Dressing Indian Women : Clothing and Fashion in the Early Twentieth Century.
Clothes veil the body. They are part of a cultural politics by which nations are actively produced. [1] They are a form of social control, a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion, mirroring social hierarchies and moral boundaries. [2] British imperial presence in India had introduced not only new forms of government, language, education and social etiquette, but also a new set of criteria of civilisation with a new set of clothes to go with it. It was only in the early Twentienth Century India that the nationalist movement begun to perceive cloth and clothing as central symbols in the struggle to define a national identity. Women, as such, emerged as important bearers of this identity. While the dress of British women who came to live in India were conformed to sartorial conventions of a memsahib, draped clothes (Sari, in this case) were of prime importance in the Indian nationalist discourse. However, many women from elite families began adopting the stitch...