Dr. Goetz speaks" of changes in fashion introduced in the early 19th century, even at the Mughal court, following impulses received from the courts of Kabul and Teheran outside India. As he says:

The basis of the development was the fashion of the court of Nadir Shah of Persia; knee-long, mostly red colored, dress, with pointed neck, open till the girdle and closed by an insertion. Round the neck, sometimes, a broad, richly embroidered collar; the legs in high boots. On the head a pointed cap, its summit being crushed, wrapped with a small cloth and a pinned sar-pesh, short full beard.

Nearly the same costume is seen on the picture of Ahmed Shah Durrani, but different in the fari dress and a whole ribbon of pearl-ornamented sar-pesh. The new fashion included the old qaba, but the neck was let to the girdle and filled with a tight insertion.

The jama was worn a little more than knee-long. Under it, wide long trousers (pyjamah), boots or slippers with high curved points. Over the jama, an over-dress with short sleeves, often with embroidered collar or with rich ribbons. This dress was always closed over the chest. Usual is a fur bordered faiji dress.

Clearly the jama and its variant, the angarakha, continued to remain a favorite as a formal article of court dress, but it underwent changes of different kinds. In the early 18th century, in the period of Farrukhsiyar and of Muhammad Shah, it attained a greater length than in the 17th century and came right down to the feet, sometimes covering them and trailing in its fullness on the ground. In fact, art historians tend sometimes to date paintings using this length of the jama as a guide.

At the Oudh court", the jama not only became long and trailing, but its seam, at the waist, went up considerably higher than the waist, and its girth increased dramatically. More or less the same kind of point can be made with reference to the cut of the payjamah.

For long, following a cut that showed it fitting quite tightly around the lower leg, the payjamah started easing out in its girth, especially in the 19th century; and with Lucknow clearly is associated the fashion of wide-legged payjamahs that came to be adopted not only by men but also by women.

These sad pajamas or, as they were sometime called, arz ke paincbon ka payjamah, were comfortable to wear if somewhat floppy in their appearance. But they seemed to combine well with the upper garments which were undergoing changes too.

The wide legged payjamahs in fact became ubiquitous as a sight not only in Lucknow but places which had a long tradition in fashions of their own, Delhi and Benaras, for instance. When the poets of Delhi and Lucknow weave in references to dresses in their elegant Urdu verses, they speak of this emphasis on new fashions, and observant writers with a descriptive bent of mind like Abdul Halim Sharar and Khawaja Hasan Nizami document much that was happening in the field of fashions in these parts.

By and large, the list of the costumes in favor at the Oudh court reads as being not much different from that popular at Delhi in the 18th century, but the changes in the cut gave them another look. A new introduction was ti-re kurta which was a modified version of the old nima or nimcha; but, made of fine material and with a great deal of embroidery work in white on white, it acquired a presence of its own.

Likewise, the tppi, dupalli as it was called, simply made but elegantly finished and sometimes rakishly worn, was made of very light material. The upper garment, the angarakha, yielded in part to a chapkan which was a modification of what was also called a balabar, and came to be very widely adopted both by the upper classes and the men who worked as low officials or servants in the circles connected with the officers of the court or, in a fast changing context, were employed by the officers of the East India Company.

The achkan and the sherwani were other outer garments that came in, the latter especially popular at the Hyderabad court. Viewing the sartorial scene in general, however, what strikes one as of interest is the accentuation of a tendency to narrow down the differences between the dresses worn by the members of the two major communities.

The Abbe Dubois had remarked that where a coat was worn in India, the Brahmins and the Muslims could be distinguished from each other by the fact that the former fastened their coats on the left side and the latter on the right. Much the same situation was noticed in Kashmir where to distinguish the Hindu from the Muslim was not difficult if one knew the subtleties in the styles of wearing the same dress, but one really had to know this well.

A comment by W.R. Lawrence is eloquent, "The Pundit wore the tuck of his white turban on the right, the Musalman on the left. The Pundit had long narrow sleeves, the Musalman short full sleeves. The Pundit wore tight drawers, head dresses of narrow white cloth of 20 yards in length and smooth skull caps; Musalmans on the contrary wore loose drawers, pagris of broad white cloth never more than ten yards in length, and skull caps with raised patterns. "

Yet another feature of the 19th century seems to be the de-emphasizing of the differences in the dresses worn by men and women in one respect and between women of the different communities in another. The situation obtaining at Lucknow where some women wore kurtas and sidha or wide-legged payiamahs, much in the same manner that the men did, or that which obtained in the Punjab where both men and women wore relatively short kurtas with full but tight-legged payjamahs, can be observed as much in the literature of the times as in the paintings from this period.

Quite naturally, certain differences remained and certain articles of garment continued to be preferred, but the trend is quite noticeable. At the same time, the sharpness of differences in the dresses worn by women of the different communities tended to become blunted.

If some of the Hindu women, especially of the dancing classes, adopted what can be called Muslim fashion, one finds the women of Gujarat and Rajasthan, especially those who belong to the tribal or pastoral communities, dressed much in the same fashion regardless of whether they were Hindu or Muslim.

The choli-ghaghra-ohbani combination, for instance, an ensemble that had existed for a very long time indeed among the Hindus and was rarely adopted by Muslim women, came to be accepted by a far greater number of Muslim women in the 19th century than one can imagine happening in the centuries preceding. Likewise, the adoption of the Hindu way of wearing a sari by the Muslim women of Bengal, is some kind of a pointer in the way things were developing.

All these statements remain, however, in the nature of things general and not specific. In fact, there is scarcely a statement that can be made which can sum the situation up with any degree of accuracy without inviting comment or contradiction. Much of what has been said and written in accounts of Indian costumes rarely takes into account the local styles and materials of dress from every part of the country.

What would be true of the northern plains of India or of areas like Gujarat, of the belt from the Punjab all the way east up to Bengal, may have no relevance to what was happening in the field of costumes in, say, north-eastern India or the south, for instance. What is true of the Punjab is not true of the northwestern frontiers; what could be seen as a norm in Maharashtra could not be seen as being applicable in Goa or Malabar.

With all its limitations, then, this brief recounting of the developments in the area of Indian dress has been gone into because it has some bearing on the collection of costumes in the Calico Museum. Through this, it is hoped, some of the dresses seen here can be placed in some kind of historical and social context.

The collection does not take into account the European style dresses that came in from the end of the 19th century and made such deep inroads into Indian styles in the 20th. An occasional waist-coat or the modern front-fastening choli worn with a sari hint at this presence, but by and large this most recent chapter in the history of Indian costumes is of little relevance to the present collection, and is as such left out of consideration.

A brief word at the very end. In the nature of things catalogues tend to be repetitive, and sound somewhat sterile. When entries are read singly, they often tend to feel devoid of all spark of life. In the case of costumes, the difficulty is even greater, for nothing, absolutely nothing, succeeds in capturing the world of colour and shape and ornament and fabric that belongs to the world of Indian dresses.

These dresses have to be seen worn and used for one to be able to take in their magic, for then alone do they begin to breathe a life of their own. For getting something of that feeling one has to turn to the present in the case of the dresses that are still in vogue, as with the cholis and ghaghras and odhanis, or one has to enter the silent but vibrant world of the paintings of the past. It is there that dresses come to life, and become part of a pageant that is virtually without compare.
 
 
  ||   Home  Page  ||   Back  ||  Log out  ||