“Cover your head, see how fast you’re greying!” said a senior neighbour, who always covers her head with a dupatta. Why had I assumed when we first became neighbours that her covered head was a sign that she was a devout and traditional Hindu, North Indian woman — and therefore ‘old-fashioned’?
The South Indian septuagenarian lives alone, drives a car, and designed the basement parking in our apartment, over 30 years ago when she worked in an architecture office. Certainly, her covered head did not define her, and I am ashamed I’d made such a clichéd assumption about her.
So, are scarves, hijab, ghoonghat and turban a matter of faith, fashion or functionality? Were they meant to just keep the head cool? Some hair experts do say the sun breaks down the protein structure of the hair, and also sucks out moisture from the hair cells causing the hair’s cuticle to become rough and the hair to become frizzy.
Personally, I’ve never covered my head. Yes, I have frizzy hair. Why did no one stop us when we played in the sun? Maybe, they did, but like most young people, we had selective hearing. In school, uniform was a must — skirt and shirt for girls, or kurta and chudidaar, with a white dupatta to be ironed and worn to form a big V on the chest.
Growing up in those conservative times, we girls pushed the boundaries wherever we could. We complied with the uniform rules but rolled up our half-sleeves just a bit or pulled out our shirt till some frowning teacher barked, “Insert your shirt!” Some girls wore tight kurtas to look like Mumtaz, and half the boys wore their hair as long as Rajesh Khanna’s until a teacher threatened to do the honours right there in class with blunt paper-scissors. What we wore was never a matter of religion, except maybe for the boys who had a pagdi.
Matter of choice?
We did have a choice once we we went to college. Did I have a choice? Of course I did. Between a davani and a saree, all six yards of it. “Time to stop wearing pavadai-chokka,” said my madisaar-wearing grandmothers. Otherwise progressive, they concurred that ‘modern clothes aren’t for decent people’. Euphemism for, ‘no respectable family will accept you as a daughter-in-law if you’re seen wearing modern clothes!’
Without being told, we knew what ‘modern’ meant — anything that wasn’t a long skirt or a saree. (By the way, Indian geography was different in the 60s and 70s. There was North India, where I grew up, and where older girls wore salwar-kameez, and there was South India, where all Madrasis lived, (though, we moved to Karnataka) and senior girls here wore long skirt-blouse.) Within that rigid dress code, we rebelled, making sure it seemed like we were only experimenting.
Tourists at the Taj Mahal in Agra.
Instead of wearing the tight, short blouses over the langa, as was the fashion in Bangalore then, some of us wore loose shirts, mostly our brothers’ hand-me-downs. Our college’s basketball uniform of t-shirt and skirt was extremely ‘modern’, with the skirt being many miles above the knee. Most of us chose to change into that uniform just before an inter-college match; we never travelled by bus, or went home, in it. This wasn’t so much about modesty as it was about self-preservation — we wanted to continue to play matches, and did not want a short skirt to make eyebrows rise and tempers flare.
Some of the girls came to our all-women college wearing burqa, and quickly took it off as soon as they entered the gates. Most of them wore it not because they were religious but because by complying with the norms, they could come out of their homes and get a college education. Our Iranian classmates, who had come to India to escape the suppression of women’s freedom in 1979, wore a different kind of hijab, which they discarded the minute they were safely inside the campus. They wore well-fitting shirts and tight jeans, much to our envy!
We did not talk about customs and religion and rules then, because every minute in college was precious, and meant for us to have fun. One of the most charming, intelligent and lively girls was Shaina (name changed). Her animated chatter was so attractive that certainly a hundred boys would have fallen at her feet and wanted to marry her if they had seen her without the burqa. Instead, half way through our degree course, she was forced to marry a man twice her age, and we learnt within a few years, that he had abandoned her.
Clothes then, and clothes now, are our choice. But are we really free to wear what we want to? A young European friend was thrilled when she wore a sari for the first time. But she said she couldn’t wear it in public. “I don’t think my aunts will approve — so much midriff showing!” This from an athlete who is mostly in bikinis because of her passion for wind surfing. She explained that it was an unwritten code in her community to not show the midriff at formal gatherings, though it was okay to flaunt the bosom.
I’ve given up wearing the nine-yard madisaar on special occasions. I wear sarees less often, jeans and kurta more often. But when I visit my daughter and her family, I still choose to wear a nice saree. Their cat loves to curl up on my lap, and she prefers that I wear something soft, like an old Chettinad cotton or ageing khadi. See? I still have a choice and that is good.
The writer is an independent editor, and author of books for children.
