What women wear, how they wear it, where they wear it, and why they should not wear it — are all apparently burning issues in our country. It’s one of those subjects that frequently raises its head in public spaces, work-places, colleges and universities, in the media, and everyone has a take on it.
The most recent uproar around women’s clothing was a comment by botany professor Rajith Kumar, who during a health awareness class held in Kasaragod, pompously declared, “Women who wear jeans and shirts and dress like men give birth to transgender children.” There’s no need to debate the scientific merits of this ridiculous statement because its exactly that, a ridiculous comment by one person given a platform to mouth off. Unfortunately, he’s not the only one.
Only a few months ago, Jouhar Munavvir, a professor from Kozhikode speaking at a counselling session, criticised the way Muslim women students in his college dressed. He was apparently offended by the leggings they wore under the purdah and censured them for “pulling up the purdah, showing the leggings to the world” and further reprimanded them for not wearing the muftah (Muslim head dress), instead covering their heads with scarfs and shawls “leaving their chests exposed” akin to “how we slice a watermelon open to see whether it is ripe or not!”
Women protested both these regressive statements — with several daring Kerala women even sharing topless pictures with cut watermelons against their breasts on social media.
But why should women’s dress draw so much attention? In 2016, when then Union Tourism and Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma advised foreign women tourists not to wear skirts/short dresses, it was apparently for their own safety as skirts, according to the minister, made them vulnerable to harassment/assaults “and there is little that the authorities can do to protect her.” A Khap panchayat in a Haryana village (Isaipur Khedi) has for the last year banned village girls from wearing jeans or using mobile phones, for this encourages elopements.
Every time a woman is stared at or groped or raped in this country, the one question that always rears its nasty head is: ‘But what was she wearing?’ So far luckily, no one asks that in the case of assaults on four-month-olds or 8-year-olds, but who knows when they could start. After all, the skirt lengths of girls’ school uniforms (as also directives on slips, bloomers, shorts, whatever the weather) are relentlessly disciplined, with failure to comply with demure standards a punishable offence in most schools.
When you police the skirt lengths of women/girls and direct hostility towards their clothing preferences, you give out various messages to women, most of which make little logical sense and even conflict with each other. You tell them that you don’t believe they are capable of making their own appropriate choices (in clothing and other aspects of their life). You tell them, their clothes immediately divide them into ‘good’ (fully covered, salwars, saris, burkhas) and ‘bad’ (short, tight, sleeveless) women, and henceforth, they will be judged on these, not what is in their heads. You tell them that when they are assaulted, it is their fault for they provoked the attack in some way — through what they wore, said, did or didn’t do. Of course, no one really explains that even the so-called ‘good’ dressed girls get molested and raped. The high levels of anxieties directed towards women’s clothing mask several national, regional and community anxieties with regard to cultural identity, modernity and control over women.
The larger worry seems to be that if today she wears jeans, tomorrow she will no more make rotis , she might seek a career not just a job, she will swipe right and choose dating over marriage, she might choose a man with the ‘wrong’ background, she may even prefer women to men, and from then on who knows what else we can expect from our women…
The writer is a Mumbai-based journalist, researcher and co-author, Why Loiter? Women & Risk on Mumbai Streets
