Deciding what to wear is one of the ways in which people try to pin down meaning, and control both presentations and interpretations of selfhood. This paper explores this negotiation of meaning in the context of the clothing practices of the ethnographer, and the judgements that are made by people in the field based on the former’s sartorial expressions. This brings to light the dialectic process of reification of identity that exists on both sides. The paper further argues that in order to understand how clothing relates to, or creates social identity, one needs to know how clothed bodies are located in a particular setting. Such an approach necessarily includes an interrogation of the clothing practices of the ethnographer.
"Mera juta hai japani Ye patlun inglishtani Sar pe lal topi rusi Phir bhi dil hai hindustani."
(My Shoes are Japanese/ These trousers are English/The red hat on my head is Russian/ But still my heart is Indian.)
This song from a 1955 Raj Kapoor Hindi movie captures the attempt by one of the film’s characters to portray his ‘Indian’ identity, despite the transnational eclecticism of his clothing, by virtue of the patriotic glow of his ‘Indian heart’. The lyrics of this song serve as an important pointer to the significance of expressions and experiences of sartorial identity during fieldwork. Individuals constantly make decisions, choose their self-image, play with identities, and recognise the role of clothes in image construction and interpretation. Clothes and their various accessories are used to define, to present, to deceive, to enjoy, to communicate, to judge, to reveal, and to conceal. The Japanese shoes, English trousers, and red Russian hat of the movie character serve not only as pointers to his Indian identity, but also locate him according to class, religion, gender, region and caste. Deciding what to wear is a way through which people try to pin down meanings and control both presentations and interpretations of the self. Attempts are constantly being made to read the minds of others and to judge initial impressions on their behalf in a bid to orchestrate one’s own sartorial practices accordingly. This is nowhere more apparent and active an exercise than when undertaking fieldwork. This is not to deny that individuals also judge others on a more intuitive or interactive understanding of behavioural characteristics, but it is equally undeniable that sartorial presentations are highly significant in shaping our impressions of others.
I cite the aforementioned song not to present my own ‘nationalistic’ credentials as an ‘Indian at heart’, venturing into a neighbouring country to carry out fieldwork, but rather because it serves as a launch-pad for a discussion of the various problems resulting from the reification of various identities and the imaginaries that are associated with the characteristics therein. In what follows, I seek to explore the various dynamics around dressing during fieldwork by describing the dress codes of some of the people in the area where I carried out my research. In addition, I also want to reflect on the various ways I sought to present myself in the field as an anthropologist from India, as well as considering how people in various parts of Bangladesh sought to label and categorise me in ways, which they thought, befitted me. Through this examination of the problematics of clothing in Bangladesh, I also wish to touch more generally on issues of classification, identification, and communication.
In order to understand how clothing relates to, or creates social identity, one needs to know how clothed bodies are located in a particular setting. As an Indian ethnographer working in Bangladesh, this became particularly pertinent in my case as it served as a tool for judging my class, regional, and religious background, especially bearing in mind the proximity of Bangladesh to India and the fact that I was born and raised in an area of Bengal which shares linguistic and many other cultural traits with Bangladesh. Despite these similar cultural and linguistic origins, however, the problem of what to wear in Bangladesh remains closely linked with its political history (although this is not to suggest that equivalent problems regarding what to wear in Bengal, or in India more generally, do not exist).
In 1947, the independence of India from British colonial rule resulted in the creation of a new homeland for the Muslims of India by carving out the eastern and northwestern corners of the country, which came to be known as East and West Pakistan respectively. In the formation of Pakistan, Islam was the sole principle of nationhood for unifying two widely disparate areas, which were separated not only geographically but also by sharp cultural and linguistic differences.
The Pakistan government’s antipathy towards Bengali culture in East Pakistan was nourished by the suspicion that though nominally Muslim, their ‘relatively recent’ conversion from low-caste Hindu status made them unreliable co-religionists. The practice of Islam in Bengal was seen as too Bengali (hence too Hinduized) by the Pakistani authorities. Thus reluctant to rely on religious allegiance alone, successive regimes in Pakistan embarked on a strategy of forcible cultural assimilation towards the Bengalis. In an attempt to purge Bengali culture of its perceived Hindu elements, steps were taken in East Pakistan to replace Bengali with Urdu as the only official state language. The Pakistan government’s discriminatory policies were further accentuated by the systematic reduction of East Pakistan to the status of a colony by bleeding her white of her jute revenues, leading to enormous disparities in the social and economic development of the two regions. The ensuing protests gave rise to the Language Movement in 1952, which lead in turn to a series of protest movements over the years. A war of liberation lasting nine months culminated in the establishment of the independent People’s Republic of Bangladesh on 16 December 1971.
Over the years the various protest movements included numerous marches by women activists. To emphasise their Bengali identity these women dressed in sarees, wore flowers in their hair, and marked their foreheads with teep (a coloured spot commonly worn by Hindu married women to denote their marital status, but increasingly worn by unmarried girls and non-Hindu women as an accessory). In fact over the years, scholars have continued to reiterate the syncretic nature of Bangladeshi culture combining as it does the various Islamic, Bengali and folkloric norms of the region. This symbolic struggle over Islamic and Bengali identity, although primarily the concern of a certain social class of intellectuals and activists in Dhaka, continues to hold sway in various suburban towns outside Dhaka. Those emphasising a Bengali identity generally consider themselves to be secular, liberal, left-wing, and ‘progressive’, while those emphasising an Islamic identity are identified by the former as being right-wing, religiously staunch, and ‘fundamentalist’ in their beliefs. In practice these categories of being Bengali and Muslim are obviously not bounded or static but have enormous overlaps with each other.
As a result of this struggle over the emphasis of a Bengali and Islamic identity, clothing patterns have also been inscribed by the political history of the country. The various successive military governments have also endorsed an ‘Islamic’ identity for Bangladesh as a nation. While not negating the ‘big brother’ role that India has played within sub-continent politics, the Islamic stance of the military governments of Bangladesh has repeatedly emphasised an anti-Indian rhetoric, which is often equated with anti-Hindu rhetoric.
Prior to deciding to do my postgraduate research on the Liberation War, I had never been to Bangladesh, as I could not afford to travel either outside or within India as a tourist, and needed either to find a job or acquire a scholarship. (In fact I am still waiting for my late life gap year after my PhD!) I also did not have any family in Bangladesh unlike many other Bengalis living in India. It was only after I came to SOAS that I went to Bangladesh for the first time on a pre-fieldwork trip. Over the years, however, I had read various ethnographies about Bangladesh and had noted the way in which the importance of the veil and the covering of the head continued to be emphasised by various ethnographers.
At the very beginning of my trip, therefore, I was faced with the dilemma of what to wear. At that stage I was not very keen to cover my head and decided to wait and see how things developed. I was also aware that since I would be travelling alone across the country it was advisable not to wear skirts or trousers and I would have to make a decision between wearing a saree or salwar kameez, the latter comprising a long tunic (kameez) worn over pajama-like trousers (salwar). Along with this one had to wear a dupatta, a long matching scarf draped around the neck. I knew that a large part of my work in Dhaka would be among activist circles, intellectuals and NGOs to whom the saree (signifying as it did a Bengali identity) was the politically correct form of dress. Since I would be travelling quite a lot, however, I found wearing a saree on a daily basis both uncomfortable and cumbersome, and decided only to wear a saree on special occasions.
My travelling itinerary across Bangladesh also made me rethink wearing a saree as I was cautioned by a Bangladeshi journalist based in London that it is easily confused by people outside activist circles as being a Bengali, Hindu, and/or Indian style of dress. If that was so, I thought to myself, remembering the anti-Indian and anti-Hindu rhetoric, I was not very keen to acknowledge in my dressing demeanour my ‘Indian and Hindu’ positionality. In these circumstances, wearing a saree would undoubtedly have challenged some social and political norms while upholding others, but would simultaneously have revealed my own origins and situatedness. I felt the need to dress to conceal my identity when travelling on my own, and tried also to pass myself off as a Bangladeshi woman by altering my Bengali accent and by use of certain words. This was also useful if I wanted to avoid being charged higher fares by public conveyances like baby taxis or rickshaws that might otherwise have discerned that I was a bideshi (foreigner).
Once I had decided that the option of wearing a saree for fieldwork was out, my attention turned to salwar kameez. I had brought with me to Dhaka the salwar kameezes I had bought in India over the last couple of years, and was looking forward to wearing them. I also decided to forego wearing teep which was again conflated with an Indian and Hindu identity (although I had hardly ever worn teep other than on special occasions in India), and which was also an accessory much favoured by women activists given its connotations of resistance during the anti-Pakistani movement prior to 1971.
On the second evening of my stay in Dhaka, however, a young woman pointed out to me at dinner that she could tell that I was from India as the style of my salwar was quite outdated in terms of Bangladesh’s styles and fashions. Looking around me, I noticed the differences in styles, materials and cuts of the salwar kameezes worn by the women in that upper-middle-class gathering. I realised that the salwar kameezes that I had bought with me from India would also be distinguishable by their styles, lack of fashion sense, cut, material, and patterns. I was also told that if I wore a salwar kameez I should not wear my dupatta around my neck as an accessory as ‘they do in India’, but should open out the dupatta or wear it as a V across my chest in order to cover it. Various NGO activists also suggested that I would be better off wearing a saree and teep to emphasise the fact that I was from India. It became increasingly clear that everybody else seemed to have more definite ideas about how I should dress than I did myself.
The importance of sartorial projections was also brought home to me by a discussion I overheard about the dress codes of Bangladesh’s two leading female politicians, the Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, and the opposition leader, Khaleda Zia. During this discussion, the upper-middle-class women I was with, many of whom were NGO activists, compared the way both Hasina and Khaleda managed to maintain hijab (an Arabic word for veiling) while wearing sarees. Some of them criticised the coloured hair-bands worn by Hasina under the cover of her saree by which she managed to communicate her Islamic credentials of having recently visited Mecca and conducted Haj despite having won the elections on the basis of a secular political programme. Some of the other women commented about how Khaleda Zia, with her coiffeured hair and her sequined veil, managed to look so much more elegant than Sheikh Hasina while still maintaining her hijab. This discussion highlighted the way in which these two women leaders combined their Islamic and Bengali identities by wearing both sarees and signifiers of hijab.
I had not anticipated this dilemma over my choice of clothing, and was searching for a no-man’s-land which would not pinpoint me as being overtly Indian or Hindu, while on the other hand attempting to dress in a style that would meet with the approval both of the activists and other Bangladeshis I would come into contact with. I still did not know at this stage what issues would arise once I was in the village, and I wanted to decide on one particular style of dress that I could wear all over Bangladesh because I was not comfortable with the idea of constantly switching clothes and identity according to different audience expectations. It was for this reason that I decided to choose a khadi punjabi and salwar instead of a salwar kameez. Khadi (meaning hand-woven and hand-spun cloth) has today moved far beyond its Gandhian coarse-cloth, anti-colonial, nationalistic connotations, although in India khadi clothes continue to be worn by politicians during election campaigns wishing to ally themselves with this Gandhian tradition. The punjabi on the other hand is a long tunic worn by both men and women over jeans or trousers, although stereotypically a khadi punjabi is usually associated with trade union activists, revolutionary zealots, or in general anyone involved with various activist issues. I had often worn a khadi punjabi over jeans during my university years in Calcutta and Delhi but only because it was cheap, comfortable, did not need a dupatta (scarf), could be worn by both men and women, and because it was different from the dress code of ‘hip MTV generation’ university students.
Having decided that the khadi punjabi would best serve my ‘no-man’s-land’ identity, I decided to modify it by wearing a salwar instead of jeans, together with a contrasting V-shaped dupatta across my chest. I hoped that wearing khadi would help me gain points with the activists with whom I would be working as they would recognise my choice of clothing’s anti-colonial, nationalistic, and resistive idioms. The self-image I sought to project through the wearing of khadi punjabi, however, led to a number of different responses, and served to demonstrate that although people may seek to communicate their identity or beliefs through the wearing of certain clothes they cannot guarantee their message will be understood in the way they intended. The initial response among various groups of people in Dhaka was proof of that.
The response among a group of upper-middle-class and middle-class men and women in their late twenties regarding my choice of clothes was that they were ‘not Indian enough’. While men in Dhaka would wear western-style shirt and trousers with an occasional donning of embroidered punjabis and pajamas during festive occasions, the women wore salwar kameez and the occasional saree for special occasions. I realised, however, that most of their salwar kameezes or sarees followed the trends set in recent Hindi movies which were extremely popular in Dhaka, and as a result ended up watching more Hindi movies in Dhaka than I did in Calcutta or Delhi. Most of these women would take film magazines to their tailors, or note the dresses of film heroines and make copies of them while watching movies. Even tailors would have Hindi movie magazines or fashion magazines from India so as to point out the recent trends to young women. In addition, women’s accessories such as jewellery and make-up – elaborately drawn teep, for example, as opposed to the black or maroon round teeps worn by activists – would be heavily influenced by Indian styles. As a consequence, my decision not to wear teep (either elaborately designed or simple ones) and my simple (‘manly’) khadi punjabis would be endlessly discussed, and plans to ‘Indianise’ me would be deliberated upon.
Activists and NGO workers mostly wore hand-printed cotton sarees bought either from small shops or boutiques and shopping arcades. Younger women activists who wore salwar kameez also emphasised the hand-woven hand-printed variety available from a few boutiques and specialised shops. A brown or black round teep worn on the forehead was commonplace. The men, on the other hand, wore western-style trousers and shirts as well as simple punjabis and pajamas as part of their daily dress code. My khadi punjabi with its feminine additions of salwar and dupatta came to be associated with the dress code of Dhaka University’s student union, and as a result I often got the feeling of being inscribed within a younger generation because of my choice of clothing. My decision not to wear a saree or teep would often be questioned, and when I would respond that I did not wear them even in India, I frequently had the feeling that my Indian ‘authenticity’ was being sternly interrogated.
After this initial introduction to attempts to fix my sartorial codes within a territorial boundary that could be labelled broadly ‘Indian’, I was very concerned about what the response to my clothing would be in the village where I was planning to work. After moving to the village I wore my old fashioned cotton ‘Indian’ salwar kameez and khadi punjabis with a dupatta over my chest (as a V or letting it hang in front from behind my neck) and also wore a saree for festive occasions like Ramadaan or when going to a fair (see Photograph 1). I was somewhat surprised to find that it was considered acceptable for me not to wear a saree and that as a young, unmarried woman a salwar kameez was fine. It was only when women married that they started wearing sarees on a daily basis. Men, on the other hand, wore shirts and lungis (unstitched cloth wrapped around the waist) or worked bare-chested with their lungis rolled up to mid-thigh. Many of the men from the wealthier families wore shirts and pajamas, but would change into shirts and trousers when heading to the sub-town or further afield on official business.
The only criticism about my choice of clothing came from a few Hindu families in the village who commented that as a Hindu woman I should dress in a saree and wear teep on my forehead. They also commented that I was being contradictory in my behaviour when I wore a saree for a Muslim event such as Ramadaan. At various times while travelling on a bus from Dhaka to the village, and sometimes while in the village, people would comment on the abstract cotton prints on my salwar kameez and refer to them as ‘Indian prints’. My wide-necked blouses worn with sarees would also be described as Indian and I realised early on that I needed to cover my shoulders whenever I wore a saree to avoid being conspicuous. On the other hand, I would sometimes try to forge a shared Bengali identity when wearing a saree by emphasising that the saree was from Calcutta in Bengal rather than from India per se, which in some respects remained connotative of a distanced Hindi-speaking population only ever seen in Hindi films. I was also cautiously aware of the connection between Hindi with Urdu, the language spoken by the Pakistani army, a fact that would be reiterated in various conversations when recalling the atrocities of the Pakistani army in 1971.
It is important to note that we are defined not only by the clothes we wear but also by the objects we consume. A certain incident that occurred while crossing the border between India and Bangladesh drove this point home to me. Knowing that I would be travelling alone through Bangladesh I had packed my things in a backpack, as I felt more comfortable carrying heavy luggage on my back rather than in a bag slung over one shoulder. As I passed between the immigration officers on both the Indian and Bangladeshi sides of the border I was surprised to find myself being questioned about where in America my parents were based. Despite being dressed in a salwar kameez with a backpack on my back I did not initially understand the reason for this question. The higher charge for a rickshaw, however, and attempts by the rickshaw driver to talk to me in English made me realise my mistake in carrying a backpack in this manner. It was an important lesson for me not to take my backpack to the village, but to rather carry a side-bag so as to avoid causing confusion about where I was from (Dhaka? Calcutta? India? New York? London?). In the village, my black cloth bag, my lack of jewellery, my open-toed sandals, and the fact that I did not add oil to my hair would be endlessly commented on, and attempts would be made to territorially fix the objects I used or the demeanour I assumed. During my eight-month stay in the village I would be constantly asked to buy a new bag (deshi, ‘of the country’) and more feminine sandals (see Photograph 2).
Before going to Bangladesh the repeated references to the importance of the veil in the various ethnographies I had read had made me cautious about the maintenance of purdah. Even in Dhaka, while standing on a balcony in a residential middle-class suburb, an NGO activist warned me about maintaining veil in the village. Pointing to a group of young women in a garment factory working with their heads covered by their dupatta, she reiterated "the practice of veiling by illiterate people like these women and those in the village tarnished Bangladesh’s image." In this context, being veiled as a woman was stressed to the point of exclusion of other attributes such as age or class. In similar fashion, however, I would argue that the use of cars, baby taxis and rickshaws by middle-class women in Dhaka to travel even short distances is a form of veiling couched in luxury, class position and the ability to pay travelling expenses.
My experience of veiling assumed a deeper understanding in the village. I realised that as a young, unmarried and urban woman I was not required to cover my head, although all women did cover their heads before elders and other men, and when they were travelling. That equivalent restrictions extended also to men (although not to the same extent) became apparent after a particular incident in the village. A village youth wore a pair of shorts to the village market that he had been given by a city cousin and was slapped by an elderly man for being indecently dressed and showing off his knees. During a later conversation with the elders in the village I was told that I had managed to maintain purdah and had preserved a code of conduct by wearing a dupatta ‘appropriately’ (that is, covering my chest), by not wearing jeans (which they said they knew I wore in other situations), and that my wearing of long-sleeved, loose-fitting salwar kameezes was suitable to my position. It is apparent from this that the villagers were cognisant of my social class and my urban practices even though I did not practice them in the village. It can be seen from this that the repeated references to the omnipresence of the veil in various ethnographic studies, not to mention the comment by the NGO activist in Dhaka, stood in marked contrast to my own experience in the village where veiling and its various forms was dependant on the class position and situational context of the wearer.
Reflecting back on my clothing dilemmas and how I attempted to project myself in order to conceal my Indian identity, and the attempts by others in Bangladesh to reconfigure that identity through sartorial prescriptions, serves to demonstrate that clothing practices during fieldwork are not simply a matter of choice. In fact, by choosing to wear or not wear certain types of clothing I was participating in a process of identification and differentiation myself. At the same time, too close an identification with one group can cause difficulties when trying to identify with others, as exemplified by my experiences with the Hindus in the village or the activists in Dhaka who expected me to wear a saree and put on a teep without which they seemed to suggest that I had deserted my Indian sense of ‘self’. In actual fact, in my attempt to identify with the activists the simplicity of my clothing became acutely conspicuous. I often seemed to be the only one who failed to fully comprehend the semiotics of clothing that seemed to emanate from my khadi punjabi or my simple cotton-printed old fashioned salwar kameezes.
The visual effects of clothing, or the lack thereof, was brought home to me when Mofelluddin, a landless sharecropper with whose family I had worked closely, decided to ‘dress down’ in order to be photographed by me. He took off his shirt and wanted to be photographed bare-chested as he felt that this would not only portray the extent of his poverty, but might also encourage higher authorities to try to ameliorate his material condition as a consequence. In various ways my own clothing practices would be similarly ‘read off’ in terms of locating me in Dhaka (the way I wore my dupatta), Calcutta (my sarees), India (my wide-necked blouses) or London (my slippers), which serves to demonstrate that the objects we consume define not only us and our material culture, but also form part of our sartorial self-image. I was made increasingly aware that what we wear during fieldwork can, on the one hand, engender a feeling of exclusion and peculiarity if we are inappropriately dressed, while, on the other hand, it can produce a feeling of group inclusion with all the concomitant advantages, limitations and restrictions that being appropriately dressed seemed to embody.
From the above, it is apparent that dress serves not only as a cultural marker, but can also create sartorial borders located in various categorical territories such as nationality, class, religion, caste, gender and region. This raises interesting questions about similar issues that may arise for male ethnographers when considering how to dress during fieldwork. A white, male ethnographer told me that when he wore local safari suits in East Africa (also used by local people working in an official capacity), another western male ethnographer had asked him why he had decided to ‘go native’. Unlike men, however, it is apparent that in the case of female ethnographers a certain element of the local dress code needs to be incorporated into their clothing practices in the field. However much we choreograph our dressing practices we must be cautious about reifying the people we are trying to emulate in our dress and demeanour, because they in turn might reify the identity of the ethnographer and locate the latter within fixed sartorial boundaries. After all, it is only through such readings of others and ourselves in the field that we can administer an ethnographic ‘reality-check’ and seek to re (dress) our own naiveté.
Nayanika Mookherjee is a PhD student at SOAS and did her fieldwork in Bangladesh where she explored the histories of sexual violence of the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. Her research interests include gender and the body, sexual violence, communalism, narrative, state, nationalism, transnational organisations, globalisation, performative groups and South Asia.