s explicit support for particular

religious-cultural behaviors to gain support from voters, who do not support religious and

cultural based, moral policing. Last January, the BJP Madhya Pradesh home minister, Babulal

Gaur, remarked that “there were fewer sex crimes against women in Chennai because they

dressed up fully and regularly visited temples” by comparing “Chennai’s lower rate of crimes

against women to much higher rates in Bhopal” (HT Correspondent 2014a). The Congress Party

denounced Gaur for his words: “State Congress vice-president Manak Agrawal said “Attributing

higher rate of crimes against women to dresses they wear is ridiculous”” (HT Correspondent

2014a). And the “State Mahila Congress28 president Archana Jaiswal said if dresses had anything

to do with rape and harassment, minors would not have been targeted” (HTa January 2014). In

Kolkata (Calcutta) the political fight for supporters and power between the BJP and the

Trinamool government,29 led by Mamata Banerjee, led to BJP support for less conservative

behaviors: “When a movie theater operated by the Kolkata Municipal Corporation refused to let

a young women in a skirt (accompanied by her father) in for a screening of Happy New

Year…the BJP’s Yuva Morcha demonstrated outside the theater against the Talibanesque

attitudes in Bengal under Mamata’s rule” (Roy, S. 2014b), despite the BJP’s protests against

other behaviors in multiple other areas of India. In Karnataka’s Dakshina Kannada district, BJP

affiliated groups banned burkas and headscarves in state colleges, and “those daring to disobey

have been suspended, asked to leave college and threatened with physical violence” (Sanjana

2009). Sudin Dhavalikar, “Member of BJP ally Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party in Goa”

(MacMillan 2014) critiques Western culture and behaviors and reminds women that they are

                                                                                                               28  The woman’s branch of the Congress Party.    29  A branch of the Congress Party in Bengal.    

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responsible for their own safety (MacMillan 2014). He “said women should not wear bikinis on

Goa’s beaches “for their own safety”, and “girls in short skirts visiting pubs” is against local

culture. ”For their own protection on public beaches, women should not wear bikinis. Pub

culture is not Indian culture and we don’t want Western culture”” (MacMillan 2014). Violence is

often a couched as a possible (and often legitimate) threat to women who breach religiocultural

boundaries. These political machinations demonstrate not only how important Indian and

religious traditional behaviors and values are to these political parties, but how fraught the

categories of religious, traditional, modern, and Indian are in contemporary Indian politics.

Indian politicians draw on the significance, manipulability, and emotional appeal of these

categories to gain support and contest other parties. Many politicians explicitly delineate Indian,

religious behaviors as opposed to obscene, dangerous Western cultural practices in explaining

their support for a putative return to Indian cultural values and religious behaviors. Babulal Gaur

suggested ““Women in foreign countries wear jeans and T-shirts, dance with other men and even

drink liquor, but that is their culture. It’s good for them, but not for India, where only our

traditions and culture are OK” (MacMillan 2014). This belief that different cultures have

different moralities and, therefore, appropriate behaviors, especially for women, who are the

markers of such moralities, is echoed in my own fieldwork with NGO workers in a rural setting

as I will discuss in Chapter 5.

The Hindu Right

Yet, the Hindu Right’s putative shared religious ideology has also not prevented

members and leaders of the party from disagreeing on the causes and solutions for gender-based

violence. In Haryana, multiple political leaders and supporters of Hindutva nationalism, are at

odds with each other over policies of moral policing. The Hindu Mahasabha, a far right Hindu

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party recently issued a dress code for women in the state—one aspect of which is a ban on jeans

(Khatry 2014). The reasoning was that ““If we succeed in our campaign we would manage to

reduce the incidents of rape and eve-teasing”” (Khatry 2014). The BJP state officials did not

support such a code; Capt Abhimanyu, the BJP finance minister of Haryana criticized the dictate

for interfering in people’s lives (Khatry 2014). The unelected, but powerful Khap officials30 did

not present a unified response (Yardley 2012). Although many did not support the ban, some did:

“Kandela Khap president Tek Ram Kandela welcomed the decision of the Hindu Mahasabha.

Simple clothes would reduce the incidents of rape, he said” (Khatry 2014). Even though all these

groups shared a political ideological foundation rooted in Hindutva nationalism, it did not

translate to a unified response to gender-based violence in India.

Blaming the Victim, Excusing the Perpetrator

Although many political actors decry gender-based violence, many blame women for

creating the circumstances that would put them at risk or invite gender-based violence (Miglani

and Chalmers 2014; HT Correspondent 2014b). Some political actors even support violent forms

of moral policing:

“On 24 January 2009, a mob of Hindu Right wing activists belonging to the Sri Ram Seva (footsoldiers of Lord Ram) violently attacked and molested young women in a pub in Mangalore, a port city in South India. Immediately following these attacks Pramod Muthalik, the founder of the SRS stated that ‘‘Whoever has done this has done a good job. Girls going to pubs [sic] is not acceptable. So, whatever the Seva members did was right’’ (NDTV 2009)” (Kapur, R. 2012:2).

As my research into popularized instances of gender-based violence in the contemporary era

shows, this type of punitive action is not ordinary and produces huge protests by women’s

groups, yet it is not unknown (Kapur, R. 2012). The rhetoric produced to support such moral

policing and punitive action does not stray far from rhetoric that situates the responsibly for

                                                                                                               30  Members of unelected, male councils in the state of Haryana (Yardley 2012).  

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gender-based violence directly on the behavior of women. In that rhetoric, women put

themselves in danger by acting in certain ways that risked violence and degradation.

Some politicians outright forgive perpetrators of gender-based violence or dismiss the

seriousness of their behaviors. Last spring, the Samajwadi Party Chief, the governing party of

Uttar Pradesh in early 2014, Mulayam Singh Yadav “opposed capital punishment for rape,

saying “ladke, ladke hain…galti ho jati hai (boys will be boys, they commit mistakes)” (Fareed

2014). Other leaders, like Chhattisgarh’s home minister Ramsewak Paikra, said ““koi jan

bujhkar nahi karta, dhoke se ho jata hai dushkarm” (no one commits rape intentionally. It

happens by mistake”” (TOI Correspondent 2014). This discourse that rape is just a mistake or

accident makes the crime less severe and therefore excuses the perpetrators. Even those who

believe male perpetrators guilty of gender-based violence make the case that Western influences

and commodities (such as movies, songs, food) lead them to that bad behavior and are to blame,

not the men. Westernized behaviors often act as a defense, even an excuse and denial of

culpability, for male perpetrators of gender-based violence, yet women who participate in

Westernized behaviors are often blamed for the occurrence of gender-based violence because of

these behaviors. The participation of women in Westernized behaviors is a sign of their

culpability (MacMillan 2014). The perpetrators’ guilt is dismissed, even as women are blamed

for instigating these “mistakes” and “accidents.”

Other politicians even complain that only the men are punished for rape and beyond

simply shaming or blaming women for instigating the circumstances of gender-based violence,

argue that women should be equally punished for gender-based violence:

Another Samajwadi party leader and father-in-law of actor Ayesha Takia, Abu Azmi had gone to the extent of…"Rape is punishable by hanging in Islam. But here, nothing happens to women, only to men. Even the woman is guilty." Azmi's solution to rape is, "Solution is this: any woman if, whether married or unmarried,

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goes along with a man, with or without her consent, should be hanged. Both should be hanged. It shouldn't be allowed even if a woman goes by consent" (TOI Correspondent 2014).

Such actors inscribe any aspect of women’s sexuality outside of marriage as criminal.

Furthermore, they make explicit the argument that women’s behaviors not only create the

circumstances for gender-based violence, but by doing so these women are complicit in and

guilty of their own attacks.

Religious Leaders and Actors

The politicians’ fears of cultural decline—especially due to the increased presence of

Western cultural products and industries in India—is also reflected and supported by Hindu and

Muslim religious leaders who share the same religious beliefs and cultural values. Many

religious leaders, both Hindu and Muslim espouse a return to Indian religious and cultural values

(these are often overlapping or the same). The Hindu Shankaracharya of Puri Swami Sri

Nischalananda Saraswati is a supporter of the rhetoric of a binary between a positive India and

negative West and reasserts that women are at risk because of the changes to Indian culture and

practices as a result of Western influence. He advocates returning to a putative past and

behaviors to solve gender-based violence (PTI 2013). Other Hindu religious actors and groups

suggest that Western behaviors are the cause of problems in contemporary Indian societies.

Recently, a movement to overturn public indecency laws used to prevent kissing in public has

swept India. This movement provoked a vigorous response from the Rashtryia Swayamsevak

Sangh (RSS), a non-profit organization promoting Hinduism and Hindu values (Crowell 2014).

They claim “”Western culture is degrading Indian culture, Western Civilization shall not

work!”” (Crowell 2014). And, in response to such protests, other “right-wing Hindu

fundamentalists entered the café [where there was a protest happening] with iron rods, smashing

windows and upturning furniture. They claimed the café endorsed “un-Indian” behavior”

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(Crowell 2014). Un-Indian behavior is linked to non-Hindu behavior and prompts fierce and

violent reprisals by religious organizations, in addition to politically affiliated groups.

Muslim religious leaders and groups have also taken it upon themselves to criticize and police

women’s behavior, particularly their sartorial choices. “The clergy of the Jamaat-e-Islami-Hind31

are not alone when they advocate co-educational institutes to be shut down, pre-marital sex to be

outlawed and girls to dress in sober and dignified clothes as ways to prevent rape” (Chaudhury

2013). Shoma Chaudhury of The Tehelka found that Maulana Ubaidur Rahman, Imam of Jama

Masjid, Faizabad, Uttar Pradesh believes “I hold women squarely responsible for the rapes. The

prime reason is revealing dresses, and that hijab32 is now extinct from urban areas” (Chaudhury

2013). Although Hindu and Muslim religious actors, like political actors, often condemn gender-

based violence and disrespect to the position of women, they claim that women must also earn

that respect by behaving in religiously sanctioned ways (Miglani and Chalmers 2014; HT

Correspondent 2014b).

Policing and Moral Policing

Babulal Gaur, as discussed in the section on politicians, was motivated to make his

claims that religious behavior and moral policing increased security in Chennai because “a

number of senior police officers in Chennai told him crimes against women in the city was less

because of their sartorial choices and religious temperament” (HT Correspondent 2014a). The

police, like political and religious actors, also have specific conceptions of what causes and

perpetuates rates of rape in India, and many of these are tied to non-Indian, Western behaviors

and influences: “Responding to a Right to Information request regarding the rising incidents of

sexual crimes against women in the state [found] in Allahabad, policemen posted at Parvai

                                                                                                               31  The same group that protested the tennis star Sania Mirza’s clothing.    32  See Figure 12 in the Appendix for an example of a hijab—a type of head covering often used by Muslim women.    

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station blamed “women’s clothes, appearance, DD telecast, mobile phones and vulgar songs””

(MacMillan 2014). India’s Tehelka magazine ran an expose on what the police officers in the

Delhi/Noida region think of rape and rape victims after the Delhi 2012 rape. Their

correspondents found that some police officers think that “if a woman is doing late hours at the

office then she had it coming” (Bhalla and Vishnu 2012) or “if girls don’t stay within their

boundaries, if they don’t wear appropriate clothes, then naturally there is attraction. This

attraction makes men aggressive, prompting them to just do it” (Bhalla and Vishnu 2012). They

also criticized women for drinking vodka, being divorced, and living with unmarried men

(Bhalla and Vishnu 2012). Many members of the police force in various parts of India believe

that women cause gender-based violence through inappropriate, non-Indian behavior, especially

by wearing what is read as provocative or Western clothing (Bhalla and Vishnu 2012).

Conclusion

Women’s bodies symbolize the boundaries of the nation. Therefore sexual transgression

and gender-based violence can pose an existential threat to the larger social body of the nation.

This is especially true if the transgression comes from outside the community and makes

intercommunal violence a popular target and rationale for perpetuating certain rules and myths

around behavior. Yet often these threats are unsubstantiated by actual incidences of gender-based

violence between groups. Gender-based violence within the community is much more common.

It can be coded as forms of moral policing to reinforce rhetoric that proclaim the necessity of

behaving in certain ways--ways that reinforce specific (usually coded as Indian and traditional)

religious and cultural values.

Politicians, religious actors, and police officers generally condemn gender-based

violence. Yet, they often blame women, at the same time, for provoking or creating the

Koester 43

circumstances for gender-based violence because of their behavior. Some actors even blame

women to the exclusion of the male perpetrators of the actual crimes or judge both parties

mutually guilty of gender-based violence. Other actors excuse male perpetrators or downplay

their guilt and culpability. Negative Western influences are often used to excuse male

perpetrators of gender-based violence, and at the same time reinforce perceptions of women’s

culpability in incidences of gender-based violence. By displacing the blame onto women’s

behavior, traditional and religious values are reinforced and other women learn that if they do not

behave within these bounds, they will be blamed if they are attacked. Therefore, such acts of

violence work to reinforce these values and demonize certain types of behavior.

Gender-based violence and moral policing are important arenas in the negotiation of how

to be Indian in a neoliberal, globalizing era. Many political leaders and religious leaders target

non-Indian elements as precipitating sexual violence and champion traditional, Indian, and

religiously inspired behaviors as preventing sexual violence. They do not acknowledge the ways

this rhetoric limits the ways and spaces in which women may move. Neither do they consider the

way discourses and acts of moral policing produce gender-based violence. Women are taught to

be afraid of public spaces, the religious Other, and behaving in Western ways. At the same time,

intracommunal violence, which is more common, is made invisible, except when it is used to

demonstrate the need for traditional Indian and religious values.

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Chapter 5: Dressing for Safety

Introduction

In my primary ethnographic research performed in Rajasthan in the summer of 2011, I

worked with an NGO whose main site is a school and orphanage for street children located in a

village outside of Jaipur on the Delhi-Jaipur highway. The NGO is primarily run and staffed by

Hindus. Most of the children are Hindu. The organization also runs livelihood training centers,

which provide short-term (several months to a year) courses for adults with little formal

education, primarily women, who want to learn a specific skill to increase their ability to gain

employment. These skills range from different uses of computers and technology to tailoring.

Most of the livelihood centers this organization runs are centered in lower socioeconomic, Jaipur

neighborhoods. The livelihood center I discuss in the conclusion teaches tailoring skills to adult

women, primarily Muslim women.

The NGO hosts many foreign, Western volunteers (in addition to fewer Indian

volunteers) who directly work with the NGO’s staff members and clients, especially children.

NGOs in India are major facilitators of globalization in India especially for people from non-

urban, non-elite strata of society. They bring in foreigners, foreign money, foreign ideas, foreign

ideologies, and foreign methodology. The direct interactions between foreign volunteers and

NGO staff and clients allow for a great deal of cross-cultural interaction.

In my two months with the NGO, I explored the social, cultural and moral functions of

dress for the women with whom I worked, including staff members, the head of the NGO, and

Indian volunteers (most of whom are Hindu). I encountered a prevalent discourse for and by

Indian women to perform “true Indian identity” (Handa 2003:68) through proper dress. In this

discourse modesty is purported to protect women and gain them respect. The community expects

Koester 45

modesty to be performed by female members. It is also a way in which women differentiate their

apparel as Indian and not Western. Modest dressing is tied to the corresponding values they

understand as Indian and not Western.

In my interviews and conversations with the staff members, the staff members who

discussed clothing restrictions and rules with me were all female even though I also spoke with

and interviewed male staff members on a variety of topics. All the women I spoke with regularly

discussed clothing rules at one time or another.33 Many of the female staff members are from

lower socioeconomic strata in North Indian society. As such, they represent a different

subsection of the population from much of the research on contemporary constructions of Indian

identities and responses to globalization, which focuses on the middle class.

Sartorial Modesty as Indian Identity34

Many of the discussions on clothing and proper behavior arose in response to discussions

about what foreign volunteers should wear in India, specifically at the NGO, given its village

location. Mirza, the head of the NGO, explained that proper clothing is a signifier of appropriate

female behavior in both urban and rural areas: “It’s not a good idea in the village or the city.

People would stare, because women in India don’t wear something lower than the neck” (Mirza,

interview 2011). One of the younger staff members, Nandini, told me that female foreign

volunteers need, “to wear long clothes, because in our culture people don’t wear shorts and mini

skirts, not here seen….When they come here we tell them” (Nandini, interview 201l). Rules on

clothing are clearly codified and understood by different members of society. They are also a

                                                                                                               33  It is important for me to note that as a foreign researcher/volunteer I had many conversations in which I was asked the Western ways of doing certain things and in return was explained the Indian way of doing things. 34  In this section I use the language used primarily by my collaborators, who often spoke of Indian culture and not a particular religious culture, although many ways that they used Indian to refer to practices and values overlap with what in the U.S. we would refer to as religious.    

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clear demonstration of membership in Indian culture,35 especially in opposition to foreign,

especially Western culture represented by the reference to shorts and mini-skirts.

The women I spoke with often tied these clothing proscriptions directly to the importance

of culture specific values. Nandini told me: “We don’t wear shorts. We don’t do anything which

is not in our culture” (Nandini, interview 2011). These discourses draw on essential notions of

Indian culture. Reshma, one of the children’s caretakers, agreed, “It is important to know our

values, not another one” (Reshma, interview 2011). Reshma’s comment even foreshadows

Babulal Gaur’s comment that ““Women in foreign countries wear jeans and T-shirts, dance with

other men and even drink liquor, but that is their culture. It’s good for them, but not for India,

where only our traditions and culture are OK” (MacMillan 2014).36 Wearing Western clothing or

acting in Western ways is in appropriate because they are not Indian ways of dressing or acting.

Women must act according to Indian standards of appropriate dress to gain acceptance and

respect, because Indian culture and values are visibly marked on women’s bodies. The clothing

choices women make perform a particular version of Indian identity on a daily basis.

Many of the women I worked with were directly involved in childcare and teaching. One

of their duties was to teach the children, by example, how to behave as an Indian. As Jyotsna told

me: “If somebody smokes close to them and the children ask ‘If it’s not good, why elder do

this?’” (Jyotsna, interview 2011). Staff members and volunteers are not allowed to do certain

things in front of the children that are not appropriate for Indians to do. However, Indian staff

members are not concerned that foreign volunteers will negatively influence the children. Mirza

told me, “some volunteers smoke and so we make sure that the children know they’re smoking

but there are strict rules that they can’t smoke in front of children, they have to go out” (Mirza,

                                                                                                               35  Which often is read to mean local or regional culture.    36  Quoted in Chapter Four.    

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interview 2011). Some Indian staff members also smoke and they must go outside the gates of

the NGO to do so, but they do not discuss this in front of the children. For the NGO staff, the

Indian staff members would have more of an influence on the children’s understandings of what

is proper behavior. The staff members believe that the foreigners acting inappropriately would

not unduly influence the children because the children are taught certain behaviors that are

directly tied to Indian values. Jyotsna explained: “they [foreign] volunteers come and they don’t

know any about our culture, they sometimes make mistakes” (Jyotsna, interview 2011). She

continued, “Western culture is so important for [Westerners], and Indian culture here is so

important for us. Depend on your situation; how you live depend on your culture. Everything is

important. For us, Indian culture is so important” (Jyotsna, interview 2011). Many of the Indian

staff members and volunteers told me that foreigners would not influence Indian practices or

behaviors.

Any time I asked whether the Indian staff members were worried about the ways in which

foreign volunteers dressed, spoke, or acted, I was met with a simple no, headshake, or variation

on Jyotsna’s explanation that we are of different cultures. For these staff members, foreign

volunteers could not influence the children to act in transgressive ways. Their notion of essential

Indianness supersedes any possible Western cultural infringement. Their response surprised me

given the context of political and religious actors who often trace the negatives they find in

contemporary India to Western influences and goods like movies, music, and clothes. However,

the members of this NGO believe that children will be able to disassociate themselves from those

foreign influences and the attendant moral values exhibited by foreigners, because it is a

different cultural and moral system. Yet, if their female caregivers acted in foreign or Western

ways, they could negatively influence the children to want to behave in Western ways.

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Modesty As Safety

In Chapter 4, I demonstrate that many politicians, religious leaders, and police officers

believe that rules and proscriptions on female behavior and apparel will keep women safe from

gender-based violence. The women I met at the NGO—Indian staff members, Indian volunteers,

and the NGO founder—also espoused the need to wear modest clothing in order to be safe from

gender-based violence. Reshma describes sartorial rules and proscriptions as a safety precaution,

“In our culture it is not good for girls to wear short.37 The boys are not good, they laugh at this.

Our Indian culture boys and men are not good” (Reshma, interview 2011). Women, not men, are

responsible for women’s safety and behaving in ways that will minimize the possibility of

violence.

In the summer of 2014, I returned to Rajasthan to participate in an intensive Hindi

language summer program at the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) in Jaipur,

Rajasthan, India. Jaipur is the capital of Rajasthan and as large city, the environment was in

many ways very different than that of the rural residential school. Yet, I found the same

discourses on modesty as safety in the city, as in the village.

AIIS is a collaboration between American universities and Indian institutes. Most of the

program’s participants are American and occasionally European. On arrival in Jaipur, we

participated in an orientation with two lectures from local Indian experts—one on gender-based

violence and the other on personal health. The woman who gave the lecture on gender-based

violence ran a local NGO that worked on gender-based violence issues. This lecture was directed

at women and the dangers women living in India might experience. She described eve teasing38

and covered everything from what to wear and to what to do in the case of eve teasing—such as

                                                                                                               37  I believe she is referring to short clothes, which was the context of our conversation. 38  The widely used term in India for gender harassment.  

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take off our sunglasses and glare if someone inappropriately touched us. We were counseled to

not go out after dark or to travel alone to prevent gender-based violence. We were advised to

wear Indian clothing,39 because it was almost guaranteed to be modest (at least more modest than

Western clothing). If we chose to wear Western clothing, the speaker stressed the importance of

making sure that this clothing covered us completely.

Two of the youngest female members of the program chose to wear Western clothing for

much of the summer. They often exposed their legs, arms, upper chest, or midriff. Their host

mother—a middle class, Hindu woman—suggested at least several times a week that they wear

salwar kameez. After multiple suggestions, she would express frustration, “Why do not wear

salwar kameez? Do you not like salwar kameez?” On the few occasions in which one of the girls

wore a kurti top or salwar kameez, the host mother expressed approval and complimented them

on their outfit’s attractiveness. Their host mother was quite worried about their safety and often

gave them advice to dress differently and more modestly in order to be safe. She also advised

them not to go out after dark, to not travel alone, and to take rickshaws together. In her opinion,

women needed to protect themselves from eve-teasing and other dangers, especially at night, and

these girls were not doing enough to avoid gender-based violence. She often used the phrase “not

good” to refer to situations in which men could attack women—such as having two men in the

rickshaw—instead of directly referring to gender-based violence, sexual harassment, and rape.

The girls lived in a neighborhood of middle class families. Other residents on the street

would gossip about these “American students” and their clothing, including a host mother who

lived across the street from the students. She expressed disproval that their host mother let them

leave the house in the clothes, because of their revealing and immodest nature. She also worried

                                                                                                               39  Primarily salwar kameez, kurtis, and churidars. See Appendix for illustrations, especially Figures 8, 9, and 10.    

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that something bad would happen to them—especially since everyone was aware of their

revealing clothes and talked about these students. Her tone and perspective was highly critical of

them and their host mother for flouting such basic safety precautions and cultural requirements.

She did not discuss other American students. She herself was a host mother and expressed

approval at her American host daughter’s Indian clothing, namely salwar kameez and kurti tops

with jeans. My own host mother also expressed approval at my wearing similar types of Indian

clothing during the summer. She complimented all my Indian outfits and at the end of the

summer gave me a chiffon dupatta to wear with my outfits.

Self Regulation

In India, women must regulate their behavior, especially their sartorial practices. If they

transgress these rules, they are vulnerable to other social transgressions including those that fall

under the heading of moral policing, as discussed in Chapter 4. The women I worked with,

studied with, and lived with in Rajasthan made a clear link between clothing and these

transgressions in explaining their clothing choices and what foreign women, like myself, should

wear. Wearing immodest, inappropriate, or Western clothing is perceived as posing danger to the

wearer. Therefore, from the viewpoints of women I worked with, women need to be conscious of

these dangers in choosing their clothing. Emma Tarlo (1996) writes that “Young women who

abandon the veil take a considerable risk in a culture where female modesty is still so highly

prized and female honor so intensely vulnerable” (Tarlo 1996:199). The same can be said about

immodest dress—it is a perceived risk taken on by women.

Performing Gender Incorrectly

I would like here to apply Judith Butler’s exploration (1988) of gender as “a performance

with clearly punitive consequences” (Butler 1988:522) to the North Indian context. Her work

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addresses gender performance in the Western context. Specifically she looks at those who act

across genders, who perform another gender than the one that society thinks they should identify

as and perform, and the consequences that arise from not performing their gender in a manner

that their society thinks is appropriate. In this work, I am focusing not on those whose identity

crosses, blurs, or rejects gender binaries and strict performance of such genders in the Western

setting, but the limits to performing the female gender by a female in the Indian context. I would

like to argue that Butler’s analysis (1988) of those acting across genders can also apply to

women recognized as female by society who are performing female identity. Butler writes that

“Performing one's gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and

performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after

all” (Butler 1988:528). Butler is referring to individuals in Western societies, which privilege a

binary understanding of gender and the way not performing one’s gender correctly, as

determined by society, puts one at risk of a number of negative consequences, punishments

(Butler 1988). I argue that, in North India, women’s embodied gender performances, if

performed incorrectly through immodest (and especially Western) sartorial practices, can invite a

range of punishments from gender-based violence to lack of acceptance by the group. If women

dress according to the requirements of their cultural context, they provide their communities with

Butler’s “reassurance” (Butler 1988:528) that Indian culture and values are still vibrant,

respected, and strong in the face of globalization and international pressures.40

Women’s Response to Sartorial Limits and the Perceived Need for Self Policing

The contemporary discourse on nationalism in India is gendered female. Women are

                                                                                                               40  Here I am arguing that there is a predominant discourse set up that excuses or even permits certain consequences of particular gender performances in North India that changes the environment in which gender-based violence occurs and how it is responded to and understood by the wider community, not that there is a one-to-one correlation between particular behaviors and certain types of violence.  

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required to be female in certain ways—one of which is wearing Indian clothing. None of my

interlocutors explicitly denounce the sartorial limits on women or the larger value system

underpinning these limits. Except in certain spaces to be explored in my concluding chapter, they

accept them as part of that system. However, not all women in India accept that clothing rules

will make them safer or that they should bear the brunt of their own security through self

policing. Activists are currently challenging this belief across India. They pinpoint aspects of

India’s culture and society, like male domination, male dominated public space (especially after

dark), and traditional attitudes that they charge perpetuate or support gender-based violence and

prevent justice for victims (Armstrong 2013; Khazan and Lakshmi 2012; Bhalla 2011; Lakshmi

2011).

Women’s activist groups often identify aspects of the nation’s culture and society as

perpetuating a culture of rape and gender-based violence (Khazan and Lakshmi 2012).

Not only is the larger culture critiqued, but protestors also target specifically the instruments of

state that are supposed to keep people safe and prosecute crimes. Protesters in villages in

Haryana called out for justice for raped girls and women, “About 100 men and women picketed

the district police headquarters over the rape of a 17-year-old girl. They waved signs demanding

“Arrest Rapists!” and “Justice for Women” and chanted “Down with Haryana Police!””(Yardley

2012). The lack of police, the lack of female police officers, and police disinterest in arresting

rapists (even support for those who commit rape) is recognized as an ongoing problem

(MacMillan 2014; Bhalla and Vishnu 2012; Khazan and Lakshmi 2012; Yardley 2012).

Many of these Indian activists have focused on victim shaming and blaming as part of the

problem of sexual violence against women. They discredit the discourse that a modest woman is

a safe woman. In this move, they are part of a widespread, global phenomenon. In 2011 in

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Toronto, Canada, one of the most visible and global protests against such shaming and blaming

was created. SlutWalk was born to protest views that “‘women should avoid dressing like sluts in

order not to be victimized’” (slutwalktoronto.com). The adoption of SlutWalks in India joins

Indian protestors with protestors around the world who all protest similar types of gender

violence and the sartorial reasoning employed by many to excuse it no matter the culture or

societal context.

Indian women have adopted and implemented SlutWalks in multiple cities throughout the

subcontinent. They take the movement in a slightly different direction than other, particularly

Western SlutWalks. In those, “the term ‘slut-shaming’ was coined…because of the way so many

survivors have been bullied, blamed, and degraded for attacks against them by being called terms

such as ‘slut’” (slutwalktoronto.com). Slut and other pejoratives are taken back and claimed

proudly—these movements attempt to defuse the pejorative. In India, the common pejoratives

are “shameful” and “shameless.” In Hindi41 the word for “shameless” is “besharm” and is never

a positive adjective in India. It is always used pejoratively to refer to one who is shameful but

does not feel shame as they should.42 However, women in India are trying to recuperate

“besharm” as meaning “without shame.” As one protestor in a march in Delhi 2011 wrote on a

poster, “I have got nothing to be ashamed of” (Hannon 2011). Roy writes that for the 2011

march in New Delhi “few Indians use the word ‘slut,’ and the organizers of the march had

attempted to translate it as ‘Besharami Morcha’” (Roy, N. 2012b) to resonate with potential

participants and observers. The organizers are deploying this word in a new context to

demonstrate that women are not to be shamed for being female (Bhalla 2011).

                                                                                                               41  One of the two national languages of India. The other is English. It is widespread in North India, but much less so in the South.  42  As described in personal conversations with Indians in Rajasthan, including in my Hindi classes.  

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Although the SlutWalks in India resonate with other SlutWalks in the world and their

aims—defending victims and fighting women shaming and victim blaming—some of the

language used is notable because it positions India as being culturally behind other nations that

are more advanced. Meena Kandasamy, a poet, wrote that:

SlutWalkers are fighting against shame, because it is an oppressive tool in rape culture. But, here in India, a woman…is shamed even before she has seen the light of day, when her sex is revealed in a shady scan, when she is not allowed to be born because she will grow up to be a woman. She is shamed when she joins a sisterhood of aborted girl children, 12 million in the past thirty years. She is shamed by deathly silence. She is shamed by us, the survivors who have not spoken out, either for her, or for ourselves (Kandasamy 2011).

This poet contests that shame as a female sensibility in India is larger than sexual harassment and

gender-based violence; it is part of the structural violence that shapes many women’s lives in

India today. These women critique Indian culture as particularly inimical to women’s lives and

safety, in a way that other national cultures are not.43 A reporter for CNN “asked [a group of

young women in Uttar Pradesh protesting sexual harassment] whether they are dealing with a

deep-rooted cultural problem, Vishwakarma's 16-year-old sister, Lakshmi, shook her head

emphatically. "This is not a cultural problem -- it's a social problem because men have a higher

social status than girls"” (Armstrong 2013). These women’s words contradict Indian political and

religious leaders’ focus on and condemnation of Western influences as the primary contributor to

gender-based violence.

The changes to the marches also directly challenge discourses championing traditional

modes of modesty as a method of security. Many of the marches’ participants across India do not

wear particularly provocative or revealing clothing. That twenty-two year old student stated: “we

face sexual harassment and rape no matter what we wear”” (Bhalla 2011). Another SlutWalk

participant in Delhi said that: “”There will be no dress code” for the march…In India, no matter

                                                                                                               43  Despite the accuracy or inaccuracy of such beliefs.    

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what we wear, even if we are covered head to toe in a sari or a burqa, we get molested and

raped” (Lakshmi 2011). If other marches highlight the marginalization of women dressed in a

particular way, these protestors are protesting the very links between appropriate gender

performance and safety in India, by focusing on the larger patterns of violence that are aspects of

daily life in India for many women. By wearing non-provocative clothes these protestors make

people question their beliefs that only girls who dress provocatively, who in some way could be

argued as inciting violence per remarks like those made by police officers and politicians in

Chapter 4, are the ones who are attacked. Therefore, they challenge the entire assumption that the

responsibility to prevent attacks is on the woman or based on women’s behaviors. They protest

that “Rape is perpetuated by perverts, not clothes. Girls are the victims, not the initiators” (Bhalla

2011). These activists pinpoint a national culture (or cultures) that produces perpetrators of

gender-based violence and doesn’t punish or stop them, as the problem in India.44

Conclusion

In my fieldwork with an NGO in rural Rajasthan and in my experience living in a

homestay and studying in Jaipur, Rajasthan, I learned that many women feel the need to be

modest in their daily sartorial practices and embody cultural values in order to be safe. The                                                                                                                44  There is a growing discourse protesting the wholesale vilification of men at the same time there is increased male

presence in activist groups and protests, like “India Needs Feminism” that has become popular on social media.

Naila Kabeer identifies one of the reasons for the huge and well publicized response to the Delhi 2012 rape as the

participation of men:

The second reason is the very visible presence of men. One of the most discouraging aspects of women’s struggles for justice, not just in South Asia, but across the world, has been how few and far between have been the men prepared to stand up and be counted. Not this time. Men, mostly but not only young men, are speaking out in the press and taking their place alongside women on the streets (Kabeer 2014).

Many SlutWalkers are university men, who protest gender based violence, and victim shaming and blaming. Part of

the reason these men join is to prove that not all Indian men are not dangerous, nor do they support the infrastructure

that often blames or shames women for gender-based violence (Bhalla 2011).

 

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women I worked and lived with echoed the discourses of politicians, religious leaders, and police

officers that women need to dress modestly (and often according to Indian styles and standards)

to be safe. These women actively espouse modesty as a way to attempt to keep safe in public

spaces and teach safety through modesty to foreigners and children.

However, Indian activists are questioning not only the misogynistic logic that modesty

equals safety, but its also accuracy. Indian protestors have embraced the global SlutWalk

movement to protest sexual violence and harassment, especially in public spaces. However, they

do not adopt the term ‘slut’ or dress in culturally immodest ways—instead these movements

attempt to recuperate the pejorative ‘shameless’ to argue that all women in India are ‘shameless’

for being women and should be safe from the multiple types of gender-based violence that

threaten them throughout their lives. They believe women are particularly vulnerable in India in

multiple ways—not just at risk of sexual violence—and contest the notion that behaving

according to Indian cultural traditions and values will make women safe. These activists call for

concrete legal and political changes that will change the way gender-based violence in India is

regarded, responded to, prevented, and fought.

   

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Conclusion: Experimentation

Purdah and Outer and Inner Spheres

In North India there is a history of spatially limiting women to certain spaces or to

moving in certain ways. The seclusion of women, or purdah, means both the seclusion of women

in homes, and in the ways women should dress and interact in public spaces (Papanek 1973).

Partha Chatterjee produces a specific notion of purdah for middle class Bengali women during

the nationalist movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Chatterjee 1995;

Chatterjee 1990). He argues for an emergence of societal divisions mapped onto a gendered

divide between the public and the private: the inner, domestic, feminine sphere and an outer,

masculine sphere. Bernard Cohn notes that elite homes in colonial Calcutta were divided into

separate sections to aid in a man’s transfer from the outside, Western dominated world to the

inner world of the home (Cohn 1989:341). Elite men who daily had to interact with colonists and

submit to their rules and lifeways in public spaces, could counteract these spiritual threats to their

culture by cloistering women in the home where they would preserve Indian values and practices

(Chatterjee 1995; Chatterjee 1990). Women’s behavior is highly symbolic, particularly so in the

colonial era: “concepts of femininity in the context of colonial India became inseparable from a

politics of cultural authenticity, preservation, and Indian identity itself” (Handa 2003:67).

This notion of purdah, or the gendered spatial division of society, did not end with Indian

Independence. Papanek (1973) found instances of multiple forms of purdah across North India in

Muslim and Hindu communities and writes in the early 1970s that “it [is] possible for the family

of an industrial leader to 'Sanskritize' its domestic life while the man's life in office and factory is

being 'westernized'” (Papanek 1973:36) directly reflecting patterns that were developed under

colonialism. In my research, I discovered echoes of the inner and outer discussion, also in

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response to foreign penetration of India. Jasmeet, a college student from Delhi University and

fellow volunteer, explained:

Foreigners can never influence Indians…. So it’s not going to impact us. Culturally definitely no but then when it comes to work, so they can influence us and there are a lot of things that can we can learn from them. In the India IT sector definitely they have an impact but not culturally (Jasmeet, interview 2011).

Jasmeet describes a new conception of the outer and inner spheres in a post-liberalization India

as economic and cultural spheres.

Forms of purdah, particularly women’s veiling in public spaces, is still very much

practiced in North India, especially in rural areas or in particular communities, like urban

Muslim communities. Purdah factors into the types of responses people in North India have had

to the presence of women in public spaces, especially workspaces—and particularly as a result of

globalization. Some groups protest women’s movements in public spaces and require they stay in

private spaces. Other groups elaborate sartorial restrictions and requirements for women in

public spaces. A significant way that women’s behavior in public spaces is restricted, but

accepted, is through the veil.

Experimentation in the NGO Space

NGOs in India are major facilitators of globalization in contemporary India--especially

for people from non-urban, non-elite strata of society, who do not work in tourist industries or

transnational companies. I first began research with an NGO because of the NGO’s ties to the

global economy through volunteer-tourists and the rising volunteer-tourism industry. The NGO,

in addition to running a residential school for street children in rural Rajasthan, lead livelihood

programs for women with limited access to education in Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan. The

particular livelihood group I worked with in Jaipur was centered in a predominately Muslim and

lower socioeconomic neighborhood.

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Many of the urban clients of the NGO were not allowed to move freely in public spaces.

Some were permitted to attend school before their marriages, but after marriage spent time in

their homes and the homes of neighbors and relatives. Although they were participating in a

livelihood program, learning such skills as tailoring, many of these women were aware that after

completing the program, they would be not be permitted to work outside the home. The NGO

understood this and planned to facilitate work for women to do inside their homes.

For these women, the NGO was a unique space outside of their home and friends’ and

families’ homes that they could go. Not only were these women allowed to go to the NGO for

work and lessons, the NGO space was also a space where women could dispense with some of

the sartorial restrictions they found in other spaces of their lives—even as they upheld others.

Particularly for women, the NGO can be a space that allows women to perform gender and their

individual identity in multiple ways.

I found that both Hindu and Muslim clients and employees of the NGO were encouraged

to remove their head coverings and veils while working and learning at the NGO. I interacted

with Hindu clients in the village in rural Rajasthan outside of Jaipur at the residential school. I

primarily interacted with Muslim clients in Jaipur at the livelihood centers. Dipali, the Hindu

wife and assistant of the NGO’s tailor, describes her sense of freedom in the NGO45 as opposed

to in her village:

In the village, women don’t do work outside the home. So it is good to work here and earn some money for my family ….In India especially in village it is very tight rules for women. They can’t go outside. They can’t show their faces. They can’t be free. They can come here and feel good and feel they are free…. Yes, I feel free here (Dipali, interview 2011).

                                                                                                               45  Located in a separate space in a Rajasthani village not her natal village, which is also in Rajasthan.    

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Nandini described the requirement to wear a veil in the village: “In the village women wear long

veils, she can’t show her face” (Nandini, interview 2011). These women are Hindu and worked

primarily in the NGO’s village location. They covered their faces in public with the end of their

saris, as illustrated in Figure 7 in the Appendix. Many of the clients of the urban livelihood

program are Muslim, and they came to the NGO wearing a burqa, hijab, or other type of head

and face covering (See figures 12 and 13 for an example of each). However, after arriving at the

NGO, the women, both Hindu and Muslim often removed these various head coverings. They

explained to me that they did so, because the NGO staff members, and the head of the NGO

herself, Mirza, encouraged them to do so. The need to cover the face is a strong proscription that

is a daily part of lived realities that these women do not challenge, except in the NGO space.

I began to explore the NGO as a space apart from the other domains, and their associated

rules and proscriptions. I started by drawing on certain understandings of Foucault’s heterotopic

space (Foucault 1984). Michel Foucault (1984) represents heterotopias as a place where “all the

other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested,

and inverted” (Foucault 1984: np). I was particularly interested in what Foucault (1984) suggests

“we might call heterotopias of deviation” (Foucault 1984:np) and Nicholas Crane’s (2012)

understanding of “heterotopic spaces as “sites of resistance” (Topinka, 2010)” (Crane 2012:354).

The NGO is a place apart from both notions of an outer, economic sphere, and of an inner,

domestic sphere. In the NGO space in urban and rural Rajasthan, women have the possibility to

deviate from the sartorial norms and requirements they find in their daily lives. For some

women, it is also a new space outside of the domestic space of the home that they can move in.

Some transgressive behaviors are acceptable in these spaces and even encouraged, while others

are forbidden—women are encouraged to uncover their heads, but prohibited from smoking and

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drinking, for instance. These discourses on appropriate sartorial behavior do not seem to have

affected these women’s lives outside of the NGO, and the NGO staff members who spoke about

encouraging women to remove their head coverings at the NGO specified they do so only in the

NGO space. In the NGO space women have the possibilities for deviance from an accepted

sartorial standard.

However, I would like to suggest that this deviance is less a sign of aberrant behavior and

more a signal that sartorial standards of modesty are changing for lower caste and class groups in

India through greater exposure to Western standards of modesty via internationally connected

NGOs. Recently there has been a Western emphasis on removing the veil and various head

coverings as signifiers of oppression around the world, which has prompted a resurgence in

denouncing head coverings by Western and affiliated groups. In India, the opening of the

national economy to the world produced an earnest discourse on reconciling the modern and the

traditional, Western and Indian. Much of this conversation has played out on woman’s bodies.

Many women in urban areas, particularly many upper and middle class women, do not cover

their faces, or often cover any part of their heads. For many Indians covering the head is no

longer congruent with dominant discourses of Indian modesty, tradition and modernity.

However, for those from strongly religious groups or rural areas, head coverings are still

a requirement for daily activities, particularly outside of the private sphere, such as traveling and

work. Emma Tarlo (1996) found that for women in rural Gujarat: “the custom of veiling is so

interlinked with the cultural construction of modesty, which is seen as natural to women, that it

acts as a sartorial constraint, preventing change beyond a certain level” (Tarlo 1996:166-7). I

found this to be true of the women I worked with in various NGO spaces and programs.

However, as I begin to demonstrate here, new types of modesty can produce new sartorial

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practices. For these women in the livelihood program, the NGO functions as a site for

experimentation with varieties of feminized identity—it is an opportunity for deviance and

resistance—even if only while they are in the NGO space. For them, the NGO is a space apart,

where women can experiment with clothing decisions and ways of performing their identity as

women—opportunities for such experimentation they do not experience elsewhere at the risk of

incurring punitive sanctions for improperly performing their gender.46 Whether Indian modesty

is again changing to incorporate foreign attitudes, these women are still transgressive in their

own societal and cultural contexts.

Conclusion

Women in India symbolically represent the nation; they are Bharat Mata or Mother India.

Women do so visually, through their dress, and most importantly, their modesty. Dress and the

values that undergird preferred dress, is a tradition that is often constructed and reformulated

based on the needs of the nation or nationalists at the time—a form of Hobsbawm’s invented

tradition (Hobsbawm 1983). Different traditions are combined and aspects of some traditions are

purged. Different forms of Indianness are privileged. Dress contains a wide variety of

possibilities for creativity, both for nationalists and the women who wear these clothes. Even

within the framework of a certain type of dress, women and communities can experiment with

the cloth, color, styling and wearing of a particular form. These different ways of wearing a type

of dress are not always available to all wearers, but their existence confound any homogenous

national project to represent India as one particular representation of India.

A variety of definitions of modesty have been privileged in India, because modesty

delineates a particular national moral imaginary of what it means to be Indian and who is Indian

                                                                                                               46  I draw on Judith Butler’s language to describe the consequences for incorrectly performing gender based on cultural and societal norms in the North Indian context.    

Koester 63

in the global political system—mapped onto women’s bodies. Women connect their cultural

performance to their demonstration of particular types of modesty. And, as I demonstrate in this

concluding chapter, this performance is beginning to change in the NGO space—signaling a

wider spread change in North Indian cultures as more groups are connected to NGOs and by

NGOs to these particular understandings of modesty and standards of appropriate feminine

behavior.

In India, women must demonstrate their adherence to accepted standards of modesty in

order to represent the nation. Women gain respect as the upholders of the nation and household if

they are modest, but can lose it if they are not dressed appropriately and modestly (Ganguly-

Scrase and Scrase 2009). Yet modesty is not a fixed category. Partha Chatterjee and Emma Tarlo

write that under British rule, ideas about what is modest in women’s dress began to change in

North India (Tarlo 1996; Chatterjee 1990). People began to adopt Victorian ideas that revealing

parts of the upper body, particularly the chest and stomach, was immodest, while at the same

time discarding the idea that modest women must cover their head and face. Women in that

period began to adopt the Western style blouse and petticoats to make their dress more modest

(in their and the British’ eyes) (Tarlo 1996). In this case, exposure to outside values prompted a

reformulation of what it means to be modest in India that quickly became very widespread (Bahl

2005; Tarlo 1996). Despite shifts in the idea of what is modest, modesty is still a key aspect of

what is appropriate national dress.

Those who do not adapt new forms of modesty are viewed by those they do as backward

or old fashioned.47 Tarlo found that wearing a style of clothing that reflects pre-colonial ways of

dressing and begin modesty was discouraged in rural Gujarat even as late as the second half of

                                                                                                               47  By demonstrating an adherence to other standards of modesty, they are by extension declaring an allegiance to a different morality from that undergirding a new standard of modesty.      

Koester 64

the twentieth century (Tarlo 1996). Those who exposed their torsos, but covered their heads and

faces were banished from the national imaginary. Even though they were following a type of

traditional way of dressing, because that tradition is not privileged they are not no longer

performing ideal Indian femininity or supporting the contemporary national project. The project

of modesty illustrates the larger projects of nationalism and national moralities that are

continually being created, including some people and groups and excluding others.

Globalization and interaction with the global economic system has increased the presence

of women in public spaces in new ways in India. These new ways and the new cultural

influences that have entered India via globalization and neoliberal economic policies have

created new ways for women to perform their identity and is prompting, for some,

reformulations of modesty and what it is to be and dress Indian. However, this process is not

without its challengers and protestors—increasing the variety of ways to dress as an Indian

woman has increased the visibility of discourses of moral policing and violence as a consequence

of particular ways of dressing. For many, specific types of Indian dress and the corresponding

modesty espoused by articles and styles of dress are seen as a way to defer violence and

harassment, because these types of dress uphold certain moral codes—often tied to projects to

create a specific Indian nation. Yet, the ties between Indian clothing, modesty, and safety are

coming under question by activist organizations, who see these ties as a smokescreen that deflect

from the real problem of multiple types of violence that affect women no matter what they wear.

And what it means to be modest, and therefore moral and Indian, is at the heart of these

discourses and current Indian identity politics—determining who can be and who is Indian,

especially in the face of great and rapid change.

Koester 65

APPENDIX: Illustrations  

   

 Figure 1. (Foreground) Sari without choli (blouse) from Bengal.48

Chest, stomach, and legs covered. Shoulder, upper chest, head, and back uncovered.

Figure 2. Brahmika sari with blouse and petticoat.49

Arms, shoulders, stomach, chest, and back are covered.

                                                                                                               48  FlickrCommons user basoo!. “Birbhum, West Bengal, 2011.” March 22, 2011. JPEG file.  49  Vintageindianclothing.com “Vintage Saree Blouse.” February 26, 2015. PNG file.  

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Figure 3. Sari with sleeveless choli (blouse)50:

Chest, part of back, legs, and shoulders (partially) covered. Option to have the head covered with the end of the sari. Part of back, stomach, and arms uncovered. One variation of wearing a sari

with choli.

Figure 4. Close up of the back of the torso in this type of sari with choli51

                                                                                                               50  FlickrCommons user CT Pham. “Vinya Model-Sun Dress Sari.” July 14, 2011. JPEG file. 51  FlickrCommons user Richard Buttrey. “Back to Basics.” April 18, 2009. JPEG file.  

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Figure 5. Bengali sari52

Part of back, chest, shoulders, and legs covered. Part of the back, stomach, and head uncovered. This style is created by wrapping the sari around the waist, and then taking the end of the sari (which is now in the front of the body) and pleating it before placing it over the left shoulder.

Then one takes the end of the sari again and wraps it around the right side of the body, under the arm, to then drape over the right shoulder. Often one does not wear a petticoat under this style

(“How to Wear Bengali Style”).

                                                                                                               52  FlickrCommons user Sourav K Dutta. “a night of celebration.” July 4, 2009. JPEG file.  

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Figure 6. Gujarati saris53

Chest, stomach, legs, and shoulders covered. Head is uncovered. More of the front is covered in this style than in the Bengali style. This style is created by making several pleats with the end of

the sari. Take the end to the back from the right side of the skirt (under the arm) and drape it (from the back) over the right shoulder. It should be pinned on the shoulder and then the hanging pleats are pinned on the left side of the waist (“How to Wear Gujarati Saree”). This style is worn with a petticoat. This style does not emphasize the body and is bulkier due to more pleats in the

draping of the sari around the waist and across the chest.

                                                                                                               53  FlickrCommons user Joel Dousset. “Fish market. Gohghla.” February 19, 2009. JPEG file.  

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Figure 7. Saris covering heads54

The head is covered and the face can be covered. The ease with which one can cover the head and face depends on the fabric, length, and style of wearing the sari. For example, given the

pleats and way of draping the Bengali sari, it would be difficult to cover the head.

                                                                                                               54  FlickrCommons user Joel Dousset. “Smiles. Pushkar.” November 8, 2008. JPEG file.  

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Figure 8. Kameez/kurti55 with churidar and dupatta56

The kameez/kurti is the top, churidar are the tight pants, and the dupatta is the scarf (usually worn across the chest, with the ends dangling down the back, or to cover the head and face,

although in this photo it is the sheer fabric draped on the model’s wrist). The churidar is more controversial because it is tight fitting around the legs and the outline of the legs can be seen

clearly.                                                                                                                55  Because of its length and tunic like shape, this top appears to be a kurti. Kurti tops tend to be shorter with a more fitted bodice. Kameez tops tend to refer to longer tops with a skirt like bottom, however many people use both interchangeably to describe long tops worn over churidar and salwar pants, especially if they are of middle length (around knee length), like this top. It is increasingly common for kurti, kameez, and even sari blouses (cholis) to be sleeveless. However, the more conservative styles still have ¾ or long sleeves. Often kurti tops will be sold sleeveless with the sleeves attached to the inside of the body of the kurti and the purchaser can choose to wear it sleeveless or add the sleeves (and in doing so, shorten them).  56  FlickrCommons user Tanu Bansal. “Wine and Blue Brocade Churidar Kameez.” November 30, 20011. JPEG file.  

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Figure 9. Kurti with jeans, no dupatta57

This is a more easily categorized kurti because it is shorter, fitted and has longer sleeves.

                                                                                                               57  FlickrCommons user Mani Arumugam. “Appealing-White-Pure-Cotton-Kurti-KRCT1203-his.” April 2, 20012. JPEG file.  

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Figure 10. Kurti or Salwar Kameez with dupatta58

Salwar is the baggy pants and the kurti/kameez is the long top (See Figure 8 for an explanation of how kameez and kurti are defined and understood). The dupatta is draped more traditionally in

this photo, with the ends draped over the shoulders to hang along the back of the body.

                                                                                                               58  FlickrCommons user Mani Arumugam. “Appealing-White-Pure-Cotton-Kurti-KRCT1203-his.” April 2, 2012. JPEG file.  

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Figure 11. Indo-Western Gown with dupatta59

                                                                                                               59   www.kalkifashion.com. “Homepage Photo.” May 2014. JPEG file.  

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Figure 12. Hijab.60 Primarily covers the head and shoulders.

Figure 13. Burqa (also often spelled Burka).61

It has much more extensive coverage than the hijab. It covers the body and face, usually everything but the eyes, although some burqas have netting to cover the eyes.

                                                                                                               60  FlickrCommons user Inayah6. “Soft Georgette Hijabs-Inayah Essentials.” May 23, 2013. JPEG file.  61  FlickrCommons user Louis Zoellar Bickett II. “Burka.” Nov 5, 2007. JPEG file.  

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