Sex and (Indian) Suits

I wore the first salwar kameez made for me to a conference on Indian higher education, where I was one of (many) speakers and needed to be professionally presentable. Monday I selected material for four more “suits,” two dressy and two everyday. They’ll be finished in 10 days.

What's a salwar kameez, you ask?

It’s the modern Indian woman’s compromise with the traditional sari (could kameez be related etymologically to chemise? ) It consists of a sheath with short sleeves and a scooped or vertically slit neckline, fitted close to the body around the arms and upper chest and following the lines of body to the hem, just above or below knee length with side seam slits. Worn beneath are bloomers to the ankle called the salwar that vary in billowingness. Draped over the shoulders is a long scarf or dupatta. It’s most likely to be worn by the young. The sari is a more traditional garment with a very tight top that ends midway down the rib cage to create a bared midriff. It has a longer dupatta than the kameez because it has to do more work. Instead of bloomers, a long rectangle of fabric ties around the hips and waist.

In Sex and Suits, Nancy Hollander says that the history of women’s fashion in the West is the story of copying male dress. This may also apply to salwar kameezes which I’ve heard it described as a feminine version of the kurta pyjama worn by men, a three-quarter length, sometimes shorter, loose shirt, slitted a bit on each side, with three-quarter sleeves and a small Chinese sort of collar.

Secular men of the world wear British-descended slacks, belted with a tucked in shirt along with the wear the kurta pyjama. Most common still is an untucked-in shirt over loose pants. Sadhus, of course, look quite different. Bare-chested, with markings on their face, long, loose hair and beards, they wear dhotis, a huge piece of white cloth wrapped back to front and somehow pulled through the legs to tuck in at the waist in back. I don’t quite get the mechanics but it never betrays modesty.

Gender-differentiated dress lands the maintenance of tradition on women, a traditional female task. In Varanasi, which is quite a conservative city, some young women wear tight jeans with their kameezes in place of the salwar, but female Western dress appears almost exclusively on Western females.

We wear it well because we know how to. It’s interesting to see Western women struggle self-consciously with newly acquired salwar kameezes (few attempt the midriff-baring sari). Wearing it is meant to signal some knowledge of and appreciation for the culture— that we’re not wholly outsiders. What it shows is exactly that we’re outsiders. The dupatta falls off, our haircuts don’t go with the drapey femininity of traditional shapes, our complexions are pastily inadequate for the rich and dramatic tapestries of color and pattern. We’re afraid to sit on the ground or the steps. It’s a lot of fabric for Western women to manage. We stand awkwardly amidst it while Indian women glide by with ease.

Westerners sometimes wear the dupattalike a Western scarf, draped around the neck with its two ends descending down the front of the kameez. This is exactly wrong. The point of the kameez is to cover the front upper chest area. Indian women put the ends of the chunri down the back and use the rest of it to cover more or less of that front area. In a sari women may show flashes of bare midriff, especially in the back, without causing alarm, but no clothing is cut to show or suggest cleavage. Same with legs. I’m the only woman whose calves I’ve seen since I arrived in Banaras. (I should add that Westerners who have been here a while live quite comfortably with their salwar kameezes.)

Indian female dress is an erotic (to my mind) dialogue of tight and loose, display and concealment to be manipulated at any moment by the wearer.

Fabric is sold in department stores and special sari shops in five yards that include the kameez and the already matched salwar, usually in contrasting color, and a silk or chiffon or cotton chunri. This is what goes to the tailor after you’ve been measured. The best (but more ordinary ones as well) establishments have tailors on site and a mind-bogglingly huge inventory of fabric colors and patterns in swatches that will be taken out and displayed to you for as long as you can stand it. Milk tea is served in small glasses to revive your spirits if you flag. If the structure of these garments is unvarying, colors and patterns bloom riotously. These are not Western patterns. They tend to be highly elaborate with lots of variety and detail. Never drab.

Where I went to get four more, the salesman said, “You are fair; you can wear any dark color,” which to my mind, of course, Is funny. Noorie, my comrade in arms for this shopping trip—it’s a bit overwhelming to do by yourself—was told that because of her fair skin she could wear any color when she was buying hers. Of course, we look at the brown skins that so dramatically set off these fabrics and imagine that any color looks gorgeous with Indian complexion.

Saris may be cotton or synthetic (big debate about which is better—synthetic has no-wrinkling to recommend it, but it looks a little differently (I haven’t decided about this) or, expensively, silk which unlike cotton is thought to be more resistant to ritual pollution. Vegetable-dyed cotton is both printed and embroidered. Hand-sewn sparkles and gold are considered very feminine. My one (so far) handmade is a fine avocado cotton with small embroidered polka dots of peach and and, about eight inches from the hem down, rows of different hues of peach, avocado, and chartreuse flowers embroidered geometrically to just below the knee. Delicate, feminine, set off with a peach and avocado chiffon dupatta.

My salwar, on the other hand, seems like a pair of trousers for M.C. Hammer. The waist is enormous. Peach, in my case. It drops in a yoke to just below hip level, then falls in small pleats at the top of the front legs but straight in the back. All this fabric is gathered up by a drawstring in a pocket at the waist.

Only it doesn’t COME threaded. You have to pull that drawstring through with a safety pin to wear it the first time. I did not know this, and opened up my newly tailored suit about half an hour before I had to get in a rickshaw to go to the conference. No safety pins anywhere! After pathetic attempts with a fork, I simply had to get them on. I ended up drawing the pants up above my waist and circling the fabric with the drawstring, something like the munchkin mayor in the Wizard of Oz, a human sized sack from ankles to rib cage and full of possibilities for disaster. This jerry-rigging definitely spoiled the sleek line of the kameez. I was more worried the trousers get loose from the drawstring and collapse around my ankles. I borrowed a safety pin from Pratima, who runs the computers at the Centre, and who sensibly pins on her chunri. I retreated to the bathroom and properly finished my ensemble.

Indian women do everything in a sari. They give papers, they go out with their famiies, worship, cook, cut grass with a scythe and gather it into great bundles tied up with a rectangular cloth to sell to farmers for their cows. They carry piles of cow dung on their heads (and the grass as well, and vegetables and lots of other things). They sweep the road in their saris. They manage their saris gracefully and effortlessly, or at least that’s how it looks to me.

When it doesn’t seem effortless is bathing in Gangaji. The men wear short bathing trunks or a kind of tight cotton jock strap rendered in different colors. The women step down from the ghats into the Ganga with sari intact. Here it tends to swirl around so they clutch it to keep their legs concealed. They don’t swim, like the men and boys do. Not surprisingly, there aren’t as many women bathing. Often theydo the washing, beating the laundry against the stone steps of the ghats. Both men and women work as dhobis, doing other peoples’ washing for money.

I will acquire a wardrobe of salwar kameezes but didn’t start out thinking that. Ordinary folks, rickshaw drivers, shop owners, vegetable peddlers, folks at temples, priests don’t seem to mind Western dress (providing shoulders and knees are covered). A high university administrator obliquely suggested I’m not quite kosher, to mix metaphors, commenting pointedly on the well dressed students at BHU (girls have dorm curfews, too: 9.00), implying a care for proper dress that isn’t reflected in my cargo pants and cotton shirts, meant for dusty hot journeys and sitting on the stone steps of ghats and temples. The wife of a colleague was dispatched off with graduate students to shop for proper dress three days after her arrival. In terms of what’s expected from peer adults for a person of my station, this one seems high on the list.