‘Marrying our crafts with modernity has its own challenges,’ Ashdeen Lilaowala told me over the phone. During my research on Indian aesthetics, Ashdeen was introduced to me by a friend. I knew of him already as a textile designer, but now I discovered him as an author and researcher who had travelled through Iran, China and India to trace the routes and origins of traditional Parsi embroidery, using it in contemporary wear in his craft and writings.6
‘Challenges such as?’ I probed.
‘Respect for deadlines. Traditional craftsmen do not work around timelines! Moreover, one of the most frustrating situations is when you give them a very specific shade of a colour to embroider, and they do the embroidery in a completely different shade with the excuse “sahib ji, bas unnees-bees ka farak hai”.
‘The problem is that many buyers accept these discrepancies. They feel that this is craft and so it is all right for the aesthetics to vary,’ Ashdeen told me.
We live in a symbiotic environment, and a lot has come to Indian traditional aesthetics within this environment despite and because of the constraints of transferability between modernity and tradition. How a commodity is produced and where it is produced determines its look and feel. In all the traditional designs I had seen produced in different far-flung parts of India, and then promoted as high fashion in Delhi, I felt that the lack of connect between the producer and the wearer is what made the garment work. The producer of that garment had probably never stepped out of a village and did not know the context in which the craft would be consumed. If he knew, he would probably have made his wares differently.
In fact, everywhere in the world, I have found that our sense of aesthetics is shaped by financial, geographical and other constraints and our perception of the environment around us. It is not the immediate surroundings, but our observations, deductions and experiences over a lifetime that shape our idea of ‘beauty’.
Perceptions are influenced by the environment we surround ourselves with over considerable periods. Because of the environment I have been surrounded by for several years it is my perception of an object that results in my assessment of it as ‘utterly complex’. The complexity would lie in my interpretation of what I have seen. It is the judgement made by my senses. My brain has been conditioned by my experiences and surroundings over the years. As soon as I sight an object or organism, my brain contiguously assesses it in regard with mental notes taken from earlier observations and deductions, and gives a verdict on its utility, beauty, value and so on.
One evening, just as I was wrapping up a long working Saturday, I got a call. ‘We will be at your place tomorrow at 9 a.m. sharp,’ Sanjay told me on the phone.
‘What for?’ I asked, puzzled. I had not met or heard from him after my first visit to his remote abode.
‘I love your pictures on Facebook and how you drape your saris; I am shooting my look-book for the season and would like to have you on our cover,’ he said.
The sari is omnipresent, changing its form according to the times and personal tastes, and now through channels facilitated by modern technologies, I thought as I agreed to the proposition.
I have written on modernity in great detail in an earlier essay in this book. However, when it comes to aesthetics, I feel that modernity in India has had another effect—of facilitating the intermediation of the arts. Intermediate artists position their audience between the medium and the discipline. They remove the confines of traditional forms of art and instead expand art to other mediums such as body art, installation art, environmental art, textiles and crafts. They explicitly think in and communicate with their medium, such as bodies, brushes, cameras, language, space, digits and guitars. We can now interpret Danto’s argument that ‘art indeed is ended, because it is omnipresent’ differently, because we can affirm that art has not disappeared because of a lack of success, but it has penetrated—facilitated by the agents of modernity—many more aspects of our life. Thus, the staples of material culture—clothing, food, habitat—can be considered mediums of art. The uniqueness of motifs on saris, its textures and falls, can be assessed in the same way we would assess a work of art.
This I see as an immense change in our overall approach to aesthetics, especially because classical Indian and Western aesthetic theories have differed precisely on the issue of medium. While most Western aestheticians consider art to be enduring visible objects such as painting or sculpture, Indian aestheticians consider the natya performance—religious dance theatre—to be the paradigm work of art.7
Classical Indian aesthetic theory explores the art of nat.ya through the idea of rasa, a term that means taste or aesthetic emotion. There have been important debates concerning the number of rasas—the principal ones being delight, laughter, sorrow, anger, fear, disgust, heroism, and astonishment—and their relationship to more transient or subsidiary emotions called bhavas—erotic, comic, pathetic, furious, terrible, odious, marvellous, and many more. It also debates whether rasa is located in the work of art itself. Or, as Tagore and Gandhi later discussed, is it located within the audience of the art? Tagore, in fact, had a fascination for the self-contained life of a glow-worm. He felt that art too was like a glow-worm—capable of internalizing the light of the universe to emit a glow, not borrowed but created from within, with which it could transcend the universe. The rasas thus have an important influence on the link between aesthetics and the environment, which begs the question: Is it human feeling that irradiates the environment around us? Is it, after all, our own emotions that give aesthetic meaning to the objects surrounding us?
The earliest discussion of the rasas in India, in about 300 BC, was taking place at about the same time the Greek philosopher Plato, in his theory of mimesis, proposed that art imitated an idea, which makes art an imitation of reality. He writes that art of all kinds becomes things that are twice removed from reality (he calls poetry an imitation thrice removed from the truth!). In this way, Plato reconciles to linking—somewhat vaguely—aesthetics to reality or the environment, even if a few times removed. However, Plato’s contemporary, Aristotle, firmly defended art and aesthetics in his rich body of work called Poetics. According to him, the arts depict universal truths in more palpable forms than history, which concerns itself only with facts.
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 e
nvironment, 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 would be known for even internationally.
The second wave in Indian aesthetics came about in the new millennium, with the stitched garment. Previously, it was almost all about the unstitched sari. But now, designers such as Tarun Tahiliani, Ritu Kumar and J.J. Valaya started experimenting with the stitched garment. They brought about a fashion movement, using a bit of craft and creating something modern. By the beginning of the new millennium, most sectors of Indian industry had been successfully liberalized. India was now open to the world. Indian tastes were being influenced by products from abroad. Our desires and aesthetics were changing to something where we could stand out, yet be one with the world. In tandem with these changes—neither causing them, nor because of them—Indian designers established new references, tailoring lehngas, cholis, kurtas and salwars. The proportions they catered to were different, and so were the silhouettes they created. They used plenty of motifs, often in threadwork. The more the kalamkari, the more ‘beautiful’ the garment was considered. The most enduring effect of this second wave of Indian aesthetics has been the establishment of the notion that simple is dull. These were the designers, later joined by the talented couturier Sabyasachi Mukherjee, who draped Indian Bollywood actors dancing on the silver screen in shimmering, gold-embroidered lehngas in front of the Indian masses, who liked what they saw. This aesthetic—of shimmer and gold all over a garment—has transposed itself from the couture stores of Delhi to the lanes of Johri Bazaar in Jaipur.
We are now in an era that is searching for India. There is a feeling that we have gone too far away, and too soon. We have lost much of our ancient knowledge in the sciences and mathematics, and we do not know any more how to read Sanskrit, the language in which most of the treasures of our ancient wisdom are written. Who are we as Indians? Are we lost in the glitter and gold of global influences? Have we lost our core?
Searching for answers, we are at the ebb of a new revivalist wave—a third wave—in Indian aesthetics. Led by designers such as Sanjay Garg, the old crafts of India are being brought back into the mainstream. The sari is once again in the limelight, with a renewed conviction that it belongs to the loom. Often, the motifs are woven in, not embroidered, thus showcasing the power of the loom. The aesthetics are minimalistic. The silhouette of the blouse and the drape of the sari have changed dramatically. The blouse and the sari are worn loose, comfortable and airy, rejecting the erstwhile tight, restrictive sari ensemble.
Wearing the sari draped casually, teamed with a loose blouse and loafers or boots, is a contemporary statement of sorts by Indian women standing up to the men in their desire to go out and work. It is not yet a reflection of changing times, but of these women’s desire to change their status. In this sense, the socio-economic circumstances that caused this change in dress are not the same as those that caused a fashion shift in the post–Second World War era of hardship, when British women gave up their corsets and gowns for garments that gave them more mobility to go out and work with the men.
We would expect economic growth to go hand in hand with the emancipation of women. We would imagine that the expansion of the economy would provide more opportunities and conducive environments for women to work if they wish to. But in India, it has been the other way round. Between 2004 and 2011, when the Indian economy grew at a healthy average of about 7 per cent, there was a devastating decline in female participation in the country’s labour force, from over 35 per cent to 25 per cent. The rising educational enrolment of women contributed to this fall in workforce numbers, but so did factors such as lack of employment opportunities for women and increased household income.11 This is a disturbing trend—and one that is long-term, not transitory—because it means that the freedom of women to earn their livelihood in India is being curtailed.
Therefore the pushback from many women comes not just in the form of words, but in their dress too. They dress for comfort, often to send out a message of ‘ready-to-work’ easy confidence and that they too are at par with the men.
It is impossible for an Indian to follow merely one culture—the one in the immediate surroundings at a specific moment, or, say, the one they were born into—among many, and be immune to the rest.
We are defined by what we surround ourselves with over extended periods. For each of us, therefore, being surrounded by an incredibly fast-changing society, which includes thousands of diverse local cultures, influences the manner in which we live and even our dress and tastes. Our personal history, socio-economic as well as political changes in the environment, the social constraints we are confronted with, regional affiliations, cultural moorings, as well as our own interpretation of the complex changes in our unparalleled, heterogeneous society all shape our individual tastes and aesthetics. This shapes who we are, our likes and dislikes, our aspirations and hopes. We are thus, each of us, a product of the complexity that such diversity and change in India bring.
References
Bhuyan, Avantika. 2016. The Benarasi brocade and a monument of weaves. Business Standard, 26 February.
Burton, Richard Francis, trans. 1883. The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana (Benares: Society of the Friends of India).
Chakrabarti, Arindam, ed. 2016. The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Indian Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (New Delhi: Bloomsbury Publishing).
Chatterji, Miniya. 2016. Unpeeling the history of the blouse. Huffington Post India, 21 August.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. 1939. Ornament, The Art Bulletin 21.4, pp. 375–382.
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. 1943. Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art (North Chelmsford: Courier Corporation).
Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience (New York: Minton, Balch & Company).
Goodman, Nelson. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking (Hackett Publishing Company).
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