World Bank. 2016. https://data.worldbank.org/country/India.
14Aesthetics
Until I returned to live in India as an adult, I had never owned a sari in my life. Within the first week of my arrival here, I scooted off to the only sari maker I knew. I had visited him earlier in the year as a passive shopping companion to a girlfriend. Sanjay Garg was a reticent and withdrawn thirty-five-year-old man, so reclusive that anyone who wished to purchase his saris had to trek up to his home, an airy two-storey bungalow located in the midst of utter wilderness almost an hour’s ride out of Delhi.
His saris were woven on the loom, mostly lustrous silks from all over the country. Each piece was so unique that it even had its own name marked on its tag.
‘I don’t think I have seen you around here before,’ remarked Sanjay on seeing me seated cross-legged on the rug in his shop surrounded by saris.
‘You will see more of me from now on,’ I replied. ‘These saris are gorgeous.’
‘Then you must visit Jaipur, my hometown, and see the saris there. That is real Indian designs,’ he added, in faltering English.
I had picked three of Sanjay’s plainest saris. Much to the chagrin of my women colleagues, I wore the traditional Indian attire loosely with the most oversized shirts and blouses. A traditional garment, the sari was meant to be draped gracefully, not in the obtuse ‘comfort wear’ manner I wore it. But the sari was emblematic of the deep relationship between heritage and the daily lives of those colleagues who wore the garment. They were well-meaning and concerned that I would portray a ‘bad character’ the way I wore it.
However, I soon realized that the sari was a garment of great diversity. There were a range of draping styles influenced by regional identity, personal taste, and most of all by weather and occupation. The women of Coorg in Karnataka tie their sari pleats at the back, leaving their hands free to pick tea leaves on plantations in the mountainous slopes. The Maharashtrian sari is especially long—9 yards instead of the typical 6—so women can wear it in the traditional men’s dhoti style and work comfortably on farms. The traditional sari in Bengal is made of cotton because the soil in the region is so rich that it produces the finest-quality cotton. Moreover, the weather in Bengal is humid, so cotton is considered a more comfortable material than silk, and women wear it in a distinct style that covers the shoulders and the bust because traditionally they did not wear a blouse. Meanwhile, the warrior culture of Punjab and the cold weather in Jammu, among other reasons, makes it inconvenient to wear the sari at all in these regions.
‘Taste’ in the context of the sari has been defined and redefined over the centuries—it has been mentioned many thousands of years ago (as nevi) in the Rig Veda, and (as sati) in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
Since those ancient times, the garment has reinvented itself continuously, influenced by the ‘taste-makers’ of different eras who defined what beauty and propriety, meant. In late medieval times, the royalty and aristocracy set the trend in the design and drape of the sari. Now that role has been delegated to politicians, actors and socialites. Of these, the influence of leading actors in films played the strongest role in defining culture, even though very little of that influence was truly long-lasting and took years to percolate down to the public.
However, I felt that there were other mechanisms at work, far greater than the influence of celebrities, which defined the Indian aesthetics of today.
I found that the taste of the masses was being defined primarily by each individual’s personal circles of interaction and influence over extended periods. Within community and family networks, there were always the ‘influencers’ and the ‘influenced’. The elders in the family would chastise the younger generation into wearing the sari in a certain regional or cultural style, just as my colleagues had tried to influence my style. These roles were fluid and mutable, each one influencing the other so that taste operated like a meme. Preferences were dictated and influenced by societal, religious and familial norms, as well as by economic factors, awareness and culturally defined ideas of propriety. It was through lenses such as these that the broader levels of aesthetic influence, such as those from cinema and celebrities, filtered in.
Indian aesthetics, I realized, was a vast topic, encompassing everything from architecture to art, music, food, clothing and much more. I chose to seek the answers to my questions about Indian aesthetics by following the trail of the sari.
My interest in the ‘sari chronicles’ led me to believe that cultural historians in India (and elsewhere) traditionally paid less attention to material culture—such as what we wear and why we do so—than to ideas, leaving the material realm to economic historians. Economic historians then neglect the symbolic aspects, and typically analyse matters such as the amount of an individual’s income spent on purchasing that item. The few studies of material culture, or the physical aspects of a culture that surrounds people, that do inspect the symbolic aspect focus mostly on the classic trio of topics—food, clothes, housing. These studies often analyse only the history of their consumption, try to draw conclusions about their symbolic role in displaying or achieving status, and explore issues related to identity, often emphasizing the influence of the media in stimulating the desire for these goods.
Instead, I marvelled at how people were easily typecast based on the garment they wore. The vocabulary of the motifs, material and drape of the sari could apparently reveal not just regional identity but also economic class, and indicate if the wearer was ‘decent’! Where did these contemporary stereotypes come from? What constituted taste and aesthetics in contemporary India? I was more interested in understanding the aesthetics of the real India. Here, ‘culture’, I found, was often used to refer only to
