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 ‘high’ culture. This term was then seemingly extended ‘downwards’ to include ‘popular’ culture. Instead, was it possible to expand the notion of ‘culture’ sideways to refer to objects—such as the humble sari—worn by every class in India, to find clues to what defined Indian aesthetics?
To find out, I took Sanjay’s passing suggestion far too seriously, perhaps foolishly so. I set off on a five-hour drive out of Delhi to the city of Jaipur, touted to be India’s design capital. En route, I realized that ironically, there is no equivalent word for ‘design’ in the Hindi language. The closest word, shilp, means ‘craft’, and for lack of such a word, the country’s premier design institute, the National Institute of Design, is officially called Rashtriya Design Sansthan in Hindi!1
It was 11 a.m. but still early in the day when I arrived in Johri Bazaar, the liveliest fashion market in the heart of Jaipur. I walked down the empty streets, imagining what they would look like in a few hours. Just then, a puff of dust blew into my eyes. A boy was sweeping a shop, sending dust on to the road two steps below and into my face.
‘Hey, take it easy, boy!’ I exclaimed.
‘Oh, you need to step aside,’ he said, looking up at me, broom in hand.
‘But why are you dumping all the dust on to the street?’ I asked, dusting off my face, perplexed that he was keeping his shop clean but clearly not caring about the street right outside.
‘Yahan bas aisa hi hai (this is how it is here),’ he replied, pointing to the large open drain at the crossroads close by.
‘Okay . . . so what are you selling in your shop?’ I asked.
‘Saris,’ he said.
‘What is so special about your saris?’ I asked, amused.
‘You see, none of our saris are simple. They have the most embroidery in the whole of Johri Bazaar,’ he explained, indicating the glittering ware-stacked floor to ceiling on all walls of his fifteen-square-metre shop.
By the time the sun was blazing down, crowds of pedestrians were swarming amid motorcycles laden with clothes strapped into large bundles, crammed horse carts, and an occasional loudly honking tempo. People would stop every few minutes to touch the silks and chiffons on the mannequins along the open shops. Adding to the cacophony, the shopkeepers were trying to entice the crowds, promising attractive prices for the textiles, saris and lehngas on sale. This was Lalji Sand Ka Rasta, Johri Bazaar’s main fashion street with a name as unique as its wares, and a sea of glittering chaos.
‘Can I see something without embroidery?’ I inquired at one of the larger sari shops.
‘Madam ji, without embroidery there is none,’ the salesman replied.
The garments sold here were mostly in silk, tissue, chiffon, kota cotton-silk, flashing bright colours with gold threadwork all over. The colour contrasts were not timid either—a deep red cropped blouse over a cream-and-gold lehnga in tissue, teamed with a dupatta in green, pink and gold. Or a pink-and-gold lehnga embellished with emerald green motifs only on the skirt.
‘Who has designed these?’ I asked a shop owner, pointing to a burgundy-coloured satin skirt draped on a mannequin by the entrance.
‘We have no designer, baba, it is our tailor upstairs who makes these,’ he said, pointing to a winding stairway in the corner going up to what seemed like a loft. ‘People in India want lots of gota and colour. They like their clothes to be full of gold work all over . . . chakachak!’
After every few shops on Lalji Sand Ka Rasta, there were arched gateways unexpectedly leading to large marble courtyards. Perhaps calm and airy a hundred years ago, the courtyards were now congested with more shops on the remaining three sides, all selling wedding saris embellished with gota and coloured sequins in designs as frenzied as the ambience itself.
By the end of the day, my feet were sore with all the walking, my hair grey with dust and traffic fumes, and my eardrums ringing with the hullabaloo. I might have even dreamt of glitter on silk that night.
The following day, I chose to venture out to calmer quarters. I drove to the village of Sanganer, located about 15 kilometres to the north of Jaipur.
At first it resembled a rustic Indian idyll: a few mud houses and some brick-and-mortar ones painted white, broad, dusty roads with no motor vehicle except mine in sight, buffalo and goats bounding around, women in colourful saris fetching water from the pump, and men sitting by the roadside smoking bidis. As soon as my car halted, I could hear the birds chirp until some cows started mooing. The quietude belied Sanganer’s reputation as the centre for the much-celebrated Rajasthani block-printed cloth. A resident of Jaipur had earlier explained to me that in the sixteenth century, Prince Sanga, one of the sons of Raja Prithviraj, ruler of the kingdom of Dhoondhar, had founded Sanganer, and under his patronage and that of the successive rulers of Dhoondhar, paper-making and block printing on cloth became two of the major industries of this hamlet. Today, all that remains of that royal patronage are the families of artisans who once catered to royalty—they now take the traditional art forward, supplying their wares to the many export houses that visit Sanganer so it can be sold to the world.
Parking my car in a side lane of this quaint town, I walked towards a cloth dyeing ground spread across roughly two hectares of land, bordered by the river on one side and low stone walls on the other. Inside, there were five large sinks dug into the ground, of which three had yards of cloth dipped in chemically treated water so that they soak up the colour. The owner of the dyeing ground, Sandeep, walked up and explained it all to me.
‘Beyond the sinks . . . that vast expanse of land you see there?’ Sandeep pointed to a few hundred metres away.
‘Yes, yes,’ I replied, noticing the stretch of several hundred metres of brightly coloured cloth in the sun.
‘Out there, hundreds of metres of freshly dyed cloth are drying.’
‘Can I see the finished product?’
‘Madam ji, why don’t you come to my house? We do block printing there,’ Sandeep offered. ‘You can see the finished product.’
I agreed and followed him as he walked across the road.
It was around two in the afternoon. After a meal, Sandeep’s family had got back to work on the textiles on the first and second floors of their three-storey home. At that hour, only his aunt was in the mood for tea, and I agreed to accompany her. As we sat together on a charpoy sipping tea, she explained how six generations of the family had been block printing on cloth in this very house. Earlier, they made cloth for kings, and now their cloth was sold all over India and to Indians abroad.
Downstairs, there were about two dozen men at work. They were busy at a narrow table about 50 metres long, tightly spreading reams of cotton cloth freshly dyed in bright pink, indigo, purple and shades of green.
‘We are Rangrej,’ explained Sandeep.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Rangrej is our caste. We are people who colour cloth in the sinks outside,’ he said. ‘They are Neelgari,’ Sandeep pointed to the men spreading the dyed cloth on the table. ‘And those over there . . . you see them, the ones printing the motifs on the cloth with their blocks of wood?’
I nodded.
‘They are of the Chippa caste,’ he continued. ‘The son of a Chippa is always a Chippa,’ he added and laughed.
‘So you can only do the work that your father did? A baby born in the Rangrej caste cannot grow up to become a Neelgari?’ I asked.
‘It is rare, but it is happening,’ Sandeep said. ‘Nowadays, people are marrying across castes here. There are hundre
ds of castes.’
I looked at the bundles of finished block-printed cotton cloth stacked in columns. The motifs ranged from flowers and creepers to animals and human faces as well as figurines.
‘Utterly complex, winding and intricate designs,’ I remarked.
‘These are our traditional designs, from the days of the maharajas,’ a workman standing beside me said.
Sandeep interrupted with, ‘Have you seen the new Rs 2000 note issued by Modi?’ referring to the currency issued by the Indian government in November 2016, after the Rs 500 and Rs 1000 rupee notes were demonetized.
‘Yes, I have.’
‘That note is American design. But the design we make here in Sanganer is Indian,’ he said with pride.
The traditional ware sold in the calm village of Sanganer was just as embellished with complex motifs of geometric designs, flowers and creepers as those in the frenetic lanes of Johri Bazaar in Jaipur. Local aesthetics—or the perception of beauty—did not show much influence of the sights, sounds and smells in their immediate surroundings. Silk or cotton, wedding attire or regular clothing, ‘plain’ was looked down upon with disdain, and ‘simple’ was clearly undesirable in both of the two contrasting environments.
I spoke to people in Delhi and found that the more patterns sewn into the design or the threadwork, the better the dress is considered. A classic, simply cut salwar kameez without any work is unlikely to be found worthy of praise. A plain sari risks being disdainfully looked down on as ‘simple’. On the ramp and off it, clothes in India, especially for women, are ‘effortfully’ intricate, not effortlessly chic. In fact, even in other mediums, the love for embellishments is evident. The detailed Islamic calligraphy embellishing the walls of Delhi’s Jama Masjid is unforgettable. Be it the tombs of the Mughal emperors, the temples, or the palaces on the border of Delhi and Rajasthan, the most celebrated architectural masterpieces of the city flaunted distinct styles of scrupulously intricate works of murals and frescoes, carvings and mosaics. The greater the abundance and intricacy of the designs, the more spectacular the structures were considered to be.
A few months later, I travelled east to Kolkata and its outskirts, hopping across more than three dozen shops selling traditional attire. The motifs on the Dhakai jamdani handwoven cotton saris were distinctly different from what I had seen in the south or the north, but a full body of work all over the sari was a tradition. Floral designs ran amok on the Baluchari sari, with the aanchal extending to one quarter of the entire length of the garment, resplendent with scenes from mythological texts. I also found here various butti and patta designs on tussar silk, and the intricate kantha stitch dazzlingly filling up a six-metre sari.
In each place I went to, the length and width of the sari varied with the region and quality of yarn. Materials such as muslin, cotton and silk cotton with zari woven in a range of techniques were embellished with embroidery, print or paint, with different motifs and designs—from human to animal figurines and from birds to floral patterns.
I visited several towns in the south of India—silk weavers in Madurai and large showrooms in Chennai. Intricate gold motifs were woven on the side border, the field (the body of the sari) the aanchal (end panel), or on the entire sari. The small shacks in Tirupati also sold similar aesthetics in different quality of silks.
When I lived near the temple of Lord Venkateshwara atop the Tirumala Hills. I found that here, and in other temples in India, the gods are also adorned. The Meenakshi temple of Madurai stands out with its wondrous collection of colourful statues of deities in traditional clothes and jewellery. In the sculptures at the Khajuraho temples, erotic imagery—women performing fellatio on men, men performing cunnilingus on women, men having sex with men, women having sex with women, men with many women, women with many men, and even men and women with animals—are detailed in the extreme, and each figure wears traditional jewellery, even if they don’t have much clothes on.
In fact, an essential component of the daily ritual in temples is the placement of jewellery on idols. During festivals, idols of gods and goddesses are often elaborately decorated and resplendently ornamented with crowns, necklaces, earrings, armbands, bangles, girdles and anklets. The great Sri Lankan Tamil metaphysicist and art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy says that whatever is devoid of ornamentation is ‘naked’ and ‘unqualified’.2 So a god without ornamentation is invisible (nirguna), but when he is adorned, he is ‘endowed with qualities’ and visible (saguna). For women to be seen without ornaments—a pair of bangles, simple earrings and a chain around the neck—is therefore considered inauspicious. In Indian traditions, there are sixteen rituals of beautification (or solah shringar) prescribed for a bride, and of these, ten pertain to adornment with jewels from head to toe, because, having been ornamented, the bride now becomes a personification of the goddess.
In the past, the maharajas, in their role as divine monarchs, proclaimed power and wealth not only by extending their kingdoms and armies, but also by the blazing turban ornaments, necklaces, armbands and bangles they adorned themselves with. These symbolized divine kingship.
In religion, literature and poetry in India, clothes, jewels and gems are used as metaphors for character, beauty and physical attributes. This is also evident in our sculptures and paintings. The art of adornment with jewels is even prescribed in ancient texts like the Kamasutra, which declares that the arts and sciences women must know should include knowledge of gold, silver, jewels and gems, and the art of stringing necklaces and making ear ornaments.3 Certain ornaments even today define social relationships such as marriage and status, caste and community. Certain jewels and gemstones are considered powerful amulets against the negative effects of planets. They adorn the strategic marma or pressure points in the body, which are closely linked with physical, mental and spiritual well-being. Energy is believed to travel in the body along these points, and so it is believed that wearing a particular piece of jewellery on these points opens up the pathways and facilitates the movement of energy within the wearer. Even now, if you look at Indian high-end luxury designer wear, it is usually dripping with gold embellishments on clothes as well as accessories.
But India is a land of heartbreaking contrasts. On the other end of the socio-economic spectrum are the tribals, who are the most socio-economically as well as politically disadvantaged group in our country.
I travelled to remote parts of Chhattisgarh and Odisha for about two weeks each month for work. On one of my trips, I discovered that in Sambalpur, a five-hour drive from Bhubaneswar, there were homes where silk was woven on a pit loom. The family sat around a bamboo loom in a room often decorated like a temple, with an anointed shrine and hand-painted motifs on the floor. On the loom, narrow design bands of rudraksha beads were made with simple string heddles. Weighted eyes were tied together for each row in the pattern, threaded over the top of the loom, with a sequence of rings woven in tightly, which they pulled down tight over a circular wire. A simple loom could render such complex patterns.
However, I found that many of the weavers in Odisha and Chhattisgarh belonged to tribal communities, which found it difficult to sell their wares in the market. They lived in secluded areas, lacked the know-how to market their product, and suffered because of the general bias that handicrafts made by tribal populations were of inferior design and quality. Handicrafts were most often purchased by those belonging to higher castes or living in urban pockets as artefacts, an object of wonder to be displayed at home, or sometimes as an act of solidarity to support backward communities—but rarely as a product good enough to be used regularly. I realized that in India, relations with lower castes and the tribes are most often theorized in religious, political or economic terms, but too little attention is given to the aesthetic dimensions of the response to ‘otherness’. There is a distinct aesthetic response—consisting of a disconnect in taste and trust—to those who are denigrated by political and social oppression. What I mean is that we do not connect with the tribal
population on their taste in design, and we do not trust them for the quality and manufacturing technique of their product either.
Our sense of aesthetics, I found, also had a cops-and-robbers relationship with modernity. On the one hand, it is believed that only our ancestors had a genetic, innate propensity for appreciating and creating beauty, and that modernity has now chased that out of our reach. It is commonly lamented that modernity has turned our villages into dung heaps and our cities into sewers, because we live in a country infested by fairness creams and mass commodification of everything from Ganesha to Gucci handbags.
On the other hand, I discovered that with all its new technologies and global connectivity, modernity has boosted the industry producing cultural items. Brocade manufacturing in Benares and the surrounding areas, for instance, has gradually incorporated mechanical devices such as punched cards to supplement manual skills. While retaining the intricacy of the original handcrafted process, these mechanical supplements have speeded up the production process and reduced errors. Modern processes such as jacquard weaving on power looms and metallic transfer printing have been introduced. There has been experimentation with motifs, asymmetrical layouts and non-traditional imagery, borrowing visual elements from other textile traditions and international fashion houses.4 How we interpret these changes is a matter of personal ‘taste’. One of India’s foremost contemporary philosophers, Sudipta Kaviraj, writes: ‘What modern art achieves is not a sense of beauty, but an intelligence.’5 He defends Indian modernity by pointing out that our symbols have perhaps become more complex, cluttered and asymmetrical, but they continue to remain powerful.
Indian Instincts Page 26