However, the theories that counter my argument, that our aesthetics are shaped by the accumulation of our life experiences, are in the eighteenth-century philosophical writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper of Shaftesbury, the works of Francis Hutcheson, and in later (and the most important) works by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. These writings assert that our aesthetics develop separately and distinctly from the environment that surrounds us. They believed that our appreciation of beauty is objective, and is only related to the object of appreciation and has nothing whatsoever to do with our surroundings, ambience and experiences.
A hundred years later, during and after the First and Second World Wars, psychologists were also involved in the debates around aesthetics and environment. They researched how our moods, choices and aesthetics are influenced by conditions such as crowding, chaos, war and peace in our surroundings. During this time, a man considered the doyen of functional psychology, John Dewey, wrote in Art as Experience 8—a book that is considered one of the most important contemporary theoretical works on aesthetics till date—that aesthetics is intrinsically linked to one’s experience with the surroundings. Dewey’s view is that aesthetics restores the continuity between the refined experiences aroused by art and the experiences of everyday life. Another American philosopher, Nelson Goodman, shared Dewey’s conviction, replacing the question ‘What is art?’ with ‘When is art?’9 By this, Goodman meant that the same object viewed at different points of time in our life would arouse in us different assessments of its beauty based on the accumulation of our life experiences at that time.
I, of course, concur with Dewey (and Goodman), as he wrote that ‘the career and destiny of a living being are bound up with its interchanges with its environment, not externally but in the most intimate way’. Dewey insisted that life goes on through our interactions with our environment. It engages all the senses, which then catalyse our aesthetics. Everywhere in the world, I have indeed found that how people live, what they eat, and what they wear is as much an anthropological summation of their environment as it is a mirror of their individual history.
In every era, social revolutions, political trends and wars have left a mark on how we dress. Our attire can be an intimate window into the psychology of social change. There are many examples of this. The combination of student protests, contraceptives and second-wave feminism in the US and Europe during the 1960s and 1970s did away with gendered roles in society, and also in fashion. When young women could choose when to be mothers and how to express themselves sexually, they rebelled against the demure scarf and stockings, and instead introduced to the world the miniskirt.
Even earlier, the post–Second World War era in the UK had knickers made of military-issue silk maps and air-raid outfits. This was when British women buried their corsets and gowns and instead began to wear garments that gave them more mobility while maintaining a sense of elegance and style. In continental Europe as well, clothing reflected the many ways in which the war had affected countries socially and economically. In Africa and Asia too, it has been distressing yet fascinating how imperialists have intervened in local dress practices through trade and education in the past.
In India, at different times, clothing has been influenced by socio-political situations. One example among hundreds is the story of the humble blouse. In the nineteenth century, most women did not cover their torsos in southern India, while some went bare-breasted under saris in Bengal.10 During that time, too, European ladies laced themselves tight in corsets and dresses that covered them neck to toe—only the silhouette, strangled into an hourglass shape, marked their femininity. No wonder the British were aghast at the perceived indecorum of Indian women walking around naked under a sari. And so it was the British who added the blouse to the sari, along with their own ideas of European propriety. Perhaps the blouse has been Britain’s most powerful export to India, one that has outlived the influence of the crown.
In independent India, the first and earliest wave of some sort of a ‘pan-Indian aesthetic’ in garments was established by stalwarts such as the cultural activist Pupul Jayakar, and the Ahimsa silk shawl–clad erstwhile Rajput prince Martand Singh, fondly called Mapu, in the 1980s. It was an era when old verities vanished and new ones raised their heads, when the Congress hegemony ended by 1989. As the seeds for an economic revolution in India were being planted, Singh and Jayakar too led a revolution in the field of Indian textiles at that time. They were not designers. They were astute historians, researchers and revivalists, conserving and popularizing near-forgotten Indian arts. They brought together various Indians motifs and techniques of production, putting the spotlight on Indian weavers and showcasing them in garments, literature and pan-Indian textile exhibitions called Vishwakarma in India and all over the world—the Grand Palais in Paris, Tokyo, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, to name a few of the magnificent venues.
As Indian trade and business opened its doors to the world in the 1990s through a policy shift—from a closed, state-controlled economy to a market-driven one—people’s lives changed. They became more connected with the world outside India in the products they consumed and sold, as well as in their exchange of ideas, knowledge, aesthetics, tastes and culture. This first wave of Indian aesthetics rode on these social and political changes in the country. Jayakar and Singh’s efforts and their Vishwakarma exhibitions were a turning point in the history of Indian textiles, because no one had previously married dying Indian crafts and couture and turned it into a pan-Indian aesthetic, an aesthetic that India
